Sticky quinoa adds health benefits to sushi
Quinoa could replace rice in your next sushi roll thanks to a Vancouver company that’s developed the first sticky quinoa specifically for the popular Japanese dish.
After 18 months of development, Top Tier Foods will begin distributing its Canadian-grown sushi quinoa to restaurants in Vancouver — and possibly beyond — next month, said company founder Blair Bullus.
“We’ve had inquiries from Japan, Korea and China — we’re really hoping it will catch on,” he said. “People are looking for alternatives to white rice.”
With more protein and more fibre than rice, quinoa has often been touted as a superfood, which makes it appealing for use in sushi.
“The feedback has been extremely positive,” said Bullus, who recently took his quinoa sushi on a B.C. government trade mission to Asia. “It has a texture that anyone who has had sticky rice would be familiar with.”
Bullus didn’t start out intending to create sushi quinoa. He was 26 and a political science graduate when he jumped headfirst into the packaged food industry in 2013, hoping to create healthy, convenient meals for university students stuck with frozen pizzas and fast food.
“I watched my friends eat terrible food all through university, and there was nothing on the market at the time that was healthy and quick,” he said.
That led him to quinoa and a line of packaged side dishes that are now available in most grocery stores.
Hoping to make his product more local, Bullus began looking into Saskatchewan-grown quinoa a few years ago, but found it a little too dense for his pilaf-style dishes; the texture seemed closer to sushi rice. Armed with a $4,500 grant from the Ministry of Agriculture, he approached B.C. Institute of Technology’s food technology program for expertise and began working to make Canadian quinoa even sticker, adding natural ingredients to make it starchier and easier to roll.
One of the first Vancouver sushi chefs to see the potential in sushi quinoa is Hidekazu Tojo, owner of Tojo’s Restaurant and one of only 13 ambassadors for Japanese cuisine outside Japan. Tojo plans to use the sushi quinoa to create three rolls in celebration of Canada’s 150th anniversary on July 1.
Bullus hopes other chefs will use the product to create innovative rolls or blend it with rice in traditional dishes for extra health benefits.
If sushi quinoa becomes popular in local restaurants, it may some day be available on grocery store shelves.
“It’s a product that could reinvent sushi,” he said.