Food to Make Your Soul Smile
I Will Always Love SPAM® Musubi
Simple to Make, Beautiful to Look At, Delicious to Eat
I have been eating SPAM® since I was a kid. My family didn’t really understand how versatile it could be, so it usually just ended up being fried and served with eggs. Basically, they treated it as though it was just sausage. Yawn. It can be so much more.
I moved to Maui, Hawaii in 1999, about two weeks ahead of the Y2K rollover. At that point, I had a very limited idea of Hawaiian cuisine. We had honeymooned in Maui, and had done the obligatory luau, but we had not really spent a lot of time delving into the things people actually eat in Hawaii.
My first job in Maui, I worked for Maui County in the County Administration Building in Wailuku. I worked for Maui County IT, doing service calls for all the county government offices on the island. While working there, I got introduced to SPAM® musubi. Now, the version of SPAM® musubi that I saw was a little lackluster. It was sold by an old local man who kept a lunch trolley in the lobby of the admin building. It was tasty, but not fantastic. That lunch trolley got shut down by the health department because the trolley’s heat lamp was not hot enough. This resulted in a food poisoning outbreak centered on that food trolley. I did not get sick, and counted myself lucky.
I did remember that musubi, though. It’s simple in concept. It’s a rectangular block of sushi rice, the same dimensions as a slice of SPAM® and about an inch or so thick. You set a slice of SPAM® on top of that, and secure it in place with a nori wrapper, maybe an inch wide. Nori, or dried edible Japanese seaweed, is readily available in the Asian sections of supermarkets. It is sold dried. You just cut it into strips the desired width, soak it in water to make it pliable, then wrap whatever needs to be wrapped.
There are any number of ways to prepare SPAM® musubi. My favorite is to cook the sushi rice as directed on the package. Sushi rice is a short grained sticky rice. Too many people who don’t understand rice will stress out when rice sticks. They do all kinds of crazy crap to negate the stickiness, including mixing in vegetable oil. That’s stupid. The stickiness is the whole point of rice. To form the rice blocks, you can use a mold purchasable from anywhere that sells Asian cooking implements. I bought my first mold from a Foodland store in South Maui. It was a small Lucite box with a press plate. That same mold is available on Amazon.com. It is not expensive, but if you are in a pinch, one thing to try is to pat the rice down firmly and evenly in a rectangular pan to about the desired thickness, then use an empty SPAM® can like a cookie cutter to just stamp out blocks of rice exactly the dimensions you need. Let the rice blocks cool, as they are more stable and less likely to fall apart than when they are warm.
At this point, you may want to get your nori cut into strips. The width of the strip is a matter of taste. I have seen musubi made with the nori cut to the same length as the SPAM®, but usually you see it cut to about half that. It just depends on the look you are going for, and how much you like nori. I just cut the nori to about inch-wide strips. When you have enough nori strips, about one strip per piece of musubi, place the strips in lukewarm water and let them sit. They will be pliable when it is time to use them.
Once your rice blocks are set, slice the SPAM® to the desired thickness. How thick is really up to you. I usually get 8–10 slices out of a block of SPAM®. To cook the SPAM® you will need to make a sauce. The sauce I use is super easy to make. It’s just a quarter-cup each of sugar, soy sauce and rice wine. Place those three ingredients in a pan and heat to a simmer. Stir until the sauce thickens into a glaze. Place the SPAM® slices in the pan. Do not stack them. Work in batches if needed. Lightly sauté the SPAM®, turning until it is nicely coated with glaze. Remember, SPAM® is already cooked, so no worries about undercooking it.
When all the SPAM® is glazed, it is time to assemble your musubi. Place a single slice of SPAM® on top of each rice block and press down lightly, but not hard enough to deform the rice block. If you wet the palms of your hands a little, it will prevent rice grains from sticking to your skin. You are just looking to make sure the SPAM® has full-surface contact with the rice. The final step is to bind the SPAM® to the rice with a strip of nori around the middle. With that, you are done! One or two pieces of SPAM® musubi make an excellent snack or even lunch. It is easy enough to make at home for yourself, but impressive looking enough that you’d be proud to serve it to friends. It is also great to take to a potluck.
Oh, and if anyone tells you SPAM® is gross and refuses to eat it, all the better. More for you!
