Mochitsuki 餅つき
- Teiba Ahmed
- Dec 10, 2016
- 3 min read
This morning we arrived at Showa Women's Universities Elementary school expecting more English teaching, but none of the English teachers were there to be found! Today we would unexpectedly partook in Japans New Year's tradition of making mochi!
Mochi is just pure gluttonous rice! That is the one and only ingredient. You might be familiar with sweets such as Dango and Daifuku which include mochi as its main ingredient. I love the taste of mochi so much! Even back home in London I would try to make it from scratch, not being readily available in every supermarket as it is now (Heaven). I would take Sushi rice, blend in to form a powder and then cook it in the microwave with some water and sugar to make some seriously authentic stuff. With the end result of this beauty… okay maybe it didn't turn out that good. My family couldn't tell the difference!
Mochi: How Its Really Made (No Microwave here folks)
So when I heard we would be making mochi I imagined some rice powder and microwaves lying about. I could not be more wrong, I was greeted by a humongous pestle and mortar type of construction, only it was massive wooden hammers we were using!
So we start off with a special type of rice called 'mochigome'. The raw rice goes into this massive wooden crucible built to withstand the constant pounding of the mochi making. Multiple people start to attack it with the hammers, slowly kneading the rice.
I was slightly disappointed as I expected some real hammering to be going on here. And so it began! We alternate on hammering the Mochi in, turning it into as smooth as a dough we can. Boy was this thing heavy, my arms are sore just from writing about this! All the students had a turn, after every strike someone folds the dough in and continuously alternates this. Professionally, this can get seriously fast and scary too! But I think it's too much for the elementary kid to handle. [Me in my apron - this was all do
ne outdoors!]
As you can imagine this takes quite a lot of time and effort, the students who were on soup duty were waiting for us to finish, they got bored and created this awesome snowman (Yuki daruma) with rice flour!
After we had successfully created the mochi, it was time to start making the main ingredient for the soup they had brewing in the background! So we took small balls of mochi and stuffed them into these delicious fried tofu pockets (Abura age - 油揚げ) and sealed them with pasta (when I asked them if it was tofu, the students has no clue at all and were like noooo, a teacher confirmed it was for me, they then all looked at me dumbfoundedly ahaha). What a creative way of cooking!!
In the broth it goes, there it sits boiling away as everyone's tummy rumbles like a symphony, we worked all the way through lunch. It's December but that day felt like the same Summer heat for when we first arrived to Tokyo, not an overstatement, the sun was glaringly bright.
Finally finished and we digged right in. Itadakimasu! いただきます！
It was so delicious! The chewy mochi just melts in your mouth. It was my first time eating mochi as a savoury dish, it was delicious!
If your tummy isn't rumbling by now, it should be. It was such a great experience absorbing the culture of this very special New Year's tradition. If you might be thinking, what about Christmas? Then I'm afraid to tell you that Japan does not celebrate Christmas, exception being their weird KFC 'tradition' in Tokyo ahah. Also, if you want to see how the real pro's make mochi, check it out here, we certainly did not get it looking like that!!:
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