Tag Archives: glutinous rice

Recipe: Red Bean Mochi

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Inspired by the plethora of kakanin rice cake sweets at Dia de los Difuntos, I decided to make some glutinous rice flour treats of my own. Enter the red bean mochi.

Mochi is a Japanese sweet with dough made from sticky (glutinous) rice flour, filled with red bean paste, strawberries, ice cream or other fillings. Traditionally, mochi is made in a ceremony called mochitsuki, where glutinous rice is soaked overnight, then pounded with a large wooden mallet. While one person wields the mallet, another person turns the mass of rice. They must keep a steady rhythm to avoid injury! You can check out a high-speed demonstration of mochi pounding in this video.

Making the dough is quite simple, and requires only glutinous rice flour, sugar and coconut milk. You can substitute regular milk or water if you don’t have coconut milk, but the results are definitely better with coconut milk. For the filling, I used canned sweetened red bean paste that I picked up in Brussels. If that isn’t available, you can make red bean paste from scratch by cooking red beans until they are softened, mashing them until smooth and sweetening them, preferably with rock sugar.
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An Un-American Halloween: Dia de los Difuntos

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While all my stateside friends were partying for Halloween in scandalous, ironic and/or terrifying costumes, a couple of my classmates organized an event with a decidedly more serious tone. Dia de los Difuntos (Day of the Dead) is commonly celebrated on November 1 in former Spanish colonies, coinciding with All Saints Day in the Catholic church. For the occasion, Caro and Rae organized a gathering that combined traditions from their respective countries of Ecuador and the Philippines. Most interesting, you could see how Spanish missionaries were able to integrate elements of Catholicism with indigenous practices of ancestor worship.

Unlike the celebration of Halloween, death is quite present in Dia de los Difuntos, though not in a morbid or grotesque manner. This day is meant to remember and commemorate the passing of your ancestors, and welcome their spirits back home. In many ways, the holiday closely parallels Chinese culture’s Qingming Festival, or Tomb Sweeping Day, where your entire family visits the burial grounds of your ancestors to clean the graves and offer food.
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Recipe: Matcha Green Tea Mochi Cupcakes with White Chocolate Ganache

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Matcha green tea mochi cupcakesA couple months ago, I embarked on a mission to clear out my freezer and cupboards before moving. I stopped buying pantry items, and only allowed myself purchases of produce, dairy products and occasionally starches, like rice or pasta. Within weeks, I had finished all the random cuts of meat in the freezer, and had baked through all my bread and all purpose flours. This Iron Chef-esque exercise also forced me to come up with new ways to use esoteric ingredients like harissa (a North African chili and red pepper paste), chickpea flour (for Indian pakoras) and pomegranate molasses (a byproduct of my one-time obsession with tagines). Some of my experiments were successful (horseradish-sharp cheddar bread was a win), and others were not as good (horseradish cream and pomegranate molasses sauce was pretty fail). But hey, I was the only one around to witness my mistakes, and I never botched a dish so badly that I was unwilling to eat it myself.

At any rate, my kitchen is currently looking quite bare. If I didn’t know any better, I would look at my cupboards and call myself food-insecure. I am out of staples like flour, milk, butter and salt. Yes, salt. Actually, you’d be surprised at what you can do without salt in the house. Though my first impulse was to panic and run out to buy salt, after a few moments, I realized I had plenty of other salting mechanisms, like soy sauce, oyster sauce, fish sauce, nuoc mam and salty cheeses. And so, I’ve been getting by on a low-salt (but not low-sodium) diet for the last week or so.

All this is simply background to explain the engineering process that went into the cupcakes pictured above. I wanted to make something for my economists as a parting gift, and this recipe for strawberry mochi cupcakes caught my eye. Some further digging turned up this recipe for matcha green tea mochi cake, which was supposed to be a bit chewier and less cake-like than the previous formulation.

Baking is one of the most precise of culinary arts (second only to candy-making), which is why I don’t do it often. Here, my improvisatory ways tend to backfire and all that is left is a crest-fallen soufflé. However, I was adamant in my obsession with not having leftover ingredients, so I studied the two recipes carefully and combined them. And hoped that my gamble would work.
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