We asked around the office and the store about Furikake, expecting a few polite answers. What came back was eleven, some of them from people who apparently keep a tin at their desk!

Look at the list, and you'll notice something. Nobody cooks with it.

Not one person on our team puts furikake in a pan, into a marinade, or under heat of any kind. It goes on finished food, and about half of these involve food that never got cooked at all. Cold cucumbers. Cottage cheese. Crackers out of a box.

That is furikake working the way it is supposed to work. Here is what our people are actually eating right now:

1. Nathan's chilli crisp egg over rice

Nathan, our Food Service Manager, spoons Chef Shuai Wang's Chilli Crunch into a hot pan, cracks two eggs straight into it, and fries them over easy. Rice in the bowl, furikake over the rice, egg on top. The chilli crunch comes as a dry mix you bloom in hot oil at home, which means the crisp under those eggs is about as fresh as chilli crisp gets.

2. Poke bowls at home

Molly from our retail team and Nathan landed on this one independently. Build the bowl, then shake furikake across the whole surface at the end!

3. Laura's avocado toast

Laura, our CRO, keeps it to one line: avo toast. Salt, seaweed, sesame, avocado. The furikake is doing the job the flaky salt and everything bagel seasoning were doing, with more going on underneath.

4. Egg salad sandwich

Alyse, our Culinary Director, contributed four of the eleven entries on this list, and this is the one we keep thinking about. Furikake in an egg salad sammie. Sesame and seaweed have every business being near mayonnaise and soft eggs, and yet nobody does it.

5. Cottage cheese on sourdough toast

Also Alyse. Toast sourdough, spread cottage cheese, cover in furikake. The salt and the crunch fix the two things people complain about with cottage cheese, which are that it is bland and that the texture is strange.

6. Straight onto popcorn, out of the bag

Alyse again, and the phrasing matters. Not popcorn you popped and dressed with melted butter. Popcorn out of the bag, shaken with furikake, eaten immediately.

7. The cheese cracker swap

Our Sichuan Hot Chicken Cheese Crackers disappear in about a day whenever someone makes a batch for the office. Alyse's idea swaps Chef Shuai Wang's Sichuan Hot Chicken Spice for furikake and runs it on pepper jack instead of the original. Same method, no heat, and the sesame turns it into something closer to a rice cracker.

8. Gochujang pasta with furikake and parm

This one comes to us secondhand. “Danielle makes gochujang fusilli and finishes it with furikake and parmesan”, and Phil, our Marketing Specialist, has been eating well. 

Parmesan and nori both bring glutamate to the party, so they stack rather than compete.

9. Sadie's tinned salmon onigiri

Sadie, our Graphic Designer, mixes furikake into the sushi rice and into the tinned salmon filling. Most people only season the outside. Seasoning the rice itself is the older, more traditional approach, and it means every bite tastes like something instead of only the first one. 

Follow her sage wisdom, “Shuai’s chilli crunch and Kewpie Mayo are a must in the filling.”

10. Over edamame

Karla, our Retail Store Lead, puts it on edamame. Warm pods, still a little wet from steaming, which is exactly the surface furikake needs to stick to. It replaces the flaky salt entirely.

11. Katie's cucumber salad

The most detailed submission we got, and the one most worth stealing.

• A container of mini cucumbers, smashed or sliced
• Soy sauce
• Toasted sesame oil
• Rice vinegar
• Chilli oil
• Fresh minced garlic
• Chopped green onion
• Furikake, and a lot of it
• Gochugaru Chilli Flakes if you're feeling frisky

On the furikake, Katie is emphatic. More than two or three shakes.

In her words: "I usually just dump without the shaker lid on. I like to cover the top in a layer of seasoning and then mix it in."

And that is the right instinct, y'all. Furikake is a garnish, and garnish is not a place to be shy.

Why we love furikake! 

Eleven uses, zero of them involving a stove doing anything to the furikake itself. The tin comes out at the end, after the cooking is over, when the food is already sitting in the bowl.

We wrote a whole Spice Advice on why that is, including the reason restaurants order it by the case and what happens to the nori when you make the mistake of cooking it. Worth a read if you want the full story.

If you have a use we missed, put it in the comments or tag us on Instagram at @spicewalla!