REVIEWS
I’m a 33 year old male. I am buy no means a chef (I delivered pizzas once as a teenager) nor have I ever fooled around with trying to roll my own sushi, even once. This product makes it AMAZINGLY simple to produce rolls that my cousins and family say “Wow!” to in person and on Facebook. The directions are clear to follow and IF you follow them exactly, you will have perfect rolls. Couple of things:
1) Make sure to buy quality Niri “paper” for rolling. I haven’t had one break on me yet because I paid $2 more than the next cheapest brand.
2) When we first did this with my mother, both of us ignored the “sushi rice” recipe and just boiled rice. While still good, this time around (I have photos in the customer images area) I followed the directions and its MUCH MUCH better.
3) Don’t overpack it. Loosely fill it on each side with rice, use the “plunger” stick to create a channel down the middle and load that up with whatever insides you want. Dont pack it tight and then attempt to put in your fillings
4) Dont forget to use olive oil to grease the sides of the cylinder. Without it your creation will be completely ruined.
I looked at about 5-6 different sushi makers recently (including the $20,000 sushi robot). Sushezi seemed the best bang for the buck. It arrived today (along with a rice cooker) via Amazon Prime so I didn’t even get a chance to get impatient about it.
I’ve made sushi for years now with the little bamboo mat. I’m pretty handy in general and have had good results with the primitive tools, but still get more than half of the attempts at rolls to have a few end pieces collapsing, the roll irregular, etc. I DO have a life and I don’t want to spend it perfecting being a sushi chef.
The Sushezi does one thing and it does it well: it makes a perfect large sushi roll and it does it quickly. I was both cooking and talking on Second Life to a friend and I compared chat time-stamps. I assembled ingredients (the rice was ready before I started), cut up a few veggies, found and opened a nori package, scrounged some of that orange caviar from my freezer, fake crab, leftover smoked clams, cream cheese, etc. I made four rolls. 45 minutes after the chat start mark, I had uploaded a photo of a plate of samples of each roll and sent it to my friend. If you’ve ever made sushi before, you know that’s absurdly fast.
The Sushezi has a solid feel to it. There’s nothing small and delicate that’s going to break and leave you with a worthless product (versus, say, those cheap plastic cookie presses).
I’m staying with the very solid 5-star rating, but there are some downsides. First of all, it really needs a narrow diameter counterpart. That is to say, a Sushezi roll that can be wrapped with half a nori sheet. (Note: I e-mailed the company asking about that and got a very quick reply saying that they didn’t have such a device. Disappointed though I was, I appreciated the fast and honest reply.) Next, if you’re into inside-out rolls, this won’t work. It’s not designed to, so there’s no reason to take away points.
Finally, the company suggests other uses for the product. This is cool: Cheese logs and cookies as a bonus is good. However, I just want to make good, consistent sushi rolls and do it quickly and easily. Sushezi worked exacly as presented. As I said earlier, a lot of bang for the buck. You do sushi rolls? Get this.
It looks like a gimmick but it really works well. I’ve made nori sushi at home for many years using the traditional bamboo mat and have even experimented with a plastic press mold. The Sushezi is easy, quick, and produces a stuffing of rice and ‘whatever’ to roll in a sheet of nori (toasted seaweed) in a matter of moments. Excellent results. Easy clean-up. Inspires you to make your own nori sushi at home — often.
Gary Hayman
(UPDATE) Been having for over a year now, i find if you use a dowel rod with with a thick diameter then the push/plunger to make the trench you get more filling and less rice. I still wish they had a smaller version.
The apple of my eye (gf), my sister, and myself used this for the first time on Saturday. None of us are culinary experts!!! Once the rice was made and the vegetables were cut we embarked on our sushi making journey.
Our first stop was to Ingredientville where we had to find sushi grade fish (time of Journey 1 hr). Living in the City of Champions (Pittsburgh, Pa) we are not near any ports so we had to revert to Google to help us locate sushi grade products. Luckily there are a few places that sold it and one was a local Oriental Grocery store Tokyo Store ([…] There we were also able to locate all of the other ingredients to include rice, pickled ginger, wasabi paste, and various vegetables.
Our second stop took us to the land of rice (estimated arrival time 30 min). We purchased our rice at an oriental market and it was specifically sushi rice (California Sushi Rice). We followed the simple instructions and in 25 minutes on the stove we had sticky rice. Oh yes, it is sticky and worked wonderfully (some experts say it takes years to make “Sticky” rice, I say 30 minutes).
Our next stop was to the Island of Preparation (20 minutes approx eta). We cut up various vegetables into strips which made them easy to use in the Sushezi. No one in my house was a Samurai warrior but we cut them up and they worked just fine.
The final stop took us to the great town of Sushezi!!! We had finally arrived at our destination. Following the extremely simple instructions we were able to create our first roll in less then 5 minutes. After that it just got faster and faster. It was unbelievable how easy it was!!! Our rolls were beautiful and tasted great!!! 5 minutes to make a roll and I pay how much at the store???
Ok, aside from my fun story the experience was great and I would recommend this to any sushi lover. If you want to have a sushi party it is now easy to do. Just have your vegetables and other ingredients prepped and let the fun begin. I am a 35 year old 11 year old (so my princess says) and I think this would be great for kids. If they don’t like sushi then just use vegetables. I plan on smoking some pork and making pork (mock) sushi. Once you master the Sushezi, a whopping five minutes, your imagination is your limitation.
There should be no hesitation in buying this product!!! It should be on every bridal registry!!!
