I have no idea what you got as I've only had the ice cream ones. I'd describe them as having a mildly flavored, oddly textured but somehow satisfying thick skin around a ball of regular ice cream. First time I bit into one I found it weird but quickly realized it somehow works.

I don't like the American flavor ice cream ones, but adore red bean mochi, both ice cream and regular, and the Chinese version the size of an orange covered with sesame seeds and lovely smooth red bean filling! There are other good flavors, too, but the Asian ones, not strawberry or chocolate. Rambutan. Yum. Matcha, ick. Double ick. Even green tea, which is delicate, is hard to make into a good sweet. Matcha as tea, yes, but way too grassy for dessert. Good plum, peach, yuzu, black sesame...

So, a good sweet mochi should have a kind of spongy thin white sweet (not sugar bomb, just nicely sweet) rice wrapper, and a delicate, smooth fragrant tasty lightly sweet filling. The wrapper is bland (it's just sweet white rice, so your tongue encounters this first, then wakes up to the tasty filling.

For all I know, the balls in your picture are traditional, but I've never seen them. There are a whole bunch of ”real” Japanese traditional mochi which are like little sculptures—I'm only talking about filled round American ones.

Lol FOAS I have no idea either.

Even the photo on the box would suggest a filling but there isn’t one.

So much packaging. The internal covered molded plastic squares which hold 4 sweets, even have a little desiccant bag in each one.

pilllog, your orange size one confuses me even more. There were other boxes there so I’ll try again next time I’m passing.

I really don't know anything about the big, orange sized, Chinese rice balls. Thinking on it, I'm guessing about 2.5-3” diameter (I don't know if your oranges are big—I said it based on the ones I have, but those come right from a farm, and are old fashioned size, not giant). I have a friend with Cinese background who sometimes brings them to me from a Chinese street fair or flea market or something, because she knows how much I love red bean. One of them is a meal! Though, really, the size of an (American, non-giant) muffin, so mAybe not too extreme.

So Japanese or Chinese, especially not frozen, the stuffed ones need to be fresh. They stale fast. And they should come from a bakery type place. I'm worried about your description of the packaging...

Yes vacuum packed Jakkom and yes very chewy.

Plllog’s bakery fresh, red bean paste filled helps an image forming in my brain of a different version than the one in my packet. Along with the ice cream one, I will endeavour try to find this. Just means going to a different part of the city.

The term is used broadly to describe two variants -- the savory mochi is the pounded rice variant, very chewy and is best used in soup or toasted. The dessert variant (often made with rice flour and sugar and steamed), when stuffed is also known as daifuku. This type of coating is more common. The sweet ones in the vacuum pack tend to be tough and not the best. The sweet variety are best eaten when fresh. I live less than one mile from a traditional Japanese bakery with a fresh selection of mochi and manju. The outer skin is soft and delicate, and melts in your mouth. Unless flavored, the wrapper is going to be mostly texture. I like mochi ice cream, with mango being my favorite.

Thanks for that explanation Gooster. Knowing there are different names for the varieties somehow helps me when forming the concept of mochi.

So a person who works with me, visiting from Japan, brought mochi ice cream for lunch today. Shrink wrapped and frozen. I really didn't like it. It was my first time to have anything like it. But it sounds like this is the kind not to eat? Fresh would have been better? It was the outer texture thing I didn't like. Stretchy.

Or are you talking about an horse of a different color?

That's the basic type, and green melon can be a good flavor, but y'know how you can find a gummy, nasty popsicle or a delightful one or an icy recrystalized one? Obviously that mochi wasn't the delightful one. Some people don't like the texture of the wrapper, even so, and others take awhile to accept it into their vocabularies of nice to eat. It's supposed to be a little stretchy to wrap around the filling, but should bite smoothly. I wonder if it had partially thawed and refrozen. Always, fresh will be best, but for the ice cream ones, you'd have to find a real specialty shop.

All right then. Of course, the package did say chewy. Guess that should've told me 😃

I guess I’m not the only one confused by mochi!

Plllog you say “some people don’t like the texture of the ’wrapper’ ” is it by ’wrapper’ you mean the chewy skin on the outside of the filling whether that filling be fresh or frozen???

The mochi I bought did not have a ’filling’ at all even though the box picture sort of shows one.

Goosters description seems to help me think that mochi really means sort of ‘chewy.‘

Wow sorry about all this convoluted language about a product that I don’t really like so far.

Neely, yes, I meant the spongy rice wrapper around the filling. The shape and wrapper, or skin, is the same whether it's ice cream (frozen) or from the Japanese deli (fresh). This is only one kind of mochi, but it has penetrated to many corners of the USA, which is why I called it American. When I was a kid, one could only get them from Japanese places in the Japanese neighborhoods. Those villages are mostly integrated into the surroundings now, but a lot of the food, for better or worse, has gone mainstream. I know there's a whole panalpy of other kinds of mochi, but they're still are only in specialty stores here.

The Chinese rice ball has a pebbly textured rice wrapper, rather than a rice dough one, and is usually covered in sesame seeds. Oh, and they're fried and oily.

If you had really good fresh ones, you'd probably like them. :)

The mochi ice cream is probably always going to be chewy --- as the texture gets harder the colder it is (they are better if allowed to warm up a bit -- although that may accentuate the chewy in some respects). The wrapper is the mochi -- the rice product. It can be unfilled or filled with any number of items --- ice cream as found at Costco and TJ's and many grocery stores --- or with red/white beans or even a fresh strawberry or other fruit filling, and other things. In the power of suggestion, I stopped by and picked some up this weekend.

Thank you gooster. She did say we're taking it straight out of the freezer, and she wish they were room temp?

I will try it again. I also realized I sort of had to accept that that's the aspect of what it is... Maybe that's the texture every time. Maybe mochi just means chewy exterior? I could be wrong, but that's sort of what I was thinking

”maybe mochi just means chewy exterior” ... Yes that’s the conclusion I’ve come to as well thanks to all and especially Gooster.