3 Easy Temaki Recipes (Without Raw Fish)

What is temaki?

Whether you’re a sushi lover or struggle with making your own sushi rolls, temaki is the perfect fool-proof way to make Japanese sushi at home! Temaki is sometimes referred to as a ‘hand roll’ because rather than using a typical sushi rolling mat, temaki can be rolled by hand without any special tools and only requires a few essential ingredients which are nori seaweed, sushi rice and any filling of your choice! Our favourite thing about temaki is that you can have fun and mix up the filling ingredients to make a hand roll with your favourite flavours. 

Temaki Ingredients

Sushi Rice

To keep the temaki as authentic as possible, it’s best to use sushi rice. Temaki is a type of sushi after all! Try not to add too much sushi rice inside your temaki roll otherwise you might struggle with rolling and closing it. A pro-tip when adding the rice to the seaweed is to place it on an upside down triangle shape. This ensures an even spread of rice throughout the roll and prevents clumpy and over bulging areas. For extra flavour, we recommend seasoning your sushi rice with either rice vinegar or sake after it’s freshly cooked although this is optional and down to preference. 

Raw Fish 

When it comes to raw fish when making any type of sushi, you should always be using sashimi grade raw fish and nothing else. This is the best way to ensure the fish is safe to handle and consume in its raw state. However, we appreciate not everybody is confident or comfortable with handling dishes with raw fish at home. So although it’s not traditional, we do think it’s possible to swap raw fish for cooked versions when making temaki hand rolls. For our recipes below, we swapped out raw salmon and tuna for cooked prawns, tuna, smoked salmon and seafood sticks. 

Nori Seaweed

For temaki, you need to use half cut sushi nori to achieve the cone shape when rolling them out. Buying pre-made half cut nori seaweed is great for saving time and makes sure all your temaki rolls are matching sizes/shapes. However, you can always use a full-size sushi nori seaweed sheet and cut it in half yourself to achieve the same thing. Remember to slightly wet the edge of the nori seaweed so that the temaki can stick and stay closed once you’ve rolled it.

Extra Fillings

Simple temaki rolls are great with just a filling consisting of rice, raw or cooked fish wrapped in seaweed, especially when you just want to make use of a few extra ingredients you have lying around in the kitchen. However, we think the best temaki rolls make use of extra fillings and play around with different flavours, textures and colours. From wasabi paste, avocado, carrots and cucumbers, and more!

3 Easy Temaki Recipe Fillings (Without Raw Fish)

Video compilation making the rolls: