On Take 3 this week we’re devouring temaki sushi by the dozen. They’re easy to make and ridiculously tasty. A seaweed ‘cone’ is stuffed with vinegar laced sushi rice but the rest of the fillings we can safely leave up to you. Perhaps a slice of avocado and smoked salmon or even shredded chicken and lettuce? Experiment with your pairings, but remember to spare a thought for your sauce. It’s hard to go wrong with a pungent, creamy wasabi mayonnaise. There are plenty of easy to follow directions online, but remember temaki sushi need to be served absolutely fresh. Before you get started though, you’ll need your ingredients. Raw sushi rice and rice vinegar, soy sauce, wasabi and of course your sheets of nori or seaweed. Here’s where you can find them.

Branas | No.10, Kollupitiya Market, Dharmapala Mw, Colombo 3. Tel: 011 – 2421675

Branas used to be the only place in town where you could hope to find the ingredients for a temaki sushi. Tucked into the corner of the uppermost floor of bustling Colpetty Market, it’s still something of an institution. Colpetty Market is a great place to visit in any case. There’s fantastic produce on the first floor with vegetable and fruit vendors doing brisk business. There are also fish and meat sellers offering everything from oysters and roe to handmade Lingus and pork chops. You’ll find most of them on the second floor while on the third there are a bunch of shops. 

Branas doesn’t have its signboard anymore and as appearances go is quite frankly left in the shade by the adjoining newer, shinier Breems. They’re still a good place to go looking for imported food stuffs like quality chocolate chips but disappointingly, their Japanese section seems to have shrunk somewhat. Stacked messily in a corner are only a handful of ingredients. There’s a pack of 10 seaweed sheets priced at Rs. 900, Japanese rice vinegar for Rs. 620 and 1 litre bottles of soy sauce for Rs.1140 but on this visit we don’t spot any wasabi, which they usually have. Sushi rice goes for Rs.450 a kg. If you’re thinking of making a tempura for your fillings, you can buy 500g of the powdered batter for Rs. 450.

Keells Super  | Crescat Boulevard, No. 89 B, Galle Road, Colombo 3. Tel: 011 – 5527526

A small corner selling exotic ingredients is the most recent addition to Keells Super in Crescat’s basement, something the management slipped into the newly refurbished premises. This particular branch of Keells has some great cheeses, meats and vegetables and it would be a good place to find your fillings even if the basics are markedly more expensive than at our other two shops – a large pack of seaweed retails for Rs. 2,145 and a bottle of Japanese rice vinegar is Rs.649. A tube of wasabi costs Rs.572 and the same pack of tempura batter we saw at Branas goes for Rs. 975 here. Sushi rice isn’t available. Their stock has been steadily decimated and so the shelves look a little empty right now – here’s hoping they’ll refill them in time for Christmas.

Jalanka International | No 89, Dudley Senanayake Mawatha Colombo 8 Tel. 07736859411

Noboyu Karunagoda’s shop has to be our undisputed favourite this week. Inside a house off the main road, the little rooms are filled with all sorts of Japanese groceries. Noboyu keeps her front door closed but a push and it will open to you seven days a week. Having lived in Sri Lanka with her husband Sanjeewa for close to 18 years now, she opened Jalanka in 2009. Her first customers were exclusively Japanese but she says she’s seeing more and more sushi-mad Sri Lankans wandering in. Noboyu ensures they come back for more by acting as a translator and guide to these shelves of confusing ingredients labelled almost exclusively in Japanese. She’s also the most affordably priced – she manages this by buying things like soy sauce and mirin in huge quantities and then filling smaller bottles. 

A large pack of seaweed retails for Rs. 1600 while a smaller 10 sheet pack costs Rs. 760. Her sushi rice sells for Rs. 390 a kg, while her vinegar goes for Rs.390 per 500ml. Firmly disabusing me of the notion that Kikoman is the best brand for soy sauce, she nudges me in the direction of her Yamasa stocked shelves where a litre goes for Rs.920. A tube of wasabi sells for Rs.395.

Once you’re done shopping for your Temaki, this is the place to wander. On one wall, Noboyu keeps all sorts of kitchen implements (including cleverly designed, dummy friendly maki rollers). There are posters on the walls advertising everything from dumplings made by a local Japanese chef to frozen spitchocked eel. In a fridge she keeps perishables like giant radishes and miso paste. This place is enough to fuel a year’s experiments in Japanese cuisine.