🍲 Onigiri

Ingredients

• 100 ml (½ cup) uncooked Japanese-style short grain rice
• Filling of choice, such as any of the following:
• Umeboshi (pickled plums), stones removed
• Canned tuna, mixed with mayonnaise and seasoned to taste with chopped leeks, soy sauce, or chilies; sour or salty flavours work well.
• Cooked salmon
• Cooked egg
• Katsuobushi, moistened with a small amount of soy sauce
• Nori sheets

Method

1. Cook the rice according to package or rice cooker directions. Let cool just enough to handle with your hands.
2. While the rice is cooking, prepare your fillings.
3. Fill a bowl with salt water to rinse your fingers and season the onigiri. You can fill and shape the onigiri using two different methods:
4. * Method 1: Wet your hands in the salt water. Take two large spoonfuls of rice into one hand (carefully; the rice is hot), and gently squeeze and flatten it with the other. Make an indentation in the middle, and put some of the filling into the center. Be a little careful to get the filling only in the center and not all over the ball; that can make the rice less sticky, and stickiness is good. "Fold" the rice over the filling so it becomes covered. Squeeze gently, and mold it into a triangular shape by folding both your hands along the palms while keeping the fingers straight. Squeeze like that, rotating the ball a few times, and you will soon have a very neat triangle—this really is much harder to explain than to do. Once the ball is done, put it down on a clean surface to cool down. Rinse your hands in the salt water and repeat.
5. * Method 2: Use a bowl and some plastic film. Place about ⅔ of the mixture into the centre of the cling wrap that has been draped into the bowl loosely. Then, add approximately 2 teaspoons of filling (this is working off of about 3–4 portions per cup of rice. Then, place the last ⅓ of the rice to the top. Then, mould the onigiri within the cling wrap. This drastically reduces mess and also is slightly more 'kid friendly'.
6. Once the balls are reasonably cool, you need to protect them from drying out. The easiest way is to wrap them in cling wrap, or put them into an airtight plastic food container. When it is time to eat, take one rice ball, wrap it in a piece of nori, and eat away. If you don't mind soggy nori, you can wrap the balls in nori beforehand.