Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia · Volume 11, The Imu, the Camp and the Plate Lunch
Spam Musubi
Postwar Hawaii, plantation-adjacent
Illustration
- Time
- 30 minutes
- Researched
- Researched from 66 sources in the brief
Grilled Spam, glazed in a sticky shoyu-sugar-mirin reduction, set on unseasoned or lightly seasoned rice, wrapped in a strip of nori. Flagged honestly: the widely repeated claim that Barbara Funamura, a Japanese-American restaurant manager on Kauai, invented the specific rectangular format in 1983 traces to a single academic paper title cited at one remove; this chapter does not assert it as settled fact.
As tradition built it
Makes 8. About 30 minutes.
Ingredients
- 1 tin Spam, sliced into 8
- 3 tbsp soy sauce
- 2 tbsp sugar
- 1 tbsp mirin
- about 8 cups, cooked cooked short-grain rice, warm, unseasoned or very lightly salted
- 4 sheets nori, cut into strips
- 1 a musubi mould, or an empty, clean Spam tin with both ends removed
Method
- Fry the Spam slices in a dry pan until browned on both sides.
- Combine soy sauce, sugar and mirin in the pan, and reduce until it clings thickly to the Spam as a glaze.
- Pack warm rice into the mould, top with a slice of glazed Spam, press firmly.
- Unmould, and wrap with a strip of nori, sealing with a few grains of rice.
What a modern chef changes
The glaze built as a proper reduction and the rice's temperature and seasoning given real attention.
Kit note, not tied to a numbered rung.
Method
- Reduce the shoyu glaze low and slow until it genuinely lacquers rather than merely coats, watching for the point it turns glossy and slightly stringy, well past a quick simmer.
- Pack the rice while still genuinely hot, straight from the cooker, not rested, since cold or rested rice falls apart under the mould's pressure and will not hold a clean shape.
- Spam is trivially and widely available in Britain from every major supermarket; no substitution is needed here.