Strawberry mochi is a fruity take on traditional mochi filled with fresh strawberries layered with a creamy red bean paste. It is soft and chewy with a delightful sweet and sour taste. Make this mochi with three key ingredients: fresh strawberries, glutinous rice flour, and red bean paste.
A Look At Strawberry Mochi With Red Bean Paste
Mochi is a traditional rice cake in Japan that is loved for its round, chewy, and sticky consistency. It is enjoyed as a dessert for any occasion and season. However, this is a common dessert served during special seasons like spring and celebrations like Japanese New Year, Children’s Day, and Girls’ Day.
Basically, mochi is made with a soft filling that is wrapped around a mochi dough. The dough gets its special texture from glutinous rice flour, along with other enhancing ingredients, including cornstarch, white sugar, oil, and water or milk. It’s pretty easy to make the mochi dough since you only have to mix and cook it in a non-stick pan until it becomes semi-solid for shaping.
In this recipe, I use strawberries coated with red bean paste as its filling before wrapping it with dough. It is actually quite similar to my other fruit mochi recipe, mango mochi. If you prefer mochi without fresh fruit, you can simply use red bean paste only and follow my red bean mochi recipe.
Red Bean Paste: Where Can I Buy It?
You will love red bean paste for its nutty, creamy, and sweet taste. It is made from red beans or adzuki beans that are mashed and mixed with sugar and oil. Once you have this, you can make various Chinese, Japanese, and Korean treats, including mooncakes, red bean paste buns, and red bean bread.
Find this nutty paste in Chinese or Asian grocery stores or online like Amazon. This is sometimes called adzuki bean paste, red bean jam, or hong dou sha (红豆沙). If you don’t have red bean paste, it’s okay to omit this and simply have the fresh strawberries alone or replace it with another type of filling that I recommend in the next part of this guide.
Do you have some spare time to make red bean paste? Making homemade red bean paste is an even better option. Follow my red bean paste recipe, which involves soaking, boiling, blending, and cooking the beans in the pan with sugar and oil.
Glutinous Rice Flour: Is There An Alternative For Mochi?
For the mochi’s texture, glutinous rice flour is crucial. As you know, you’re going for a sticky and chewy rice cake texture. Glutinous rice flour is the only ingredient that can achieve this.
Glutinous rice or sticky rice is the source of this flour. It is actually gluten-free! The word “glutinous” is merely a description of what the rice becomes when it is cooked, making it glue-like and sticky.
Sadly, no other type of flour has the same level of stickiness as glutinous rice flour. In order to make the perfect mochi, I highly recommend purchasing this special ingredient in advance. Just to let you know, rice flour cannot be interchanged with this.
Rice flour is different from glutinous rice flour because it is made from long or medium-grain white rice, such as japonica, sinandomeng, angelica, or indica. Moreover, it produces a different texture which is slightly chewy without the stickiness. Discover their differences with my comprehensive guide, Rice Flour Vs Glutinous Rice Flour.
Ingredient Substitutes And Recipe Techniques
Whether you are a newbie in making mochi or not, I recommend reading this part first. In this section, I share my ingredient tips and suggestions when it comes to alternatives. Learn how each ingredient plays a vital role in making the mochi dough and filling.
Mochi Dough
- Glutinous rice flour: There is no suitable alternative to glutinous rice flour that creates the same sticky, chewy texture, so avoid substituting it from the recipe. Make sure to get this ahead of time in your local Asian supermarkets or online stores like Amazon or online grocery stores.
- If you still want to make this recipe but don’t have glutinous rice flour, try using tapioca starch and adjust the amount to get a more desirable outcome. Tapioca starch helps create a chewy texture but will not make it sticky like glutinous rice flour. It’s not exactly like mochi, but you can still enjoy it with the same strawberry filling.
- Make these recipes if you have leftover glutinous rice flour: Homemade Ham Sui Gok 咸水角 (Fried Glutinous Rice Dumplings)or Festive Snow Skin Mooncakes.
- Cornstarch: This is an additional ingredient to make the dough chewy and thick. Alternatively, you can also use the following substitutes:
- All-Purpose Flour (1:1 ratio)
- Arrowroot Powder (1:1 ratio)
- Tapioca Starch/Flour (1:1 ratio)
- Potato Starch (1:1 ratio)
- Rice Flour (1:1 ratio)
- Sugar: Make it a bit sweeter with white sugar. For a consistent white color, use white sugar instead of brown. However, if you don’t mind the color of the dough changing a bit, you can use brown sugar, coconut sugar, cane sugar, or muscovado sugar.
- Oil: Any neutral oil works, such as corn oil, peanut oil, soybean oil, and vegetable oil. Oil helps add moisture and fluffiness to the mochi dough. Aside from neutral oils, you can use other types of oil you have in your pantry.
- Water: In order to let the dough firm up, it has to be mixed with a liquid such as water. If you want to make it creamy and milky, use milk instead such as regular milk, dairy-free milk, or coconut milk if you prefer coconutty flavors.
- Coating: You may have noticed that mochi is usually coated with powder on the outside. This is because of the dusting step when kneading the dough. Mochi dough is dusted with a bit of cooked glutinous rice flour to prevent it from sticking to the surface or your hands. When you are done shaping and assembling the mochi, you can coat it with milk powder, coconut flakes(as I do in my Red Bean Mochi recipe), or shredded coconut. If you want to make the mochi colored, you can use colored powder like purple potato powder (as I do in my Taro Mochi Recipe ) or red potato powder to match the strawberry colors.
- Cooking method: In order to make the mochi dough solidify for kneading, it has to be cooked on low heat on a non-stick pan. The liquid dough will start to clump and eventually form into a semi-solid dough ready for shaping. Instead of cooking in a pan, you can also cook the dough by steaming. Follow the steps on how I steamed the dough with the recipe Soft & Squishy Red Bean Mochi. If you don’t have a steamer, you can still steam in 5 techniques: pan with steamer rack, microwave, pan with sieve, rice cooker, and instant pot.
Strawberry Filling
- Strawberry: Use fresh, frozen, or canned strawberries. Clean the strawberries with water and remove the green leaves before coating them with red bean paste. You can replace strawberries with other fruits like mango or any of your favorite fruits.
- Red bean paste: If you are to make your own red bean paste, follow my red bean paste recipe and use adzuki beans. But if you don’t have these, you can swap it with kidney beans to have a similar taste and texture. Alternatively, you can also use other types of filling, such as the following:
- Yam paste
- Lotus seed paste
- Purple sweet potato paste
- Black sesame paste
- Taro paste
- Matcha bean paste
- Cheesecake
- Mung bean paste
What You Need To Make Strawberry Mochi
What I love about making mochi is the basic kitchen tools that you already have. Simply prepare your mixing bowls, a spatula, and a non-stick pan. Use any flat surface in your kitchen to roll the dough and assemble the mochi.
Here are the ingredients needed:
Ingredients
- 7 Strawberries
- 140g Red bean filling
- Mochi dough:
- 80g of glutinous rice flour
- 30g of corn starch
- 20g of sugar
- 10g of oil
- 130g of water
- Dusting (Cooked glutinous rice flour)
How To Make Strawberry Mochi: Steps To Follow
It is quite fast and easy to complete the recipe with simple techniques. Prepare your strawberries, cook the dough, and combine the dough and filling. That’s it!
Check out my Instagram or TikTok tutorial reels to learn more about it. Have you finished making the recipe? Remember to tag me @kitchenmisadventures to show your cute and squishy mochi.
- Clean the strawberries with water and pluck out the green leaves.
- Make the red bean paste.
- Cover each strawberry with a layer of 20g red bean paste, but leave the pointed end exposed.
- Make the mochi dough by combining glutinous rice flour, cornstarch, sugar, oil, and water.
- Mix well using a whisk and pour it into a non-stick pot.
- Cook over low heat, stirring for about 3 minutes. It should eventually become a fluffy, non-sticky dough.
- Roll the dough in a sprinkle of cooked glutinous rice flour. In this way, it makes it easier to work with without the dough sticking to the surface or your hands.
- Divide the dough into 35g portions, making about 7 in total.
- Flatten each portion with a rolling pin to make a flat circular dough wrapper.
- Take your coated strawberries and wrap them with the dough wrapper.
- Seal the mochi by pinching the edges together.
- If you prefer extra flavor or color, coat the exterior with milk powder, coconut flakes, or any of the coating suggestions mentioned above.
Do you love strawberry recipes? Check out these recipes for more strawberry treats: Strawberry Lemon Twist, Snowflake Crisps, and Homemade Tanghulu (Candied Fruit) Recipe.
Strawberry Mochi With Red Bean Paste
Ingredients
- 7 Strawberries
- 140 g Red bean filling
Mochi dough:
- 80 g of glutinous rice flour
- 30 g of corn starch
- 20 g of sugar
- 10 g of oil
- 130 g of water
- Dusting Cooked glutinous rice flour
Instructions
- Clean the strawberries with water and pluck out the green leaves.
- Make the red bean paste.
- Cover each strawberry with a layer of 20g red bean paste, but leave the pointed end exposed.
- Make the mochi dough by combining glutinous rice flour, cornstarch, sugar, oil, and water.
- Mix well using a whisk and pour it into a non-stick pot.
- Cook over low heat, stirring for about 3 minutes. It should eventually become a fluffy, non-sticky dough.
- Roll the dough in a sprinkle of cooked glutinous rice flour. In this way, it makes it easier to work with without the dough sticking to the surface or your hands.
- Divide the dough into 35g portions, making about 7 in total.
- Flatten each portion with a rolling pin to make a flat circular dough wrapper.
- Take your coated strawberries and wrap them with the dough wrapper.
- Seal the mochi by pinching the edges together.
- If you prefer extra flavor or color, coat the exterior with milk powder, coconut flakes, or any of the coating suggestions mentioned above.
