A fistful of ice cream.

I know I am late to the game on this, but I finally tried a treat that the rest of the world has tried -- mochi ice cream. I'd heard it referenced in everything from books to video games, but never wanted to invest in a boxful of the stuff. Well, My/Mo has made it possible by sheer genius for everyone to have a taste, one frozen dollop at a time. 

"Chew Your Ice Cream Because, Whatever" is one of their slogans. and it seems to sum it up. I was hunting for pearl onions in a strange town halfway up the county when I saw a freezer full of these li'l cuties near the registers. For $1.50 I had to sample the mochi mojo.

For those as ignorant as I was, mochi ice cream is a dollop of ice cream within a sticky rice cake, invented in Japan. This gives it the chewiness mentioned above, but also the ability to be handheld, at least long enough to eat it, without significant melting. Genius!

As for the taste, the dollop shown above was as advertised, vanilla ice cream with a touch of blueberry in the middle, the perfect ice cream serving to ease a craving. 

Hurray for thinking of such a clever idea. Portable ice cream has been a dream from the beginning, when the ice cream cone was invented more than 120 years ago. Eskimo Pies (or whatever they are called now), ice cream sandwiches, Klondike bars, ice cream bars on sticks, all sorts of clever ideas have been tried to give us ice cream on the go. I can't say mochi is the best from my small sample, as the rice cake is kind of flavorless, but it achieves a kind of perfection -- one little ball of goodness that doesn't melt as you eat it. It's like the M&M of ice cream.

One of the curious things about this invention is that, while everyone loves ice cream, people of Asian heritage are among the most lactose intolerant in the world. Europeans and their descendants tend be 18% to 26% lactose intolerant, but Asian ethnicities run 75% to 95%, and some figures for Japanese run all the way up to about 100%. Now, not everyone suffers severely from the condition, and the mochi is so cute and small that it might bother only those who really get the heebie jeebies from milk the worst. I'm just impressed that a people who are that intolerant to lactose devoted the will to make this great ice cream treat. All the same, My/Mo is wise to make some vegan and nondairy flavors. 

So will mochi replace our scooped ice cream as the traditional Key family Thanksgiving dessert (for the last two years, by popular demand)? Nah. A big bowl of vanilla with cranberry sauce and whipped cream is what I want. But I still give a big hand to a little treat that represents another way to enjoy the world's greatest confection.