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INdulge: Despite so-so rep, Spam stars in next dish to try in Indy
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An unfortunate consequence of the “I’ll try anything once” approach to dining is that, every once in a while, you will end up absolutely nuking your stomach.
While I have so far managed to stay cyclospora-free, I did have a recent ill-advised encounter with some demonically hot chicken, leaving me yearning for a meal that would pass through my digestive tract a bit easier than a glowing hunk of pure plutonium. So for this week’s INdulge, I took a trip on the mild side with:
The next dish you should try in Indy
I’m a firm believer that plain, even unattractive foods can be incredibly tasty. And arguably no food represents that gulf between form and flavor like Spam, the famed (or in some cases, notorious) canned ham that stars in such dishes as the Spam musubi from KauKau Hawaiian BBQ in Speedway.
Spam musubi is about as straightforward as cuisine gets: a sponge of short-grain white rice, a slab of the dish’s namesake meat product and a snug sleeve of seaweed to keep everything cozy. The result is a delightfully digestible brick of salt and starch with some nice griddled flavor from the Spam.
The chief source of textural contrast in Spam musubi comes from the nori (the Japanese term for edible dried seaweed), which stretches and snaps between your teeth en route to the musubi’s soft center. Nori also packs a flavor that can be a bit overwhelming for some in large doses, bitter and earthy with the high level of salinity that comes from a lifetime at sea.
While Spam musubi is a Hawaiian creation, you could probably guess from the rice and seaweed that it has roots in Japan. Demand for labor on Hawaiian sugarcane plantations, combined with dicey economic conditions in Japan, drove a mass influx of immigration that led to people of Japanese descent comprising roughly 40% of Hawaii’s population by 1920.
The Japanese brought dishes such as onigiri, also called omusubi, with them. The islands already grew a substantial volume of rice, and seaweed wasn’t hard to come by, either, what with Hawaii being in the middle of the ocean and all.
Spam, however, didn’t enter the picture for another few decades and came courtesy of haoles, aka white people. After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the United States military’s already looming presence on the islands rapidly grew, and the freedoms of Japanese Hawaiians substantially shrank.
Among other restrictions, Japanese Hawaiians were prohibited from fishing, forcing thousands of people to drastically reshape their diets. Their solution came from the same group that disenfranchised them.
Portable, pre-cooked and blasted with enough nitrites to last somewhere between three years and three lifetimes, Spam was the go-to protein for hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, including those stationed in Hawaii. The Minnesota-based Hormel Foods Corporation introduced Spam in 1937 as an everyday “convenience meat item” (gotta say, already off to a rough start reputationally), essentially rebranding Hormel’s less successful canned spiced ham.
The Japanese population quickly incorporated the nigh-immortal foodstuff into their diets out of necessity, though historical records suggest Spam musubi took some time to emerge. Restaurateurs Mitsuko Kaneshiro of Honolulu and Barbara Funamura of Kauai are both frequently credited with inventing the dish, and it’s entirely possible they arrived at the now-iconic dish independently of one another. Regardless of its precise origin point, Spam musubi quickly caught on at restaurants throughout Hawaii.
Elsewhere, Spam’s reputation has been far less gilded. While other U.S.-occupied areas including the Philippines, Guam and South Korea embraced the canned ham amid debilitating postwar economic conditions, those in the comparatively prosperous West largely ridiculed it as a low-nutrition poverty food.
That said, Spam has recently enjoyed something of a resurgence in the States as diners are increasingly exposed to global cuisines and realize that a slab of griddled pork, however processed, tastes quite nice. The still forgiving price tag doesn’t hurt, either. It’s a turnaround that really makes you believe in the underdog, the underdog in this case being the Hormel Corporation.
If it’s been a while, I encourage you to refamiliarize yourself with the curious canned meat commodity via KauKau’s Spam musubi. The dish truly is a fascinating intersection of Japanese tradition, hardship-induced culinary ingenuity and – if you glance past the fact Spam had to travel about 4,000 miles from Minnesota for someone to turn it into anything remotely pleasant to eat – pure Midwestern greatness.
What: Spam musubi, two for $6
Where: KauKau Hawaiian BBQ, 5808 Crawfordsville Road, Speedway, (317) 390-4590, kaukauspeedway.com
In case that’s not your thing: KauKau’s menu offers a glimpse at Hawaii’s many culinary influences, like Japanese-style chicken katsu ($12), Korean-style short ribs ($17) or the smoky-sweet kalua pork ($12) whose origins trace back to indigenous Hawaiians and early Polynesian settlers. Most dishes come with rice, broccoli, cabbage and macaroni salad, the last of which rivals Spam musubi for the title of most fascinating quirk of Hawaiian cuisine.
Contact dining reporter Bradley Hohulin at bhohulin@indystar.com. You can follow him on Instagram @BradleyHohulin and stay up to date with Indy dining news by signing up for the Indylicious newsletter.
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