I am a huge fan of Mochi in general, and I used to make Hawaiian butter mochi by hand. Usually my hands are perfectly adapted to destroy promising recipes, so when something goes right it is cause for celebration. This entry in Good Stuff is not a recipe per se, just a listing of preparatory activities that seem somewhat ancient in retrospect, like cave drawings from the earliest humans.
You start with a coconut picked from the ground under a Samoan coconut tree, a type of tree short enough to reach without having to climb high up in the air, like those tall swaying symbols you see in Hawaiian commercials.
Once these babies fall to the ground the outer husk turns brown, and is ready to be peeled off to expose the actual coconut inside.
I would do the peeling by using a pick axe with the flat part embedded in the ground and the pointy part facing up. Then I would force the coconut onto the pointy end and, using my weight, begin to pry off the husk. I have seen videos of coconut crabs in the south pacific with claws so strong that they could open a coconut. That is not me as my claws are puny. Once done I have the familiar nut you see in the store.
Now you want to open the nut. I would rotate the nut on my hands until the “eyes” were pointing left and then, using the dull side of a machete, give the nut a few firm whacks around the perimeter. The nut splits neatly open thusly:
Now some folks want to preserve the “juice” but I am not seeking that for mochi. This juice is just old water and I have never been a fan despite it being promoted as a health drink. What I am seeking is the white meat, which I will now scrape out into a bowl. For this I used a cool scraper nailed to the end of a board:
This is more fancy than the one I used. It has a bench for sitting!
You sit on the board to hold the scraper in place, then proceed to use the tines to scrap the meat out into the bowl beneath. Once you have the grated raw “meat” you can move to the next step which in squeezing out the “milk” from the grated coconut. Yes, all this work was to get a bowl of grated coconut meat!
The rest of this article is really just using the painfully extracted coconut milk for Sweet Butter Mochi, replete with Asuki beans. This Mochi is baked and has a thin crust on top and is so good it “Brok da mout” in Hawaiian pidgin English.
I am unsure if this activity — producing a dessert from raw ingredients — made the result taste better, but it’s as close as I have come to farming since I worked in my father’s garden as a child; long ago, far away.
Bon Appétit!
whoisfenton 