When I’m not abroad on a new adventure, I love to travel through food. I spend lots of time every week searching for new recipes to try on the next week.

Today, I want to share with you a little bit of this passion for cooking recipes from all over the world. The first recipe I will share is that of Japanese tuna-mayo onigiris. Not any onigiris, however. Let’s take it a step further and make extra-cute panda-shaped tuna-mayo onigiris.

INGREDIENTS

For this recipe, you will need:

• A pack of nori seaweed
• A pack of sushi rice
• A can of tuna (with no oil – ideally in water)
• 10 cl of sunflower oil
• A tbsp of Dijon mustard
• A bottle of rice vinegar
• 1 egg

COOKING SUPPLIES

If you want your onigiris to be shaped like a panda, you will need this kit from AliExpress which costs 7,11€. It contains a mold to shape your onigiris like pandas and a seaweed cutter which lets you cut the nori seaweed in the shapes needed to create your panda’s eyes, ears and mouth. You can also find similar molds in other marketplaces such as Temu.

METHOD

• Prepare your sushi rice: I like to follow the recipe suggested by the Blue Dragon brand to prepare the sushi rice. Namely, you put 3 cups of water and 15ml of rice vinegar for 1,5 cups of rice. Put the rice in the pot once the water is boiling and cook it for 15 minutes. Once it is ready, let it cool before using.
• Prepare your homemade mayonnaise: To make your homemade mayonnaise, all you need is to mix together one egg yolk, a teaspoon of rice vinegar and a tablespoon of Dijon mustard. Once that’s done, start incorporating little by little the sunflower oil while continuing to whisk the preparation the whole time. You continue doing this until the mayonnaise gets the right consistency.
• Incorporate the tuna: Mix the tuna with some of the mayonnaise you’ve just prepared.
• Combine it all to get panda onigiris: Start putting some of the sushi rice in the panda head mold. In the middle, put a small quantity of your tuna-mayo preparation. Top it up with a bit more rice. Use the press that comes with the mold to compress it all so it takes the shape of the mold. Get a plate out and remove your onigiri from the mold. Repeat the operation until you run out of rice or tuna-mayo preparation.
• Cut the nori seaweed: Use the seaweed cutter to create the ears, eyes and mouth of your panda. Then, carefully place them onto your onigiris using stainless steel plating tweezers.

THE RESULT

Here we have our onigiris! They will give you the WOW factor in any dinner with friends or they are also perfect for a cute lunchbox.

If you want to keep with the Japanese theme, you can accompany these onigiris with some vegetarian makis and make some sando (the famous Japanese fruit sandwiches with cream) for dessert.

Have you tried making those? Feel free to share your experience!