Sushi Pizza

What to do with leftover sushi rice? Make sushi pizza, what else! Okay, you could also make onigiri but I don't want onigiri today. I want something crunchy and crispy.

I made sushi for Little Shack's lunch and made way too much rice. I also happened to have leftover salmon from the previous evening's dinner so it made perfect sense to plan on sushi pizza for dinner. You can pile anything you want on a sushi pizza. You can throw on some raw fish, cooked fish, leftover fish, pickled vegetables are good, kimchi is great if you like kimchi. If you are vegetarian, you can just throw on pickled veggies and sauce, avocado and whatever else you would normally like to eat in a sushi roll.

It really couldn't be easier:

Heat a frying pan over med to med high heat.

With wet hands, grab a baseball sized ball of leftover, cold sushi rice and pat it down into a patty, much like a hamburger patty. Mix up soy sauce, sesame oil and a bit of water (I do about 2 tbls soy sauce to 1/2 tbls sesame oil and then maybe 1/2 tbls water) and brush that on your rice cake. 

Add enough vegetable oil to the hot pan to cover the entire bottom generously. Add your rice cakes soy sauce basted side down(they should spatter and sputter in the very hot pan). Now, brush the the other side with the soy sauce mixture and keep an eye on them. Turn them when the bottom is all brown and crispy, which doesn't take all that long. Carefully flip them over with a spatula and fry the second side until it's brown and crispy too and remove to a plate with some paper towel to blot off any excess oil.

the naked rice cake before you baste and fry

Put your rice cake on a small plate and start to build.

For this version, I topped my rice cake with cooked salmon, some avocado, some pickled daikon, radish and cucumber (also leftover from my salmon dinner the night before). I mixed up some Kewpie Mayonnaise (if you can find some at an asian grocery store that sells japanese food, get it - it's a different flavour than western mayo) with a bit of hot sauce, sirracha - whatever your particular poisin is. Mix it to taste and then, because I didn't make enough to put it in a fancy squeezy bottle, I put it in a little snack back, cut a tiny hole in the end and used that to squeeze it out all over my pizza. I also drizzled some plain mayo onto it. A dollop of tobiko (those little finy fish eggs) and a sprinkle of bonito flakes, and you have got yourself a tasty sushi pizza. I kind of wish that I had bought some Ungagi bbq sauce (I am out) because it needed one more saucey component that wasn't mayonnaise based. The contrast of the crunchy, warm rice cake with the cold toppings is really something that I like a lot. I also like sushi rolls that have deep fried fish in them so you get the same crunch of the hot fish in the same bite as the cool rice.

I do have a recipe for homemade unagi sauce and I might give that a try next time.

I think you could also deep fry the rice cakes to get the same end product as you would get at a japanese restaurant but homie don't deep fry so I simply pan fried them in some canola oil and I was very happy with the results.

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