Just Bento

Warning: This furikake is very dangerous. It is so more-ish that you might find yourself putting spoonfuls of it directly in your mouth. To prevent this, I recommend making it a tad spicier than you might be comfortable with eating it on its own, so it will not disappear before you can use it on your rice. The spicy-salty-sweet taste, coupled with the interesting textures of the peanuts and the seeds, is quite hard to resist.

It’s the least Japanese-tasting furikake so far perhaps, but it fits plain white or brown rice very well. It is not exactly low-calorie, but a tablespoon or so goes quite a long way to spice up things.

All the spices can be found at an Indian or South Asian grocery store.

Spicy curry peanut furikake

• 1 cup (240ml) roasted shelled peanuts, unsalted is preferred but salted is ok
• 2 tsp. vegetable oil (light olive oil, peanut oil, canola oil, etc)
• 1 Tbs. kalonji seeds (also known as black onion seeds or nigella seeds)
• 1 Tbs. mustard seeds (brown or black; here I used brown)
• 1 Tbs. brown sugar
• 1 Tbs. curry powder
• 2 tsp. turmeric powder
• 1/4 tsp. hot chili powder (more or less to taste)
• 2 tsp. soy sauce
• salt if needed

Equipment suggested: food processor, frying pan

Heat up the frying pan over medium-low heat.

Chop the peanuts up roughly in the food processor - don’t turn it into a powder. (You can also do this by hand.)

Put the oil and peanuts in the frying pan; toss for a few minutes until it starts to smell a bit toasty. Add the seeds, sugar and dry spices; stir around to release the oils in the spices. Do not let it burn or it will taste bitter.

Add the soy sauce to the hot pan - it will sizzle. Stir around until the moisture has evaporated.

Take off the heat, and immediately empty out into a bowl or something - if you leave it in the hot pan it will continue to cook and may burn! Let cool.

Taste, and add salt if you think it needs it.

Makes about 1 cup. Store well covered. It doesn’t need to be refrigerated. It rarely lasts more than a few days in our house so I’m not sure how long it will keep though.

Notes

I’ve used a premixed curry powder here (which I buy at a multi-ethnic grocery store in Zürich), plus turmeric to give a color boost. If you know how to mix your own curry powder by all means do so. Here is a formula used by a Japanese spice company.

Kalonji seeds, often seen as naan bread topping, are the black seeds from the nigella sativa plant, which is known as Love-In-A-Mist. They make gorgeous dried flowers. It seems the ‘black onion seed’ name is a misnomer, and I’m not sure I detect any onion flavor. But they are very tasty and I love them on a lot of things.

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