When I was in Japan once on a business trip, we were served once or twice for lunch a food item made up of a roughly fist-sized ball of rice with cooked salmon in the middle, wrapped in nori seaweed. The impression I got was that this was a pretty common lunch type food.
Anyone know what I’m talking about? It was very good, and I’m curious if it’s available in America anywhere.
It’s called onigiri. It’s common for homemade box lunches, and also a staple at convenience stores in Japan. It’s a bit unusual for a business lunch though, it’s more of an inexpensive comfort food.
I don’t recall seeing them in Japanese markets in the US, but they have all the ingredients. Onigiri is just plain steamed rice sprinked with salt and wrapped in nori (seaweed). You can put something inside, like katsuobushi (shaved dried fish) with soy sauce, salted salmon, or umeboshi (plums pickled in salt). Some people pack the nori separately so it doesn’t get soggy, and wrap it on the rice just before eating. Convenience store onigiri is packaged this way too - there’s a layer of plastic between the rice and nori, which is pulled off when you open the packaging. Hard to describe but an amazing piece of engineering.
Koreans have something very similar called “Kim-pap” (Kim=seaweed and pap=rice).
Take a sheet of seaweed about the size of a standard piece of paper, cover it with a thin layer of cooked sticky rice, and add assorted seafood/veggies. The roll it all up into a cylinder, and slice it into pieces about 1/2 inch thick. Not my cup 'o tea, but there ya go!
Here’s a link where you can see some if my description above wasn’t very good: here Scroll down about 1/3 of the way to see the Kimpap…
Onigiri is sold at several asian markets in the Chicago area. It is usualy quite fresh and of very high quality. If you’re near Arlington Heights, IL (just northwest of the city) try Mitusuwa on the corner of Arlington Hts Rd. and Algonquin Rd.
Is there anything in Korea that isn’t named “kim”? I mean, it’s like “marklar”.
The modern Hawaiian equivilant of this is “spam musubi.” Tried to get some friends to eat some the other day and they were horrified.