TOKYO – The U.S. Embassy Tokyo Agricultural Trade Office (ATO) gave USA Rice an opportunity to share costs on creating two cooking videos using U.S. medium grain rice. Yoshiyuki Okuno, a well-known owner-chef who operates five Italian restaurants in Tokyo and has recently opened a restaurant in California, created the two recipes: a U.S. medium grain rice salad bowl and U.S.-style Chirashi sushi. Chirashi, which translates to “scattered” in Japanese, is a popular dish consisting of sushi rice topped with fish, vegetables, and additional ingredients chosen by the chef.
Chef Okuno owns the Michelin-acclaimed Tokyo restaurant La Brianza, as well as the trendy Magari restaurant in Hollywood, California, both of which offer a distinct brand of Japanese-Italian inspired cuisine that originated in Tokyo in the 1990s. Chef Okuno is a creative innovator of this fusion style and a well-respected figure on the international culinary scene.
The videos were taped on August 2nd and will be uploaded to the ATO and USA Rice Japan websites, as well as shared on social media. Chef Okuno indicated that U.S. medium grain rice is suitable for salad-style menus that are common in the U.S. and Europe. He cooked the U.S. medium grain rice by boiling it, a cooking method USA Rice is promoting to make U.S. rice more versatile to the foodservice and food processing industries.
USA Rice will hold a media luncheon on August 24th to introduce the videos, providing an opportunity for the media to taste the dishes developed by Chef Okuno.