Originally Posted by Kyuusai
*shudder* MOCHI.
All you inexperienced fans of Japanese food out there, BEWARE mochi. Do not cook it unless you have a contingency plan in place. For at least your first try, don't cook with anything (anything meaning utensils, cookware, rooms of your house) that you can't easily throw away.
I can spend all afternoon typing about how thick and sticky mochi is, about how impossible it is to clean, but you just can't know.
In my efforts to teach her about her Japanese heritage, I tried to make daifuku for my sister. After meeting utter failure in our attempts to make paste out of azuki beans, we moved on to the mochi. Mochi made with rice flour, not counting cooling time, can be made in fifteen minutes. Supposedly.
I started at 4:00pm. At 5:30 I had to send my sister home empty-handed, as it still wasn't nearly cool enough to work with.
I finally finished cleaning the kitchen at 11:00pm.
Some notes: Corn starch is no substitute for potato starch. You can try a hand-held electric mixer, but pray the motor doesn't burn out. If you pick up a piece of the mochi before it's cool (and by that I don't mean "cool enough to not burn", but "at least, but preferably below, room temperature), it will stick to you and not come off. You can walk outside and try to throw it away, but, like a wad of bubble gum in a cartoon, it won't come off. And good luck cleaning anything the mochi has touched (aside from the pan which SHOULD have been greased and God help you if it wasn't). You can't put the mochi in the garbage if you aren't taking it out soon, because it will rot. You can't put it in the sink or down the garbage disposal, because it will clog. All you can do is repeatedly soak it in hot water and scrape and scrub, dissolving it layer by layer until it's all gone. That's if you start washing immediately. If you let it dry, good luck ever getting it clean.
I would rather fight a tar baby.
When we got done cooking, my sister informed me that she remembered that she'd had mochi once already, and didn't care for it. If I hadn't been so exhausted, she probably wouldn't be here today.
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