How to Cook Japanese Rice in a Rice Cooker

Hello Nami!

Yeah, rice pudding-type food can be quite good. There’s also a widespread food brand called “risifrutti” here which is pretty much makes a fairly sweet rice pudding in a plastic cup with various types of fruit jam depending on what you want in a smaller plastic cup beside the rice pudding one, mainly used as a mid-day snack. I used to have it often back in the day.

I wonder why we sometimes stop eating something even though it’s good, haha. Like risgrynsgröt, used to have it around christmas every year but then I just stopped and almost forgot it even existed. I feel like it also used to be more widespread and found everywhere but that it’s now rarely made anymore. That might be because I grew up and my mother wasn’t making it anymore and that I didn’t go to schools providing school meals anymore, so it sort of just faded out of mind. I guess that it’s not all about finding new stuff to try out, sometimes it’s nice to find nostalgic foods that you haven’t had for a long time as well 😀 Perhaps making them oneself will make for a whole new experience.

Hello Nami,

Ran out of options to “reply”, haha, so I’ll just reply to your previous comment again instead.

Yeah, I guess it’s also about the world becoming more connected so the food options and preferences are steadily increasing while many traditional recipes/meals are forgotten. Should at least eat them every now and then for nostalgia, right? Haha.

The hijiki salad isn’t really up my alley, I can eat seaweed but I’m not really that fond of it, I prefer if it’s used for things like dashi rather than using a lot of it in my cooking.

As for the fish, I sadly can’t try out the charcoal grilled one(I don’t live in a place where I can use a charcoal grill) but perhaps I could try the foil version. Sadly it’s somewhat difficult to acquire daikon over here, it’s usually just in seed form. At most I might be able to find some form of white radish, perhaps. Or I’ll have to see if I can grow some at home myself.

I’m a bit averse to the idea of cooking with guts and leaving guts inside, but if you just eat the meat I guess it’s of no issue.

To be honest, I’m at the stage of starting to want to try some more fish recipes. I grew up in a family where fish was almost entirely avoided. We had it in the form of a type of swedish fish ball in a type of dill sauce or fish sticks/breaded and fried fish fillets. Rarely did we have any “normal” fish. My father hated fish, so did my sister and I grew to dislike it as well(my grandfather loves fish and often nets his own down the lake he lives by but I don’t feel like he’s the best at preparing it). Well, even then I always loved catching perch when I was younger then rushing over and grilling it right after in aluminium foil with butter, dill and salt, perhaps some pepper as well. That taste was quite heavenly, fresh fish is always the best.

The biggest issue is that we don’t really cook much with fish in Sweden, thus the recipes haven’t evolved much and people don’t know how to properly prepare it. Fish is also one of the ingredients that are quite easy to completely ruin. The fish I had was either somewhat bad or prepared in a dissatisfying way. That’s also why I have big issues with “fishy” smells and taste, but fish prepared properly doesn’t have that. I feel like seaweed often tastes similar so I have a hard time eating it, although dashi is great. I think that’s a big reason why I can’t stand most furikake, although the worst part is that I find furikake often have weird combinations of flavors, flavors I don’t even recognize on their own and are often very sharp and heavy, perhaps it’s easier if you grew up with japanese food.

We do have some basic fish recipes and ways of utilizing fish, of course. Perhaps the most notorious is “surströmming” which is often used as a joke by other countries, or even our country(like people gagging at it even here or some brats placing a can in the air ventilation system of a school, hehe), but we also have things such as “sill” which is pretty much raw pickled herring in different forms(it’s quite good but special, usually eaten while meeting during easter, summer, christmas etc), we also have cold smoked and hot smoked salmon which is quite popular.

But the basic recipes aren’t usually all that in my opinion and it doesn’t get better because we don’t have access to very fresh fish, it’s mostly just frozen, vacuum packed or VERY expensive fish placed in ice which doesn’t tend to be that much better anyway. We have some ready-made gratin fish sauces and similar stuff for use in the oven. Simple stuff. That’s what you get when fish isn’t a big part of your diet and the market isn’t really that big for fish.

But from what I understand, fish needs to be handled with care and cooked properly to be good(and preferably as fresh as possible). I believe that the only reason I am still not overly fond of fish is that I grew up with fish that had been abused by ignorance and neglect. I want to try cooking it properly and paying attention to the details, getting it right and then seeing if I can’t break my own, and perhaps some other people’s I’ll invite for dinner, preconcieved notions.

When you have fish with a fishy smell and unappetizing meat that either is mushy or too hard or perhaps decent overall without fishy smell or weird meat but instead no taste whatsoever, feeling like biting into little more than chewy water that needs to be drenched in strong sauce to be “good”, I think it’s no wonder that you don’t like it, and from experience I know that us humans likes to avoid things we think are bad instead of trying to change our minds, but I’ll see if I can test some of your recipes and change my mind 😀 If good fish is even half as good as people in Japan and many other places claim, I think I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Looking forward to when I can travel to Japan and explore while trying a lot of local delicacies by experts. Still, that’s sadly quite a while away, I still have a few years more left of college and then I need to save money, which will have to be a big sum, it’s not really cheap to travel Japan and explore. I also want to be somewhat fluent in japanese before going, at least to the point of being able to hold a proper conversation. At the moment I just know a few hundred words and can read kana almost as fast as the roman alphabet, but I just know a few dozen kanji so there’s still a long way to go. At least several hundred more words to memorize(to hold a proper conversation), many kanji and having to get more used to japanese grammar. I feel like pronounciation isn’t an issue anymore though. I really feel like it’d be hard to properly enjoy travelling japan if all I can communicate with is english. Isn’t part of the fun to interact with those around you, asking questions, perhaps chatting a little, I feel like I’ll be way more welcome if I can speak Japanese.

I also want to time the visit to a festival, one with a lot of stalls and festival food to try out. Also have to try out a hot spring somewhere and some other famous things of Japan 😀 But I feel like only by going there will I be able to feel the true essence of japanese food, what I make at home is, at the end of the day, nothing more than copycat imitations that I don’t even know the original taste of. I don’t know if they taste right or wrong, I can just judge if I think it tastes good or bad. Knowing the real taste will help increase the quality of my own cooking quite a bit, I reckon.

Wow, that was one hell of a long reply. I hope you don’t mind.