Meaty Rice Balls Wrapped In Bacon (2024)

The delicious meaty rice balls recipe from Zelda Breath of the Wild feature sweet and spicy meat-filled rice balls wrapped in bacon.

Skip To: How I Made Meaty Rice Balls

Jump To: Tears of the Kingdom Fan Art

Recipe for Honey Ginger Ground Meat

This cooking reflection is part of a four-part series on Breath of the Wild’s rice balls, as well as my thoughts on the new gameplay demo of Tears of the Kingdom that came out on March 28th – including my new fan art!

So I guess we have all seen the Tears of the Kingdom gameplay demonstration that came out on March 28th. I know I can’t stop thinking about it, and have been watching the reaction and theory videos by all my favourite Twitch streamers about it. I feel like the past few days I was thinking so hard about Totk that I stopped doing anything else. So, I’ll be posting some of my thoughts about Tears of the Kingdom in tandem with this four-part mini series about the rice balls of Breath of the Wild. First up – meaty rice balls!

Meaty Rice Balls in Zelda Breath of the Wild: rice + meat

Meaty rice balls can be made in a cooking pot by combining any meat with Hylian rice. However, there are a few more customizations you can make to this recipe to max out the effects of the dish. You can make specific elemental meaty rice balls by adding an extra ingredient with an elemental behaviour – enhancement of stamina, endurance, speed, attack, defence, or stealth, or protection from cold, heat, or electricity.

Here are some example ingredients for each element:

• Stamina – courser bee honey*, staminoka bass, stamella shrooms
• Endurance – endura carrots*, endura shrooms
• Speed – lotus seeds*, rushrooms
• Attack – mighty porgy*, mighty bananas
• Defence – armored porgy*, ironshroom
• Stealth – silent princess flower*, sneaky river snail, silent shroom
• Chilling – hydromelon*, chillshrooms
• Heating – sunshrooms*, spicy peppers
• Electric – voltshroom*, zapshroom, voltfruit

* = rendered highest number of hearts during my cooking experiment compared to other items with same elemental behaviours.

Also, maybe it’s important to note that single safflinas tended to only give meals of about 4 hearts, which was the lowest hearts count of everything I tested besides a single herb, apple, nut or berry.

Best Tip: You can significantly increase the heart count of the meaty rice balls by adding a hearty ingredient. In order of highest to lowest hearts during my test:

• hearty durian
• hearty radish
• hearty salmon
• hearty truffle

More common and less valuable items can also create a meaty rice ball with up to 8 hearts, if you use 3 of one heart item (plus standard prime meat + hylian rice):

• 3 hylian shrooms
• 3 wildberries
• 3 chickaloo nut
• 3 apples

Conclusion: Durian makes everything better. All the more reason to spend time running around Faron collecting durians, right?

See below the recipe for my first thoughts on Tears of the Kingdom. INCLUDES SPOILERS!

How I Made Meaty Rice Balls

Note: This is NOT an authentic Japanese onigiri / rice ball recipe. Please look elsewhere for authentic Japanese onigiri recipes, there are some amazing recipes to choose from with a quick Google search!

These four rice ball posts are solely regarding my own experience cooking rice ball recipes inspired by the Zelda Breath of the Wild video game. As such, I’m not including recipe cards with any of the rice balls from Zelda that I will be covering in this four-part series. These are my own fun cooking reflections. Meaty rice balls did take some time to make, but making any rice balls is well worth the effort, I think! I made 6 meaty rice balls and had some meat leftover from the amount specified below.

The ingredients I chose to use included:

• 3 cups short grain white sushi rice
• 3 cups water
• 12 strips bacon
• 1/2 cup ground meat
• 1 tbsp grated ginger
• 1 tbsp minced garlic
• 1 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tbsp honey
• 1/2 tsp chili oil
• 1/2 tsp sesame oil
• salt and pepper, to taste
• 1 tbsp mayonnaise
• 1 tsp Siracha
• 1 cup water with a dash of salt

For cooking tools and preparation, I used:

• a medium pot with a tight-fitting lid
• wood spatula for handling the rice
• cutting board
• grater
• garlic press
• knife
• measuring spoons
• cooking spoon and tongs
• medium frying pan
• small dish
• paper towels
• plate

How I made these meaty rice balls:

First, I cooked the rice. I washed the rice with cold water, until the water ran clear. Then I soaked the rice in water for 40 minutes, then washed it again. I added equal parts rice and water to a pot and covered it with a tight-fitting lid. I brought the water to a boil over high heat, then reduced the heat to low and cooked the rice for 20 minutes. I then removed the rice from the heat and let it sit covered for 10 minutes (still covered with the lid).

Next I cooked the bacon in small batches in my frying pan over medium-low heat for about 10 minutes. I didn’t want the bacon to get too crispy or I wouldn’t be able to wrap it around the rice balls, so I just made sure it was fully cooked and not raw. I prepared a plate lined with some paper towels and set the cooked bacon on the paper towel to cool.

Then I cooked the meat filling in the reserved leftover bacon fat in the same pan over medium-high heat for about 8 minutes. I added the grated ginger, minced garlic, seasonings, sweetener, salt and pepper, then continued to cook the meat for another 4 minutes or so. Once fully cooked, I set the meat filling aside to cool.

I prepared some Siracha mayonnaise by mixing Siracha and mayonnaise together in a bowl, then setting it aside. Easy peasy.

Finally, once the rice had cooled enough to touch with my bare hands it was time to assemble the rice balls. I filled a small dish with a cup of room temperature water and a pinch of salt to dip my hands into as needed, so they wouldn’t get sticky. I wetted my hands in the salt water, then took about 3/4 of a cup of rice into one cupped hand.

I made an indent in the middle of the rice in my hand. I find it helpful to think about making a bowl or mug shape with the rice whenever I do this. Next I added about 1 tbsp meat filling and a dab of Siracha mayonnaise into the indent in the rice, then folded up the edges of the rice to cover the filling. I had to re-wet my hands a few times while doing this. I also needed to add a little extra rice to fully cover the meat filling once or twice.

Now, the hardest part – to make the rice into a triangular prism shape. I began by making a 45 degree L shape with my right hand and cupping the rice ball into my hand repeatedly. I don’t own a rice ball press, but cupping with my hands still rendered a fairly triangular shape.

And finally the fun part – adding the bacon! I wrapped 2 strips of bacon around each of the rice balls. This was definitely easier when the bacon was a little warm, so it was more flexible. To match the illustrated graphic of meaty rice balls in Breath of the Wild, I added a little more meat filling to the top of the rice ball as a garnish.

I stored the rice balls we didn’t eat immediately in the fridge for 1 day, wrapped tightly in plastic wrap.

These were so tasty. My family literally gobbled them up. The filling also tasted great by itself. I actually made way more meat initially and we ate the rest of the ground meat over a sort of deconstructed hamburger style salad the following night, which was delicious.

Upon reflection, I would definitely make these meaty rice balls again, even though they are somewhat labour intensive, more so than making maki sushi I think, just because of the shaping required. I think it would also get easier with more practice though!

Okay, now for the juicy gossip. Spoilers from here on out, so don’t read if you want Tears of the Kingdom to be completely a surprise. First, my newest fan art illustration:

Honestly I’m not sure how one would avoid seeing some of the hype about the game at this point, what with the trailers and the gameplay demo now being out in the world. I am so excited for this game to come out, and I haven’t decided yet how I am going to handle the first week of the game’s release, in terms of my exposure. My physical copy of the game won’t arrive until May 16th, and then I want to play through the game uninterrupted …so I think that for all of May I will silence all the updates I get from various Twitch streamers, YouTube channels and or social media platforms so I don’t personally get any unwanted spoilers.

I love the look of the sky islands. The golden autumnal colour scheme is gorgeous. Aesthetically I feel like the sky islands have something of an ancient Greek style to them, as if Link was in a kind of Icarus-style mythic position. I also am super weirded out ( but not in a bad way!) by Link’s new outfit here – can it be considered armor? Like… it’s a kilt right? So he’s basically dressed in a sort of “ode to the Scottish highlander” during the gameplay demo.

I completely agree with the thoughts of one of the speedrunners I follow online – Limcube – that the sky islands, or at least the one we saw in the gameplay demo, is a type of Great Plateau style tutorial area, or starting area, maybe. Especially since the constructs here seem quite tame, being that they can be easily taken down with tree branches – for the most part. I also think these constructs, while technically described by Mr. Aonuma during the gameplay as enemies, might actually be more like Link’s guides or trainers – like the Monks in Breath of the Wild. If you’ve ever played the Breath of the Wild DLC and gotten the Master Cycle Zero, you know what I mean.

Over all, I love the colour schemes and aesthetics of Tears of the Kingdom, and I am beyond excited for the new themed pro controller and Switch console. I told myself beforehand (because we all knew they were going to release a new console) – yeah, it will be pretty but I don’t need it, my current one works just fine. Well… then I saw the new one and fell in love. It’s just disgusting how effective marketing is sometimes, ugh. That Switch console and pro controller are the most beautiful things I’ve seen recently.

More on my thoughts about Link’s new abilities next time! Thanks for reading!