How to make sweet rice mochi
How do macrobiotics make sweet rice mochi, tips for making mochi from sweet rice, what other alternative to sweet rice can you use?
This is recipe from the Michio Kushi book - Macrobiotic Way
With many of my comments in the brackets (I hope you don’t get confused by my writing style, just let me know in comments at the end of this article).
Ingredients:
1 cup of Natural sweet rice
1 and 1/2 - 2 cups of water (preferably natural spring water)
pinch of best quality sea salt
Rinse the sweet rice, put into the pressure cooker and pour water over it. Let it rest for 4-6 hours so the rice grains get more softer. Add the pinch of salt, close the pressure cooker and bring the water to boil (this is what Michio Kushi suggests in his book, but I am doing it a little differently - I am not closing the pressure cooker before seeing the water boiling, so I first wait until it boils, than I collect all the foam until it’s formed and then add the pinch of salt and after that I close the pressure cooker and let it pressurize). The Michio Kushi method continues: To prevent the rice from burning, place heat disperser (I am not sure about the exact English term, but I hope you know what I mean, something metal that disperse the heat over the whole pot bottom). And if the cooker has enough of pressure, turn the flame low and cook it for 50 minutes.
Put the cooker away and let it cool down a little, so the pressure falls. Let the rice get cooked like this for at least 4-5 minutes and remove the rice to the wooden bowl. With the use of heavy wooden muller (in Japan they used something very similar to baseball bat) press the cooked rice for 15-20 minutes (I can tell you it’s a really hard job even for man, you will feel your muscles nicely, but isn’t that the natural type of work that Macrobiotic is suggesting us? 
why to spend time in fitness studios if you can make something useful while strengthening your muscles). Press the rice until all grains are crushed and until you have created sticky substance. You can moisten the muller (baseball bat), but we don’t recommend to much of water. But to create really perfect mochi dough, it would take you 1 hour of pressing (but as I have read, all the woman in the village were involved for this in the Japan history).
After you have created good mochi dough, brush the baking plate with a little of oil or dust it with a rice flour and spread the crushed rice (mochi) over it. Let it rest for 1-2 days, so it become dry. The dried out mochi should be stored in the fridge or somewhere in the cold place.
After the proper parching, slice the mochi to 5cm squares. Put them on the frying pan, cover with a lid and let it roast on a mild flame. Roast them from both sides until the sides of these mochi squares have golden-brown colour. Put them on a plate and serve with grated daikon radish and with roasted nori sheets (nor is a very tasty seaweed used in macrobiotic cooking quite much). We do serve 2-3 mochi cakes per person.
Tags: kushi, Macrobiotic, mochi, rice, salt