Mochitsuki 2010: Traditional Japanese Rice-Pounding

A legion of volunteers rinsed, soaked, steamed, pounded, shaped, and packaged (and ate...) these rice cakes. This is what they looked like in the end:


...and this is what they looked like in the beginning:

From 6:30am-4:30pm it seemed as though the entire Japanese community came out to the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre in Montreal for this annual event. The fundraiser offered packaged bags of the steamed rice cakes to hungry guests who didn't even look into the enormous room where all the work was taking place. Here's the behind the scenes look.


First the rice was soaked in a large buckets. I don't want to think about how much rice was there. First we had to strain the rice and measure it into this wooden steamer. The bottom of the steamer was a bamboo mat, like a sushi-rolling mat but the pieces of bamboo were wider. So steam could still get up into it from below but the rice wouldn't fall through. The soaked rice water was collected and thrown out into the snow. About half the weight of the huge metal and plastic buckets was water.

Someone else had to wash the bamboo box bottoms in hot water and remove the sticky grains of steamed rice before they could be re-used.

In the bamboo steamers the rice had to be shaped into a donut so that steam could rise easily in the middle and in the corners. Then with a long wooden toothpick the rice that ahd fallen in the spaces between the wooden piece of the bamboo mats had to be scraped out.

Then out to the steamer:

Heated from below, a wooden steamer system was set up with just one box in an outside shed. After 4 minutes a second box was added. Another 4 minutes later another box. Another 4 minutes and a fourth box. Finally, 4 minutes later the first box was removed and a new box added. So 16 minutes total rice-steaming time for each box. This kept the production line-style system going.


It was pretty cold outside...So from 6:30am onward these guys sat and waited in 4 minute stretches before standing up, removing a box, hefting up a new box, and waiting again. It's a tough, tough job. Fortunately they had sake to keep them warm.

There aren't really any easy jobs in a mochitsuki, though:

The next part of the process involves pouring the steamed rice into this rice-grinding machine with some sea salt. Traditionally a giant machine isn't used, but you'll see why the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre invested in it in the next step:

The machine-ground rice turns into a dough. A rhythm is set and one after another a group of 3 people hammered the dough ("One!" "Two!" "Three!" "One!" "Two!" "Three!" "Ich!" "Ni!" "San!"). Then after maybe 15 seconds someone yells "Stop!" and that person steps in and flips the dough. "Go!" and they start again. 15 seconds later: "Stop!". Flip. "Go!" 15 seconds later the same caller takes the dough to the dough cutter and the hammerers start in on their next batch. Imagine people actually using their hands to work this dough! It would take forever, and it still takes forever if you only hammer it. that's why they use the machine, to expedite the process. Then the hammering doesn't have to be amazingly efficient and powerful but you keep the tradition alive.

Then a dough cutting machine spits out blobs of rice. You've got about 10 seconds to pick up that dough while it's still hot and shape it into a slightly flattened sphere. It can't be oblong. It can't be too flat and it can't have any creases. If you wait too long and it cools off the dough gets grainy on the outside where it should be smooth. In that case you throw it back into the cutter to be reheated a little and then you try to shape it again.

You can see the shape the machine spits out (just to the right of the wooden box on the left) versus the shape of the finished mochi in the boxes. I it takes you more than 5 or 6 seconds to shape a mochi it's not going to happen. Improperly shaped ones that got slipped into the boxes were sent back by the packagers.

Then the mochi had to cool on tables. They would cool on one side and then be flipped over to cool on the other. Finally they were weighed and packaged into plastic bags, about ten apiece. Then into paper bags and stapled. Done. $4 a bag.

The Timesheet: Every time a batch of dough was made it was written down on this chalkboard. 6:30am to 4:30pm. 149 batches. That's a lot of hammering...and a lot of sake.

These aren't even stuffed with anything. These are the easy ones! The mochi are served simply with soy sauce, sweet soybean powder, or wrapped in seaweed. They can be frozen and reheated by toasting, grilling or broiling. They'll never be the same as when they're fresh, but I wouldn't want to spend too many days hammering dough, so it's reasonable to enjoy it while it lasts and then dream of next year...