Soboro

In anticipation of eating lots of rice with me new handy dandy rice cooker, I made some soboro to top it with! Soboro is basically just ground meat seasoned kind of sweet and salty, usually used for topping boiled rice in Japan in lunch boxes and the like. I made my soboro with tuna and egg yolk, flavored with soy, white wine, and mustard. I also used a little olive oil since my tuna was a lot dryer than, say, hamburger would have been in the same treatment. I just put everything in the pan on pretty low heat and basically just dried it as much as possible.

This is pretty much what it looks like when you're done: like powdered tuna. The little greenish bits are very small slices of celery. It's a lot darker than usual canned (or bagged) tuna because of both the soy sauce and the heat of the pan.

Some pieces are bigger than others. I liked the idea of having different texture within the soboro itself as well as it contrasting with the rice. It also looks a little nicer, I think, to be able to identify parts of the otherwise mysterious brown powder.

Here's my rigging! Once I took the soboro out of the pan, it was still a little steamy but not enough for me to want to risk burning it. I also had that jar there that I wanted to use for the soboro to put it in the freezer between uses, so it was important to make sure it was fully cooled and as dry as possible before packing it up. Here you can see that I just put a piece of a brown paper bag over a wire cooling rack. It worked really well to wick off the last bits of moisture from the bottom while allowing the steam to rise from the top. I could curl the paper and just pour the soboro into the jar once it was cool.

Like that! Now it's just hanging out in the freezer, where it should keep pretty much indefinitely between uses. The pieces are so small that it should just warm right up in the steam of the rice when I want it. Mmmmm!