Apparently while the world (a.k.a., the US) was in a tizzy over who should be president, an egregious oversight was made on May 12 of this year: Barbara Funamura died at the age of 78. So what, you say. Well, Barbara is credited as creating one of my favorite snacks (and sometimes meals) of all time: spam musubi.
Spam aspires to be as divisive as our president-elect: you either love it or you hate it. And yet I have yet to physically meet anyone who hates one of my spam musubis. It’s not particularly good, but it is delicious. I have aspirations of opening a restaurant specializing in the art of the musubi with the tentative name of Musubi Nation (though that already has a Facebook page) or perhaps Musubimasu! (where you could even make your own musubis, Subway style). I have visions of musubis with forbidden (black) rice, asparagus and bacon; with buttery-garlic geoduck and shiso peppers; with firm tofu swapped in for rice and tamari-marinated field roast in for the spam. It’s only a matter of time, I think, before musubis blow up on the market like teriyaki and ramen have, because face it: spam musubi is delicious! (Since writing this article, I found out about ʻĀina in San Francisco, which has a killer menu including a upgraded spam musubi. But is it good??? Let me know if you have it!)
For the majority of the world that hates spam: I challenge you to try a spam musubi and not love it! I make it all the time for friends who only have a negative opinion of spam and they absolutely love it. It’s a great snack for hikes and beach days, or even to take to work. Plus you can put whatever you want in it. Don’t like the seaweed (called nori)? There’s a soy wrappers out there, or you could also make your own egg wrapper (though that’s more time-consuming).
But what do musubis and laulaus have din common?
Well, first, most people don’t even know what a laulau is (it’s the green bundle in the photo above). Laulau is the quintessential Hawaiian “dish,” even more so than the tourist-friendly kālua pig (NOT kalua pork, because Hawaiians really at the whole pig, or might as well have), which isn’t unique at all: practically everywhere in the world where pigs are eaten, they have a version of salty, shredded pork. (Kālua simply means “to bake (in an underground oven)”.) A laulau is a portion of salted meat (generally pork) and a cube of pork fat that melts (very important), wrapped first in edibly taro leaf, then wrapped again in fragrant, inedible tī leaf (no relation to tea leaves). Optionally, you can tie the whole thing in a bundle with cooking twine, as my family did at our church in Keaukaha, Ka Uhane Hemolele o ka Mālamalama church, when I was growing up before we switched over to the easier-to-handle, most cost-effective aluminum foil. Foil is good because it keeps all the juices in. In the old days, these bundles were made by the dozens, hundreds or (in our case) thousands and cooked in an underground oven called an imu. Today, though, our church uses huge steamers instead of imu — and I have yet to eat a laulau that I like more. You can get inventive with what you put inside the leaf to eat; my uncle who was the pastor of our church had pretty interesting (yummy) ideas that included turkey tail (for non-pork eaters) and pumpkin (for vegetarians). Many people also include a piece of butterfish in their laulau, but I’ve never cared for that preparation. Taro tops were also cooked in laulau in times of antiquity, though I’ve never eaten this type of laulau.
Now you could say that what musubi and laulau have in common is that you can swap out the basic ingredients (rice and nori for the musubi, taro leaf and tī leaf for the laulau) for other ingredients — but that’s not all they have in common.
Turns out, it’s all in the presentation: “musubi” comes from the Japanese verb musubu meaning “to tie.” Meanwhile, “laulau” comes from the verb laulau meaning “to wrap”. Both of these foods are named after the preparation style, which aren’t all that different from each other, if you think about it.
A final thing they have in common is that I love them both. If I absolutely had to choose one or the other, I would have to stick to my Hawaiian roots and go with the laulau though.
Interesting Side Notes
- Lāwalu is another dish (and preparation) similar to laulau. Palaoa lāwalu is a type of bread or similar dough-based starch wrapped in tī leaves and baked in an imu (underground oven). There’s a part in Kawelo when the characters make themselves some sweet potato lāwalu.
- Palusami is a Samoan take on laulau: create a meat (Iʻve only ever had it with corned beef) and coconut-milk filling (usually has white onions and perhaps green onion and maybe tomato) and wrap that in taro leaf, then wrap the whole thing in foil. Then you cook it (baking is the easiest way now). Many places substitute spinach in for taro leaf in both palusami (as in this recipe) and in laulau. (This I believe is how Hilo High School used to make its approximation, which was basically a layer of shredded kālua pork covered with a layer of boiled spinach, the whole of which may or may not have been baked in a conventional oven. The result was nothing like laulau but was far from terrible.)
Because musubi just means “a knot,” the word is used for lots of other things in Japanese culture:
- Musubi (o-musubi) is another word for the all-too-common nigiri (o-nigiri).
- Musubi also refers to the knot used to tie kimonos in place.
- And for our manga/anime lovers, Musubi is also the name of a character in the manga Sekirei.
If you had to choose between spam musubi and laulau, which would you choose and why? Let me know in the comments below!
Ā hui hou aku nō!
Ryan Keawekane 