Plain Mochi

Author Notes

Is there any food happier and cuter than mochi? A gentler incarnation of a marshmallow, it's subtly sweet and a powdery pastel, with a hint of coconut and a pillowy-soft chew.

Mochi is traditionally eaten around the Lunar New Year (in fact, the Chinese version, nian gao, literally translates as “year cake”), and that means it’s currently mochi high season. There’s no better time to learn how to make mochi yourself.

Traditionally, making mochi sounds pretty labor-intensive. It’s made, more or less, by taking gigantic mallets to a pile of cooked sweet rice and pounding the crap out of it until it forms the chewy, tender consistency that we know and love. So violent for such a cute dessert!

We're not going that route. Instead, armed with some flour made from that same sweet rice, you can make your own mochi with a recipe that’s practically foolproof and not nearly as much of a workout.

This is only a basic mochi recipe, waiting to be dressed up however you like. Add about 1 teaspoon of matcha powder to the dry ingredients to make green tea mochi, or a flavored extract to the wet ingredients to flavor it to your liking.

I’ve often seen the plain version colored with a few drops of red food coloring, too, to turn it a dainty pink. Finally, you can use it to wrap around fillings, like red bean paste or ice cream. Go to town—and happy Lunar New Year! —Cynthia Chen McTernan

Test Kitchen Notes

A chewy, marshmallow-y snack, mochi is made with short-grain glutinous rice. Though in recent years its popularity has grown so that it's served year-round (it’s so desired in the United States these days that large American grocery store chains like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods even offer prepared mochi snacks or desserts), mochi is traditionally eaten during the celebration of the Lunar New Year. Numerous cultures make mochi-like treats, many of which have their own unique name and incorporate a distinct take on the recipe’s base ingredients, as well as flavors and fillings.

Though the classic technique involves pounding cooked glutinous rice over and over until it forms that delightful chewy texture, here, recipe developer Cynthia Chen McTernan outlines a shortcut for a “quick mochi”: using a base of sweet glutinous rice flour. This mochi’s flavor profile is quite simple, being that the additional ingredients are just sugar, baking powder, water, and coconut milk. Still, mochi can be flavored with ingredients such as matcha powder or various extracts (try fruity ones like strawberry or mango, or nutty taro). From there, you can even wrap mochi around various fillings, like bean and nut pastes, or the particularly popular filling in the US, ice cream.

Though plain mochi will be creamy-white in color, you can also add a few drops of food coloring—packaged natural food dyes, as well as homemade dyes like turmeric, beet juice, and spirulina will work here to tint the confection: pink, green, yellow, and blue are most common, but the sky’s really the limit. Some ingredients work as mochi coloring as well as flavoring: Matcha yields a very pastel green mochi; black sesame paste will color the treat light gray. —The Editors