Today, I went to my wife’s childhood home to make traditional mochi with her grandparents. Mochi, a chewy, processed form of rice, has played a role in Japanese diet and culture for generations. The type of flat mochi we made is specifically called noshimochi, and it’s a stable food for Japanese New Year’s celebrations.

The grandparents - let’s call them Grandma and Grandpa - are both career rice farmers. At over 90 years old however, they’ve been contracting out their fields to younger hands for many years. They receive a significant stipend of high quality, homegrown rice each harvest.

Step 1: Preparation

Making mochi starts by steaming the rice. There’s no fancy trick here, other than letting the rice sit in cool water overnight before steaming it.

There was some debate as to how long to steam it, finally settling on 20 minutes. Grandma also explained that the steaming was only done when it was possible to “make mochi with your hand” by simply rubbing the grains together.

Step 2: Processing

Traditionally, the steamed rice is then beaten down into a sticky, chewy consistency using a large, wooden mallet.

As amusing as it would have been for grandparents to perform this spry maneuver, we opted to use a mochi-making machine akin to an industrial mixer.

Over just a few minutes, the rice accumulated in the bottom of the mixer, forming the actual mochi. Occasionally, Grandpa used a spoon to push renegade rice grains down into the central mass.

In just 10 minutes, all that remained was a central glob of shiny, jiggling mochi.

Step 3: Packaging

The next part is time-sensitive. Fresh mochi hardens fast, so you need to quickly process it into edible chunks. This is done by tearing it up by hand into large pieces and stuffing them into special plastic bags.

Afterwards, you knead the still-warm mochi into sheets of relatively even consistency.

After a few days, the mochi will completely cool down, hardening in the process. We laid out the sheets in cool, dry room of the grandparent’s house.

The bags come with guidelines for cutting up the mochi when you’re ready to eat it. Usually you break off a chunk against a flat edge (ie. the table), cut it off, then rehydrate and cook it.

Step 4: Consumption

We took some of the just-made mochi and had a simple vegetable soup, followed by anko (red bean paste) mochi for dessert. It was warm, chewy, and incredibly pleasant to eat!

Interestingly, they also had a box of mochi from three years ago. This mochi had been entirely desiccated, hard as rock.

It turns out these fragments can be rehydrated or fried to make them edible again. It’s pretty resilient!

Conclusion

Making mochi isn’t complicated, but it does take time and some manpower. While the process takes a lot of space to perform, I noticed that the grandparent’s Shōwa-era house was incredibly predisposed to this kind of cooking: there are numerous platforms all over the house, likely for use in other sorts of processing.

We were a little worried that Grandma, currently toothless, would be able to eat the fresh mochi safely. Apparently, dozens of elderly people die choking on fresh mochi in Japan each year. Hopefully she gets her teeth back soon!