Discovering onigiri

That’s my friend Sheila on the left, eating lunch at the Wild Oat. She visited me from Winnipeg for a few days this past week. And she introduced me to the wonders of onigiri. Onigiri’s are a popular lunchfood or snacktime treat in Japan. I think it’s also featured in manga books or in anime. Basically, it’s rice wrapped around a filling. Sometimes with a strip of nori or seaweed on the outside. Its simplicity makes it delicious. Sheila learned how to make onigiri’s when she went to her family reunion. Her cousin’s boyfriend made them with tuna fish and mayo as the filling.
I remember at my office, Susan had spoken about onigiri as well. Susan taught English in Japan for a few years and one of her stories is about the ingenious way in which store-bought onigiri’s are packaged. You can get them at any convenience store. They come wrapped in cellophane with three tabs sticking out. Onigiri package designers have created a way to unwrap the cellophane so that as you pull tab one, tab two, and tab three, a piece of nori previously folded into the cellophane starts to wrap around the rice – so that by the time you’ve pulled all the tabs and completely taken the cellophane off, the onigiri is now wrapped in a nice, crisp sheet of nori. No chewy, soggy nori to deal with. It’s an origami marvel. (Though soggy versus crisp is totally your call.) I’ve heard Susan tell this story to people two or three times. This guy has an amazing collection of onigiri pics.
When Sheila and I tried to make onigiri’s in my kitchen, we couldn’t figure out how to shape the onigiri’s into triangles and ended up with rice balls instead. We think they look kinda funny in the photos. But I did some Googling and learned how to properly shape the onigiri’s into triangles. I tried making them again last night. You can see the results and recipe (as well as the recipe for the pork dumplings below) by clicking here. I think I can make them look half decent with some practice.