Name: Spam Musubi (Grilled Luncheon Meat Rice Block)
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 25 min
Total time: 55 min
Yield: 8 servings
Cuisine: American
Ingredients: 2 cups short-grain rice; 2 cups water; 1 tbsp rice vinegar; 0.5 tsp salt; 1 tin luncheon meat; 3 tbsp soy sauce; 2 tbsp sugar; 1 tbsp mirin; 1 tbsp oil; 4 sheets roasted nori; 2 tsp furikake; 1 tsp sesame oil

Ingredients

8servings

Rice (makes 8)
short-grain rice · japonica; it needs the stickiness to hold together2 cups
water2 cups
rice vinegar · optional, for a mild tang1 tbsp
salt0.5 tsp
Meat and glaze
luncheon meat · 340g, sliced 8-10mm thick1 tin
soy sauce3 tbsp
sugar · reduced down for the gloss2 tbsp
mirin · or sake with a little extra sugar1 tbsp
oil1 tbsp
To finish
roasted nori · cut in half lengthways, 8 bands4 sheets
furikake · optional, between rice and meat2 tsp
sesame oil · optional1 tsp

Steps

Rinse and cook the rice. Let it stand covered 10 minutes, then fold through the salt and vinegar with a cutting motion. Use the rice hot — cold rice will not bond to itself however hard you press, and the block falls apart as you lift it.
⏲ 10 min
Turn the luncheon meat out and cut 8-10 slices 8-10mm thick. Thinner and they break up in the glaze; thicker and the ratio to the rice is wrong. Keep the tin and wash it — it works as the mould for pressing the rice.
Fry the slices in a little oil over medium heat, 3 minutes a side, until the edges are deeply browned. The meat is already cooked, but this browning is what turns a tin of salt into something worth eating.
⏲ 3 min
Mix the soy, sugar and mirin, pour it into the pan and reduce 2 minutes, turning the slices so both faces take the glaze as it thickens. Do not let the pan go dry — burnt sugar tastes bitter.
⏲ 2 min
Line a musubi mould, or the washed tin, with cling film, add warm rice and press it down firmly with a tool rather than your fingers — about 2cm thick, the same footprint as the meat. This pressing is what decides whether it holds once cold.
Scatter furikake over the rice, lay a glazed slice on top and push the block out of the mould. Wrap a band of nori from underneath and seal it by pressing a few grains of rice onto the overlap. Use the nori dry; do not wet it.
Wrap each one tightly in cling film and leave 20 minutes. In that time the nori takes up moisture from the rice, softens and binds the whole thing together. Eaten straight away the nori is stiff and separates from the rice as you bite.
⏲ 20 min
Eat at room temperature within about two hours. The fridge makes the rice go chalky, so if they must wait longer keep them in a cool bag and eat the same day.

Variations

With egg: a thin omelette laid between the meat and the rice, standard in Hawaii's convenience stores, and it takes the edge off the salt.
Teriyaki style: ginger and garlic in the glaze makes it the same sauce as teriyaki chicken. In Hawaii that is arguably the more standard version.
Kimchi musubi: chopped kimchi folded into the rice, a combination that came out of Hawaii's Korean community — the same idea as kimchi fried rice.
The other Hawaiian one: with poke, it is one of the two things the islands eat every day.
As a packed lunch: wrapped, it travels in a cool bag — the slot filled by tamago sando or gimbap.

More detail and the reasons why (2)

How it differs from onigiri: the Japanese rice ball is its ancestor, but the structure is not the same. Onigiri hides a filling inside rice shaped by hand into a triangle; musubi presses rice into a rectangular block, puts the filling on top, and ties the two together with nori. It is built more like a sandwich.
Why Hawaii: tinned luncheon meat arrived as US military supply across the Pacific during the Second World War and stayed afterwards, meeting the rice-ball format of the Japanese immigrant community. In Korea the same tin went into budae-jjigae — the same route exactly, a completely different result.

Tips

Do not press too hard, either. Compacted to a paste, the grain structure disappears and there is nothing to chew. Firm enough to lift without collapsing is enough.
Wrap the nori dry. Wetting it makes that patch soggy while the rest stays stiff. Moisture from the rice softens it by itself within twenty minutes.
Wrap each one separately. They do not stick to each other, and peeling the film halfway keeps rice off your hands — which is precisely how they are sold in Hawaii.
The ratio of thicknesses decides it. 2cm of rice to 1cm of meat is the benchmark. Thinner meat and it reads as salt; thicker and it cloys.
With a reduced-salt tin, increase the glaze. Add a little more soy to make up the difference or it will not balance the rice (balancing flavour, soy sauce).

More detail and the reasons why (6)

Glaze the meat, do not merely fry it. Straight from the tin it is salt and fat. Browning builds flavour and a reduced soy-and-sugar glaze coats it into something else entirely. Those two steps are most of this dish (browning and Maillard, what sugar does).
Press the rice while it is hot. Freshly cooked, the starch on the surface of each grain is still tacky and the grains bond; cold, that property is gone and no amount of pressing brings it back (cooking rice).
Press with a tool, not your fingers. By hand the pressure is uneven and one end ends up dense. With no musubi mould, the washed tin with both ends cut out is exactly the right size.
Those twenty minutes are cooking, not waiting. The nori bonds to the rice and a little of the glaze soaks in. It is definitively better twenty minutes on than straight away (serving temperature).
The tablespoon of vinegar is for flavour, not for keeping. Sushi rice takes several times as much, and one tablespoon does not make rice safe to leave out. Eat them within about two hours of making, and use a cool bag if they have to travel (vinegar, salt and seasoning).
If eating within two hours, never refrigerate them. The starch recrystallises and the rice goes chalky. Where lamington is a recipe that relies on exactly that process, musubi is one it ruins — the same chemistry working in opposite directions (reviving leftovers).

The basics behind this dish

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