Daifuku (Red Bean Mochi) Recipe

writ­ten 12/8/24, updat­ed 12/8/24

What

Japan­ese dessert. It’s mochi (sweet gluti­nous rice flour), a chewy rice cake, wrapped around a fill­ing, usu­al­ly anko (sweet red bean paste). Can be filled with oth­er ingre­di­ents like mung bean, fresh cut fruit, ice cream, or cus­tard, and col­ored with pow­ders (such as matcha pow­der), fresh fruit puree, or food col­or­ing.

This recipe is made in the microwave for ease, but can also be steamed

*See Notes for more details

Ingredients

Supplies

Time and Serving

Directions

• Pre­pare your Anko fill­ing
• On a tray or bak­ing sheet, do the same thing and set aside (this is where you’ll put the formed dai­fuku)
• Whisk togeth­er Flour (1 Cup) and Sug­ar (¼ — ½ Cup, to your desire)
• Add the Water (1 Cup) and com­bine with the sil­i­cone spat­u­la until it forms a smooth bat­ter
• Cov­er with either plas­tic wrap or microwave lid
• Microwave for about 1.5 min­utes
• Remove and stir well
• Return to microwave for anoth­er 1.5 min­utes
• It should have formed a shiny, smooth dough, a some­what hard lump, dif­fer­ent from the bat­ter from before
• If not, then return for 30 sec­onds at a time, stir­ring in between
• Dust your parch­ment paper work­space with either pota­to starch or corn­starch
• Scrape the dough out onto your work­space (Be care­ful, it’s going to be HOT)
• Sprin­kle starch as need­ed to make it less sticky
• Divide the hot dough into equal por­tions
• Roll them into flat disks
• Put your Anko fill­ing into the mid­dle and pinch the ends to close them
• Place it seam side down on your pre-dust­ed tray
• Con­tin­ue to make the rest
• This is best enjoyed right away, or cov­er and refrig­er­ate up to 2 days

Notes

Clean-Up Tips

• Soak your bowls and imple­ments in water to help loosen it up
• Try not to dump the wet flour down the drain if you don’t want to deal with a clog
• If it’s being stub­born even after soak­ing, use the sil­i­cone spat­u­la to scrape the wet dough into the trash­can

Katakuriko = pota­to starch

Mochi vs Dan­go

• Dan­go: term for ball-shaped foods
• While these days the lines have blurred between the two desserts’ ingre­di­ents, tra­di­tion­al­ly, the dif­fer­ence is that Mochi was made from steamed gluti­nous RICE (grain) and pound­ed in a pes­tle, while Dan­go was made from non-gluti­nous rice FLOUR, mixed with water, knead­ed, then steamed or boiled.
• Dan­go is made like boba, where the lit­tle balls are boiled

When made the same way (Flour, sug­ar, and boil lit­tle balls) tapi­o­ca starch (cas­sa­va) will make boba, while rice flour will make dan­go.

Mochiko vs Shi­rata­mako

• Both flours are sim­i­lar to each oth­er but dif­fer in pro­cess­ing
• Both can be used in oth­er dish­es like bak­ery goods and as thick­en­ing agents in savory dish­es