Hot green tea is poured over rice topped with grilled salmon and laver flakes just before eating. As the salmon and soy sauce seep into the tea, the broth gets richer, and the wasabi on the side changes the heat each time a little more is stirred in. Some pour dashi instead of tea, or swap the salmon for umeboshi (pickled plum) or pollock roe.
Gardenia fruit turns the rice a clear yellow, and a brothy stew of crumbled tofu, minced lizardfish and root vegetables is spooned over it. The dish comes from Usuki in Oita. One story credits the frugal local domain, which used yellow rice in place of costly red bean rice; another ties the color to paella seen through Nanban trade. Merchant households cooked a large pot of kayaku on New Year's Eve and reheated it through the first three days of the year.
A shallow crosshatch on the inside of the squid makes each piece curl into a thick, bouncy roll the moment it hits the heat, and the opened cuts give the gochujang sauce more surface to grab. Onion and cabbage go into the pan first to cook off their water so the sauce stays glossy.
Barley grains and chestnuts dried for a day give chew to this steamed sticky rice, which also carries chicken, burdock, fuki, shiitake, and fried tofu glossed with soy seasoning. The dish came to the Hiruzen area of Maniwa in Okayama from Daisen okowa in Tottori, and barley entered the mix around 1972 through a local staple-food improvement campaign. Families served it at New Year, seasonal celebrations, and festivals. The liquid left from simmering the filling is kept and sprinkled over the grains partway through steaming.
Mozzarella goes over rice cooked with butter-sautéed corn, the lid goes back on, and the heat of resting melts it so it stretches in long strands when you lift the paddle. A little milk in the cooking liquid makes the rice soft and creamy, and the corn kernels pop as you bite.
Ketchup rice, fried in butter with ham, vegetables and peas, is folded inside an egg still moist in the middle, using the curve of the pan. Cut into, the half-set egg runs over the rice, and the peas show up as flecks of green.
Korean snack bars serve omelet rice in its plainest form: ketchup fried rice with ham, onion and carrot, wrapped in thin egg and topped with more ketchup. The ketchup and Worcestershire sauce bubble at the edge of the pan before being stirred into the rice. Turned out onto the plate, it takes the familiar oval shape.
From late April through June, when Spanish mackerel entered the Seto Inland Sea and broad beans ripened, farming families in Sanuki made this pressed sushi for Haruio, a spring gathering where relatives shared fish, food, and sake. The mackerel on top must be sold for raw consumption, because the vinegar cure does not kill parasites or pathogens.
Thin slices of vinegared mackerel and a sheet of vinegar-softened white kombu wrap a firm block of sushi rice that has been pressed in a wooden mold. The Osaka style needs no soy sauce, and sweet pickled ginger is served alongside. Sushi Tsune in Minami-Semba created it in 1891 using konoshiro, and the half-fish shape looked like a small boat, battera in Portuguese. Mackerel and a square mold came later.
Chicken thigh and onion simmer in nothing more than water, soy sauce and mirin, with no dashi. The eggs are beaten only lightly, so streaks of white remain, and poured in two goes: the first half sets around the edges, the second stays soft and barely trembling, and the topping ends up marbled yellow and white. A little broth is left in the pan to soak into the rice underneath.
Chicken, rabbit, green beans and saffron make this the Valencian version, a long way from seafood paella. Once the rice is spread thin in the pan it is never stirred again, so the grains stay separate rather than creamy like risotto, and a thin crisp crust called socarrat forms on the bottom.
Tied to the winter solstice custom of warding off bad luck, this seasonal rice is soaked and cooked in the water the adzuki beans boiled in, which tints every grain an even red. The beans' first boiling water is thrown out, and they come out of the second pot just before their skins split.
Pushing only half of the cooked adzuki beans through a sieve and leaving the rest whole makes the porridge velvety while keeping whole beans and soft glutinous rice balls (saealsim) to bite into. Koreans traditionally eat it on the winter solstice (dongji).
Twelve chard leaves are rolled finger-thick around ground beef, soaked rice, onion and dried mint. The rolls are packed tightly into the pot, weighed down with a heavy plate, and cooked slowly in a thin tomato broth. In Turkey they come to the table with a tangy garlic yogurt.
Plain glutinous rice, with no filling and no seasoning, is folded into triangles of doubled bamboo leaves, tied with rush, and boiled for close to two hours. In Niigata the dense, chewy parcels are unwrapped and dipped in roasted soybean flour mixed with sugar and a little salt. Triangular chimaki turn up in writings from the Nara and Heian periods, and because the leaves kept them from spoiling, they became food for breaks in farm work. Local legend credits the warlord Uesugi Kenshin with ordering them as battle rations.
In this Indian breakfast dish the flattened rice never boils. A quick rinse in cold water and a short rest soften it enough to press between two fingers, and a brief toss in oil scented with mustard seed and turmeric warms it through. Roasted peanuts go into the yellow flakes, and a squeeze of lemon follows once the heat is off.
Pyongyang once ate this chicken and rice soup for breakfast. With no doenjang or gochujang and salt as the only seasoning, any cloudiness in the broth shows up in the taste. The chicken, scallion and garlic are kept at a bare simmer for 45 minutes. Rice goes into the bowl first, then the broth with its shiitake, and the shredded chicken on top.
Thick slices of fresh shiitake sit on the rice as it cooks, staying moist in the steam while their aroma drifts down into the grains. With dried shiitake instead, the soaking water becomes the cooking water and the mushroom flavor gets deeper. The finished rice is mixed with a sauce of soy, sesame oil, green onion and sesame seeds.
Rajma means kidney beans and chawal means rice, and that is the whole idea: a thick tomato and bean curry ladled generously over rice and eaten together. Onions cooked slowly until their edges brown give the sauce its body without any cream.
Mashing some of the beans is all it takes to thicken the pot, and spooned over separately cooked rice, it seeps between the grains like a sauce. This version uses canned beans that are already fully cooked.
Red shiso rubbed twice with salt releases a deep red juice that dyes cooked glutinous rice, and warm sweetened rice vinegar gives it a sweet-sour edge. This version replaces traditional room-temperature fermentation with refrigerated curing, so it will not taste identical, and it relies on measured pH and temperature instead. The shiso color makes test strips hard to read, which is why a calibrated penetrating food pH meter is required; without one, a finished product from an established producer is the safer route. Only a batch whose highest pH reading, taken at several points, is 4.2 or below moves on to curing. Mold, swelling, bubbles, slime, or an off smell after curing mean the batch is discarded untasted.
Inside each squid body, glutinous rice and chopped tentacles absorb a simmering liquid of kombu dashi, sake, and soy sauce and turn dense and chewy. Every sliced round shows white rice framed by a ring of squid. The bodies are only partly filled because the rice swells as it cooks, and overfilled squid split.
Warm stock steeped with saffron goes in a ladle at a time, turning the rice yellow as it cooks. Off the heat, cold butter and Parmigiano are beaten in quickly, and the risotto is done while it is still loose enough to spread slowly on the plate.
King oyster mushrooms are cut lengthwise into thick planks and scored in a crosshatch, which gives them enough heft to stand in for meat over rice. They are seared in a dry pan first to drive off water, then glazed with soy sauce, cooking wine and sugar, and they stay chewy under the sauce.