Storage: Store rice in an air-tight container in a cool, dry cupboard.
Shelf Life: A minimum of twelve months.
Mochi rice can be used boiled or steamed whole, pounded into dense rice paste (mochi) after cooking for use in pastries, or ground into glutinous rice flour (mochiko). As a short cut to the somewhat laborious (but traditional) pounding method used to make mochi, some chefs steam ground mochi rice until it is cooked, then stir it into a paste.
In Japan mochi paste is roasted or grilled for savory applications or formed into filled balls for sweet pastries. The fillings are most frequently pastes in the center, but sometimes whole adzuki beans or other ingredients are mixed into the dough instead. In a few pastry recipes the dough is rolled into very thin sheets and then wrapped around a sweet filling.
Mochi rice pastries can be filled with a wide variety of items, but their most commonly paired ingredient is cooked & sweetened adzuki beans, either whole or blended into a paste. Other flavorings sometimes added to adzuki fillings include cinnamon, green tea, taro root, ginko nuts and butter.
Because red bean paste can be very sweet, these pastries occasionally have matcha green tea powder blended into the dough or used as a dusting ingredient. Most often they are simply served with a hot cup of green tea on the side.
In other parts of Asia mochi rice is used as a savory ingredient, often similarly to other Asian white rice varieties.
Rice Recipes
