San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘ Mochi Magic’ boasts fun recipes, like mochi brownies.
East Bay native’s fun recipes update tradition with shortcuts, bold flavors
Growing up in San Leandro, Kaori Becker remembers how her mom made mochi every January, a Japanese tradition for the new year, using a mochi machine that soaks sweet rice overnight, steams it and pummels it until it becomes a dense, glossy dough.
It’s a modern progression from what Becker’s grandmother did in Japan, pounding glutinous rice paste with only a bowl, a mallet and her two hands. These days, Becker takes an even quicker route: the microwave.
These different styles of mochi are all explored in Becker’s new cookbook, “Mochi Magic.” Microwaved mochi might be a shortcut but it still produces a soft, chewy texture that Becker argues is only slightly less supple than the more common steaming method — plus faster, less messy and easier for beginners. As for handpounding mochi — well, not even Becker’s mom, Yukiko Zinke, does that anymore.
Becker’s book runs through dozens of traditional and modern flavors with the mixandmatch approach. It also dives into savory mochi and baked mochi, a style popularized in the Bay Area by the mochi muffins and doughnuts by Berkeley’s Third Culture Bakery. And there are recipes for ice creamfilled mochi, many Americans’ first introduction to the sweet confection.
Ultimately, Becker’s story is a classic tale of a halfJapanese woman feeling a sudden pull to her cultural traditions as an adult and then making them her own. Her book shows a range of possibilities for mochi, inspiring readers to invent their own creations.
While Becker remembers eating mochi frequently as an East Bay kid, scarfing down red beanstuffed daifuku at Japanese community bazaars, she didn’t consider making mochi herself until she was a graduate student in Ohio.
On visits home, she started asking her mom for lessons, and Zinke introduced the microwave method using mochiko, sweet rice flour. Around the same time, Becker developed an interest in food and cooking classes. She volunteered at a cooking school so she could drop in on classes for free, then jumped in with her own class devoted to ramen.
But it wasn’t until 2016, when Becker realized she wanted to start a family and that she was more interested in food than teaching high school English, that her professional mochi life began. Becker moved back to the Bay Area and started Kaori’s Kitchen, a cooking school focused on Asian cuisines. She enlisted her mom to coteach a mochi class — what she believes was the first mochimaking class in the region — and it quickly turned into Kaori’s Kitchen’s most popular offering.
The classes would start out with traditional pounded mochi, with students taking turns with the wooden mallet and dropping pieces into ozoni soup, a traditional New Year’s dish. Becker’s recipe features dashi, chicken and seasonal vegetables, and when the mochi pieces fall into the hot broth, they stretch like mozzarella.
Then, Becker and Zinke would show the students microwaved mochi, perhaps flavored with matcha tea or rosewater. They’d demonstrate the smooth, translucent look of the fully cooked mochi and dump the hot, sticky mound onto a cornstarch covered cutting board, letting it cool before rolling it into a log and pinching off balls, ready to be filled with soft bean paste and fresh fruit.
“As we started teaching these classes, I realized you can make so many kinds of filling for mochi,” Becker said. “It’s so versatile.”
She paired cocoa flavored mochi with Nutella, then made her own rich chocolate truffle filling. She discovered white chocolate truffles as a prime vessel for new flavors such as hojicha tea and freezedried strawberries. She blitzed black sesame seeds into cream cheese and wrapped coconut milk enriched mochi around squares of jiggly coconut pudding.
With the pandemic, those classes are all happening online now — and Becker and Zinke typically teach separately since Becker returned to Ohio in 2019. Meanwhile, Becker launched her own popup mochi bakery, bringing a taste of the Bay Area’s baked mochi doughnut trend to the Midwest, and Zinke began selling her daifuku under the name Taste of Mochi, with popups in Hayward and delivery available throughout the East Bay.
While writing “Mochi Magic,” Becker devoured books to learn about the history of mochi, but she had even more fun interviewing her mom. “Being able to be there in person in Japan and grow up with these traditions is so different than being in America,” Becker said.
Zinke talked about how her mother, Becker’s grandmother, picked yomogi, Japanese mugwort, growing wild along the sidewalks to flavor mochi. She recalled seeing neighbors literally throwing mochi from newly built homes to spread good luck. In the Bay Area, Zinke and Becker had to hunt down powdered yomogi and mochi at Japanese stores.
After moving back to Ohio, Becker made ozoni soup with mochi in January 2020 to remind her of home. For 2021, she plans to make pounded mochi, soaking the rice overnight, cooking it in a rice cooker and pounding it with her stand mixer — again, a mix of traditional and modern.
She misses her family, but in ways, the pandemic brought them even closer together through mochi. She and her mom promoted “Mochi Magic” together, and the dropoff in cooking classes is what led Zinke to sell mochi for the first time. Becker’s sister stepped in to help her mom with the online store, while her dad drives around delivering the mochi to customers.
“We’re a mochi family now,” Becker said. “We’re always talking about mochi all the time, and I don’t get tired of it.”