The mix of textures is neat.Ĭost: $7.37 for a box of 21 pieces, each one 14 ml, at T&T in West Edmonton Mall. The outer shell of chewy mochi rice paste is wrapped around a core of chocolate ice milk. If the whole box contained nothing but these, I’d be a happy fella. Compared to other chocolate ice creams, the filling is middle-of-the-road at best, but the shell makes it better. Not very sweet, and not very creamy, but with enough chocolate to be enjoyable.

Without a strong flavour to the ice cream, the shell’s taste is more pronounced, especially once the milk has melted away, leaving only the mochi in your mouth.Ĭhocolate: The real winner. The filling is a light vanilla ice cream, minus the cream. But if you like green tea, you’d like this. I’m not big on the whole green-tea flavour trend, so this isn’t my bag. These miniature daifuku mochi ice cream snacks from Lotte don’t have red bean in them, but they preserve the chewy texture of the mochi shell I remember from the shop in Hawaii. The shell has almost no flavour, but its texture messes with your mouth. The sticky, stretchy mochi shell - not solid, despite the freezing temperature - pulls away from the ice cream inside as you try to bite off a piece of it. (Please, please, please - correct me if I’m wrong.) Daifuku, a related Japanese confectionary treat, uses the pounded mochi rice paste to contain a non-frozen filling (red bean, say), while daifuku ice cream is effectively just a lump of ice cream wrapped in a mochi shell. Near as I can tell from the research I’ve done, mochi is a chewy, stretchy rice paste made by pounding the bejesus out of a particularly glutinous type of rice.

I took a bite … it was utterly bizarre, but entirely good. I handed over some greenbacks and pointed at (if memory serves) what I gathered to be the chocolate flavour. doesn’t exist), but I picked up words like red bean, rice, and cream. His English wasn’t very good, and my Japanese was even worse (ie. I asked him a question or two, but we didn’t get very far. There, in a glorious rainbow of colours, was a selection of round little flat things that either looked like squashed gummy pool balls or miniature dead jellyfish.įoodie curiosity got the better of me, so I popped into the store where a man at a counter of refrigerated glass cases was selling the strange treats. There's just enough English on the box for you to figure out that it contains Lotte Yukimi Daifuku Mochi Ice Cream.Ī year and a half ago on a trip to Honolulu, I spotted a display in the Shirokiya department store window that confused the hell out of me.

Lotte tico ice cream