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Making Mochi, a Japanese Treat That’s All About Texture
Sometimes the pleasures of food aren’t packed in remarkable tastes, but in textures. And when it comes to mochi, the Japanese rice dough, much of its appeal can be attributed to a glorious bounce or a gelatinous squish or a comforting kind of gloop.
One of the most popular ways to eat mochi is in the sweet packages known as daifuku: The dough is stretched around a filling of red bean paste, or creams in flavors like green tea, chocolate or strawberries.
This dumpling-like sweet is one of many Japanese confections developed over hundreds of years that transform rice and beans into exquisite little mouthfuls, traditionally to accompany tea.
It’s easy to grab plastic-wrapped daifuku at Japanese grocery stores in New York, and to spot boxes of mochi ice cream in supermarket freezer aisles. (Frozen mochi have the same basic structure as daifuku, but swap the fillings out for scoops of ice cream, like dairy-free coconut or chocolate-mint chip.)
Fresh handmade mochi is harder to find, but Tomoko Kato cooks a batch three times a week at Patisserie Tomoko in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And a visit to her kitchen showed that despite the confection’s pedigree, sweet mochi dough can be simple to make, with just three ingredients that come together in minutes.
The payoff is rich: Ms. Kato serves big, tender daifuku that are almost slippery, with dough as smooth and soft to the touch as a kitten’s paw pad.
Ms. Kato, 38, was born in Hokkaido, Japan, and has worked as a pastry chef in French and Japanese restaurants. She has been making mochi for a decade, ever since a customer requested that she serve more traditional Japanese sweets.
Ms. Kato went down a rabbit hole, reading books about mochi varieties and techniques, and testing ratios of flour to sugar, along with many brands of rice flours, until she found her own style of dough.
Street vendors in Japan can be seen using long wooden mallets to make mochi dough, sometimes taking turns smashing the rice like two blacksmiths across an anvil, doubling their power and speed. For sweet mochi, specialty rice flours can provide a shortcut and require way less muscle.
Behind the counter at her shop, with her hair tucked behind a brightly colored bandanna, Ms. Kato measured out sugar, water and shiratamako flour, which she likes for the smooth, elastic quality it lends the finished dough. Mochiko flour, more commonly available (and sometimes called sweet rice flour or glutinous rice flour), will also get the job done.
After Ms. Kato whisked the gritty-looking shiratamako with water, the tiny pellets dissolved completely. She poured the slurry through a strainer just in case, then added the sugar.
This basic mixture could be steamed in a double boiler, or even blasted for a few minutes in the microwave. But Ms. Kato stirred the ghostly white liquid in a pan on the stove until it thickened, first into a sticky, lumpy paste, and then into a heavier, tighter mass. It was nearly there.
She slapped the smooth dough around the pan with a wooden spoon to discourage catching and browning, and to allow some excess water to evaporate. The dough was finished in just five or six minutes, when it became very shiny. Ms. Kato coaxed the blob out onto a generous dusting of potato starch, which prevents the dough from sticking but doesn’t alter the flavor.
After it cooled a bit, Ms. Kato folded pieces of the dough around fillings: anko, a traditional red bean paste made from adzuki beans and sugar; and a chocolate ganache that Ms. Kato had infused with just enough Earl Grey tea to give it a delicate whiff of bergamot. (Making anko from scratch takes some time, but the filling is available ready-made, in cans. For those who want to use it, Ms. Kato suggests popping it into a pan to dry it out a little first.)
The mochi dough hardened as it cooled, but not much: It was still comically sticky. Home cooks can use a rolling pin, a lot of potato starch and a positive attitude to get the dough around fillings. Ms. Kato used her fingers, holding the dough in the air and spreading it across the bean paste so evenly that it was nearly translucent.
Shaping neat, symmetrical daifuku is the trickiest part of the process to master, but the beginner can easily repair holes, or pinch off excess dough and hide a seam on the bottom. Ugly daifuku are still delicious and a joy to eat, the mochi yielding so easily that it feels as if it wants to be consumed.
But the fresh dough deteriorates quickly, turning dry and stiff within just two days, and losing its lovely tender chewiness. Mochi enthusiasts know how to deal with this setback: Eat it all as soon as you can.
Mochi ice cream has started to give the dough a much higher profile in the United States. Mikawaya, based in Los Angeles, started selling the product locally in the early 1990s, and pushed it into major supermarket chains. By 2014, Trader Joe’s was advertising a fully Americanized pumpkin pie mochi ice cream, just in time for Thanksgiving.
“Mochi is right where the macaron was 10 years ago,” said Ken Gordon, who founded the New York mochi ice cream company Mochidoki.
At Patisserie Tomoko, Ms. Kato also serves fresh mochi with ice cream. She cuts the dough into small pieces and scatters these on a plate with smudges of creamy white bean paste. She scoops a grassy, barely sweet green-tea sorbet onto white chocolate ganache, and garnishes it with coin-size meringues that break easily, then strings syrupy, candied yuzu zest across it all.
It’s a fantastic clutter of textures. Sure, it tastes great, too, but that’s almost beside the point.
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