Engineering a Green Tea Mochi Cookie: Planning Phase

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If you search for "the BEST chocolate chip cookie" on Google, you'll come up with recipes by the boat load. Every food blog has to have to have a chocolate chip cookie and they all claim that is the "best". Some are crunchy, some are cake-y. Others can be light or have deep caramel overtones. There is so much information out there on developing a chocolate cookie, my favorite being Kenji Lopez-Alt's "The Food Lab: The Science of the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie", but there are only a handful of posts on Mochi Cookies.

Mochi is found in many delicious Asian desserts such as daifuku or delicious black sesame balls and also those delicious fluffy pillows of dough you put in your froyo. You would normal make it by mashing up some glutinous sweet rice or steaming/microwaving a glutinous rice flour mixture (none of which contains any gluten). If you want to break out your large wooden mallet and team up with a shouting Japanese man, this might be your preferred method: Less common methods involve substituting rice flour for all-purpose flour in baked goods to give it a chewy delicious texture with the gluten free perk. You can get real creative and develop delicious baked goods like these Matcha Mochi Cupcakes (my favorite use for rice flour). For making the mochi cookies that I have in mind, traditional mochi or mochi cupcakes are neither here nor there. For my mochi cookie I want the follow:

  • Structure - I want my cookie that feels firm like a cookie. Many mochi cookie recipes out there are still essentially mochi: floppy. Who wants a floppy cookie anyways?
  • Outside Texture - Crispy. I want a crust on the outside of my mochi. If you toast mochi in an over or make a moffle (mochi-waffle), it has a delicious crispy crunch.
  • Inside Texture - Gooey of course! Mochi is pretty much synonymous with this texture.

I have narrowed down my approach to two:

  1. Start of with the Matcha Mochi Cupcakes and tweak the recipe to my desired liking.
  2. Take the classic Toll House Cookie recipe and replace the all-purpose flour with rice flour.

Stay tuned for my first batch and attempt at a mochi cookie.