Strawberry Mochi (Ichigo Daifuku) Recipe

Strawberry Mochi is a chewy, sweet Japanese dessert. The Japanese call it ‘ichigo daifuku’ (苺大福) or describe it as a confectionery piece, ‘wagashi’ (和菓子) in Japanese. This dessert has a well-balanced sweet and sour taste and is perfect as an edible cute gift for your loved ones.

Jump to:

• What is it?
• Ingredients
• Strawberry Mochi Recipe (Ichigo Daifuku)
• Without Bean Paste
• How to Make Pink Mochi 
• Cooking Tips
• How To Store
• Hawaiian Variety

What is it?

Strawberry mochi is a doughy ball of glutinous rice flour stuffed with sweet red bean paste and a juicy, tart strawberry. While the fruit is usually completely covered by rice flour, you may see it sold in some innovative wagashi shops with the berry appearing in the middle of the dough ball.

Ichigo daifuku blends the fruit's sweetness with the rice cake's tartness. Think of biting into a strawberry, but instead of being immediately greeted by the juice, you’ll first taste the soft, chewy glutinous rice flour. 

The earthy rice flavours of the daifuku skin neutralise the sweetness of the fruit. Many people liken it to marshmallows.

Ingredients

To make strawberry mochi, you’ll need glutinous rice flour and fresh strawberries.

Fresh Strawberries

First, let’s look at how to choose fresh strawberries. As they are the centrepiece ingredient of the dessert, we need to make sure we pick the best ones for our dessert.

• Look for bright red berries. The fruits do not continue to ripen after they are picked, so what you see is what you get. 
• Look for fresh green leaves and plump berries without signs of green mould. 
• The berries at the top and bottom of a box should help you tell whether they are fresh. 

Glutinous Rice Flour

Now, for the flour to make strawberry mochi, if you can buy shiratamoko from Japanese grocery shops, you’ll be able to make really soft daifuku. Shiratamako is a type of glutinous rice flour (also called sweet rice flour) made from mochigome.

Substituting mochiko or other glutinous rice flour is possible, but the texture may be slightly chewier and tougher.

Red Bean Paste

We recommend making your own red bean paste so you can control the sweetness and texture.

Other ingredients include sugar, food colouring (optional), and cornstarch for dusting. We recommend buying white refined sugar, as raw sugar may change the colour of the daifuku.

Apart from the fruits, the ingredients above for strawberry mochi are the same to make the red bean mochi recipe.

Without Bean Paste

While strawberry daifuku is usually sold in stores stuffed with red bean paste and then wrapped completely with soft glutinous rice flour, you can also make ichigo daifuku with other paste or no paste. 

One way is to use white bean paste. Some recipes also use white kidney beans meshed to make a fine paste.

Another recommendation for making strawberry mochi without bean paste is to try adding matcha instead. The bitter green tea powder is a great counterfoil to the sweetness of the fruit, which is also why this fruit works in matcha mochi.

Another conventional favourite is to use dark chocolate. Smother the berries into dark chocolate, then wrap with soft glutinous rice flour paste. This makes it a very romantic, seductive gift for a loved one.

Feeling adventurous? You can even use cream cheese as a substitute for bean paste. You can mix cream cheese, biscuit, and jam into a paste and slather it all over the strawberry. The result is strawberry mochi that tastes almost similar to cream cheesecake.

How to Make Pink Mochi 

If you want to make your strawberry mochi a pretty pink hue, skip the pink food colouring and go au naturel instead. 

When mixing the flour mixture for the dough ball, add freeze-dried strawberries and pound them into the flour mix. This will give the mochi a perfect rosy complexion. 

In the recipe below, we will not be making pink-coloured strawberry mochi. So, if this is an additional step you want, do not forget to pick up some freeze-dried berries along the way.

Cooking Tips

Here are some cooking tips before you make your own strawberry mochi. 

• First, coat your equipment and your hands in corn or potato starch. As glutinous rice flour is sticky, this will keep the daifuku soft and stop the portions from sticking together. 
• Second, when making many dough balls, wrap each daifuku in plastic. The plastic wrap helps prevent the dessert from drying out.
• You should also choose smaller berries, which help make the dough into a ball.
• You can use a rice cooker or a steamer if you do not have a microwave. The method is the same as our recipe, which uses a microwave.

How To Store

Strawberry mochi can be kept covered at room temperature for up to 24 hours. Leftovers can go in a plastic freezer bag or an airtight container, then defrost at room temperature when ready to eat.

Consume them within 2 days, or the daifuku will become waxy and hard. For best results, put them in a freezer, not a refrigerator.

Hawaiian Variety

Unlike traditional daifuku, this dessert uses fruits and was first created in the 80s. Therefore, Ichigo daifuku is a fairly modern dessert. While strawberry mochi is widely known to originate from Japan, the recipe’s popularity in Hawaii gives rise to claims that the Hawaiians invented it. 

Indeed, the Japanese initially brought daifuku to Hawaii. The story goes that Hawaiians, who love using fruits in their cooking to combat the hot summers, infused sweet, fresh fruits into traditional daifuku. When you try one of these cool desserts, it does not seem like an impossible claim.

Strawberry mochi in Hawaii is softer, and its form is less structured than a Japanese wagashi. Apart from fruits, the Hawaiians also experimented with stuffing fun ingredients like sweet lychee and savoury peanut butter into the daifuku. As a result, some unique wagashi flavours we know today are from Hawaii.

Modern Renditions

Other modern variations of this dessert that are trendy now include infusing strawberry mochi into ice cream and cakes.  To imagine what the ice cream tastes like, consider how the berry is packed with ice cream before being wrapped with the glutinous rice flour skin. Vanilla ice cream is most often used. 

The popular strawberry mochi cake is also a delicious dessert. It is not cloyingly sweet. Each mouthful is crumbly and soft with fruit, a pleasant mix of cake and daifuku.

Now, you have a plate of beautiful strawberry mochi, perfect for a hot summer’s day. Indeed, it is a splendid choice for beating the sweltering heat.

If you’ve enjoyed making this and would like to find out more about how to make other Asian desserts, then be sure to follow us on Instagram @honestfoodtalks.