Homemade Sushi: Why Don’t We Ever Roll With It, Even Though It Looks So Easy?

There are certain foods that once you have them on your mind, nothing else will do.

Once you've got that gut of yours focused on a nice juicy steak, suddenly, falafel just won't do.

For me, sushi is in this category. I was once one of those people who wrinkled their nose at the mention of "raw fish," but I've since learned the error of my ways and often find myself jonesing for a nice spiny tuna roll.

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However, to get this hankering satiated, I have to go to a sushi restaurant, or, if the situation is especially dire, the grocery store.

But this got me wondering: why does no one ever make sushi at home?

I'm sure culinary Evel Kinevals have given it a whirl, but shouldn't it be way more common? 

Could it be that it's just a pain in the ass? Probably not. You just lay the ingredients out and roll ‘er up. There’s usually no cooking involved, just assembly. It's the Lego of food.

Compare that amount of effort to the amount we put into barbecuing, something I do regularly. I've got no qualms about standing next to a hot smoker for eight hours on a summer day, tending to a pork butt. I think I could handle throwing together a California roll for lunch.

I feel like I could handle this, but still, making sushi at home still never seems to happen. (Getty Images)

Could it be that you need all kinds of special training? I'm not even sure if this is true, but I feel like every sushi chef's background involves spending years studying how to filet a blowfish the correct way so it doesn't kill an entire table of people.

I'm sure this is true, but I recently discovered something that would keep me from having to hone my knife skills in a sushi dojo so I can slice apart an entire tuna I grabbed from a fishmonger.

I was at Costco recently, and after I was done hitting up the free samples, inspecting the snack aisle, test-driving an electric bicycle, sitting on every piece of furniture I could find, and playing "Chopsticks" on the electric piano, I finally found myself in the seafood section.

As I was pretending to know what I was looking for in a salmon filet ("That one looks orangy-red, that's good… I think?"), I saw a vacuum-sealed package in the fridge.

It was full of Kirkland-brand sashimi. 

That's just sliced up raw fish, and you can eat it by itself. However, in my pioneering mind, I realized I had just made a stunning discovery.

"Sweet mother of crap," I thought to myself (or maybe said out loud; I can't remember, it was quite a moment). "I think I just found the cheat code for homemade sushi! Now I don't even have to know which parts of the fish are good to eat and which ones will kill me."

I held the pack of sliced-up raw fish in my hand, picturing myself rolling up one of those little bamboo mats (I needed to buy one of those, too) and churning out some fresh rolls.

But then something hit me, and I put the package back in the freezer, as a Costco employee gave me the stink eye for fingering up sashimi I wasn't buying.

There's a weird stigma surrounding it. If someone said to you, "Hey, come on over, we're going to watch the game and the missus is going to whip up some rainbow rolls," you'd probably make up plans or fake an illness to get out of it.

I realized at that moment that my culinary brain was simply ahead of its time. If I told people I was making homemade sushi — even while using my cheat code — they would think I was odd or playing fast and loose with a potential bout with salmonella.

It's the unfortunate burden of being an innovator.

That's okay, though, maybe someday that will change, and we'll all have one of those bamboo mats in our drawers at home for anytime we want to roll up a quick California roll as an afternoon pick-me-up.