Veggie Rice Balls With Fresh Herbs and Avocado (2024)

The veggie rice balls from Zelda Breath of the Wild! Read my cooking reflection making these rice balls with fresh herbs and avocado. Scroll to the bottom for more fan art based on the upcoming Tears of the Kingdom!

Skip To: How I Made Veggie 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 less than two weeks now! It doesn’t seem real yet, but May 12th is coming up quickly.

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

Veggie Rice Balls in Zelda Breath of the Wild: any vegetable/herb/flower + Hylian rice

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

You can add elemental side effects to veggie 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 veggie rice balls by adding a hearty ingredient, namely hearty durian.

And now here’s my review on making veggie 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 Veggie 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 veggie rice balls.

The ingredients I chose to use included:

• 3 cups short grain sushi rice
• 3 cups water
• 1 avocado
• 1/4 cup chopped parsley
• 1/4 cup pickled vegetables (I used pickled ginger, but kimchi or sauerkraut would be amazing here!)
• 1 sheet of nori
• homemade furikake seasoning
• water with a dash of salt
• 1 tbsp oil
• 6 tsp tamari

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
• cooking spatula
• frying pan
• basting brush
• small dishes
• for the homemade furikake mix I also used an electric grinder

How I made veggie 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 prepared the filling ingredients for the rice balls. I peeled and sliced the avocado, and chopped the fresh herbs. Beyond that all I had to do was grab my homemade furikake mix and my jars of pickled ginger and sauerkraut.

Homemade furikake mix, you may ask? Well I was visiting family while I made these, and furikake seasoning isn’t locally available there, since it’s a small community. So, I had to make some, which is pretty easy to do. All you need is a sheet of nori or some other dried seaweed, sesame seeds, sugar, and salt.

Of course, if I had more ingredients on hand in my kitchen, I could add other elements like bonito flakes or wasabi powder, or ground chili peppers.

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

Then I combined all the ingredients together, and there we go, homemade furikake seasoning. I don’t just put it on rice either – it goes great with just about every kind of savoury meal you can think of. Anyways, back to the rice balls.

See Also

Savoury Mushroom Rice Balls

Once the rice had cooled enough to touch, 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 tbsp of avocado and a teaspoon of freshly chopped parsley 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 some parsley to the outside of the rice ball.

Now looking at the pictures in Zelda Breath of the Wild of these rice balls, they are quite browned, so I decided to pan fry mine after I assembled them. Before that, 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 while frying them.

To fry the rice balls, I heated some oil in a pan. Once the oil was quite hot, I added the rice balls. As they were cooking I used a basting brush to paint them with tamari. I cooked them for about 2-4 minutes on each side. To finish, I sprinkled each rice ball with more fresh herbs 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 surprisingly crispy, it was really delicious. There were absolutely no leftovers.

These veggie rice balls would be easy to make with just about any vegetable, herb or edible flowers. I’d love to decorate these with pansies or nasturtiums in the summertime, and in the fall it would be fun to make some with a pumpkin carrot sort of filling, or maybe roasted yam! Other fillings that I’d love to try would be seasoned sautéed leeks, roasted eggplant, as well as marinated cucumber. So many possibilities!

More Thoughts About Tears of the Kingdom

Possible spoilers below – but first, my latest fan art!

At this point we’ve seen the gameplay demo, the trailers, and a few streamers are now reviewing the game early, plus there are lots of leaks circulating. It’s pretty difficult to not see a spoiler or two, and I’m just actively trying to avoid them, which is bound to get more and more difficult over the next two weeks.

That being said, I do want to ponder something regarding the final trailer that was released. Zelda says that Link needs to find her, and that she’s lost in the past. Okay got it – but what is Zelda doing in the past?

I’m curious if the game will touch on this at all, or if it’s left to our imagination, as with Breath of the Wild, where Zelda is allegedly somewhere in the depths of the castle trying to restrain Ganon, and she’s been doing that for 100 years. Wherever or whenever Zelda is lost in Tears of the Kingdom, what is she doing? Here are my not-so-serious thoughts about it.

• It’s possible Zelda could be living Stardew Valley style in an ancient Hylian settlement, growing fruit crops and doing side quests for the ancient Hylian villagers.
• She could be terrorizing the local cuccos to the point Link must prevent their extinction in the future.
• She is sitting there doing nothing, sighing and looking at the sky. Ew.
• Zelda becomes a fortune teller and travels around Hyrule like Pikango or Beedle.
• Maybe she secretly hates Link still, and got lost on purpose so she could hopefully avoid him for eternity. Maybe she is secretly hanging out with Ganondorf….
• She built a house on the back of a Talus using the fuse ability and is living her best Studio Ghibli travelling around life like Howl with his moving castle.
• Inspired by the local scientists, she could be trying to build a legitimate time machine, to solve her own damsel in distress problem instead of waiting for Link to do it -because face it, none of us want to go rescue her… again!

Okay, more on this next time. Thanks for reading! Only TEN more days until the release of Tears of the Kingdom! Ahh!