What did I just eat? It has ice cream on the inside but the outside is some sort of unappealing raw dough. I feel like these need to be cooked….but they contain ice cream so that does not add up….

7 comments

1. That’s mochi – pounded rice with sugar, it’s a traditional Japanese sweet.

   It’s not cooked, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Personally I enjoy the taste and texture of it.

2. Ice cream mochi is delicious. I always pick up boxes from Trader Joes or Costco. I will admit, it took a few tries to get accustomed to the “raw dough” feel, but they really grew on me.

3. You can buy simple mochi at world market or an Asian food store. The ones I got were only a little chewy. Get the bubble tea flavor, those are really good. Never had frozen mochi though, could be worse.

4. Today you learned: mochi is not your jam and that’s okay.

5. It is cooked, but even cooked has that texture. You’ve learned now that mochi isn’t your thing, and that’s okay 🙂

6. The outer layer is made of mochi – glutinous rice that’s been sweetened and rendered into a viscous dough-like consistency. It’s perfectly fine to eat exactly as-in and it’s a classic, popular sweet in Japan.

   That said, these particular sort of ice cream sweets aren’t really the best representation of mochi either. I’m not very fond of those super-thin mochi wrappings myself; the mochi always gets extra sticky and wet as the ice cream melts, which yields a rather unappealing texture in my opinion.

   More common and popular iterations of mochi are thick and chewy, so they feel a lot better to chomp into, especially if it’s fresh. If you heat them up, they get really stretchy and gooey like a super-dense cheese. My personal favorites are things like [mitarashi dango](https://i.imgur.com/aA6MOnY.jpg) (grilled mochi dumplings covered in a sweet/savory sauce) and [azuki daifuku](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-59e49200503e252be57bcf05055222cc-lq) (a thick, sweetened mochi stuffed with red bean paste). They’re really tasty and have a much different mouthfeel to each other, as well as to those ice cream sweets you tried.

   Don’t write off mochi just yet. You’ve discovered you don’t like this particular version (can’t blame you either; they’re far from my favorite type), but there’s lots of other versions that are really tasty.

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