Spam Musubi (Grilled Luncheon Meat Rice Block)

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.
• How it differs from onigiri: ko.wikipedia records the Japanese rice ball as 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.
• The other Hawaiian one: with poke, it is one of the two things the islands eat every day.
• As a packed lunch: wrapped, it survives half a day in a bag — the slot filled by tamago sando or gimbap.

Tips

• 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.
• 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.
• 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 keeping. Add it if they are going to sit out. It does not need to taste like sushi rice; one tablespoon is enough to lower the pH (vinegar, salt and seasoning).
• 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).
• 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).