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.
1. The ice cream must be at –18°C before wrapping — any softening at the surface causes the mochi skin to absorb moisture, which freezes and creates an adhesion layer that tears the skin when eating 2. Work speed is everything — from the moment the mochi skin is placed under the ice cream ball to the moment the sealed confection enters the freezer: under 30 seconds per piece in professional production 3. The base pinch must be airtight — any gap allows freezer burn at the join, creating a hard spot in an otherwise yielding confection
Japanese Confectionery Deep: Wagashi, An, Mochi & the Seasonal Sweet Tradition