Quote:
Originally Posted by Unknown Soldier
I don't normally eat just a bowl of rice. Yeah, I know, the rice in an onigiri is seasoned, but still, it doesn't sound very appetizing. They weren't specific as to if that one is stuffed with anything or it's just rice. I don't think I would be able to eat a half-pound of just rice. I guess that's how I know I'm not Miki.  |
Japanese rice is a different type of rice than say, Chinese/Thai rice. Chinese/Thai rice are long grain rice and are fairly tasteless and dry, Japanese rice is short grain rice with high starch content and are actually very sweet and sticky. Their taste is very different, in fact once you've lived in Japan for a short while you can always tell which sushi shop is "fake" overseas (ie run by non-Japanese) just by the type of rice it uses, as those shops usually goes cheap and buy Thai rice and not real Japanese rice (which are usually very expensive to buy, as you are looking at something like 2000yen for about 5kg/10 pounds even domestically).
A lot of non-Japanese people, especially Chinese, don't understand why Japanese people can just eat rice with some light seasoning or some very light side dishes such as the pickle radish, that's because they've never truly had real Japanese rice and had only been eating cheap "fake" sushi and/or only eat Chinese/Thai rice at home. I can easily have a pound of Japanese short grain rice with just some pickles but I would never be able to do that with Chinese/Thai long grain rice, they taste really different. That said, I would also never be able to make good fried rice with Japanese rice either due to the high starch content.
