Mochi Ice Cream — The Cold-Stable Modification

Mochi ice cream — a ball of ice cream wrapped in a sweet, soft mochi skin — was commercialised by My/Mochi, a Los Angeles company founded in 1993 by Frances Hashimoto, who developed the preparation based on the traditional Japanese yukimi daifuku ("snow-viewing daifuku" — a Japanese confection from Lotte, introduced in 1981 as one of the first commercially successful mochi ice creams). The yukimi daifuku was engineered in Japan specifically to solve the cold-stable mochi problem: how to maintain the characteristic soft, yielding texture of mochi at the temperatures required to keep the ice cream filling frozen.

Standard mochi paste (mochigome-based) freezes rigid at –18°C — it becomes a hard, unpleasant, difficult-to-bite shell. The modification required to make mochi ice cream workable involves replacing a portion of the mochigome with glucose syrup and glycerol: these compounds depress the freezing point of the starch network, maintaining plasticity at freezer temperatures. The resulting mochi skin is not identical in texture to a room-temperature daifuku (it is slightly chewier, slightly less elastic) but it yields to teeth at freezer temperature without requiring the confection to be partially thawed.

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