If you’ve ever wandered leisurely through a Japanese grocery or browsed a Bento blog, you might have come across Furikake. Furikake is one of those uniquely Japanese things; simple and yet capable of making a huge difference. In this case, that means bringing the ‘Umami‘ flavor to a ‘bland’ medium such as plain rice. Interestingly, Japanese people of older generations don’t consider it classy to even stock it in their pantries; but it makes the ‘Gourmet’ list every time some prominent food personality claims to be fascinated by it.

Furikake is basically any dried condiment-usually Japanese-that can be sprinkled over rice. It even provides flavor to pasta and such when there isn’t much more on hand. The most common types include some sort of dried small fish & seaweed, salt, sugar, and a generous dose of MSG. MSG has long been the artificial ‘inducer’ of the Umami taste; and finds its way into several other ‘inducer’ type foods such as Furikake.

For any rice lover; in particular the Japonica rice variety lover; Furikake makes life ever so easy. While consuming MSG and the staggering amount of salt used in their preparation (and that is before we even get to the preservatives) is not something one should be doing on a daily basis, it is very useful to have in the kitchen. Besides, most Furikakes have unique and intriguing flavors that make for a very interesting experience. (They are easy to spot in the dried goods section of Japanese groceries; they generally come in loud foil packets or sturdy glass jars.)

The other downside-besides the aforementioned two -is their cost. Like most imported foods, they are ridiculously overpriced; enough to make you wonder why you would be spending that much to consume something that isn’t all that good for you in the first place. The good news is, they are easy enough to make at home. In fact, Japanese nutritionists recommend you do so, since then, you have control of what goes in.

Sounds like a bit of work, but honestly; no more arduous than baking bread. Not even as much, perhaps.

Before going into that, however, I’d like to share some of my favorite types of store-bought vegetarian Furikake:

My most favorite; this is basically just dried Shiso leaves. (Another type in the same class (not pictured) is Yukari; a Furikake made with dried Shiso leaves & Umeboshi.)

Another favorite, Wakame Chazuke, combining Wakame and dehydrated rice balls flavored with tea.

This here is Kimchee Furikake, whose title says it all.

One of the most common, and popular, I should say, is the Noritama (not pictured), which is a combination of Nori and dehydrated egg yolks.

Ok, on to the home-made versions now.

I found a recipe for making Furikake with carrots and jumped at it, since using up the all the carrots I buy every week has gotten to be a bit on the difficult side.

It involved a bit of watchful patience, and well, you know what that means. I did end up burning much of the first batch, and unfortunately, only have a picture of that; but honestly, it really does look a lot better and tastes fantastic as well.

Shredded carrots and sesame seeds are the stars of this one; but the key ingredient is the Shichimi-Toogarashi, or seven-ingredient spice, which is a coarsely-ground red pepper containing other ingredients such as dried Yuzu peel, sesame seeds, etc. It’s commonly used to top a steaming hot bowl of Udon or chilled cubes of Tofu.

The next one I tried my hand at was Gomashio, or Sesame Salt. This is much easier than the one above; involving only 3 ingredients-one of which is water-and very little ‘cooking’.

Merely involving sesame seeds, salt and water, Gomashio with just rice could actually help constitute a complete meal-judging by how nutritiously rich sesame seeds tend to be. Good quality sea salt will give it a nice and even flavoring as well.

Try Furikake out sometime. They’re not up there on the healthy, nutritious scale, but then, neither are Samosas and yet we wouldn’t want to avoid them, would we?

Here’re the recipes for Carrot-Sesame Furikake and Gomashio.