Botamochi: The Sweet Spring Sticky Rice Snack
Botamochi are a Japanese sweet mochi made with sweet rice and sweet azuki (red bean) paste. They are made by soaking sweet rice for approximately six hours.
The rice is then cooked, and a thick azuki paste is hand-packed around pre-formed balls of rice.
A very similar sweet uses a slightly different texture of azuki paste but is otherwise almost identical. It is made in autumn called ohagi.
Some recipe variations in both cases call for a coating of soy flour to be applied to the botamochi/ohagi after the azuki paste.
The two different names are derived from the Botan (peony) which blooms in the spring and the Hagi (Japanese bush clover or Lespedeza) which blooms during autumn.
Botamochi is the modern name for the dish Kaimochi (かいもち) mentioned in the Heian Period text Uji Shūi Monogatari (宇治拾遺物語).
Botamochi is a type of mochigashi, a sweet made from mochigome.
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Joost Nusselder, the founder of Bite My Bun is a content marketer, dad and loves trying out new food with Japanese food at the heart of his passion, and together with his team he's been creating in-depth blog articles since 2016 to help loyal readers with recipes and cooking tips.
