Pounded rice today- mochitsuki at the Palo Alto Buddhist Temple. For the uninitiated, mochi is the gooey substance, usually served as a dessert, made from a sweet rice pounded into a solid, uniform mass. Very yummy.
Damn I’m sore. Mochi is a traditional New Year’s treat. Traditionally everyone gathers together and pounds the rice with giant wooden mallets and a stone mortar… there are songs that go with this process and it’s a lot of fun. Next weekend I plan to go to the mochitsuki put on by San Francisco Taiko, where they play the songs while little kids pound the rice and eat it afterwards. This however was a JACL benefit, so it was a little more utilitarian- the focus is more on producing the mochi for everyone. As with all events at the Palo Alto Buddhist Temple it is surrounded by 30+ years of organization and half a dozen committees.- Everyone brings in their sweet rice, which they have soaked in water since the previous night.
- The batches are numbered on a first-come, first-serve basis
- Each batch is drained and stacked in an enormous tower over a custom-built steamer made out of 55-gallon drums welded to gas lines made out of lead pipes. The batches are stacked top-down so the hotter steam finishes up the batches ready to go.
- When a batch is ready, it is removed from the bottom of the stack and placed in a converted meat grinder to start mashing the rice together into a single mass. Historically this part would normally be accomplished by five of six people walking around with wood rods the size of broom handles, mashing the rice against the other rods as the participants sing and walk around the mortar. However this takes more people and more time than we have… Every so often the grinder is lubricated with “Pam.”
- The mass is placed in the mortar, which has been kept warm and wet with boiling water. Some sake is added for flavor and texture. Now the pounding starts…
- Three or four hammers are used at a time, the weilders alternating in a rhythm. This is definitely where the taiko drums would have helped… A brave person wearing a glove to prevent sticking turns the mochi mass over and moves it to the center of the mortar in time. If the mallet-weilders mess up, the person’s hand is crushed.
- When the mochi is almost ready, one of the mallet strikers “finishes up” with the glove-man.
- The result is very smooth mochi. The giant mass is shuttled into the kitchen, where a gauntlet of ladies is waiting…
- The table is covered with mochiko, a flour to prevent sticking.
- The woman at the head (lately it’s been Kazi Taga) twists off a ball of dough and throws it down the line to the first person without a mochi to work with
- The person pinches the “scar” where the ball was separated and gathers it to be the bottom of the mochi ball- making it nice and smooth and pretty
- some of the mochi will get an balls put inside them- a sweet bean paste filling
- Note that the farther down the table you are, the less likely you will get to form any mochi… so the pros tend to crowd the head of the table!
Note that if the mallet people are sloppy, the mochi sufffers… the texture may be too grainy, for example. The mallets work water into the mochi.
Mortar-pounded mochi tastes better than store-bought or machine-produced mochi. This is because of the longer cooking time, and the smoother texture… although there are other possible considerations:
- Sake is added for texture, as well as let’s say a social lubricant
- Wood chips will invariably be worked into the mochi… little splinters which come off the mallets, which are used for decades. Mmm, fiber!
- Rain, if it happens to be raining
- Possibly a little blood if the glove-guy isn’t quite fast enough!
There are also machines for making mochi– soak the rice over night, and then dump the drained rice into a machine. Turn the dial to “cook” and the rice is steamed- when the alarm goes off in 30 minutes, turn it to “knead” and the impeller in the bottom mashes the rice. In 5 more minutes the rice is a single ball, which thrashes violently in its bowl when it is close to being the right consistency.
However, given the volume of our mochitsuki operation, you would need about fifteen of these machines working in parallel to produce the number of mochi we go through!ShaColby and Monica came with and the three of us pounded about a third of all the batches. I was afraid we would be it (last year it rained and the only pounders were me, my brother, and Bob Kameda), so I was prepared for another ordeal- however this year we had more like ten or so pounders, including some giggly teenaged girls, so it was a lot less work.
Of course we gorged on mochi– I ate five or six in the first few hours, and each mochi is the equivalent of two bowls of rice. We had:- mochi with an
- mochi in ozoni, a broth with mushrooms and cabbage
- mochi with grated daikon radish and soy sauce
- mochi with soy sauce and sugar
- last year we had mochi with kinako, a sweet toasted soy bean powder
- last year we also had some walnut butter, and natto, which is kind of an acquired taste
SHAC: so when is the temple’s wet t-shirt contest?
SHAC: i know if i volunteer for these hard ones i will get invited to the REALLY COOL stuff too right?
BRIAN: definitely
BRIAN: there’s the bukkake festival in april
BRIAN: and the flogging koreans marathon
SHAC: when is the festival w/ the flaming hello kitty?
SHAC: thats like japanese burning man right?
BRIAN: totally