Having more onigiri in your life in San Francisco, a perfect Japanese snack

A staged concept outside the 7-Eleven in downtown San Francisco. As of March 2024, you can’t find onigiri at any 7-Eleven location in the continental US. But hopefully this changes soon! If not 7-Eleven, we’d like to see onigiri emerging elsewhere.

Finding onigiri locally in San Francisco.

Here’s a list of places that sell packaged / boxed onigiri. There’s also Japanese restaurants and sushi places that offer onigiri on their menu too, but this list is focused on the conbini style of ‘grab an onigiri on the go’ as a quick snack / mini meal.

If you’re a fan, ask your local grocery store / convenience store to stock them — especially if they already have sushi vendors. Onigiri has to be made fresh each day, so it’s a tricky logistic! 🍙

Kororin in Chicago has figured it out! They’re a supplier of conbini style onigiri to local grocery stores throughout Chicago. We are jealous in other US cities.

Making onigiri at home.

It’s so nice to make 10 at a time, and carry them around and give them to friends. A day with onigiri is a better day. There’s a beautifully comprehensive guide on the Japanese recipe site Just One Cookbook, which includes onigiri’s history in Japan as a portable preserved food.

Here’s a quick list of the steps I do to make onigiri.

1. Get ingredients and tools

   • You can find rice ball sheets / seaweed wrappers online or at some local Asian grocery stores. (They’re not everywhere, so call first!) Most of the imported wrappers I’ve seen online are from Korea.

   • Find a “Rice ball mold” or “Onigiri mold”, either stainless steel or silicone. You can form them by hand, but a mold will give you a perfect triangle shape. I had better luck finding this online than any physical store.

   • Get good sushi rice. I used Nishiki.

   • Get filling ingredients.

   • Optional fun part — if you have a sticker paper / printer, you can make your own creative packaging.

2. Make sushi / sticky rice

   You can find so many opinions on sushi rice on the internet. For onigiri, keep it plain! I make my rice in an Instant Pot, and use a ratio of 1 cup of rice to 1.25 cups of water. I also found that 2 cups of dry rice yields around 11 onigiri, but it depends how thick / dense you make them.

3. Make fillings

   This is a creative format! I love salmon + sesame oil + chili flakes + lots of salt + dash of mirin, and also experimented with flavors like pickled jalapeño + lime. I’ve also mixed fermented bean & Lao Gan Ma. The overall idea is, something really ‘sharp’ in flavor. It should taste intense on its own, but it balances itself out with the plain sticky rice and unsalted seaweed. (You could also experiment with sweet flavors, idk! Play around)

4. Put it all together

   • Put a layer of rice packed into the bottom of the mold, and make a divet for the filling to go in. Use a spoonful of filling and put it in the center (eyeball this to your preference, but don’t overfill it). At another layer of rice on top and pack it down.

   • Keep your mold in a bowl of water between making each one—to keep the mold from getting sticky.

   • I put my finished onigiri on parchment paper on a plate, so I could pry them off easily.

   • I make them while the rice is hot, then put them in the fridge for 15 mins to cool before putting them on the seaweed sheet, to prevent the seaweed from getting soggy.

   • Seaweed sheets come with instructions of how to wrap them and seal them with a sticker.

5. Enjoy for up to ~24 hours.

   Onigiri are best fresh, but I like to carry mine around / refrigerate them and eat them the next day too. Over time the rice gets more firm, so you have a limited window to eat them. The packaging isn’t perfectly sealed so it just dries out. I’ve had 2-day old onigiri and it’s edible, just not as good!
   
   With leftover onigiri that got too dried out, I’ve fried them in a pan and it was delicious! It softens the rice and gets super crispy, and you can dip them in sauces.