Why Everyone Should Make Butter Mochi

It’s easy, it's like mochi and it's like cake! Plus—a book on and for cruciverbalists.

The other evening, I had an intense a craving for Hawaiian butter mochi. If you’ve never had butter mochi before, it’s like mochi and cake, combined into one. People often assume it’s from Japan, and there is, in fact, butter mochi in Japan. I corresponded with Tomoko Imade Dyen, of Culinary Curation, who confirmed that while there exists Japanese butter mochi from the Akita prefecture, it is completely different from Hawaiian butter mochi. Writes Dyen: “I spoke to people from Akita, and they didn’t know the Hawaiian version, I didn’t know the Akita version. Akita butter mochi originated as matagi’s food on the go (matagi is the name of winter hunters in mountain areas of Tohuku region who use traditional hunting methods).” Akita butter mochi retains its fresh mochi texture—from what I can gather from the recipe Dyen shared with me—because it is never cooked in the oven. (If anyone is curious, write me, and I will share the recipe Dyen found for me.)

Dorothea Lange. Ester Naite, an office worker from Los Angeles, operates an electric iron in her quarters at Manzanar, California.

Hawaiian butter mochi is heaven. It has the essential texture of mochi, but because it’s baked with milk, eggs, and butter, its becomes this dense, chewy, delicious dessert that you will not be able to stop eating. Some light sleuthing online has led me to believe that Hawaiian mochi cake can trace its roots all the way back to Goa, India, where a slightly more complex dessert called bebinca exists and that moved, by way of the Portuguese colonies, from Goa to Malaysia to Indonesia to the Philippines to, finally, Hawaii.

The key to any butter mochi cake is sweet rice flour, and anyone west of the Rockies will tell you that the only sweet rice flour worth using is from Koda farms. Koda farms was started by a Japanese immigrant named Keisaburo Koda in the first half of the last century, who, because of the Alien Land Law of 1913, was unable to own land, and thus formed a trust with his American-born children, who were citizens, to do so. Using Japanese rice growing techniques, he became a very successful until the arrival of WWII; Koda and his family were labeled a threat to the United States and incarcerated in Colorado at a Japanese incarceration camp. But because his farm was so big, the U.S. government decided it should stay operational to feed the wartime effort, and Koda had no other choice but to entrust the management of it to strangers. Upon the family’s return, after the end of the war, they discovered their farm stripped bare. Slowly, Koda’s sons rebuilt it, eventually entering the market for sweet rice. One wonders if we’d have more Koda farms today had we never had Japanese incarceration camps. Were these people really that threatening or could it have been their very successful farms?

Dorothea Lange. San Francisco in 1942.

Anyway, I digress. Butter mochi is deceptively easy to make. I think the coconut milk is what gives it that nutty flavor, and you want it to be a little greasy feeling, too, so don’t be alarmed if it seems that way. I used this recipe, but other butter mochi experts also suggested this one (they are the same, but other recipes vary in whether to use milk, coconut milk, condensed milk or a combination of two. I would love someone like Deb Perelman to figure out what, in fact, is the best ratio). As for me, I eat it too quickly to take notes. Though this time around, I added a splash of bourbon.

Otherwise, I have to recommend a book I’m very biased about (the author and I went to Iowa together): the paperback edition of Adrienne Raphel’s “Thinking Inside the Box” is here! Admittedly, I am a terribly apathetic cruciverbalist, though I’ve been known to apply myself when I feel competitive. This book is about the history of the crossword, its evolution through time, how our brain likes to puzzle, the crossword’s blind spots and, crucially, the people who love it so much. It is a charmingly intelligent book and I cannot recommend it enough for a pleasurable weekend read, as you sit in your apartment and wait for spring to hurry up and get here.

P.S. I need to quickly mention vanilla extract, a small but potent ingredient. I was beginning to be disgusted by the cheap version I bought from the local grocery store—it tasted of chemicals—and have now been converted to the “bean-to-bottle” company Heilala, a New Zealand brand that is worth the splurge and thinks very responsibility about sustainability. It has that alluringly real scent of vanilla that’s hard to beat and it’s inspired me to bake up a storm this past week.