New Years Day is coming – I’m resting up for two full days of cooking. A big part of my Japanese New Years party is mochi. Mochi is a traditional Japanese rice cake – it can be sweet – but on New Year’s it’s plain, eaten with kinako or soy sauce+sugar.

In the old days my family used to pound mochi by hand with mallets. THAT’s old skool. Me? I use the new electric plugged in machine with very minimal work on my part because I live in the future.

I recently went to thefoodlibrarian’s house where they used old school machines to make their mochi. They’ve been doing it for 50 years and they’ve got the process down – steaming the rice, extruding the mochi, cooling the mochi, forming the mochi, letting it sit in a bed of mochiko flour, and then finally packaging it. We made over 150 pounds of mochi. Unbelievable.

It was a lot of work but so worth it. There’s nothing as good as fresh mochi!

1 steaming sm

2 mochi machine sm

3 cooling

4 mochi sitting sm

5 kid mochi sm

6 ready sm

7 packed sm

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