Enjoy with Easy Temari Sushi

Enjoy making Temari Sushi so simple because it’s so easy, cute, and a little bit fancy.

Temari-zushi (or Temari-sushi) is a small ball-like sushi. (“temari” means “hand-ball”) It’s not really a seasonal food, but you can see a lot of temari-zushi in spring, around girl’s day (March 3rd) in Japan because temari-zushi is very colorful.

If you can’t find fish fresh enough to eat it raw, no need to be sad. You can use scrambled eggs, avocado, or shrimp, as shown below.

[How to make temari-zushi]
- salmon, tuna, shrimp, egg, avocado, etc…
- sushi rice

1. Make sushi rice! (see “How to make rice for sushi”) You have to use sushi rice for temari-zushi even if you aren’t using raw fish. Plain rice with food on top might taste very bland.

2. Put whatever you want on plastic wrap, put a little bit of sushi rice over, twist and close on the top and make a ball. That’s it!

Such as…

[Salmon]

Not the prettiest looking sashimi but once it's wrapped no one can tell.

[Tuna]

[Shrimp]

If you have shrimp prepared for sushi (see “How to prepare shrimp for sushi”)…

This is the other way to do it. You can make a small rice ball and put it on. It'll make it easier to make all temari-zushi the same size.

If you have regular curled up shrimp…

Slice the shrimp in the center

[Egg]

You can just make it with scrambled eggs.

Or if you have a little more time, you can make an egg sheet (see “How to make an egg sheet”), and cut it into strips.

[Avocado]

[Fish and avocado]

And you have plain temari-zushi! The one on a black plate was actually from a while ago. I was in a rush and didn’t really decorate them at the time.

But if you can, spend 5 minutes to put different kind of toppings on it to decorate it. You can put pretty much anything on it. It’s such a little amount you won’t really taste the topping that much, but it’ll make ordinary temari-zushi look like something you’ll see at a fancy restaurant. I used scallion and black lumpfish roe I got from IKEA but you can put seaweed cut out with a hole punch (or craft hold punch), carrot flower (see “How to make vegetable flowers”), a leaf of parsley, thinly sliced lemon, or even a tiny bit of wasabi or mustard or grated ginger! Using as many colors as you can.

For this plate, I mixed decorated ones and non-decorated ones.

Carrot flower as a topping, in Totoro temari-zushi bento

The key to make a pretty temari-zushi is to make it small and let the food cover the most of rice. Use just enough rice so that if you see it from the top, you won’t see the rice. Also try making each ball the same size. I’ve seen some very cute arrangements of temari-zushi, like have an egg temari-zushi in the middle, and surround it with salmon or tuna so the whole thing will look like a flower. I’d still dip it into soy sauce when I eat it, but if the rice is well seasoned (with vinegar), you won’t even need soy sauce