In the few weeks since my last post, my primary food-generating focus has been on mochi. I suspect that this post will essentially not make sense to, or have meaning for, anyone other than my sisters, but… I also suspect that my sisters comprise a large percentage of my overall readership, so this is probably OK! 😬

I have been making mochi at home since 2017, when I acquired this miraculous invention (a mochi machine). For many years, growing up in Westport, CT, our parents purchased the annual New Year’s fresh mochi at a Japanese market (Nippon Daido) in White Plains, NY. Their trips to this market were always a happy event for us, as it meant that we’d get to have fresh mochi (if around New Year’s) and arare (Japanese rice crackers). These are the kinds of treats that we loved so much they needed to be rationed out to us.

Many people think of mochi as the pink, orange, or green ice cream filled stuff, but for us “mochi” was always the simple, white slabs of still-warm, just-pounded sweet rice that came wrapped in plastic from Nippon Daido. Mom or dad would cut the slabs into little rectangular pieces and we’d try to grab bits of it out from under their noses. When just-made, eating plain and still-warm mochi is a very special treat. Later, as the mochi dries out a little, or is frozen to keep it from getting moldy, a few minutes in the toaster oven produces wonderfully puffy, oozy, gooey blobs of yumminess.

We had a couple of favorite ways of eating mochi. My favorite was always coating the little squares of mochi in soy sauce then wrapping each one in a piece of seasoned nori. Another favorite was making a syrup by stirring sugar into soy sauce, then dipping the mochi in the syrup. Another was immersing the mochi in warm milk.

When I moved to Boston, I sought out the markets where I could buy fresh mochi, but was distressed to learn the fresh mochi was all frozen. Then, the Japanese markets gradually closed or stopped carrying the fresh stuff at all (instead opting for a shelf-stable version, blah). Meanwhile, my parents had started spending winters in Florida where it was also not easy to find fresh mochi. So, Louise got them a mochi machine, and our lives were transformed! The machine is a blast… first it steams the rice, then it agitates/pounds it into a big, sticky blob. Mom would make big batches of it and give packages of it to each of us to take home. Nom nom nom.

Eventually, of course, I got my own machine. I’ve had various adventures making the mochi. There was this time (last year) when the machine’s agitating caused stuff to crash off my table. Then there were issues I had because the stuff is SO STICKY. My first attempt at making mochi resulted in this quote in my notes: “They are NOT KIDDING when they say to handle the mochi ONLY with wet (or floured) hands. I screwed this up and the result basically looked like a murder scene, but with mochi and flour instead of blood.”

My recent process improvements are:

• I wear (FDA food-rated) vinyl gloves to handle the hot mochi so there’s no sticking to my hands
• I use a silicone pan liner on the counter with a generous dusting of rice flour to avoid sticking to the counter
• After spreading out the hot mochi into a slab of the desired thickness (about ½”) on the silicone liner, I wait a few minutes for the mochi to cool a little and form a bit of a “skin” on top, then very lightly dust the top surface with rice flour and flip the slab onto a lightly dusted cutting board for chopping into the rectangular pieces
• Any amount that I’m not eating the same day gets immediately put into the freezer, portioned into containers of about 10-15 pieces. I’ve found that thawing a container takes about an hour on the counter, and then the mochi tastes and feels just like the freshly-made stuff… no baking required