WaniKani level 3 – celebration Onigiri

Dear reader,
I have leveled up to level 3 on WaniKani today! Even the revered Crabigator is pleased with my progress.

In celebration let’s make some Onigiri!

How to make Onigiri

Ingredients
200g sushi rice
500ml lightly salted water
100g smoked salmon
wasabi paste
soy sauce
1 sheet of nori seaweed

Directions
Boil water in a pot and salt lightly.
Meanwhile wash the rice.
Put washed rice in boiling water. Set heat to low and put on the lid to let it simmer until water is mostly absorbed and rice is wet and mushy.
Cut salmon into small chunks, mix with some wasabi paste and a few drops of soy sauce.
Fold nori sheet two times and seperate into four long strips.
Let the rice cool down until it’s warm. I divided the rice in the pot into four portions to make four onigiri.
Use a sheet of plastic wrap, lay it out flat and put in half of the portioned rice in the center. Fill in some flavored smoked salmon in the center of the rice. Put on the remaining rice of the first portion into a ball.
Wrap the rice ball with the plastic wrap and try to shape it into a onigiri.
Dewrap the rice ball and wrap it with a strip of nori.
Repeat three times until you have four onigiri.

Taste
I really liked the flavor. The rice was a little boring, as I haven’t used rice vinegar or much salt.

Storage
I stored two onigiri wrapped in new plastic wrap in the fridge for the next day. They were pretty cold and should be taken out of the fridge a few hours before consumption. I have read it’s better not wrap them in nori, if you want to refrigerate them, but the nori was wet and hold form and not soaked and ripped away.

Afterthougths
I’ve used too much salmon. I ate the rest of prepared salmon raw. About 75g would have been enough, as filling space is limited. This lead to some chunks of filling sticking out of the rice shell.
The portion sizes with 200g of raw rice for four onigiri was okay. Getting the strip of nori evenly on both sides is hard. As soon as the mushy rice touches the nori it will stick together.