🇯🇵 How to Make Onigiri

Craving Onigiri? On FoodNeverComes the food never actually comes — so here's how to make real Onigiri at home, in about 20 min, with stuff you probably already have.

🛒 Ingredients

Tap ingredients to tick them off as you shop or cook ✔️

• 2 cups cooked short-grain rice, warm (freshly cooked shapes best)
• fillings: canned tuna mixed with 1 tbsp mayo, or umeboshi plum, or flaked grilled salmon
• 2 sheets nori, cut into wide strips
• salt
• a small bowl of water

👩‍🍳 Method

1. Wet both hands in the water and rub a generous pinch of salt across your palms — the salt goes on your hands, not in the rice. That's the traditional seasoning trick.
2. Scoop a tennis-ball of warm rice, press a deep dimple in the middle, and drop in a teaspoon of filling.
3. Fold the rice over the filling and squeeze gently into a triangle: cup one hand into a roof shape, rotate, press. Three rotations usually does it.
4. Press firm enough to survive being held, loose enough that it crumbles pleasantly when bitten. Squeezing hard makes rice bullets.
5. Wrap the bottom with a nori strip — added just before eating so it stays crisp.
6. Eat warm, or wrap for later — onigiri is Japan's original portable lunch and it survives backpacks better than any sandwich.