More gratitude: Making mochi

Thinking about the Dyo family, here’s another thing I recall from my childhood.

Every year on the Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s, the Dyos hosted a huge mochi-making event for the Japanese-American community of Los Angeles. Their backyard, which was also the base for their landscaping business, was the perfect size for such an industrial-scale operation.

(If you don’t know mochi—it’s basically steamed rice ground up into a paste and shaped into little cakes, dusted with cornstarch. Sometimes it’s wrapped around sweet bean paste.)

(And apparently MSFT Word spellchecker does not know mochi because it keeps autocorrecting to mocha. Turkey.)

Scores of families from all over the area brought rice to be steamed over bonfires in barrels, and then smashed up and made into mochi to last through the next year. The deal was the men managed the steaming and smashing, the women made all the cakes around huge paper-covered tables sprinkled liberally with corn starch.

There was also udon—broth, noodles, chicken, chopped scallions and seaweed to be assembled as you pleased and slurped up. (And galvanized metal tubs full of sodas in bottles, which was a huge treat for me because we never had soda in our house, ever. Oh—and you needed a bottle opener to get the caps off the sodas. And of course you had to look out for the dinosaurs and primordial ooze because this was so long ago.) I was kind of suspicious about those seaweed sheets, but they turned out to be okay.

The kids basically ran wild throughout the back yard, which was part plant nursery, part equipment lot.

The first year we went they were just shifting from the old method of two men rhythmically pounding the rice in alternating strokes with wooden mallets, but they had a couple of demos. The men would go smack-smack; then, while they were raising the mallets, a woman would reach in really quickly with a couple of rice paddles and kind of flip the rice mush around so that the next strokes would squash a different part.

She was really, really fast. The whole thing was like some finely-tuned machine operating.

But most of the rice went from the steamer baskets to gas-powered rice grinders (yes, actual rice grinders). They had several going, and men tended them, running each batch of rice through several times to get it to the right state of smashedness.

When that state was achieved, the basket of paste would be hurried over to one of the tables, the name of the family whose rice it was announced, and the women would start pinching off little balls of it, rolling them in the cornstarch and patting them into little round bite-sized cakes.

Everyone worked at a speed of knots, but in both operations—male and female—there was a robust continuo of chatter, gossip, joking and camaraderie, in a mixture of English and Japanese. Occasionally, as I hovered at one of the tables, producing the most pathetic misshapen mochi ever to emerge to face the light of day, there was enough English for me to get the gist of it. But there was a whole lot of laughter, which warmed that December day.

(And no, I am not exaggerating about how awful my little cakes were. Someone would surreptitiously take one of my products and give it a few pats and rolls while it was still warm enough to be malleable, and make it presentable. I have the same problem making onigiri—I just don’t seem to be able to get it compact enough.)

I’ve never developed a taste for mochi, even though it’s basically just squashed rice, and I like rice fine. But udon, now…

Back when I was working with a lot of sales teams for a data networking hardware manufacturer, one of the account managers came to town and took one of my colleagues and me out to lunch. It was a miserable, rainy cold day in Northern Virginia, and we went to a Japanese restaurant, where I ordered a nice bowl of steamy udon. We were deep in a discussion of the project in hand, and slurping our soup. I was in the middle of saying something pithy (no doubt) when I flashed back to the mochi-making days, interrupted myself and proclaimed:

“You know, when I was ten years old I’d never have imagined I’d be saying this, but this soup needs more seaweed.”

Maybe I should give mochi another try.