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Hilo college students
pack it in for
massive musubi
Collegians pitch in to build
By Rod Thompson
a 'not necessarily edible'
contest entry
Star-BulletinHILO -- Rice will be the word of the day on the Big Island tomorrow -- and it won't have anything to do with the U.S. Supreme Court.
Hawaii Community College students will pack 600 pounds of cooked rice into a wooden form to produce "The Big Island of Hawaii's Largest Musubi of the Millennium."
It's all in fun, the community college's contribution to the American Savings Bank FamilyFun Festival at Hilo Union School starting at 9 a.m. Millennium Musubi construction begins at 11 a.m.
The festival is being held in conjunction with "From Bento to Mixed Plate: Americans of Japanese Ancestry in Multicultural Hawaii," a traveling exhibition being shown around the corner from the school at the Lyman House Memorial Museum.
To those not familiar with the Japanese food product, a musubi is a ball -- well, no, a trapezoid ... well, more like a plump, chewy triangle of cooked white rice wrapped in a thin sheet of black seaweed, leaving exposed just three white feet (so to speak).
Except when Millennium Musubi technicians considered wrapping their 6-foot-wide creation in multiple sheets of nori seaweed, and then cutting the college logo into the nori, they realized they would end up with a great, gooey mess, said community college Trades and Industry Division chief Ed Hayashi.So instead of nori, they'll use a sheet of black plastic.
The notion of a monster musubi arose after festival organizers decided on a contest for regular-sized musubi with two categories: one for "onolicious" edible entries, the other for "unique and not necessarily edible" creations.
But 600 pounds of hot, wet rice is nothing to fool around with.
"You've got to think about the pressure (on the wooden mold)," said college carpentry instructor Gene Harada.
Wisdom prevailed, to some extent, and the size was reduced from eight feet across to six. It will be 10 inches deep.
About 50 trays of rice, contributed by Diamond G, will be steamed in the college's commercial kitchen, then trucked two miles to the school.
And how do you pack the rice in the 6-foot mold? The final decision was to start at the edges and work toward the center, said Hayashi.
CHOW TIME
What: FamilyFun Festival
The mold can be disassembled, leaving a real, albeit plastic-wrapped, musubi.
But how to display the finished work of art?
"I was trying to think of a way to lift it up, but it's 600 pounds," Hayashi said. Too much tilt and it slides off the table into a big, white heap on the ground. The working theory is that a 10 percent tilt may be enough.
Even if there's no disastrous rice slide, the end product is big but perhaps a bit bland.
So college woodworking students also made some giant koa chopsticks and a very large rice scooper. Serving as a "chawan" rice bowl will be a 3-foot-wide stainless steel bowl, covered with Saran Wrap and spray-painted to look like traditional red lacquer.
For added color, an oversized daikon root will be sliced and dyed yellow to look like takuan pickles.
Hanging over this dinner table will be "chochin" lanterns.
For still more zest, Hayashi suggested tongue-in-cheek that college Provost Sandra Sakaguchi could dress up as Musubi Girl.
Sakaguchi responded, "I've been called a lot of things in my life, but this is new."
Coming from the waste-not, want-not school of life, though, Sakaguchi was pleased with the final destination of the Millennium Musubi.
A local farmer will feed it to his pigs.
