Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where one man is constantly throwing himself through slowly-closing deadlines in an Indiana-Jones Style fridge Raid. I’m your Archaeologist of the Edible, Jon O’Guin, and today’s dish is a quick continuation of our earlier post of the week, with…stuff? Information?  It’s been a very busy week, so I don’t know how this is going to go. If you want to just skip it all and get to the recipe, here’s the link. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

Inspiration and…”Un”Spiration

So, when last we left off, we had made Furikake mix. And, as I explained, the cookbook I got the recipe from followed a format of “first we make an ingredient/building block, then we make several recipes from it.” And in the book, each recipe has its own summary. For this one, Vivian describes coming up with what she names “Inspiration strikes Party Rolls”. A weird name, but she at least provides the narrative for it, explaining how the recipe for this dish comes from how she personally gets inspired to make recipes, which she finds doesn’t match up with how many other chefs describe being inspired: for her, she needs a purpose, and parameters. In short, she needs the box to be drawn, so she can then think outside of it. (Speaking of thinking outside the box, I realize right now I’m doing that most hated of recipe blog actions: telling stories…and it’s not even MY story, but someone else’s relayed secondhand. Let it never be said I could not innovate in the medium of tedium.)

“Whenever the leaves turn brown, I think of my father, and his relentless poisoning of our local forests…”

Anywho, she describes how it was the limits of her local grocery store (a mostly Southern chain, Piggly Wiggly) combined with her desire to riff on her Quirky Furky, and the disconnect between “what you can buy at a supermarket more known for a variety of collard greens that also works with Japanese flavors” is what inspired her to whip up a Hawaiian-inspired recipe of party rolls. To which I of course said: “What the hell are party rolls?”

Googling it, it appears that what we’re dealing with is a linguistic gray spot: the thing she DESCRIBES is fairly well-known to me, and the internet knows exactly what I WANT, but the terminology isn’t 100% set. I see “ham rolls”, “party sandwiches”, “sliders”, all describing the same idea. That idea being: “what if we made a bunch of little sliders/sandwiches out of a pack of pull-apart rolls”?

The lack of unified name makes it irritatingly hard to find pictures of it.

A classic potluck idea, but like with the Robert Redford/Better Than Sex cake of last year. (oh, no, just 6 months ago. Man, time is weird) a complicated linguistic muddle. I think in both cases, the problem is that the descriptors are very vivid/pointed, but not QUITE pointed enough. “Ham rolls” only works if the filling is ham, “sliders” are probably the best term for it…but they’re technically supposed to refer to little burgers, so I can understand if some regions don’t accept it, ‘party rolls’ is one of the better descriptors I’ve seen, but I’m not 100% on it. Maybe “party sliders”? I don’t know, I’ll stick with party rolls for now. She’s the chef, after all.

In any case, the inspiration she had for the party rolls was pretty simple: she saw Hawaiian rolls. Furikake may be predominantly Japanese, but it’s also fairly common in Hawaiian food: while we didn’t use it in our recipe, a lot of Spam Musubi uses a layer of furikake between the Spam and the rice. Party rolls are often a ham-and-cheese situation, and ham/Spam and pineapple go together, so the idea of a “Hawaiian Party Rolls with Furikake” made intuitive sense to her. Sense she then IMMEDIATELY backed away from, on the grounds that Spam has a lot of sodium and fat. Which…I mean, she’s not wrong, but also Spam Lite exists, and is better than the replacement she chose: Bologna. (Maybe. Different bolognas will have different nutritional data, but generic pork bologna is better than normal Spam, worse than Spam Lite.) But on the other hand, Bologna is more beloved in the South, so it might work in her circles better. So we decided to use Spam.

A choice PROBABLY influenced by the fact that we like Spam Musubi enough that we have not only bought molds to shape the rice, but a tool to CUT THE SPAM for us.

Build, Bleed, Bake

And now we come to the recipe, which, as noted, is pretty simple. It’s just a simple sandwich built in the cut halves of a sheet of Hawaiian rolls, topped with furikake butter, and baked until the cheese melts. However, one of the ingredients needs to be addressed beforehand. The Pineapple.

Fun fact: raw pineapple, with the enzyme bromelain can curdle cheese if set next to it. This is why most “Hawaiian burgers” used GRILLED pineapple: it’s not just that grilling pineapple reduces some of the raw acidity and bite of the fruit (which it does), it also keeps the pineapple from screwing up the cheese on the burger. As such, you need to tame the bromelain. You could grill it, but Vivian goes for a different fix: soaking the pineapple in vinegar. The acidity of the vinegar reduces the enzymatic power of the pineapple, making it weak enough that the heat of baking will break down the enzymes before they can affect the cheese texture too much.

Which means, technically, you COULD write this step as “drown the fruit in acid”.

I will note, however, that the recipe calls for marinating your pineapple for 30 minutes, and thus, as with our earlier post, I urge you not to need to go to urgent care while the pineapple is marinating, causing you to quintuple its soaking time. It won’t hugely impact the dish, but the pineapple will taste rather prominently of rice vinegar.

Beyond that warning, the steps are fairly straight-forward. Slice a brick of Hawaiian rolls in half. Or, if, like me, you’ve created multiple batches of furikake for different chips, you can tear the slab into two halves, and then cut each of them in half.

Variety is the spice of life. And bread is the bread of life.

On the bottom half, give a quick swipe of mayo, then a layer of provolone cheese (Or another cheese you like. Vivian specifically notes that she went with it because it’s what the Piggly Wiggly had.) Then the marinated pineapple, then the Spam, then more cheese. Just layers of flavors.

Lay it on thick.

Pop on the top, and then pour over a Furikake butter. What’s a furikake butter? Nothing, what’s a butter with you? (I am very tired.)  Anywho, all you gotta do is melt some butter, and mix in furikake and Dijon. You don’t NEED the Dijon, but adding a little extra pungency to cut the richness of the dish isn’t going to go wrong.

Which means this step could be written as “Drown the buns in butter”.

We used foil pans to separate the two halves for the two different butter toppings (the Hot Pepper and the Salt and Vinegar), popped them in the oven, and baked for 20 minutes. The directions say to go until “the cheese is melted, and the tops are browned and bit crisp”, which I assure you, our rolls were definitely browned when they came out.

Perhaps TOO browned.

The results were quite good. A classic example of great return on effort: when NOT making your own furikake, the recipe takes about an hour, of which half the time is just waiting for the pineapple to marinate. The result is like a crazy rich ham and cheese, with the pineapple helping to cut what would otherwise be pretty rich. Sure, our pineapple turned out a little pickled, but overall, a great dish. I can’t tell you that the different furikake makes much of a difference, at least in the first tasting. But maybe that’s because ours cooked a little hot: our furikake was MUCH more browned than the example shot in her cookbook, but it’s hard to know how much of that is food styling.

So if you’ve made the Furikake and want a way to start on your 1 tbsp a day consumption rate, this recipe will knock out about 4 days of the stash, and it’s pretty good.

MONDAY: I STILL HAVE NO GUESS OTHER THAN “MAYBE CRAB RANGOON”. I HAD TWO MIGRAINES THIS WEEK, ON TOP OF TECH, AND IT TURNS OUT MY CAR WON’T BE OUT OF THE SHOP UNTIL NEXT WEEK, SO I REALLY HAVEN’T HAD MUCH CHANCE TO GET THINGS SORTED.

Recipe

Quirky Hawaiian Party Rolls

Makes 12 rolls

Ingredients

Sandwich

¼ whole pineapple

1/3rd cup unseasoned rice vinegar

One 12-pack Hawaiian rolls

1-2 cans Spam, depending on how thinly you slice it

8 slices provolone

¼ cup mayo

                Topper

1 stick unsalted butter

2 tsp Dijon mustard

¼ cup Quirky Furky/Furikake

Foil pans for baking

Preparation

1. Thinly slice the pineapple (roughly 1/8th inch/3 mm), and marinate in rice vinegar for 30 minutes.

2. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Melt the butter for the topper, and combine with mustard and furikake. Slice Spam between 1/8th and 1/4 inch thick.

3. Drain the pineapple, and slice the entire package of rolls in half, creating a top and bottom. Brush the tops of the bottoms (not at all confusing phrasing) with the mayo. Lay half the provolone, then the pineapple, then the Spam, then the remainder of the cheese.

4. Place the top of the rolls back on the sandwiches, and place assembled unit into foil pan. Pour furikake butter over top of assembled sandwiches.

5. Place in the oven, and bake for 20 minutes on the middle rack, until cheese has melted and buns are browned and crisp. Cut into rolls and serve.