Mochi is a soft chewy Japanese dessert made with sweet rice flour called mochiko. It comes traditionally filled with koshian, a sweetened red bean paste, but now-a-days you can find them filled with almost anything--even malt balls, jelly beans and skittles as we discovered when we visited Two Ladies Kitchen in Hilo Hawaii. There's a nice write up by Cat Toth here about the famous mochi place if you want more ideas of what to fill your mochi with.
Even though I own a whole recipe book about mochi, most of the time, we just buy from the shops when we get mochi cravings.
Cuz, I'm not gonna lie. Cleaning the pot and utensils afterwards is a total pain...
BUT for special friends and milestone birthday party potlucks, I've made these soft pillows of chewy delight. My favorite is to fill them with a piece of Reese's chocolate and peanut butter candy! I guarantee that you can't just stop at eating just one.
Adapted from Jean Watanabe Hee's "Hawaii's Best Mochi Recipes"
Yields 16-18 pieces
Ingredients:
- 1 box mochiko (16 oz)
- ¾ c sugar
- 3 ½ c water
- 1 can koshian (12 oz can) or 9 peanut butter cups cut into thirds
- potato starch to prevent mochi dough from sticking
Procedures:
- Add sugar and water to a pot and bring to a boil. Turn the heat source to lowest setting and pour mochiko into the pot stirring vigorously until a dough forms and there are no lumps remaining. (I use a set of disposable chopsticks to do the stirring, for easy clean up later.) Turn off the heat.
- On a cutting board, place a sheet of parchment paper. Sprinkle the potato starch onto the parchment paper in a small mound (see photo).
- Using a cookie scoop, spoon out a small scoop of dough and place it on the mound of potato starch. Sprinkle top of dough ball with potato starch, and then pick it up with your hands, shake off excess potato starch and flatten to form a disk that is roughly 3 inches in diameter. Careful-- the dough is very hot. (That's why I found that using a cookie scoop, ploppling dough on the potato starch mound, and then coating top of dough ball with more potato starch before picking up the dough ball, was the best way to not get burning hot dough stuck on your hands. This dough is very sticky without the potato starch coating.)
- Fill the disk with a small teaspoon of koshian (or a 1/3 of a piece of Reeces peanut butter cup--my favorite!). Gather the edges of the dough disk, pinch close, and shape into a ball. Place seam side down into mini cupcake liner.
- Repeat steps 3-4 until dough is used up. If you fill with different ingredients, use different cupcake liners, or add food coloring to dough, or mold into different shapes to help you differentiate the different fillings. (For example, I used half the white natural color dough for koshian filling. Then added 1 drop of green food coloring to the remaining dough in the pot, stirred vigorously to incorporate food coloring, and then filled the green mochi dough with Reeces Peanut butter cups. This way, there's still only one pot with the sticky stuff to wash. Did I mention that clean up was a pain?)
- Note: Fresh mochi lasts no more than 2 days at room temperature.