Savoury Mushroom Rice Balls (2024)

Delicious mushroom rice balls from Zelda Breath of the Wild. Read my cooking reflection making these rice balls with lots and lots of mushrooms! Scroll to the bottom for more fan art based on Tears of the Kingdom!

Skip To: How I Made Mushroom Rice Balls

Skip To: Tears of the Kingdom Fan Art

This cooking reflection is part of a four-part series on Breath of the Wild’s main rice balls, as well as my thoughts on the upcoming Tears of the Kingdom sequel to Breath of the Wild. I can’t believe Totk will be available in SIX DAYS! It doesn’t seem real yet, but May 12th is almost here.

Scroll to the bottom to read my thoughts about Tears of the Kingdom and see another illustration I did inspired by this new game!

Mushroom Rice Balls in Zelda Breath of the Wild: any mushroom + Hylian rice

In Breath of the Wild, mushroom rice balls can be made in any cooking pot by combining a mushroom with Hylian rice. I recommend using a hearty durian for rice balls with extra hearts! Just don’t attempt using any extra meat or seafood ingredients for these rice balls, as you’ll end up with meaty rice balls or seafood rice balls respectively.

You can add elemental side effects to mushroom rice balls by adding ingredients with elemental behaviours for stamina, endurance, speed, attack, defence, or stealth, or protection from cold, heat, or electricity.

Also, try using more than one unit of the same vegetable, herb or flower to increase the number of hearts in the dish.

Here are some possible ingredients for each elemental effect:

• Stamina – courser bee honey
• Endurance – endura carrot
• Speed – lotus seed, swift carrot, swift violet
• Attack – mighty thistle, mighty bananas
• Defense – armoranth, fortified pumpkin
• Stealth – blue nightshade, silent princess
• Chilling – cool safflina
• Heating – spicy pepper, warm safflina
• Electric – voltfruit, electric safflina

Best Tip: You can significantly increase the heart count of mushroom rice balls by adding a hearty ingredient, namely hearty truffle or hearty durian.

And now here’s my review on making mushroom rice balls. Don’t forget to scroll to the bottom of the post for my latest fan art based on Tears of the Kingdom!

How I Made Mushroom 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 the main 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.

With these ingredients, I made 6 mushroom rice balls.

The ingredients I chose to use included:

• 3 cups short grain sushi rice
• 3 cups water
• 1 1/2 cups raw mushrooms, sliced
• homemade furikake seasoning
• water with a dash of salt
• 2 tbsp oil
• 2-3 tbsp tamari
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• salt and pepper, to taste
• 1/4 cup chopped parsley, just as a garnish

For cooking tools and preparation, I used:

• medium pot with a tight-fitting lid
• wood spatula for handling the rice
• cutting board
• knife
• measuring spoons
• measuring cup
• cooking spatula
• frying pan
• basting brush
• small dishes
• for the homemade furikake mix I also used an electric grinder

How I made mushroom 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 cleaned and sliced the mushrooms, washed the fresh herbs, and measured out the tamari and sesame oil. Beyond that all I had to do was grab my homemade furikake mix.

To make some homemade furikake seasoning, I ground up the dried seaweed into minuscule pieces – like coarse ground coffee beans.

Then I combined the ground nori with black and white toasted sesame seeds, salt and sugar. Now, back to the rice balls.

Next I cooked the mushrooms for the filling. To do this, I heated up 1 tbsp of oil in a frying pan over medium-high heat. Once the oil was hot and shiny, I added the mushrooms. You should space them out so that they sear evenly, but I’m impatient, so I just added them all.

Tip on cooking mushrooms: Don’t add salt until right before they’re done cooking. Salt makes the mushrooms release a lot of their water. This also applies to salty seasonings, like tamari, miso or bouillon paste.

I cooked them for 2-3 minutes on each side, drizzling them with a little tamari right at the end of the cooking process. Once the mushrooms were cooked, I tossed them with a dash of salt and pepper in a bowl and put them aside to cool.

Once the rice and mushrooms had cooled enough to touch with my bare hands, I began 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 added about 1-2 tbsp sautéed mushrooms into the indent in the rice, then folded up the edges of the rice to cover the filling.

Next I formed the rice into a triangular prism shape by making a 45 degree L shape with my right hand and cupping the rice ball into my hand repeatedly.

I also added more mushrooms to the outside of the rice balls. Getting them to stick was a little difficult, but I wrapped the rice balls tightly in plastic wrap and put them in the fridge for a few hours, just so they would hold their shape better.

Before serving, I fried the rice balls. First, I heated some oil in a pan over medium-high heat. Once the oil was quite hot, I added the rice balls. As they were cooking I used a basting brush to paint each rice ball with a mixture of tamari and sesame oil. I pan fried the rice balls for about 2-4 minutes on each side. I plated the rice balls in groups of two to a plate, on some parsley. To finish, I sprinkled each rice ball with a few leftover mushrooms and lots of homemade furikake seasoning.

That’s it! These were so delicious, I would definitely make them again. The pan frying made the rice balls super crispy and delicious. I could eat many of these, let me tell you!

These mushroom rice balls would be easy to make with different seasonings too. They could easily be made with lots of spices for some heat, or flavourful herbs – or even grated lemon zest. I also think using different types of mushrooms would offer a wider range of rice balls to enjoy here, especially if the mushrooms are prepared so simply that you can taste the flavours of oyster mushroom versus Shiitake versus Cremini, etc.

Thank you for completing this 4-part rice ball series with me as we prepare for Tears of the Kingdom! I will be posting the monster rice balls as a separate post later this year in the fall, so stay tuned for that. Enjoy my latest fan art below before you go!

More Thoughts About Tears of the Kingdom

Possible spoilers below – but first, my last fan art illustration before Totk debuts next week:

Of course, I had to draw an illustration of Link surrounded by mushrooms for the post about mushroom rice balls! I thought it was really cool to see some giant mushrooms in the new underground caves that we will soon be exploring.

On the subject of underground caves in Tears of the Kingdom – what will happen to all the sand in the Gerudo Desert? Will it still be a very sandy place despite holes opening in the ground to reveal caverns below? Will sand seep down into the caves and reveal hidden levels between the surface and the underground?

I’m also really excited to see what lies in the Thyphlo Ruins, now that they won’t be shrouded in darkness. In one of the trailers for Totk it was revealed that the Thyphlo Ruins will be visible in the sunlight, and I am curious if it is a place we are encouraged to visit early in the game, to learn information about the main quests. I have similar questions about other places with lots of Zonai statues and architecture, such as the Seven Heroine statues, the Eight Heroine, and the Thundra Plateau. Will there even still be thunder there constantly? Also will things like the orb balls from the Thundra Plateau come to hold new meaning for us now?

Another remaining major question I have is how will the weapons and defence systems change in the game? In particular, I tend to favour archery over other forms of combat, so I’m curious about all the major changes to the archery system – beyond being able to use meat arrows now. Will there still be bows in the game that cause higher damage, or must higher damage now be achieved with bows through fusing?

Also many times can you fuse something? If you fuse two weapons together, can you then fuse another, and then another to that until you end up with some monstrous mecha sword contraption? I feel like there will be quite a few new nuances to learn about these new abilities Link will be getting.

Lastly, will we still be looking for Koroks or have they reemerged to hike around Hyrule like Bilbo Baggins, looking for their 998 other long lost friends? I’m very curious to find out…

Okay, thanks for reading! SIX DAYS until the release of Tears of the Kingdom! Let’s go!