Konbini Kinyoubi: Makizushi, Sushi Hand Rolls (Plus Bonus Black Thunder)

Welcome to Konbini Kinyoubi, where every Friday (Kinyoubi) we visit our local convenience store (Konbini) and buy something delicious.

We’ve spent a lot of time covering sweets and drinks from the konbini on this blog, but one thing we haven’t discussed enough is the savory options. Japanese convenience stores, unlike their American counterparts, are full of delicious bento, or boxed lunches. You can get noodles, sandwiches, curry, and even sushi at the konbini, and the prepared food is actually quite delicious. No joke, I ate konbini lunch every day for like my first 10 months here. I will die soon.

In addition to the lunch options like bento, there are smaller snack-sized prepared foods as well, like fried chicken, gyoza, or onigiri. We’ll cover those in the future, but today we’re going to talk about makizushi, also known as sushi hand rolls.

Don’t worry, we’ll get to that guy at the top later.

Though Americans are used to eating their sushi in roll form, in Japan it’s less common. Most of the time, when you go out for sushi, you’re buying individual pieces, and there will only be a few roll options available.

These are smaller than your standard American roll, and aren’t cut. The result is a hand-sized piece you can consume on the go in 3-4 bites with a minimum of mess. Today at Lawson there were four flavors, and we got three of them: tuna, natto & wasabi, and salmon & salmon roe.

First up: tuna.

This was my go-to for that first winter in Japan. I’d go to Lawson Station for lunch and grab a curry bento, a piece of fried chicken, and one of these bad boys. You don’t always get your pick of hand rolls because the konbini often runs out of them, and truthfully the reason I wanted to cover this on the blog today was because they had a tuna one and I wanted it.

Here are the steps to eating a sushi hand roll. First, you peel off the strip of plastic like so:

That leaves you with two parts: the rice (surrounding the tuna), and the piece of seaweed, separated by plastic to ensure freshness.

You then grab the rice/fish with the end of the seaweed, and as you pull the seaweed from the plastic, it wraps around the roll, creating an easy snack you can eat with your hands. If you do it right, you won’t get too sticky. If you do it wrong, DISASTER.

Here’s two of our completed rolls:

On the left is my tuna roll, which was as delicious and reliable as ever. There was just the right amount of fish, nice soft rice, and a crispy wrapper. Far better quality than you have any right to expect from a convenience store.

On the right is Eriko’s choice, natto and wasabi.

What is natto, you ask? Let’s take a look.

Natto is the word for fermented soybeans. They are usually this tan color and covered in a sort of sludge. It’s an old-fashioned Japanese snack, and Eriko loves it because she ate it a lot as a child. However, she is very, very wrong about its taste.

Natto. Is. Disgusting.

I mean, just look at it. Disgusting. Natto is one of the grossest foods known to man. I have tried bites of it on several occasions, including today, and I can confirm that it is objectively terrible and that my wife belongs in jail for liking it.

What does it taste like? Gross, that’s what it tastes like. It tastes like your girlfriend cheating on you with the vice president of the computer club. It tastes like losing a game of Connect Four to your dog. It tastes like how Andy Dufresne smelled after crawling through that pipe. It tastes like sadness and despair.

Anyway, Eriko likes it. This version had wasabi in it too!

Eriko enjoyed the addition of the wasabi. She said it had a strong wasabi taste, but not so much that it ruined the natto. I would argue that there was not enough wasabi to mask the awful natto. I had to run to the kitchen to drink several cups of tea, and I now view my wife through a fog of horrible suspicion because we just saw Species and I bet that alien would have liked a natto-wasabi roll.

There was one more to try: salmon and salmon roe.

If you get a sushi sampler box from the grocery store or konbini, you’ll usually find both of these things in it, but rarely are salmon and salmon roe put together. Eriko thought there wasn’t quite enough roe in it, while I would have liked more salmon. To me, rather than teaming up to create a dynamic duo, they sort of canceled each other out and tasted like nothing, just that vague aftertaste of salmon roe in your mouth. Not bad, but pretty forgettable.

We ended our konbini dinner with a treat, because we are a good boy & girl.

The bag was a bit deceptive. The pieces inside were awfully small.

Yes, children, it’s a new kind of Black Thunder! This one boasts of having 150%!

150% of what? We’re not entirely sure. We think maybe it’s 150% of the crunchiness, because these were very crunchy.

These little guys were kind of hard, and you really had to bite down to get through them. While crunchier than normal, they still contained the great BT taste we were used to. Of the Black Thunder variants, this one tasted the most like the original. Didn’t need to mess with perfection, but if they keep churning out new flavors, I’ll keep trying them.

in summation: sushi hand rolls are good and Black Thunder is good 15/10 I love food. Until next time, remember: my taste is good and correct and therefore natto is disgusting and everyone who likes it owes me $50. Those are the rules.