Mochi

Mochi is Japanese rice cake made from mochigome, a short-grain glutinous rice that is steamed and then pounded until the grains disappear into a single smooth, stretchy, faintly sweet mass. It is eaten in dozens of forms: plain blocks toasted until they puff and served with soy sauce or in the New Year soup ozōni, soft rounds filled with sweet red bean paste as daifuku, dusted with kinako soybean flour, grilled on skewers as dango, and wrapped around a strawberry as ichigo daifuku. The pounding, mochitsuki, is done in a wooden mortar with a heavy mallet and is still a New Year ritual in many towns, though most mochi sold today comes from a machine that does the same job. Mochi ice cream, a ball of ice cream in a thin mochi skin, is a Japanese-American invention from Los Angeles in the 1990s and is now the form most people outside Japan meet first.