Mr. Sato dreams up an innovative way to ensure good luck and give yourself an excuse to eat fried chicken.

This year, the Japanese holiday of Setsubun falls on February 3. Originally meant to mark the start of spring, it’s also a day on which to wish for peace and happiness for your family and household, and it’s said that one way to do that is by eating sushi rolls.

Specifically, you’re supposed to eat ehomaki, rolls of vinegared sushi rice and luxurious fillings. While supermarkets and food specialty stores across Japan offer all sorts of ehomaki for sale during the Setsubun season, but this year our ace reporter Mr. Sato didn’t want to eat just any ehomaki, he wanted to eat a KFC ehomaki, substituting fried chicken skin for the orthodox outer layer of nori (dried seaeed).

Unfortunately, while KFC has done a lot to embrace the local food culture in Japan, the chain doesn’t offer ehomaki. That’s OK, though, because Mr. Sato, intrepid innovator that he is, figured out how you can make your own KFC ehomaki.

Obviously, you can’t make a sushi roll without sushi rice, so that was the first thing that Mr. Sato needed to sort out. It’s easy to find recipes online for how to make your own sushi rice using white rice and vinegar, but Mr. Sato opted for the convenience of just buying some already-made sushi rice, and for that he swung by conveyor belt sushi chain Kura Sushi, which offers sushi rice, called “shari” (シャリ) on their menu, for 100 yen (US$0.65).

▼ He decided to pick up two orders, just to make extra-sure he’d have enough rice.

Then it was off to KFC to get some chicken skin…except that they won’t sell you just the skin. So instead, Mr. Sato procured a four-piece Tokutoku Pack for 1,540 yen.

The Tokutoku Pack lets you pick between Original Recipe or boneless chicken, and Mr. Sato opted for two pieces of each. This turned out to be a mistake, though, since the boneless chicken is breaded but has no skin. This left Mr. Sato with only two pieces from which to source his fried chicken skin, which, as we’ll see later on, ended up being an issue.

However, for the pieces he had that did have skin, removing it turned out to be really easy.

All you need to do is poke the tip of a chopstick or fork through the skin, and it’s a quick and simple process to peel the rest of it off from underneath.

Though it’s not an absolutely essential piece of equipment, a makisu, the bamboo mat used by sushi chefs to form sushi rolls, will make the construction easier. After placing a sheet of plastic wrap on top of the mat, Mr. Sato began laying his strips of fried chicken skin across it.

Ideally, you want the strips of skin to overlap with each other as you place them side-by-side, but unfortunately, with only two pieces of fried chicken to source skin from, Mr. Sato couldn’t always do this. In any case, though, once you’ve got the skin set, the next step is to add rice on top of it.

Technically, you could roll everything up here and you’d still have a sushi roll, but remember, ehomaki are supposed to have some kind of special filling inside of them too. As you might have noticed in the above photo, Mr. Sato’s KFC combo pack included sides of French fries and coleslaw…

…so he made some fries his first filling choice.

Next came the meat from the pieces of fried chicken he’d gotten the skin from.

And last, a bit of coleslaw, used more like a condiment than a full-on filling.

Now this was looking like an ehomaki! Ready for the final step, Mr. Sato rolled up the makisu mat and made sure everything was pressed, but not smooshed, together.

Finally, it was time to see how our KFC sushi roll had turned out, and…

OK, we admit that it’s not much to look at, at least in the above photo. Like we mentioned earlier, ideally you want to leave a nice bit of overlap across the pieces of fried chicken skin as you’re laying them out, in order to provide sufficient coverage if there’s any shifting or sliding during the final roll-up. Unfortunately having only two pieces of chicken to source skin from didn’t leave us with quite enough to do all that, which is, again, why we should have asked for Original Recipe chicken, served with the skin still on, for all four of our combo meals fried chicken pieces.

That said, after some slicing and plating, our KFC ehomaki was looking a lot more photogenic…

…and, most importantly of all, it tasted great! In his tasting notes, Mr. Sato says that it’s immediately flavorful, thanks to the combination of the KFC chicken’s herbs and spices and the enticing oil of the fried chicken skin, which then gives way to a clean finish thanks to the refreshingly sour notes in the vinegared rice and coleslaw.

Even though his original inspiration for making this is that he thought it’d be a weird and quirky fusion cooking experiment, the results are so good that he gives it his personal Mr. Sato Guarantee, and until KFC Japan wises up and starts selling their own ehomaki, he absolutely recommends making one for yourself.

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