How to make ONIGIRI 🍙 (Rice Ball) 〜おにぎり〜 | easy Japanese home cooking recipe

Welcome to Taishi's Kitchen. Today I'm going to show you how to make onigiri. Onigiri is probably nowadays well known especially for those who watch anime because in anime comes often these triangular shaped rice balls. That's onigiri. You can make with different toppings. Well topping is not the right word for it because it goes inside but there's no right matching word for that in English so I'll call it topping. So I'm going to show four different types of onigiri with one of them just with salt and with three other different toppings. Then let's get started. Here are the ingredients for onigiri. We have the rice of course and then for the topping I'm going to make four types. One without any topping just with salt and then two okaka which is bonito flakes and then three umeboshi. For those who don't know it is saltly pickled plums. It's got very sour taste to it. I've heard many foreigners don't like it so if you don't like it you can of course skip that. And then I also have salted salmon. Of course you can use regular salmon but if it's salted it matches the rice much better. I also have another video on that so please look that up. And then we also have the nori. Nori is a type of seaweed which is dried in the form of paper like this which we'll use at the end to wrap the onigiri. Let's prepare the rice. So we're going to rinse the rice first. Wash it with water the first water you want to get rid of right away and then mix well and then wash away all the is clear. I'm gonna let it drain last time and let it drain for about a minute like so. So we're gonna add in the water. We had one cup of rice so we're gonna add in 1.2 cup of water. So it's about a little under one and a quarter because one and a quarter is 1.25 so this is a good amount of water. So we're gonna let it sit for about a half an hour because it's very warm today. Let's cook the rice. So the rice has been soaked in water for about half an hour now and you see that the rice is all white. Then I'm gonna put the lid on and turn the heat to high and wait till it boils. So the water is boiling. I'm gonna give it a little mix here so that it'll be cooked evenly and then put the lid back on and turn the heat to simmer and then let it cook for 10 minutes. So the 10 minutes has passed. I'm going to turn off the heat for rice and let it just sit like this for another 10 minutes and let it steam on its own. Then on the side I'm going to prepare the toppings. I'm going to turn the frying pan to high and I'm gonna put a little bit of oil. While we wait until the pan gets heated I'm going to prepare the okaka. So this is just regular bonito flake. This is regular soy sauce. I'm just gonna put about a teaspoon and then I'm just gonna give it a little mix. So bonito flake is just full of umami and soy sauce is also with umami. So this is actually just umami bomb. The frying pan is heated. I'm going to turn the heat to medium so the salmon doesn't burn and put this. I'm gonna grill this one side for three minutes or so. Then I'm gonna put the lid on and let it cook with medium heat for about three to five minutes. So it's been about three minutes. I'm going to take the lid off. Yeah perfect. And then flip to the other side and let it cook for another two minutes or so. So it's been about two minutes. Let's see. Looks good. Yeah looks perfect. I'm just gonna fry it like this so that the skin part gets crispy. So it looks perfect. So I'm gonna turn the heat off and put it on a plate and it's finished. So it's been also about 10 minutes since the rice is turned off and looks perfect. Looks great. So I'm going to put this on a plate so that the rice gets cooled. Otherwise when you make the onigiri your hand's gonna get burnt. So like this much is probably good enough. So try not to waste any grains of rice otherwise it'll get dried up and you can't eat it anymore. So let's make the onigiri. Of course I just washed my hands. Please always wash your hands before. Well you should wash your hands anyway before you cook anything. So what I'm gonna do first is I'm just gonna divide this into four sections so that each onigiri will have about the same amount of rice. And then I'm going to wet my hands with water. First I'm going to make shio musubi which is onigiri just with salt which is also really delicious. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use one fingertip and then let it and put salt and that's enough for the onigiri. I'm going to spread it out like so. So the the salt is evenly spread out. I'm going to take a section of the rice and make the onigiri like so. So what you want to do is you want to make a triangle and here is going to be the base of the triangle and with the right hand I'm making a cup but more a sharp cup like this that covers the top of the onigiri. I'm not squeezing so hard because it's going to get too packed like this. And then what I'm doing is I'm just turning one side and squeeze again and then turn one side and squeeze again. One side, squeeze, one side, squeeze, turn, squeeze, turn, squeeze, squeeze, turn, squeeze, turn, squeeze, turn, squeeze, turn, squeeze, turn, squeeze, turn, and well you shouldn't do that much that's too much. And then it comes to a perfect triangular shape. Then next I'm going to make with okaka and I'm going to wet the hands again and then I'm going to put the salt again and spread the salt around the hand. I'm going to take a section of the rice and I'm going to make a small dent in the middle and I'm going to put this topping inside and then you want to kind of cover it around and like this and do the same all around. Squeeze, turn, squeeze, turn, squeeze, turn, squeeze, turn, like this. So don't get discouraged if you can't do it the first time. I've failed many times. It took me a while for me to be able to do this so don't worry just practice. So my hands have gotten a little bit sticky so I'm just going to give it a little wash and then they're clean again. The next topping I'm going to use is umeboshi. There's one inside. Some people take the pit out of the umeboshi. I don't really care so I'm just going to put in like just so and cover it and then squeeze, turn, squeeze, turn, squeeze, turn, squeeze, turn, squeeze, turn, squeeze, turn, squeeze, turn, like so. Oh I think I forgot to put the salt. It's okay, well not a big deal. If you forget you can put the salt in the hand and then you can squeeze again. So lastly I'm going to put the salmon. So that's a bit too much so I'm just going to cut a small piece like so. That wet the hands. Salt and then a little dent in the middle and then I'm going to put the salmon in the middle like so and then try to cover it as much as possible. So you kind of see it outside. It's okay, no big deal. So and that's that. It often happens that the rice gets stuck in the plate. Don't throw these away. You're just going to have to eat it. Also the these rice on the finger or rice on the hands you can just eat it up. So onigiri is finished then let's put the nori. So a lot of people don't know but nori gets moist really fast so what you want to do is as soon as you open the package put in a ziploc like this and then seal it like so and store this in fridge not outside and what I usually do is because I'm going to use all the nori at once and so I'm just going to take out the amount that I need and then store this in the fridge and then cut these up in pieces. When it's fresh then you hear this crispy noise and then what I do is that I have another smaller ziploc and then store this these in the ziploc and today I just need four one two three four and I also store this in the fridge so in my fridge I have these. There's no right way to wrap nori with onigiri but I'm going to just like this one two so nori has top on the bottom so you see the rough side that's the bottom and you see the smooth side that's the top so the rough side is the bottom when it gets dried so like paper and then just wrap it like this. If you like the nori still crispy then you want to wrap it at the very very end right before you eat but I'm just gonna wrap it like this today. Itadakimasu! Okay let's eat oh I'm starving I'm gonna start with shio musubi which is just a musubi with salt it's just rice and salt it's also one of my favorite then you can enjoy really the taste of rice so the salt just kind of brings out the sweetness of rice and try chewing for at least 30 seconds because with the saliva so the rice will turn from starch to glucose which is actually sugar you can really taste the sweetness of rice when you chew and mix with the saliva. I'm just gonna grab some tea so next I'm gonna eat okaka which is bonito flakes oh this is also really good this mix of bonito flakes and soy sauce is just perfect so I really have to thank our ancestors of making this combination not quite sure which ones which ah that's definitely some so I'm gonna eat umeboshi umeboshi is pickled plum and we usually find umeboshi in bento because somehow through fermentation umeboshi prevents food to get bad so that's why you often find umeboshi in bento box this umeboshi is a little bit sweeter I think nowadays a lot of umeboshi you find has a little sweetness to it I like the very strong sour salty umeboshi but I like this as well so don't forget to spit out the pit then last not least salmon oh this is really by far my oh this is great this salted salmon is just really good so other onigiri are of course good but for me when I eat salmon onigiri I feel all it's just rich oh that was just a perfect lunch actually it's just rice but somehow when you make it into a shape of onigiri it just kind of adds another layer I don't know why in Japan we call it because we add in love to the rice maybe that's the reason it might take a little bit of practice to get the hang of it but once you get it then it's actually not that hard so I hope you try it yourself and let me know how it went in the comments if you have any requests please write that in the comments as well and I look forward to see you in the next video bye