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When I was a kid, we had a goldfish. Even though I wanted a cuddly, furry pet, our parents started us off with a goldfish. And of course, we would have to feed fish food to our goldfish. Fish food, in case you haven’t seen it before, is generally a can of flat fish flakes. To a little Japanese Canadian kid like me, it looked like furikake. So I would eat it. And if I was feeling particularly generous, I would share it with my friends when they came over. Just another example of what weird things kids will eat!
Furikake is a dry seasoning mix that we have eaten with rice ever since I can remember. There are many different combinations of ingredients and brands, so try a few and see which ones you like. Since our dad has a crustacean allergy, we never bought the ones with shrimp (these flavours of furikake will have pink bits in it). My favourite needs to have sesame seeds, nori (seaweed), bonito flakes (aka fish food), and yellow egg crumbles. Some varieties have small sembai cracker sticks added for extra crunch. Shiso leaf can also be added to lend a bit of citrus flavour. If you want your sinuses cleared, try a variety with green powder – this is wasabi!
We have always just sprinkled this on fresh white Japanese rice, but you can also form riceballs (onigiri) and roll them in the furikake.
A few years ago, my family would visit a great uncle on Sunday afternoons to watch sumo wrestling and eat his Ukrainian wife’s amazing Japanese cooking. In between bouts, there would be ‘commercials’ on the wrestling platform which consisted of people holding poles with banners or flags and walking in circles before departing. All of the writing on the banners was in Japanese, which I can’t read. But I could identify one ad: the black, yellow and red stripes of Nagatanien furikake!
You can find this in most Japanese or Korean grocery stores. Chinese grocery stores often don’t carry it, but take a look anyways.
