Tuesday, January 5, 2010

What's Smoking?...Smoked Miso Cheese and Rice Balls with Donabe


I love my Donabe Smoker, Ibushi Gin.


What's so great about it is that this smoker can make the wonderful smoked dishes so easily. In fact, when I feel lazy, as long as I have some ingredients to smoke, I just put the ingredients in it and start the donabe smoker. Then, the magical smoked dishes are ready in such a short time.

This lunch today was definitely my "lazy" lunch. I had some leftover gobo rice (burdock rice) from the previous night. So, I made the onigiri (rice balls) with it and rubbed the miso paste to the rice balls. I also sliced some Swiss cheese and seasoned with miso paste. Both the rice balls and cheese were put in the donabe smoker with the sakura (Japanese cherry blossom) tree smoke chips, and smoked over the stove top.


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Smoked onigiri (rice balls) were ready in about 35 minutes! I wrapped it in the nori seaweed to eat. It tasted super nice. The sakura smoke chips gave the very nice aromatic smokiness to the onigiri.


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Then, I saw Jason wrapped both the smoked rice balls and cheese together with the nori seaweed. So, with my second onigiri, I did the same. It was so decadent!