Thursday, November 27, 2008

The Amazing Onigiri Wrapper Trick

Onigiri (rice balls) are a staple convenience food in Japan. You can find them in all the convenience stores and they're relatively cheap ($1 to $1.50, depending on the filling). When I told my beau that we could eat out of the convenience stores for lunch he was thinking microwave burritos, but these are much better. Most shops have a pretty good selection of noodle bowls and ready-to-eat food; a lot of stores have actual cooked food too (hot tofu balls and korroke and those cakes with bean inside) though it didn't look that great....

When you can't read a lot of Japanese it's sometimes a gamble as to what's inside the rice ball, but we did okay.

The trick about prepackaged onigiri is that you want the nori (seaweed wrapper) to stay crisp. If you wrap it around the rice it absorbs moisture and gets gummy after an hour or so. (Personally I don't mind it gummy, but crisp is the ideal.) So they wrap the nori in its own layer of plastic wrap. When I was in Japan in 1995, only some companies packed the nori separately, and if they did you had to wrap it up yourself. But now there's this great packaging innovation that wraps up the rice automatically when you open it.

Here's how it works:



P.S. Ebi = shrimp.