If Hawaii has a starch it would be rice for most, taro for tradition, and noodles as the guilty pleasure. Hawaii rice fields took over many taro fields in the immigration of the plantation bringing many cultures that preferred rice over taro or bread fruit as the ancient Hawaiian staples. Today, many of those areas have been built over with residential real estate or high rise apartment complexes.
As Hawaii's most popular starch, rice comes in many forms with many stories and many recipes that are specific to the family- including steamed rice, seasoned rice (topped rice), mixed rice (aka. flavored rice, jushi rice, mushi rice), sushi rice, fried rice (sauteed). In this case the rice that will be looked at is the mixed rice variation that has been found in old Japanese books, Honganji Temple recipe books, and Sports Fundraiser recipe books. Hawaii Mixed Rice, (aka.Flavored rice) was a easy way to take a few ingredients, miscellaneous vegetables, and a sauce to feed plenty of hungry workers. According to Barbara Kawakami it is said that many starch dishes were made from ingredients that people could afford on the plantation and mixed with the rice, which would make mixed rice a valuable recipe to feeding everyone. It really stretched meals with what was available and making use of canned goods that were seen as a special treat back then... a few make shift mixed rices were: Abalone mixed rice, Pork Cabbage mixed rice, Vienna Sausage mixed Rice, and Chorizo mixed rice. While canned goods may seem to be nothing special in todays super markets they were not that easy to get during the plantation days, so many people would want to stretch the flavor as much as they could through starches like rice. The original recipes from Japan explain to slice many of the ingredients into strips, but in Hawaii many people will opt to chop or dice their ingredients. It is a staple in many Japanese families to bring to pot luck some sort of mixed rice and it can be hard to trace where it exactly comes from, since it is nothing close to what the recipes originally were. Some from Japan may even call it Hawaii mushi or mixed hawaiian rice. Local recipes of mixed rice tend to have mushrooms and can consist of: Button Mushrooms for a soft texture, Oyster Mushrooms for a meaty consistency, Enoki Mushrooms for a bit of a slurp, or Shiitake Mushrooms for a extra boost of umami. Many mushrooms are preserved from drying, so it isnt uncommon to re-hydrate the mushrooms with fat and sauces mixed with the soaking water to extract even more powerful flavors. It becomes similar to a dashi with even more flavor than ever before and it is then re-used in the rice steamer to further push the flavor profile of the rice. However it is sometimes not easy to make mixed rice sound appealing to some of the younger crowd in comparison to other rice dishes, due to the flavor taking center stage and nostalgia being non existent. Shoyu Tuna Mixed Rice canned albacore tuna, shoyu, mirin, sake, bonito dashi stock Bamboo Chicken Mixed Rice (Tori meshi) bamboo shoots, chicken thighs, carrot, butter, mushrooms, sake shoyu with cooked in sugar, fish cake, konnyaku diced Aburaage Tofu Mixed Rice (Taiwan meshi) aburaage tofu, firm tofu, green onion, ground pork, shiitake, bamboo shoots, sweet onion, ginger, ground pork, ground chicken, brown sugar, shoyu, sake Pocho Mixed Rice (enoki mushrooms, bacon, sweet onion, garlic, rodondos portuguese sausage) Lup Cheong Mixed Rice (Cheong meshi) (lupchoeng, shiitake, sweet onion) Abalone mixed rice (Abalone meshi) (canned abalone, pork belly, ginger, alii mushrooms, chicken stock, mustard cabbage, shoyu, white pepper) Shiitake Clam Mixed Rice (Clam meshi) (shiitake, canned clam juice, canned clams, button mushrooms, bamboo shoots.) Jushi Pork Mixed Rice (Jushi Rice) (thin sliced pork, carrots, shiitake, konnyaku, konbu, konbu dashi stock, chicken stock, shoyu, sake, mirin, ginger)
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