Vegan sushi and rice balls (1)

Since I became a vegetarian 27 years ago, I have usually cooked brown rice at home. It is more nutritious than white rice, but white rice is also good when I feel like eating something light. When I went to BIO Atsumi, a supermarket 7-miniute walk from JR Hamamatsu Station, last night, some sushi and rice balls were already sold at a discount price. So, I bought one pack of kappamaki or cucumber sushi rolls and two rice balls.

Kappamaki is one of the most recognizable vegan foods available in supermarkets. It may be the simplest kind of sushi, just consisting of rice, cucumber, and laver. Beside the sushi corner in BIO Atsumi, there were soy sauce and wasabi you could take as necessary. But I ate them only with soy sauce I had at home. Since I like sushi rolls with laver because of their flavor of sea (it is difficult to explain the flavor of laver), I thought these cucumber rolls were also good.

The rice balls contained kombu (昆布) or kelp and goma (胡麻) or sesame. Though kelp is a popular filling for rice balls, it is often flavored with dried bonito broth. Fortunately, this wasn’t the case with the kelp in these rice balls. The ingredients were just rice, kelp, laver, salt, and sesame. I couldn’t feel the taste of sesame very much, but I enjoyed the flavor of seaweed both inside and outside of the rice balls.

BIO Atsumi is an interesting supermarket with many high-quality foods from Japan and abroad. I have once introduced ganmodoki and oyaki sold there in this blog, and there are still other products to write about.

BIO Atsumi
Address: 1168 Sunayama-sho, Naka-ku, Hamamatsu-shi, Shizuoka
Tel: 053-456-5550
Open hours: 9:30 - 21:00