Photo
Recipe
2025-03-21
Used the recipe below, for the most part.
- 25g mochi, 20g anko.
- I’ve gotten better at working with mochi, and this is a better ratio. The mochi itself doesn’t have much flavor, so you don’t want too much of it.
- Any less mochi though, and it doesn’t work well. Because of the uneven nature of the mochi, it gets really hard to get an even surface. It starts to show the anko through.
- Don’t wipe down the leaves too much.
- 10m soaking is good, but more than that, and you lose that pickled flavor.
- Don’t use tsubuan. Use koshian.
- The leaf already gives texture. Adding the tsubuan waters down the lovely texture difference you get from the leaf.
- Don’t wipe down the leaves too much.
- 10m soaking is good, but more than that, and you lose that pickled flavor.
- Don’t use tsubuan. Use koshian.
- The leaf already gives texture. Adding the tsubuan waters down the lovely texture difference you get from the leaf.
- Grind it way more than in the title picture above. No rice grains showing.
- When adding the pink food coloring, get the uncooked rice to the shade you want, then go just a little beyond that.
- When you add the pink, it only colors the water. Then when it comes out of the rice cooker, it comes out way more intense.
- When you start wrapping it though, and it’s thinner (ie not one big pink blob), it chills out a bit.
- Just use your hands and water. No need to use the saran wrap thing.
- I left the anko in the fridge, and that was fine. Don’t do freezer. It’s hard to get the egg shape when the anko is not malleable.
- To make the egg / cylinder shape:
- Roll it into a ball first, evenly distributing the mochi.
- Then roll it out into an egg / cylinder.
- (Similar to the reason that I use less mochi: a big bite of mochi doesn’t taste great. So rather than shaping the mochi into the egg immediately, and leaving big concentrations of mochi on either end, starting with a sphere and working it out will leave even coverage)
- Don’t forget that the veiny side of the leaf is on the outside.
April 10, 2022
1 cup of rice makes ~5-10 mochi pieces.
Ingredients
- Mochigome (ie Hakubai)
- Koshi-an
- Red food coloring
- Sugar
- Salted sakura leaves
Steps
Prep
- Soak sakura leaves in water for ~10 minutes before using, else they will be too salty.
- Shave down the veins of the sakura leaves (ie “planing”) to make it easier to cut.
Making the mochi
- Make mochigome in rice cooker per the rice cooker instructions.
- Soak mochigome overnight after thoroughly rinsing.
- Before cooking, add food coloring until pale pink.
- Crush cooked rice with a wooden mortar (or the rear end of a wooden spoon). No fully-intact rice grains should remain.
- Add sugar, appx. 1 tablespoon per cup of rice.
Forming the mochi
- Form anko balls. For large pieces, ~~~25g~~ 20g anko and ~35g mochi. For more “normal” sizes, ~15g anko and ~25g mochi.
- NOTE: Anko should be dry enough to hold its shape when forming into balls.
- Press the crushed rice onto saran wrap and flatten until approximately right size to wrap around anko.
- NOTE: Keep your hands wet while doing this. The mochi is very sticky!
- Place the anko onto the flattened disc, and use saran wrap to help wrap the mochi around the ball.
- Form mochi into approximate egg shapes.
- Place finished mochi on sakura leaf.
On leaf position
The leaf should be positioned with the point facing you, and the underside of the leaf should be facing outward. When the leaf unfurls open, it should look like a flower sitting atop a leaf (ie, top side is now facing up).
Comments
- Glenn does approximately the same, but uses his hands instead of saran wrap. Try that?
- Ratios are way off. Big one is way too big. Next time, try 20g anko and 35g mochi.
Teaching-2023-04-15
- 20g anko, 35g mochi was great! Could do slightly less mochi, but that’s an optimization
- 1.5 cup of mochigome yielded 488g of mochi
- Was very hard to cut still, and the leaf trick to doesn’t work (leaf is stuck to mochi, can’t unwrap it).
How to eat
From Glenn-sensei: No trick, cut as usual. But if it’s hard to cut, you can cut the mochi (no leaf) in half, then wrap the remaining half in the leaf and pop in your mouth. (This is particularly if the leaf is making it hard to cut.)