Visitors to Donkey Mill Art Center in Holualoa took turns with a huge wooden mallet to pound steamed rice into sticky dough for rice cakes. Photographs by Baron Sekiya

By Karen A. Iwamoto
Hawaii 24/7 correspondent

The hot, sticky rice dough is quickly shaped into rice cakes making mochi.

Mochi, that sweet, sticky rice treat sought by cultists of Two Ladies Kitchen in Hilo, and available in the freezer section of your grocery store via the Mikawaya Mochi Ice Cream company, has a more humble history as a traditional New Year’s food.

Traditional mochi is made from an especially glutinous short-grained rice that is first soaked in water for 24 hours then steamed over an open fire for an additional hour. From there, it makes its way to a wooden usu (large Japanese mortar, usually made of wood or stone) where it is pounded by someone weilding a kine (large wooden mallet that serves as pestle to the usu). The grains of rice are mashed to a sticky-smooth doughlike consistency, then transferred to a long wooden table where small chunks are pinched off and molded into round, palm-sized, flat-bottomed rice cakes.

The steamed sweet rice is kneaded in an usu before being pounded with mallets.

No fancy chocolate fillings here. No ice cream or fresh strawbery fillings either. Nor will you find the fancy mochi confections molded into intricate shapes. Just a plain white mochi ready for the grill or a pot of ozoni (traditional Japanese New Year’s soup).

This is the way the Holualoa Foundation for Arts and Culture has been making its New Year’s mochi for the past 10 years. (The usu used has been in Holualoa Foundation member Kris Kaneko’s family for three generations.) But the plainess has a purpose.

“It’s symbolic. Mochi is sticky and heavy, representing strength and energy (for the new year),” explained Setsuko Morinoue, one of the founders of the Holualoa Foundation for Arts & Culture. “And it’s white. Anything white is purified, represents purity.”

Morinoue, who married a Big Islander but hails from a town just south of Tokyo, remembers rolling the mochi dough onto a flat surface and cutting it into neat rectangles.

“There are two different ways of making mochi,” she explained. “Tokyo versus kansai. Kansai is southern Japan. In Tokyo, the mochi is not round. Round is just for the shogun (Japanese military commander). In kansai, they make the mochi round.”

Rice is steamed over an open fire at Donkey Mill Art Center.

Also, Morinoue said, in Tokyo the New Year’s mochi tends to be plain and ungarnished, while in the kansai region the people tend to garnish with sweet adzuki beans or other fillings. In a nod to that tradtion, members of the Holualoa Foundation for Arts & Culture set out bowls of sweet adzuki bean paste, natto (fermented soy beans) and daikon so eaters could garnish their mochi should they so choose.

To find out more about the Holualoa Foundation for Arts and Culture, please visit the Donkey Mill Art Center Web site at: http://www.donkeymillartcenter.org

Tiare and Celia Ball get a lesson from Hiroki Morinoue, right, in the art of building a kadomatsu which is a Japanese New Year decoration made of bamboo.

Visitors to Donkey Mill Art Center lend a hand at shaping mochi rice cakes.