Unfiltered Hawaii Spam

[skchai]

This year's Waikiki Spamjam has been set for April 22-24.

Yellow Truffle has posted some interesting info in the Spamjam (the restaurant) thread. . .

[skchai]

As the 2004 SpamJam beckons on the horizon, here are some links to old news stories about last year's event.

Forever Spam

Amateur’s Spam Mochi among winners in Waikiki

Spam Jam honors maligned mystery meat

Waikiki will get Spammed as Hawaii's vice goes public

And if you are yet unsated, there's additional stuff at the Waikiki SpamJam website.

I'll keep things updated, and will post pictures here after the great event . . .

[ryanozawa]

It seemed a simple enough question: "How do you make a spam musubi?" But while the basic recipe wasn't debated much, the HawaiiAnswers.com group was stymied by the follow up: Where did the spam musubi come from?

At least a few of us think it's a fairly new development for the musubi, sprouting up as late as the '80s. But, like the loco moco, is there some well-known piece of spam musubi lore that explains its origins?

[skchai]

Ryan,

I found this in the Star-Bulletin:

There is no definitive history for this aberration, but Ann Kondo Corum, in "Hawaii's 2nd Spam Cookbook" (Bess Press, 2001), says the creator may have been Mitsuko Kaneshiro, who first made them for her children, then started selling them out of City Pharmacy on Pensacola Street. By the early '80s, she was selling 500 a day from her own shop, Michan's Musubi. Now, this was in the pre-acrylic-mold days, so all 500 were formed by hand.

However, it's quite likely that there were Spam musubi around long before then, possibly since the days that Spam first got imported into the islands. It's one of those ideas that are obvious enough that many people have independently "invented" it over the years. However, I don't doubt that Michan's Musubi may have be responsible for popularizing it. . . just that I never got to eat there!!

[skchai]

In Hawaii's 2nd Spam Cookbook, Corum adds that Kaneshiro used to sell her spam musubi to the blind vendors, who would resell them at food stands inside of State govt buildings downtown.

Indeed, it may have been the blind vendors who really popularized the musubi, since they were pretty ubiquitous in those days. However, the real boom in the musubi seems to have occured in the 1990s. There are about a dozen Spam musubi recipes in the second volume of Corum's book, as compared to only one in the first Hawaii's Spam Cookbook, which was published in 1987. This gives you an idea of the extent to which the musubi's popularity blossomed during the intervening period.

Here are links to the Bess Press homepages for the cookbooks (eGulletized links to Amazon.com are above):

Hawaii's Spam Cookbook

Hawaii's 2nd Spam Cookbook

[skchai]

Almost before we knew it, the day is upon us.

Here's the schedule for Waikiki Spamjam 2004.

Friday, April 23 , 12-1 pm. The world's largest spam musubi will be constructed at the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center. The goal is to make it 325 feet long, thus defeating a record set at the Kauai State Fair. Geevum!

Friday, April 23, 6 pm. Spam Jam concert and comedy revue at All Star Hawaii, 2080 Kalakaua Blvd., free with can of Spam donation for the Hawai`i Food Bank.

Saturday, April 24, 4-10 pm. Street festival on Kalakaua Ave. Star chefs, food booths, and free entertainment.

Though I probably won't be able to witness (or eat) the giant musubi, I will try to make it to the stree festival and send back pictures for those unable to attend. .

Here's a crucial piece of information for Spam tourists, from the Press Release:

Participating Waikiki hotels are offering a SPAM® Jam room upgrade free (subject to availability) to those who present a can of SPAM upon check-in.

Unlike last year, the Hawai`i Foodbank, who receive all those donations, won't be creating a giant Wall of Spam on Restaurant Row. They've somehow opted for a Sea of Tuna instead of Wall of Spam - what gives? Perhaps this is because they already broke the record for largest Spam Wall in history last year. Instead, there will be a mini-wall of Spam in Waikiki, with wonderful prizes awarded to those who come closest to guessing the correct number of cans. . .

Facetious comments welcome. . .

[skchai]

Another SpamJam event I neglected to mention:

Waikiki Spam Jam: "The Musubi Man" Book, with book signing by author Sandi Takayama, keiki coloring activities, pictures with Spammy and Honolulu Boy Choir's traveling chorus, 10 a.m.-1 p.m., Outrigger Waikiki on the Beach; free. 545-4195.

[The Little Blue House]

Sun-Ki, there are only about 6 and a half hours between your posts (overnight). Where in the world do you find that much energy? Is it the spam, perhaps?

[skchai]

Yes, two cans a day before bedtime does the trick. . .

[skchai]

The Spamjam street festival has come and gone: We arrived at 5:30 and had promised some friends that we would meet them at 6:30 near Duke's Beach to watch their daughter's halau dance at the nightly torch-lighting ceremony, so we didn't really spend too much time there. Still, I managed to extract enough pictures by rear-ending my way through the crowds, then suddenly pivoting to snap the off-center shot.

Yes, there were crowds, often full of bewildered tourists. My wife ended up on the sidelines with a nice couple from Colorado who had a hard time believing that there could actually be a festival devoted to Spam. "We assumed that you couldn't even get Spam in the stores here", the lady exclaimed. Something about everyone in Hawai`i being so healthy, etc. Presumably they waited to get back to the hotel before starting to question the competence of their travel agents.

One of the joys of browsing Spamjam food booths was seeing the desparate lengths the participating hotel kitchens would go to find something, anything, to do with Spam that would not instantly destroy any reputation they have of producing fine Hawaiian Regional Cuisine.

Here are some examples, each representing a different approach to this intractible problem:

The first, used by the Radisson Prince Kuhio, was to hide the Spam inside another dish and hope it wouldn't affect the taste. This "Sesame Chicken-Spam Rouladen" apparently only had minute amounts of Spam in it, and seems to be to be an adaptation of something that might appear on their convention catering menu. You can imagine the executive chef saying - "Just put a couple slivers in the stuffing, then we can say it has some Spam in it."

The other Radisson offering was "Chiplote Pulled Pork and Spam Quesadillas", along a similar vein. Here it is:

I have no idea what Prince Kuhio, a noted gourmand, would have made of all this.

The opposite approach was taken by the Chart House Restaurant. Instead of trying to hide bits of Spam inside a quasi-HRC dish, they chose to flaunt the Spam saying, more or less, "Hey! Spam IS Hawaiian Regional Cuisine!" Look at the classical HRC presentation of this "Char Siu Spam Bun", with the gratuitious Nalo Greens inside the adapted Peking Duck bun. I'm not sure how they got the Spam to be so purple - but I wouldn't put it past them to have marinated the slices in a mixture of hoisin sauce and fermented tofu.

One way of side-stepping this can-we-make-it-HRC-or-not conundrum is to simply play it for laughs. This is what Duke's Restaurant did with their "Spambalaya", which actually looks more like Spam fried rice. The name of the dish suggests, "But of course, this is not the food we would prepare for our real guests. It is but a joke, ha ha ha." Note also the dendrobium orchid stuck on top of the spambalaya, which suggests not HRC, but rather a deliberate attempt at Tiki-style presentation. It is the kitchen's way of announcing the this is supposed to be kitsch.

Perhaps the dishes that came out most successfully were from places that didn't get all defensive about the use of Spam, but instead just gave it up to you as more or less ordinary food. K Restaurant played this up by offering a wide choice of ordinary plate lunches, and sticking a Spam Katsu amongst them. Of course, K Restaurant is not a high end restaurant, so perhaps they didn't have to worry so much about the HRC reputational aspects. But nonetheless, whatever the reason, you see here a secure restaurant, a restaurant at peace with itself.

Times Supermarket took a similar route, selling a mixed grill of Steak and Spam. The Spam grill chef looked like he was having a good time.

One establishment, or set of establishments, with HRC reputation to uphold did choose a similar approach. The Sheraton kitchen staff, from the Moana Surfrider and Princess Kaiulani Hotels, chose two relatively straightforward but nonetheless ingenious presentations. They get my A+ award. Their first dish, "Teriyaki BBQ Spam, Shoyu Chicken, Kalua Pig and Cabbage" is more or less a riff on the traditional Hawai`i mixed plate. The second dish, the "Spam Katsu Don" was a katsudon (fried pork cutlet on a bowl of rice with an egg, onion, and sweetened soy sauce), where the pork cutlet replaced by a Spam cutlet. This is the one I chose to eat. Both dishes married Spam with dishes that naturally complement it. The Spam and Kalua Pig / Cabbage made for a kind of local-style choucroute or budae cchigae, while the Spam Katsudon ended up being a kind of fried Spam n' eggs with shoyu on rice. O.K., nothing earth-shattering, but nobody thought of it before.

How did the Spam Katsudon taste? My son asked me for one slice, and my daughter asked me for the other one. Then, when I had eaten about 1/3 of the remaining slice, my son demanded the rest, so I had to give it to him and ended up eating mostly rice and egg, which was pretty decent approximation of a tamago don.

They had all kinds of entertainment at the SpamJam as well. Two stages withe live music, mostly Hawaiian music on the Diamond Head stage, and R&B-style on the Ewa side. There was a mini-arcade where you could play all kinds of games, including Spam Car races:

Roaming around the arena was Mr. (Mrs.?) Spam, who would periodically accost unsuspecting kids before they had a chance to run away. . .

[yellow truffle]

Sun-Ki

Great post. Thanx for the photos. It speaks to me. Its like an Iron Chef party with the theme ingredient being Spam. Looks like you had fun.

yt