As a recipe creator, my favourite part of the job is digging into a recipe, ingredient by ingredient. Often, it’s easy to predict how they’ll act and adjust accordingly. Sometimes, though, a recipe can feel impossible to crack. Enter butter rice cakes.
Also known as Shanghai butter mochi and butter tteok, butter rice cakes are a style of mochi that are subtly sweet and deeply buttery. They have become very popular online, especially in Korea. As with many viral recipes, this one’s history is vague.
The cakes are often attributed to bakeries around Shanghai.
One theory credits a baker in Nantong, China, just north of Shanghai, who combined the traditional Chinese rice cake nian gao with custardy French canelés.
Other influences may be Hawaiian butter mochi and Filipino bibingka; though their ingredients and cooking methods differ, their batters are similar.
Coming up with a version for home cooks that was browned and crisp on the outside while still bouncy and buttery in the centre when baked in a muffin tin was an ambitious task.
Early on, I used a fluid batter made, in part, with tapioca flour and a decent amount of milk. But those cakes separated from the pan and browned unevenly. I knew I needed a denser batter, so I lessened the milk. The tapioca was eventually replaced with more mochiko, as suggested by Genevieve Ko, my editor, who had found results could vary from brand to brand of tapioca flour.
To ensure that crisp brown crust, the batter is baked in a well-buttered tin. But exactly how much butter to use was difficult to gauge. At first, thinking the water from the butter was steaming the bottoms, I cut back. Instead, too little butter made the crust hard and unevenly browned. A generous, almost excessive, amount of butter was needed.
The most important piece to the puzzle, though, was the baking pan. After testing exclusively in a nonstick muffin tin, the most even browning came from an uncoated pan: in a nonstick muffin pan, the butter proved more likely to spread unevenly.
It took over a dozen tests for the recipe to take its final shape, but it felt incredible when it did. The resulting mochi have deeply caramelised crusts that produce an addictive A.S.M.R. crunch and give way to a bouncy, chewy centre. For the best texture, enjoy them while still warm. A drizzle of condensed milk makes them all the better.
