mochi tsuki

Well first you take a big bowl of rice, and steam it so that its' well cooked, then you dump it into a hollowed out stump, ready for bashing it to a pulp with a large wooden sledge hammer.

.. well then you really start to swing into it, and being the local gaijin, it was entertaining to offer me the hammer, and see that happened. Being a soft handed computer geek these days I was a little worried about smaking the wrong thing, but it was really rather easy, as the hammer being long is easy to aim ... Once you start hitting the rice, a helper with a scraper keeps the ball of doe in the middle. Naturally some rythm is needed, to coordinate the hitting and the scraping...

Shift that hand ... we don't want red mochi, with crunchy bits in it ...

The amazing thing is that everyone is surprised that I can swing a sledge hammer (gaijin have hammers?) It was rather fun actually,in fact I got rather hot, and had to take my vest off.

It was good to hand the hammer back, as not only was it getting rather heavy, but I had a few close shaves with the fluro lights over head .. no action shots of that one though

Ok, so now we have this white pulpy doe, what do we do with it? Good question ... well as you can see in this photo, there is a table of white balls, and dark red balls. The dark red balls are ANKO which is a type of bean that is really sweet. This is then wrapped in the mochi, and is ready to eat. When its wrapped like this, you just eat it, but another way to use mochi is to make little bricks out of it, and put them under the griller. When they start to go brown, wrap them in some NORI and dip it in soy sauce, and your off!