Dreams of Mochi

Many years ago I had mochi for the first time and I fell in love. It was squishy, sweet, yummy, strange. Love at first bite.

A few weeks ago I came across a video online that showed an older lady and an older man beating the shit out of rice, the video was about making mochi. Immediately I got excited, "This can be done by my mortal hands!" I thought, and a few days later I went to the local Japanese market and bought what I needed: mochigome, sweet rice flour, adzuki beans, etc.

Today, a few weeks after I got all that, I finally got around making my mochi. It was a complete and utter failure. After about an hour of beating the rice the way you would a demon haunting you at night, the rice just didn't have the right consistency. So I gave up, threw it on the counter on top of some flour, and hoped it would magically fix itself. It didn't.

After emptying half my box of rice flour on my dough in hopes I would be able to wrap it around anything I wanted, I accepted defeat. My mochi ended up being incredibly floury, and kind of bitter.

Thankfully my anko was very tasty, so the end result was edible and to a degree enjoyable. But next time I know what I need to do to end up with some quite amazing mochi.

I had some leftover mochi dough at the end and I remembered that one of the videos I saw earlier had a picture of deep fried mochi wrapped in nori. So I cut some of my overly floury mochi into squares and did what humanity has always done when they want to be happy, threw it in a pot of boiling oil.

This was the highlight of my culinary adventure, fried mochi wrapped in nori. So good, incredibly so!

I'm already hungry, what should I make next? Stay tuned, and find out!