Off the Map

Street Snack Memory

Every time I go back home, I will go to a grandma’s booth at the corner of local fresh food market and buy 250g/ ~0.5lb of her banana mochi roll for 10RMB/ $1.5. Banana mochi roll is childhood memory for many cantonese. It is not as famous as egg tart, shrimp dumpling that cantonese will mention if you asked them what’s famous cantonese pastry/food. But if you mention banana mochi roll, I believe many of us will have the: “ahh! that!!” expression and our eyes will beam. Banana mochi roll is always at the back of my head. It is also a street snack that is sold in less and less stores/ food booths. Missing home, missing banana mochi roll, I am sharing my 1st attempt of banana mochi roll here to pass on cantonese culture and traditional snack!

Banan mochi roll recipe is simple. It does not have a lot of oil and sugar, and it’s cook by steaming instead of oven-baking or frying. Healthier I guess? I referred to 2 videos before adapting to my own banana mochi roll making. I attached the 2 videos here and comment on their pros and cons.

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QUICK TAKEAWAYS

• cook sweet rice flour for dusting, so you will not have raw flour in your month when enjoying banana mochi roll
• stir mochi mixture quickly for 2-5mins after steaming, increasing elasticity
• let mochi mix cool down before rolling out. Mochi is less sticky when cools down.
• brush off dusting cooked rice flour when rolling to achieve smoother, less dry inner texture
• mochi dough is that even it’s very sticky at first, BUT it’s very flexible, plasticity, ductility and malleability ( I am throwing out all the words with same meaning to emphasize this point haha!) 非常好的延展性和易塑性; in another word, if you make mistake rolling dough out or have uneven thickness, you can easily correct it without trace
• longer pieces of banana mochi roll has better texture than small rolls (pictured below)

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RECIPE

Step 1: Cook sweet rice flour for dusting

• use a pan to cook/stir fry 30-50g sweet/glutinous rice flour (I used Mochiko flour)
• low heat (3 on electric stove for me)
• NO OIL
• 5 mins
• rice flour should turn slightly brown/yellow

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Step 2: Banana roll mixture

• smash 2 ripen banana (with brown dots)
• + 10g oil (any type should work), + 80g sugar ( I used white sugar, have not tested brown sugar yet)
• mix well to blend in oil and sugar
• + 100g water, mix well

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• + 120g sweet/glutinous rice flour, + 50g rice flour, sieve in and mix well

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• brush oil on steaming container’s surface
• use a blender to blend the mix till smooth, sieve in the container for steaming

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Step 3: Steaming and Rolling

• boil water, put container to steam
  • if medium temp ~30mins
  • if high temp ~20mins
  • use a chopstick to poke mixture, chopstick is clean when pulled out
  • there is no more liquid on mixture surface
• take off from stove
• ** IMPORTANT** stir quickly for 2-5 mins, this is to increase elasticity of mochi roll

• cool down. Mochi is easier to handle and less sticky when cools down.
• spread whole surface of cutting board with the cooked sweet rice flour for dusting. Be generous because mochi dough is VERY STICKY!
• transfer cooled-down mochi on cutting board, there will be left over in container that might be hard to transfer, it’s ok!

• coat both palms, rolling pin fully with cooked rice flour
• dust the mochi dough surface with cooked rice flour as well
• first use palm to press down, than use rolling pin. Mochi dough will quickly spread out, but might stick to rolling pin any time. Just use more cooked rice flour on dough and rolling pin.

• roll mochi dough out into a rectangle; it really spreads, elongates surprisingly QUICKLY!
• roll from the bottom to top tightly, BRUSH OFF dusting cooked rice flour so inside banana mochi roll there is almost no flour, achieve smoother and less dry texture.
• if mochi dough spreads outside of cutting board, feel free to cut it off for rolling later

• cut main dough into smaller pieces, roll them from thicker roll into thinner dough
• if thickness is uneven, you can fold together nearby dough to make it even; you can barely see reshaped “scar”
• again, good thing about mochi dough is that even it’s very sticky at first, it’s very flexible, plasticity, ductility and malleability ( I am throwing out all the words with same meaning to emphasize this point haha!) 非常好的延展性和易塑性

• cut banana roll into 10cm/3.9 inches long pieces
  • if you like bigger chunk of banana roll cake (pictured below), you can roll it up as well. But since mochi is still a little bit sticky, a thinner, flatter long piece is more ideal texture-wise. 長條形會比卷形口感更好
• dust the cut site with cooked rice flour so they would not stick together again

READY TO SERVE!

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Resources

I used this video’s ingredient measurement; but clean white lines can be seen in this video’s rolls, indicating a lot of cooked rice flour used for dusting, which might lead to dryer texture. So try to brush OFF dusting flour.

This video uses more sugar. Also I would NOT recommend having plastic wrap on steaming container for 2 reasons:

• how much heat plastic wrap can withstand is unknown, might be toxic to have heated up plastic
• water might form on plastic wrap’s inner side towards mochi mix and drop on mochi mix, and will take longer to cook and introduce more moisture in mixture