Mochi is one of those “projects” I’ve been meaning to make for a long time, along with bread and Mexican mole. The bread I’ve tried before and it was a failure. Mole… don’t have all the ingredients and may never. But today I finally made mochi.

It was really easy, actually, despite being told before that it requires a whole Japanese family and hours of sweat as you pound the glutinous rice flour into a stick, springy mass. Not so. All you need is a Pyrex glass measuring cup and… a microwave.

I started with a recipe from Allrecipes.com for the squishy mochi part, and a recipe from About.com for the anko (red bean paste) filling, but made a few alternations (mostly involving deleting some sugar). Here are my versions below:

Basic Anko (or Red Bean Paste)

Ingredients
1 1/2 cup dried azuki beans
1 cup sugar
4 cups water

Method
1) First soak beans overnight to soften them.
2) Discard soaking water, and add 4 cups new water. Bring beans to a boil, then lower to a fast simmer, partiually cover, and cook for 1 hour or until beans are mush. Peek into the pot once in a while and stir up the beans on the bottom so they don’t scorch.
3) When nearly all the water is evaporated/absorbed, add in the sugar and stir to combine.
4) Wait to cool a bit and stuff it in a blender to purée. The final texture should be smooth and firm enough to make into a little wad that can hold its shape on its own.
Note: You will end up with far more anko than is needed to make the mochi. Anko freezes well.

Basic Mochi

Ingredients
1 1/2 cup glutinous rice flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 cup water

Method
1) Mix everything together in a microwave-proof bowl (or an awesome quart-sized Pyrex measuring cup). Use the back of a spoon to mush out any lumps. You’ll get a watery batter—this is normal.
2) Cover with a plate and microwave on high for 4-6 minutes (depending on the strength of your microwave). It is done when you poke it, but NOT WITH YOUR FINGER*, and it feels like a sproingy solid mass.
3) Take it out, dust a surface with sweet potato starch, cornstarch, or tapioca starch, and empty the sticky mass onto that surface. After it cools, it will be ready for shape or filling!

* I’ve discovered the culinary equivalent of napalm. Fresh out of the microwave, this stuff is HOT. Even though it will be demurely sitting there, puffy and white and not emitting any steam. Worse, if you get any on your fingers, you won’t be able to get the sticky goo off fast enough to avoid getting a neat little burn. Which is why it is very important to wait. But never fear, it won’t actually harden beyond workability if it cools. I wish I’d known that before I rushed into this. =P

After you make the anko and the mochi, the adventures begin. By far the most fun (or exasperating, depending on your frame of mind) part of this process is getting the mochi around the anko. The stuff is sticky as hell, and I think I went through half a cup of cornstarch to make 10 mochi.

Basically the steps go something like this:

1) Dust your hands generously with starch. Re-dust with every mochi you make. Get a knife and use it to manhandle off a ping-pong ball-sized blob. Put it down and flatten with your (well-starched) palm. Try to smooth it out with your fingers into more or less a round shape that is thick in the middle and thinner at the edges.

2) Grab a teaspoon full of anko and pop it in the middle.

3) Dusting your hands with starch again, pick up the mochi and stretch the edges of the flattened disk up and over the anko. The stuff is so fantastically stretchy that you don’t really have to worry about breaking a hole in the middle. Pinch really hard to adhere the opposite edges to one another (to overcome the surface dusting of starch), and keep doing this in a haphazard fashion (at least this is what I did) until you can no longer see the anko peeking out from inside.

4) Roll around in some starch, dust it off, and put it on a plate. Yay!

Another wonderfull thing about mochi is that it is super forgiving. Even if you make the most unattractive collection of creases and folds on the bottom from disorganized pinching, poking it several times will smooth them out pretty quickly. The stuff just seems to *want* to assume its true form, a cute little white ball.

So, Jess wants me to go to an art gallery to see her amazing award-winning art now. Sounds good to me.