Sunday, April 13, 2008

Mochi is yucky

A friend at work told me that her family loves mochi. It's a Japanese food made with brown rice. It's a kind of dough that you bake.

Since it's made from brown rice I figured that maybe I could eat it as a low-guilt treat. Plus, since it's Japanese, I thought my husband would approve.

Well ... I followed the directions and baked some this evening. The plain unsweetened variety was pretty awful. I put a little honey on it, which made it somewhat tolerable. However, THAT kind of defeats the virtuosity of the experience. Plus, even with the honey it was not all that interesting.

Experiment: FAILED.

4 comments:

RaineS said...

we buy mochi at trader joe's, but its frozen ice cream (or something similar to ice cream)... our son loves it, but we get it only rarely, since its pretty pricey. Comes in chocolate, mango, strawberry or green tea...

Kitten Herder said...

Maybe it would be a reasonable frozen dessert base. It would definitely need some flavorings and sugar though.

barbie2be said...

i was just about to say the same thing changejunkie said. roommate M loves it but i am not a fan of the rice flour paste covering of it.

briwei said...

What you get at TJ's is a thin shell of mochi around a ball of ice cream. That's not really mochi at all.

And it is not usually made with brown rich. It's made with a special mochi rice. When made the traditional way, the rice is steamed in bamboo boxes over a fire, poured into a stone bowl, and rapidly pounded into dough with wooden mallets.

It's actually a very cool and interesting process. The dough gets dumped onto a table coated with a light sugar. It is cut into pieces and made into little balls. Some get filled with a sweet red bean paste.

They taste best fresh, IMHO. And you don't need to toast them.