Monster Rice Balls
No artificial colours! (No, really!) :)
I'm going to be perfectly honest right out front here: I think these are a 3/10 on taste and texture. There's room for improvements (run with it!), but I think the actual value of these is in their novelty. Normally, I could give an F about novelty, as I really do care how my food tastes!
Anyway, make these if you'd like to put a (perhaps temporary) smile on another fan's face. I'm very open to suggestions on how to improve this recipe! :)
I must give credit first to this lady (Ana, on VeganandColors.com) for her purple rice recipe... she even gave options for making sushi rice, bless her!!!
I've modified her recipe a little through trial and error. See my version below.
Monster Rice Balls
Ingredients (makes approx. 7 triangular rice balls folded by smallish hands):
- Sushi rice - about 1/2 cup worth (125mL or so)
- Red cabbage - half of a very small head or a quarter of a medium head of cabbage
- Sushi rice vinegar - need only about 1/2 tbsp (can use white vinegar in a pinch)
- granulated sugar - 1/2 tbsp
- Soy sauce (1-2 tbsp) or table salt
- Nori seaweed sheet for wrap (less than one sheet, assuming the sushi ones are standardized!)
- A little filling, about 1 tbsp per rice ball.....
Method:
Note: I'm no onigiri expert, and there are plenty of pages with great advice on how to do it well. I took their collective advice and ran with it. You might consider cross-checking my method here with others to get a feel for it if you're a first-timer.
Cut the head of red cabbage in half, then quarter it (in half once more). Cut out the hard white middle wedge (by cutting diagonally) and discard.
 |
| Be careful not to let the knife slip on you |
Either chop this very fine by hand (tedious), or throw it all into a food processor with a blade and let it do its thing (mince!). The finer the pieces, the better. It can practically be a paste and that'll work great, too.
 |
| Rice on the right had shredded cabbage, which gave a weaker colour. Surface area is key! Mince that cabbage! |
Measure this (pack it firmly) - you should have a generous 1/2 cup / 125mL of very finely chopped shredded cabbage. If not, mince some more of the remaining cabbage. You should have a roughly equal volume of red cabbage to the amount of dry rice you wish to cook.
 |
| At least this fine (or more)... |
Make the rice:
Rinse 1/2 cup / 125 mL of dry sushi rice under cold running tap water.
Tip rice into a heavy pot with a snug-fitting lid (important!).
Add 1 cups / 250 mL of water to the rice (2 times the volume of the dry rice you measured) and stir. Note: I would normally do 1.5 times the water to rice ratio when I cook any rice, but I tried this initially with this recipe and found it insufficient (in spite of what the sushi rice package told me).
Cover it with the lid and bring to the boil (highest heat).
Once it boils, reduce the heat to a lower setting (for example, 2 out of a maximum of 10) and let it boil gently for 5 minutes (use a timer).
After 5 minutes, carefully remove the lid (steam! Caution!), stir in the cabbage very well, replace the lid and boil again for another 5 minutes. I had to turn the heat back up to high for a little bit to get it to boil well.
After the 5 minutes (time it!), leave the pot where it is and turn off the heat altogether (to 0!) and just let it naturally simmer down and sit with the lid on, cooking in the steam (Don't remove the lid! Very important!) for at least another 5 minutes or so.
Now remove the lid, fluff up the rice, and let it cool to a temperature that you can work with with bare hands (occasional fluffing over the next 10 minutes or so will help dissipate the heat). But don't let it get cold.
Dissolve 1/2 tbsp of sugar in 1/2 tbsp of rice vinegar while the rice cools, and then pour that over the rice evenly. You'll see a colour shift from blueish purple to pinkish purple.
Stir and turn the cooked rice and be 100% sure that all of the rice has an equal coating of the sugar-vinegar solution (all grains the same colour). Stir occasionally to be sure it's cool enough to handle. Sticky rice burn is extraordinarily nasty...!
Now - form the rice ball by hand (or an alternative preferred method):
Stir some soy sauce (or table salt) into some lukewarm water in a nearby bowl that you can dip your hands into to wet (depth/volume of water varies by bowl used).
Cut a small rectangle of nori seaweed using scissors approximately 3 cm by 10 cm (or an inch by 3 inches, or something like this). Set aside for now.
 |
| I then cut these strips in half |
Dip your hands in to the soy sauce solution / salted water. Scoop a handful rice into your wet hands and spread it out evenly across your palm and fingers using both your dampened hands to form a long oval. Convenient photos of this process are here.
Scoop in your filling of choice (approximately a tbsp in volume) right into the middle of the rice oval. It won't hold much filling at all - don't add too much!
Fold the rice sheet together, and firmly press it together (FIRM!) to seal in the filling. Then shape it slightly at this point into a triangle.
Stick on the nori strip so that it pokes up evenly on each side (or whatever you think looks best).
Plate up a pair of them, preferably on a blue or grey leaf-shaped plate as we see in-game.
Enjoy, if you dare!
Aren't they... monstrous?!
Please share your iterations by leaving a comment below - would love to hear your favourite fillings!
There are VERY TASTY, tender and succulent, moist and hearty, pass-on-to-your-kids recipes coming up, ones which I'd eat regularly even if they had nothing to do with BotW. I just really wanted to start things off with a visual bang. ;)
See you again on another monstrous post!
Comments
Post a Comment