1. Skin the fish and slice into 8 pieces.

2. Lightly wipe the surface of the kombu, coat with the ume pulp and place the fish over it. Put it in a bag and vacuum pack.

3. After 15 minutes, take out the content from the bag and remove the kombu from the fish. Form a sushi rice ball in your left hand and place a piece of fish on it to make hand-rolled sushi. Make 8 pieces this way. Wrap each piece of sushi using 2 bamboo leaves and tie them together using a rush stalk.

Tips:

• In flavoring the fish with the kombu by placing them together, sliced fish is used here instead of a whole piece to shorten the time needed for flavoring. However, if you set it aside for a while, the kombu absorbs the moisture in the fish and they sometimes stick together and cannot be taken apart. To solve this problem, I substituted powdered seaweed drink for the kombu and vacuum packed. That way, the moisture from the fish was left unabsorbed in the bag. So, I made another trial by spreading the ume pulp over the kombu to provide some moisture between the kombu and the fish so that they do not stick together. This way, the moisture brought out from the fish by the salt in the ume was absorbed by the kombu, and the delicious flavor of kombu could easily permeate the fish in approx. 15 minutes.