Yakimochi…Failure

So I just attempted to make yakimochi like the one I had with Robyn in the City a couple of weeks ago, and I failed miserably. X/ It was highly disappointing because ever since I got a bag of adzuki beans at the local Oriental Grocery (Stony Brook has an abnormally massive Asian population, so it makes sense that we’d have a nearby supermarket brimming with awesome Asian foods, yum!), I’d had my heart set on having homemade yakimochi.

I cooked up the sweet red bean paste with the adzuki beans last night, and THAT came out fantastic. Of course, if it hadn’t, I’d have to seriously reconsider my goal of becoming a chef/baker of some sort, since it’s ridiculously simple. Soak beans, cook beans, drain, add sugar and oil, cook and mash until it becomes a paste. About the only thing you could do to mess it up would be to undercook the beans or something. ๐Ÿ˜›

With that done, I’d planned on making the mochi to wrap the bean paste in and cooking it in a pan tonight. Well, apparently it must not be the sticky kind of mochi on the yakimochi I had because no matter what I did after I made the mochi, I couldn’t get it to cook into a wonderful doughy, slightly crusty shell. ๐Ÿ™ It just stayed gummy until it got burnt/caramelized on the outside. It didn’t taste HORRIBLE, but it wasn’t exactly what I’d consider edible either.

At least I only made a little bit of bean paste and mochi…

Anyway, I was hoping that maybe someone who reads this might be able to point me in the direction of a recipe that’s appropriate for making a yakimochi dough. I can’t seem to find one myself, and regular mochi clearly is not the way to go. XP

5 thoughts on “Yakimochi…Failure

  1. I usually only make unstuffed yakimochi… In such cases, I generally buy vacuum-packed kiri-mochi orand maybe microwave or boil briefly, or use some two-or-three-day old fresh mochi. Then I grill with a tiny bit of oil on either side until puffy; I season with soy sauce and mirin, and wrap nori around them.

    In Dazaifu I ate something like anko stuffed yakimochi, but these were “grilled” inside a mold that made an ume blossom-shaped impression.

    I don’t really remember if the dough was from mochigome or wheat, because it was too long ago, but I do have a photo hidden somewhere on one of my computers that I can hunt down. I seem to recall it as a mochi-based pastry, otherwise I don’t think I would have distinguished it from anko no oyaki.

    How did you prepare the mochi pastry? From mochiko (milled mochi rice) and hot water, kneaded, or from pounded, cooked mochigome?

  2. Ooo free food! I would be delighted to be your test subject, I mean, to enjoy a future international chef’s cooking. :yum: I’m going to pump my bike with air and pedal to the metal all the way to your dorm. Hopefully I’ll reach there before I die from dehydration or before the end of this semester… or before you graduate… lol… Actually I need to get letters of recommendations from my professors, so I would definitely be on campus sometime in the future… via car of course. :laidback:

    Hmm, I don’t bake, so I can’t help you with your yakimochi thingie. But if you’re interested in beef noodle soup, this video teaches you how to make it in a few easy steps: http://dissonant.org/~pjammer/movies/pho.swf
    :up:

  3. I wonder if the microwave method gets the dough as sticky as when it is cooked using boiling methods or the electric mochi machines. The machines have a process that’s more like kneading the dough and that probably creates gluten-like strands.

  4. Michael: Leave a comment or something the next time you plan on coming out to Stony Brook. ๐Ÿ™‚ I’ll be here all during winter break, too, so you actually have all the way until MAY, hehe. ;D

    And OMG that Flash movie is HYSTERICAL!! My sister and her friend absolutely loved it, too. ๐Ÿ˜€

    Jason: Oh, the dough was definitely right sticky. It was absolutely impossible to work with if I didn’t have wet hands. And yeah, it probably didn’t have much along the lines of glutinous strands. However, I don’t think that was really the problem when I tried to cook it.

    What I was experiencing was that the outside was caramelizing-burning while the inside of the dough remained completely uncooked. There also was no in between stage of sort of crusty-doughy outside to OOPS! overcooked. I tried cooking over lower heat, having the paste more thickly covered, more thinly covered, coating it in flours/starches… Nothing was working to prevent this weird crispy-caramelly skin from forming on the outside while the inside stayed all gooey-mochi instead of becoming the doughy-mochi from the yakimochi I had in the City. :hrm:

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