Part of my dream for my professional life is to manifest a museum, and to have a cafe in that museum, today I was able to create a starting point for rice balls to be served in that museum, inspired by one of the most beautiful places I used to frequent, Santa Monica, CA -- especially the omusubi-style rice balls sold by Sunny Blue.
I used Calrose white short-grain rice (I prefer CJ's Chun Ha Il Mi brand for some things), which I cooked in the Instapot.
I made a sweet savory sauce made of: fish-fermented-flavored soy sauce, a bit of Maruchan bouillon Chicken flavor broth, oligo, sesame oil.
I re-warmed the rice in a carbon steel pan and added the sauce and incorporated it -- I find that adding the sauce while cooking the rice, as opposed to just adding it raw into the rice after it's cooked imparts a toasted caramel-y flavor, and adding multiple batches in the pan will create a nice crust of fried rice and sauce at the bottom (like the wok hei people talk about) that adds extra oomph into the food.
I spoon a generous heaping of this rice mixture into a seaweed wrapping.
I still have to figure out how I'm going to create the shape of the rice - I think it would be ideal to use a bamboo mold, but I want round edges. Maybe I'll just use a ceramic bowl instead, and shape the rest with my hands. I want to avoid using plastic as much as possible.
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