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So we've talked about stacking and stuffing.
How about rolling?
My favorite rolled entrée is California rolls or vegetarian sushi rolls.
They might sound a little bit intimidating,
but once you get the hang of it, they're very easy to make,
and it's really a way to impress your friends to make your own homemade vegetarian sushi roll.
So let's get started.
The first step is I'm going to need to prep a few different vegetables,
so I want to show you a few more knife techniques,
and then we'll get into the actual rolling process.
I'm going to use a variety of vegetables in these rolls:
carrots, cucumbers, red bell pepper, and avocado.
For the carrot, a nice change of pace from having
to cut it into a julienne or matchstick shape,
is to make ribbons, and that's what these are.
And they're very easy to make.
You simply use a vegetable peeler, and you peel your carrot.
And then you just continue peeling the carrot into ribbon shapes.
A lot easier than cutting it into matchsticks.
So we've got some carrot ribbons there ready to go.
Now for my cucumber, I do want to do a matchstick shape for this,
and I don't want any seeds in there.
So here's how to julienne a cucumber easily.
I'm going to cut the cucumber into planks,
and I'm going all the way up to the seed bed in the center.
And once I hit the seed bed, I'm going to stop
so that I don't get too many seeds.
There's a few, but that's okay.
And then I'm going to rotate the cucumber and continue making those planks.
This cucumber has a lot of seeds, so I'll stop there.
Rotate one more time.
Rotate one more time.
I can get a couple more here.
And then this seed bed just gets saved for your juice.
So now that I've got my planks,
I can stack some of them that stack easily,
and the ones that are a little bit rounded because they're end pieces,
I'll just leave those separate.
And now I can cut these cucumbers into a julienne.
A julienne just means a matchstick shape.
Now I'm going to julienne a red bell pepper.
Get it into the same matchstick shape as the cucumber.
So I'm going to cut off the ends,
and the shape of the ends is not going to work for our matchsticks,
so we'll just save those for another time.
I'm going to cut down the side of the pepper, and then cut out the seeds,
as I just go around the inside of the pepper.
And then I'll just remove any remaining white pieces.
And there's nothing wrong with the white.
It's actually very nutritious,
and if I were going to blend this dish into a soup or into a dressing, I would leave it on.
But just for aesthetics, I'm going to cut it off for this particular dish.
So now we have some nice, flat pieces of pepper
that I can cut into a matchstick shape.
And I'm cutting this pepper with the skin side down
because the skin can be a little bit slippery.
I'm using that down and through technique,
moving the knife down and forward.
If you ever want to see if you're cutting your matchsticks thin enough,
just take a peek on the other side of your knife,
and you can see exactly the thickness that you're making.
And then finally, I want to cut the avocado.
As you can see, I'm preparing all of my vegetables before I ever start rolling my roll.
This is called mise en place in French: everything in its place.
And doing vegetarian sushi rolls does require having your mise en place.
So I'm going to cut this avocado in half.
Give it a twist.
Remove that pit.
Now to get nice slices of this avocado,
I'm going to remove the peel by scouring the peel with my knife.
That means I'm just cutting only deep enough to go through the peel itself,
not too much through the avocado.
And the peel is going to come off very easily.
I'm just going to turn it inside out and remove the peel.
And now I can make my slices.