Hey, what's up, guys? Welcome back to Binging with Babish.
Where this week, I am just so embarrassed to find out that onigiri are not jelly-filled donuts, but a rice ball, traditionally stuffed with pickled plums, kelp, or a whole host of other ingredients.
So let's start with the kelp, which we're gonna let reconstitute in water for 15 minutes until it's soft and flexible, just like this.
And then we're going to pat it dry and slice it into thin 2- to 3- inch long ribbons.
Now, beware this stuff is really sticky once you cut it.
Just gotta get it off the finger there, c'mon.
Once you manage to get yourself unstuck, continue slicing your kombu until it is all sliced up into slices, like this.
Which we're then going to throw into a saute pan, along with a half a cup of water, one tablespoon of rice wine vinegar, three tablespoons of soy sauce, and one tablespoon each of mirin and sake.
I know this seems like a lot of flavors for a little bit of kelp,
but onigiri fillings are very bold
because they're just mostly rice.
So now we're bringing this over the stovetop,
and over medium heat,
bringing to a simmer and cooking
for about 10 minutes.
We're also gonna add
a big tablespoon of sugar.
This I imagine is to help combat
all that salt and acidity.
And so after about 7 to 10 minutes,
you will find that most of the liquid
evaporates and and you're left with a nice thick sauce,
into which we are going to generously sprinkle
some sesame seeds, setting aside
and covering until ready to be used.
Our sour pickled Japanese plums, or umeboshi,
are much easier to prepare
in that they just need to be pitted.
To get the pit out,
just give your plums a little squeeze.
Then you can mash these up with a fork,
I'm just gonna give them a little chop.
And then it's time to get our rice ready.
We are making sushi rice,
so that means we have to thoroughly
wash it. When I say thoroughly
I mean thoroughly
Into a bowl it goes, along with
about a cup of water,
and then we're going to slosh it around,
trying to rinse off as much of the starch as possible.
You'll notice that the first three or four washes,
your water's gonna look kind of like skim milk,
and we wanna keep going until
it's almost running clear.
Then into a rice cooker,
or in this case, a pressure cooker, it goes,
along with one and one half times
its volume in water.
So, to this one cup of rice,
how many cups of water am I adding?
That's right, one and one half.
Then I'm cooking the rice on high pressure
for 7 minutes, before letting it rest for 5.
And then releasing the pressure
using the valve and a protective glove of some sort.
And then spreading the rice out
onto a sheet pan so it can cool slightly.
While it's still hot, though,
I wanna drizzle it with a mixture
of two tablespoons rice wine vinegar
to one tablespoon of sugar
to one teaspoon of salt.
Give it a little mix without mashing it too much.
We want the rice to stay nice and fluffy,
we don't want it to clump together.
Get our fillings at the ready,
and then it is time to start forming our onigiri,
which you gotta do with wet hands,
otherwise the rice is gonna stick to you like glue.
I'm gonna start by making a little disc of rice in my hand,
dropping in a few pieces of our filling,
and then topping with another disc of rice.
Brock specified that the rice balls containing plums
were round, so I'm going to go ahead and pat this,
into a sort of kinda burger patty shape.
there we go
And then onto the slightly more challenging task
of forming triangular onigiri.
It all starts the same way,
sandwiching the filling between two flat hunks of rice,
shutting the edges closed.
But this time, instead of patting into a patty,
we're going to coax it into a cone.
By holding it flat with one hand,
and then pressing down with a rounded hand on top.
And then these guys get a strip of seaweed
on the bottom to act as a sort of handle
and protect your hands against the sticky rice.
So here they are, my first attempt at making onigiri
stuffed with umeboshi and kombu.
The pickled plums were definitely my favorite.
They almost taste like sour cherries,
and they work surpisingly well
with the ocean-like flavor of the seaweed.
The kelp-filled ones? Eh, not so much.
The flavor's great, but the texture's
offputting to me. It's very chewy and leathery.
That is, however, purely a personal opinion
and just something I'm not yet accustomed to.
The umeboshi, however, were entered
into the Clean Plate Club.
The one thing I was really not happy with, though,
was the shape of my onigiri.
It looked pretty rough and sloppy,
and often Japanese cuisine can be
incredibly beautiful and precise,
so I wanted to try and do a better job.
Attempt number 2 had better shapes,
but I cut the seaweed too big,
so they looked a little out of proportion.
Attempt number 3 had under-washed rice,
so they had came out kinda slimey.
Attempt number 4 was preceded by
a couple jazz cigarettes
and kinda went off the rails a little bit.
I call him "Snowmanigiri",
which I recognize is not clever.
But attempt number 5 is where I finally hit my stride.
Warm rice, wet hands,  and properly cut seaweed
yielded perfect onigiri,
proof that with enough practice,
you can and will do anything.
