Microwave Milk Mochi Recipe

Make soft, creamy, milk mochi in the microwave in under two minutes! This chewy, blobby mochi is great topped with kuromitsu (Japanese style) or spooned and dusted with nuts and seeds (Taiwanese style). You can even use this mochi as a topping for other desserts. It’s simple, easy, and delicious!

What is Milk Mochi?

Milk mochi is really just a starch thickened with milk and cooked into a chewy blob. I realize none of those descriptors sound particularly appetizing, so uh… let me try to explain a little more.

Traditional Japanese mochi is made from pounding glutinous rice into a dense, chewy cake. If you want to learn all about Japanese mochi, definitely check out my Ultimate Guide to Mochi post. The “mochi” in my milk mochi recipe is made from glutinous rice flour cooked with sugar and milk. For this particular milk mochi, I also wanted it super soft and pliable, almost cloud like. So this milk mochi has a large liquid to starch ratio. A standard Japanese mochi would hold its shape a little more and be less…. floppy.

All that to say, “milk mochi” is really not a traditional food that you’d find in Japan (for the most part…). Instead, it’s more like the mochi you’d find in Taiwan!

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Taiwanese Mochi vs. Japanese Mochi

If you live in the Western world, you probably have only heard about mochi in regards to its Japanese origins. But many Asian countries have their own rice cake desserts and snacks. Makes sense, given how much rice is a staple food in Asia. Due to mixing of cultures (both through negative avenues like colonialism or positive like travel and pop culture), it’s become common in Asia to refer to many rice cake treats as mochi, even though those foods would not be called mochi in Japan.

Mochi in Taiwan can be presented as balls of rice cake dusted crushed in nuts or seeds. In Japan, mochi can be dusted with kinako, but is usually not in quite a spherical shape. Ball-shaped mochi with a stuffing inside is called daifuku in Japan. I find that in other areas of Asia and in America, people tend to still call daifuku as “mochi.” If this is confusing, definitely check out my Ultimate Guide to Mochi post.

Another difference is that in Japan, mochi refers to only pounded rice. Rice desserts made from rice flour would have a different name. In other countries, many desserts made with rice flour and sugar are still called “mochi” as well. I cannot tell you how much this drives my Japanese friends nuts.

In any case, Taiwan has a “milk mochi” that you can find at night markets. I remember going to a night market in Taipei for the first time and being VERY CONFUSED about some of the foods. Fried milk? Mochi in sheets? Here’s a good video I found on Youtube of what milk mochi looks like in Taiwan.

Obviously this is not a Japanese style mochi. But doesn’t it look fun?

Japanese Food Trends

Interestingly, recently I have begun to see more and more creative dessert videos from Japan on Instagram. One such video showed a Japanese shave ice cafe putting a huge blob of mochi on their shave ice (I can’t find the video now! Urgh!). I watched that video like 20 times. That was actually the inspiration for this recipe. I KNEW I had to try it!

I also read that a microwave mochi recipe with milk went viral in Japan (I also cannot find this video).

In both cases, it looked like those “mochi” recipes were more similar to the Taiwanese milk mochi. They were soft… blobby… and didn’t look like it hardened or dried up when put on cold desserts. So I based this recipe more closely off of Taiwanese mochi.

I feel like I’m spiraling down a rabbit hole of multiverse mochis at this point, but the bottom line I want you to know is that this is not traditional Japanese mochi. It is, however, similar to mochi from Taiwan and similar to an internet viral dessert in Japan. If you go to either of those countries, you may not be able to find anything exaaactly like this recipe. If you’re looking for something just chewy and fun and sweet to eat at home, then this is for you!

Milk Mochi Ingredients

The ingredients to make this microwave mochi are super simple: milk, sugar, and mochiko.

Tiffy Cooks has a Taiwanese milk mochi recipe that uses tapioca starch, as she says it’s more like the texture she finds in Taiwan. She’s probably right, and I enjoyed the tapioca starch texture when I made it (it’s like boba), but the Japanese video I tried to replicate looked more like mochiko texture. Plus, you know me. I’m the Mochi Mommy! I will almost always prefer mochiko.

If you’re looking to turn this milk mochi vegan, coconut milk is a great substitute for dairy!

How to Eat Milk Mochi

You can see in the Taiwanese street market video above that one way to eat milk mochi is to spoon it into a ball shape and dust with peanuts or sesame seeds. If you’re going for Japanese home cooking, you can leave it as a blob in the bowl and top it with kuromitsu and kinako.

Or if you’re going for the Instagram desserts like me, plop it on top of shave ice or ice cream! And THEN add kuromitsu and kinako! Or whatever other toppings. Go hard. Be extra. And let me know how it goes!