Many years ago, in downtown New Orleans, friends and I went to a sushi bar across the street from The Hard Rock Café. The name eludes me; but what’s more important about this place was what they served. We were introduced to variation on the crab roll. What was different about the Rolls at this restaurant was that they wrapped Imitation crab sticks (kani fumi kamaboko) with a thin sheet of English cucumber. The sushi chef would take an English cucumber and with surgical precision peel it along its length. See online demonstration video here.
I found an easier way to peel vegetables into sheets. I recently saw a vegetable peeler/sheeter used on the show Dinner:Impossibe. The episode was where the host, Robert Irvine, is challenged to prepare and serve tons of food to hundreds of spelling bee students and their families. One of the dishes they decided to make for the challenge was vegetable lasagna; and if I’m not mistaken there was some sort of dietary restriction (glucose allergy). He needed to make pasta sheets out of something other than the classic broad pasta noodles.
That’s when they pulled some sort of gadget resembling a manual hand cranked pasta maker. They placed a zucchini in the middle and cranked the handle, producing a thin long sheet of zucchini. The zucchini sheets were used in place of pasta sheets for building the lasagnas.
That is amazing… I was so impressed with how easy they could crank
out sheets. The sheets kind of look likeMame Nori (multi-colored soybean wrappers), used for making sushi rolls. If you’ve never used these colored soybean wrappers, they are pretty cool. What I like about Mame Nori is it doesn’t have that strong seaweed flavor that Nori has. Therefore, it is much more versatile and can replace things like pasta sheets, tortillas, rice papers or wonton wrappers.
I maybe the alone in thinking this vegetable peeler/sheeter is the greatest thing ever. You may not be as excited to find out where you can get one as I am; and possibly only want to try using the soybean wrappers instead. You can get the wrappes online at Amazon.com fairly inexpensively. Click this link and go toAmazon.com to order online.
At the end of the day, who knows if there are other kitchen gadgets that do the same as this vegetable peeler/slicer can? I for one would love to know about it. There is always the option of hand peeling the cucumber. I’ve tried and it’s not as easy as it looks. So for those of you who want to check out this cool kitchen gadget; it’s called the Bron Coucke Vegetable Lasagna Slicer available at Amazon.com.
Check it out or let me know if there is something better.
Big Bobby's Stuff 