I made your favourite food (after what you voted for)

Out of 111 votes, I made what you consider to be the best meal on the planet. It's probably what you expect!

Nov 16, 2025

Last week, I posted a note that went surprisingly viral. It was asking what your favourite food is while making a dig at Substack for good measure.

Although I mainly meant it as a light-hearted comment and, frankly, I didn’t expect it to garner over 130 replies, I’ve decided to take it seriously.

This week, I’m going to be cooking your favourite food. Not you individually, of course. The most popular food of my subscriber base (and beyond).

Of course, if you missed out on the fun, it’s probably because you haven’t subscribed. For this and many other delightful culinary rambles, subscribe for free to get weekly posts delivered straight to your inbox every Saturday.

What’s your favourite food?

I was going to add “the results may surprise you” to the end of that paragraph, but they probably really won’t. Apart from a few cool answers, such as “my girlfriend”, “sweet popcorn with melted American cheese”, and “We’re working to build a community on Substack focused around AI and technology—come join us”, the results are mostly what you’d expect.

Before I reveal the exact results, I’ll tell you that the most popular cuisine according to 110 random people on Substack is… Italian, closely followed by American (a thought that will probably give any Italian reading this a heart attack) and Japanese. So if you’re Italian, you can give yourself a pat on the back and act smugly whenever eating another country’s cuisine.

But now it’s time for the moment you’ve all been waiting for - the favourite food. According to my readers, the most popular food in the world is sushi, coming in at 8% of the vote, followed by pizza at 5.5%, and finally steak and pasta, which are in a tie for 5%.

So there we have it. Your favourite food is sushi, and I’m going to cook it. But there’s only one problem… I hate sushi with a passion.

A fishy conundrum

When I said there that I hated sushi, I might have been exaggerating a bit. You see, I haven’t had a lot of sushi before, and one thing I actually dislike about it is the raw fish.

I may not be a vegetarian, but I still find it difficult to eat meat and fish - and I’m not quite ready to wolf down a raw one. So I decided that for my sushi, it would be totally vegetarian.

Now the only problem would be finding out how to make them and what to put in - but that turned out not to be too much of a problem after all.

Getting ready

I looked for a vegetable sushi recipe online, and upon looking at the ingredients, I probably would have spit out my tea if I had a cup at the time and if I wasn’t such a refined, upper class gentleman. Roasted nori sheets, bamboo rolling mat*, preserved ginger - what were these ingredients?

Nonetheless, I went to my nearest supermarket and headed straight for the Asian section. It wasn’t too bad, fortunately, as everything turned out to be very cheap and straightforward.

I left the shop with a sickeningly-healthy shopping bag and a suprising eagerness to get going.

*Not an ingredient.

My disgustingly fruitful vegetable haul

Unsurprisingly, making the sushi was the hardest part of this experience, not only because of the complexity of all the things I had to prepare or the sheer quantity of rice vinegar being used, but because of my - in hindsight, bizarre - decision to start making a Mediterranean vegetable tart halfway through my sushi preparations. (It turned out to be quite nice, despite having to use ketchup instead of pesto, but that’s a story for another day.)

There was a lot that had to be done - boiling, seasoning and cooling my rice, pickling grated carrots, slicing and roasting peppers, dicing cucumber, slicing avocado, planting the avocado seed (not relevant to sushi) in a pot, chopping and boiling broccoli, slicing spring onions, and, of course, trying and nearly blowing my head off with a big piece of sushi ginger. It’s all part of the process.

Thankfully, I got it all done quite well, and now all that stood between me and delicious sushi was a bambo rolling mat and a couple of sheets of nori.

Just managing to roll my sushi

You remember when I said I hated sushi? Well, part of that hatred, apart from the raw fish, is the seaweed sheets they all get rolled in.

Sadly for me, there isn’t really an alternative to nori (the name for that seaweed, to those who don’t know) when it comes to rolling sushi, no matter how many times I desperately ask ChatGPT for one.

So I got on with the rolling, topping my bamboo mat with a sheet of nori, some of that sticky rice, a selection of vegetable fillings, and then some picked carrot and spring onion.

Actually, instead of trying to describe it in my natural clumsy way, how about I just show you a quick animation? Here’s one I made earlier.

I think the fact that in the background of those photos there is a gradually increasing amount of rice scattered across the rolling mat says it all: rolling wasn’t easy. But, still, I got through it, and I ended up with a plate of something that actually resembled sushi.

Now, I’m sharing my exact recipe with you. It’s definitely not one to try if you’ve come back from work exhausted and only have 5 minutes to cook, but if you have a bit of spare time, it’s definitely worth the extra effort, in my opinion at least. The toppings below are only suggestions; feel free to modify them, try new flavours, and edit the recipe as you please.

Ingredients (makes about 24 sushi pieces)

For the rice:

300g sushi rice
4tbsp rice wine vinegar
2tbsp granulated sugar
1tsp salt

For the fillings:

1 sliced avocado
About 4 shoots of tenderstem broccoli
2 peppers
⅓ of a cucumber

For the toppings/other parts:

1 carrot
1tbsp rice wine vinegar
1tsp granulated sugar
1tsp salt
3 spring onions
Some sushi ginger (optional)
4 sheets of nori
A bamboo rolling mat (optional, but highly recommended. They’re only about 70p.)

Method

For the rice:

Put the rice in a pan with about 500ml of water and bring it to the boil, then reduce it to a simmer and cook for 10 minutes with the lid on.
Turn off the heat and leave it to stand for a further half an hour with the lid still on.
Then, mix in the vinegar, sugar and salt and leave it to cool.

For the pickled carrots:

Grate the carrot, then mix it with the vinegar, salt and sugar. You can serve it as soon as it’s ready, but I recommend leaving it for at least half an hour to let the flavours develop more.

For the fillings:

Avocado - slice the avocado thinly.
Peppers - cut the peppers into strips and roast for about 20 minutes at 180°C.
Cucumber - cut the cucumber into strips.
Broccoli - cut each stem into long pieces, then boil until tender.
You can also slice the spring onions at this point.

To prepare the sushi:

Place a sheet of nori on the bamboo rolling mat.
With wet hands to stop it sticking, spread the rice along the nori, leaving about 3cm of space at the top.
Place your chosen fillings, picked carrot and spring onions in the middle of the rice patch.
Using the mat, roll the sushi up. When one edge of nori touches the other, lightly press and keep it in shape for about 5 seconds to ensure it sticks. If this doesn’t work, you can always wet one of the edges of the nori.
Trim the edges of the roll with a wet knife, then slice the roll, wetting the knife each time.
Repeat the rolling process with all the rolls you make.
Serve with a drizzle of soy sauce and a slice of sushi ginger.

Thank you for reading this week’s slightly special edition of Not a Vegetarian. If you enjoyed this article and want to read a new culinary ramble every week, don’t forget to subscribe!

Have you made sushi? Do you disagree with the results of the poll? Leave a comment below and share your thoughts!

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