The Evening I Ate Mochilicious Balls
For my crazy firecracker footage click here: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzQ5NzM0MzQw.html?firsttime=300
Today I ate balls. On this evening of February sixth two thousand and twelve, I ate four perfectly round mochilicious balls of delicious awesomeness to celebrate the last day of the Spring Festival. Here in China, they call this day the Lantern Festival (上元节, 上元節) which is the 15th day of the first month of the lunisolar calendar. On this day, your supposed to eat delicious balls of sweet yumminess called 'Yuan-xiao' (元宵). 元宵 are superstitiously believed to give its eaters a good life. According to some good reads about these balls of awesomelicious grandness, the first 元宵 was made about 800 years ago. That makes those balls pretty legendary. To the person who invented yuanxiao, I love your legendary balls.
I actually saw familiar street vendors selling them on their market tables yesterday. So what are they? What are they made from? What is the texture like? What's inside them? How big are they? How small are they? Do you want to know what these awesome balls taste like?
The balls are very soft and best eaten warm. They are slippery on the outside, hollow inside with a sweet filling (black sesame paste)...
元宵 'yuanxiao' are nothing more than glutinous sweet rice balls. They are made from ground sticky rice flour (common market name- mochiko flour) which is mixed with enough water to shape them into balls. Here in Beijing, the rice balls are filled with a sweet black sesame paste. Once the balls are filled and shaped, they are placed into boiling water. Once you see the balls floating on the surface, then you know they're finished.
Similar items can be found in the Philippines and Japan (and elsewhere in Asia). In the Philippines, sticky rice balls of the same ingredients are simmered in coconut milk or fried with a sweet bean filling and rolled in sesame seeds. In Japan, the yuanxiao has almost identical characteristics with the Mochi.
Overall, eating these balls were not new to me at all because I grew up eating similar items like Mochi, Mochi Ice cream, rice balls in coconut milk etc etc. However, I enjoyed the feeling of eating something so familiar. I love the feeling of biting into a warm, slippery and soft ball of sticky sweet rice dough and feeling the sesame paste exploding in my mouth with that atomic burst of sweet black sesame flavor as my teeth elegantly stabs into it like a commercial... Pretty awesome.
And yes- they are great with coffee...I would serve coffee, mochi and boiled yuanxiao during a coffee chat with a close friend.
