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(character speaking Japanese)
- [Andrew] Hello there,
welcome back to another episode of Anime with Alvin.
Today, we're gonna be taking a crack
at the potato mochi from "Demon Slayer."
This chewy glazed potato snack
seems to take inspiration from imomochi,
a potato style mochi that originated in Hokkaido.
The first thing we're gonna do
is peel six whole Yukon Gold potatoes around medium size.
It's a lot easier to boil and mash them without the skins.
And oh,
it appears I have cut myself with the peeler.
Clearly, this peeler was forged and sharpened
by none other than Haganezuka himself.
Rachel's going to help me peel the rest of the potatoes.
I have now lost approximately 50% of my dexterity, it seems.
Now that we are gloved
that we could contain our injury from earlier,
we will now proceed by cutting these potatoes
into the small cubes, roughly chopped.
These get simply thrown into a pot of water,
boiled for about 20 minutes until very, very, very tender.
A sprinkle of salt serves as the base level of seasoning
and we just kind of let that ride.
While our potatoes boil,
we're gonna work on that sticky glaze that we see.
So in a sauce pan,
we're gonna combine half a cup of soy sauce,
half a cup of sugar,
four tablespoons of mirin,
and four tablespoons of sake.
Once this has gone to a simmer,
we're gonna thicken this by adding in one tablespoon
of potato starch with two tablespoons of water,
kind of like a corn starch slurry,
but we're using potatoes here.
Once this is nice and sticky,
we're gonna take this off the heat and go
and cut up some whole milk mozzarella cheese
because imomochi has a variation
or there is cheese in inside these potato snacks,
which is very fun.
I'm cutting them to approximately the size of butter pats.
Into a large bowl,
we're gonna lay out our cooked potatoes from earlier,
which are very tender at this point,
and mash them up with my weapon of choice.
I like to let them cool a little bit
so that the steam doesn't just blow up in my face.
It's good to mash this until there are no huge chunks left.
Otherwise, it'll be a little bit more difficult
to make the mochi.
This wooden weapon is not very effective
so we are going to swap and upgrade to a steel one.
Into our mashed potato,
we're gonna add in two thirds of a cup of potato starch,
also just to help bind it a little bit,
make it easier to roll and be less sticky.
Once this potato dough is essentially ready,
we're gonna roll this out onto our cutting board
into a long even snake.
And similar to making gnocchi,
you're gonna chop this up into one inch size cubes.
And to assemble,
I'm gonna make half of these without cheese
and half of them with cheese
just so we can see the difference.
First, we're going to flatten, roll,
and shape rounded corners of a square
into our potato mochi.
These ones don't have cheese in them.
And for the ones with the cheese,
we're gonna try and shape the exact same shape
around a piece of cheese itself.
Cheese square right in the middle,
pushing down and folding the sides around,
kind of wrapping up a little baby in its blanket
and completely suffocating it.
Anyways, now that we have four of each,
and it's time to now cook these potato squares.
Into a non-stick skillet,
I'm adding in three tablespoons of oil
just to lightly fry the potato only mochi on both sides,
until golden brown,
about three to four minutes per side.
Once they develop a nice crust, we take them out,
let them drain on a rack with paper towels
and we cook the cheese ones.
I'm adding five tablespoons of oil this time
and it seems like the more oil you have in the pan,
the more even the browning will be.
So if you like a more well-rounded, crispy thing
rather than a more charred sort version of a mochi,
go for the more oil.
After three to four minutes per side,
the cheese is now melted
and we are now ready to glaze these mochi.
The final touch is a garnish
of a little nori square put on each one.
So we're gonna take sheets of nori
and cut them into basically the sides
of those cheese cubes we put in earlier.
All of these fried potato soldiers go onto a tray
and we delicately brush our sweet soy glaze,
which is now thickened,
right over the top on both sides.
These actually are very soft in the middle
because it's basically all just potatoes.
So we're, if you're gonna put them on skewers
be a little careful
'cause the gravity might just make them fall off the skewer.
And I present to you our version
of the imomochi or Hokkaido style potato mochi
from "Demon Slayer", two squares per skewer.
Let's go ahead and start with the cheese one.
Oh, that's, that's pretty good.
Soft potato, nice warm cheese,
and a sweet but salty soy glaze
seems to make this a very addictive snack.
So addictive that I definitely bit into another warmer one
to see if I could get a bigger cheese pull.
Oh yeah,
that, that's a pretty good one.
The cheese is very long
and we are going to slurp this up like a noodle.
But how about just the potato one with no cheese?
I've decided to use my blade
and I can actually say that I like this one
a little bit better.
It holds up a little bit more.
The structure is there
and you get more of that potato taste,
and I feel like this is the kind of thing
they made back in the 1800s,
maybe around when "Demon Slayer" was happening.
Where's that peeler from earlier?
I'm gonna go take on Upper Moon four.
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(soft music)