By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer, All eyes in the Cranbury Public Library were fixed on Sofia Milner Friday evening, as she turned rice into sushi., Milner, standing behind a table with rice, avocado, cucumber and other ingredients, spent around an hour leading a sushi-making demonstration for around 16 people. They watched as she walked them through the laborious steps involved, including washing the short-grain rice to remove the starch., “I find that as you go into the Far East, you find a lot of the cooking … is preparation. And then once you’ve done all the preparation, it gets all put together very quickly,” she said. “But the most of the time spent is on preparing different ingredients ahead of time.”, She sees sushi as a limitless world of culinary possibilities, from salmon and others kinds of fish, that one can use. On Friday, she brought along spinach and carrots among the other ingredients with which she was working., “There’s so many different types of sushis that you can make,” she said. “So there’s a lot of different things that you can use that are traditional.”, She explained a little about “imitation crab meat,” which is pollack, a type of fish made to look like crab meat. “So when they say imitation, it doesn’t mean it’s fake,” she said. “It still is fish.”, From the preparation, then came the creation of California rolls, including using English cucumber., “You know what they call this in England?” she asked at one point through her British accent. “Cucumber,” she said in a remark that got a laugh from the audience., She said the American version has a lot of seeds and is “very pulpy” in the center, compared to its English counterpart, which works better for sushi., Along the way, she offered some do’s and don’ts., “You want to have a thin layer of rice – too much is going to cause your roll to just be very thick in rice,” she said. “And again, you don’t want to overfill it, that’s one of the things that people end up doing is overfilling it.”, For the California roll, she used cucumber, crab meat and avocado. She showed how to roll the rice into a tight tube and then cut it in half and then into small pieces. A trick is to wet the knife so the rice does not stick to the blade., Later, she invited the audience to come up and give sushi-making a try., Milner, a resident of Cranbury, is comfortable around food and in front of a room of students. She is a home economics teacher at Montgomery High School, where she has worked more than 11 years. Milner has helped introduce sushi to her students, many of whom have never tried it before, she finds., ,
