Every My/Mochi Ice Cream Flavor, Ranked

Mochi is a small, spherical delight that's hard to pass up. Traditionally, mochi consists of a small ball of ice cream covered in a thin, chewy casing that holds everything together so that you never need to use a spoon. All you need to make a basic mochi casing is three ingredients: glutinous rice flour, powdered sugar, and water. Combine and steam, and you'll have subtly-sweet rice dough to wrap around whatever flavor of ice cream you'd like. This most delicious of Japanese treats is a must-have on New Year's and has become a popular, simple treat that many love to keep on hand in the freezer for when craving strikes.

That's where brands like My/Mochi come in. My/Mochi is an LA-based brand that wasn't content to stick to the classic mochi flavors. Instead of just offering vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate, My/Mochi has 24 different flavors of mochi, ranging from basic to complex, with several non-dairy options and a few seasonal surprises. We were lucky enough to get our hands on everything we could find in stock in order to answer this question: Which My/Mochi flavor is the best?

We were really excited to try the ube My/Mochi flavor. Ube is a naturally purple potato with a subtly-sweet taste; it originates in the Philippines, so it's a popular flavor in Filipino cooking, and it's also used in a lot of Hawaiian desserts. The best thing about ube is that it dyes everything it touches a gorgeous lilac color. My/Mochi's rendition of this snack also uses purple carrot juice and vegetable juice to further deepen the purple.

Unfortunately, this ube mochi didn't quite live up to our expectations. It tastes too much like the real thing. The flavor is very potato-y, not at all like the light, refreshing ube that most ube-flavored snacks give off. Perhaps we've just become accustomed to ube-colored food, rather than ube-flavored food. Either way, this mochi was a heavier treat than we thought we were signing up for.

My/Mochi has four different variations of strawberry-flavored mochi: There's strawberry with boba, non-dairy strawberry, strawberry banana smoothie, and plain strawberry. This most basic strawberry flavor is made with a strawberry purée that includes sugar, water, strawberries, natural flavoring, and citric acid. The strawberries aren't enough to give it this light pink shade, so the inside and outside of the mochi are actually also dyed with beetroot juice concentrate.

With so many strawberry options to choose from, it's hard to pick just one strawberry to go with. This basic strawberry flavor paled in comparison to some of the more complicated versions. It's on the sweeter side of the My/Mochi selection, and as much as we love a sweet treat, this one is testing our limits.

The My/Mochi passionfruit flavor looks pleasantly similar to the real fruit: It has purple skin and an electric, mango-y yellow center, just like real-life passionfruit. All that this mochi is missing are those delicious seeds that are so great to stir into your sparkling water or a cocktail to make a satisfying passionfruit drink. The ice cream recipe also contains real passionfruit purée.

To us, this flavor tasted like a candied version of passionfruit. Usually, passionfruit has a tart, citrusy taste, but that characteristic tanginess was lost in the puréed nature of this fruit. The flavor is actually great, but this mochi lost points with us for moving away from the flavor we expected. If you have a sweet tooth, though, this candy-esque flavor will suit your tastes.

Dairy-free My/Mochi is made from oat milk in order to appeal to vegans and lactose intolerant alike. Frozen oat milk has a different texture than frozen milk — it's significantly harder to bite through. If you want a soft mochi that you can bite into, take your non-dairy mochi out of the freezer a few minutes earlier.

The non-dairy version of My/Mochi's strawberry flavor is, surprisingly, the best of this company's four variations of strawberry mochi. The strawberry flavor is much more subtle here, perhaps because it's in competition with the flavor of the oat milk. This mochi is still super sweet, and it still doesn't taste like genuine strawberries; however, it's more palatable than the normal strawberry mochi, and the outer casing has no distracting flavors. It's definitely our pick for the best strawberry My/Mochi.

Similar to the strawberry banana smoothie, the My/Mochi mixed berry smoothie is a frozen smoothie bulb wrapped in a layer of rice dough. This smoothie flavor contains a mixed berry blend that includes strawberries, blueberry juice, and blackberry and banana purées, among other ingredients. The smoothie interior is a pleasant pink color, and the rice dough is a complementary purple, dyed with purple carrot juice and caramel.

The smoothie sphere reminded us of some flavor from the long-forgotten past — after a second, we realized it was highly reminiscent of the berry-flavored variety of Go-Gurt. It's both a new product and, paradoxically, a blast from the past. We didn't need to have a second helping of mixed berries, but we definitely enjoyed it.

Horchata, a Mexican drink made with cinnamon and rice milk, actually relies on the same base ingredient as the mochi dough — rice flour. This mochi recipe includes sweetened condensed whole milk to create a creamier texture, in addition to the rice flour that is at the core of both horchata and mochi dough. It's a very clever inclusion in the flavor list.

In addition to being clever, the My/Mochi horchata flavor is exciting. It's a little bit like biting into a Bath and Body Works candle, which feels forbidden and satisfying in a sneaky way. Cinnamon is the predominant flavor, and the mochi becomes almost aromatic as the ice cream inside melts down. In general, the My/Mochi flavors excel when they are at their most simple, and the horchata mochi is one of the best pieces of evidence to support that claim.

The non-dairy salted caramel mochi flavor is My/Mochi's third oat milk-based mochi variety and our favorite of the three. There are natural caramel flavors in this mochi, along with real sea salt. Just like with the other non-dairy flavors, you're going to want to leave this mochi box out of the freezer for a few extra minutes to let your oat milk ice cream melt a little.

The non-dairy salted caramel is similar in flavor to the dulce de leche mochi, but the added salt makes a difference — this mochi is more savory and becomes a more interesting bite. This has its pros and its cons — sure, it's delicious, but you might slip and fall and end up eating a whole box.

We weren't sure what to expect from My/Mochi's apple pie à la mode flavor. This seasonal offering hits shelves in the fall and is meant to approximate the taste of an apple pie, with an apple filling at the center of the vanilla ice cream ball. Real apple pies are a dessert so perfect that it seems silly to try to replicate them in another form, which is probably why you so rarely see apple pie-flavored goods; but we figured that My/Mochi had good reason for including this special seasonal flavor.

Turns out, the apple pie à la mode tastes chillingly like a true pie. The filling includes apples, cinnamon, and nutmeg, which combine to create the perfect pie filling reference, and the vanilla ice cream is made with ground vanilla beans. The ratio is different than your usual Thanksgiving serving — there's much more ice cream here than pie filling — but in all other respects, this mochi is a surprisingly suitable substitute for apple pie.

Did you know that matcha and green tea are made from the same plant, but they're brewed using entirely different processes? Matcha is a stone-ground, powdered version of tea leaves that can also be brewed whole to create green tea. The My/Mochi green tea flavor is somewhat confusingly named because it's actually made using a matcha mix. That means that if you're someone who goes crazy for matcha, you should definitely try out My/Mochi's green tea.

This mochi feels more mature than the rest of the My/Mochi selection, probably just because the matcha flavor is more savory and complex than, say, cookies and cream. It's grassy, with a hint of bitterness that lets you know that My/Mochi is using real matcha to create these mochis. It's hard to limit yourself to just one piece.

My/Mochi's double chocolate flavor is one of very few My/Mochi flavors that experiment with incorporating a more crunchy texture within the ice cream itself. Here, that texture comes from small flakes of chocolate folded into the ice cream center that is made from cane sugar, coconut oil, cocoa processed with alkali, cocoa, corn starch, and salt.

The double chocolate mochi delivers on every promise it makes. The chocolate ice cream is luxuriously smooth once you bite into the mochi, and the chocolate flakes offer a satisfyingly crisp textural contrast. This is the chocolatiest My/Mochi flavor by far, but it's not dark chocolate; rather, it's much more like a big old glass of chocolate milk that you might have on special occasions as a child. It was delightful and felt like decadence.

Are you ready for the shock of a century? This pumpkin spice mochi tastes like... wait for it... actual pumpkin.

As silly as it sounds, we were certainly not expecting to taste real pumpkin flavoring when we bit into something labeled "pumpkin spice." This pumpkin spice is a different one than the classic Starbucks collaboration of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. In fact, the inspiration for this flavor comes straight from real pumpkin pies — the ingredients include real pumpkin purée and graham cracker crumbs, an ingenious innovation that more would-be pumpkin spice makers should consider adopting.

We were very pleased with the robust flavor of this mochi. The bright orange wrapper, the depth of the palate, and the surprise of the graham cracker crumbs all combined to rocket this mochi almost all the way to the top.

Ah, the pièce de resistance. This mochi was far and away our favorite on the list; once we had a bite of this flavor, we realized there wasn't much competition for the top slot.

My/Mochi's mint chocolate chip mochi contains natural flavors, but not mint. It also includes a fair number of chocolatey flakes, but they're pretty subtle and you might not get that many in your mochi bite. Still, it's always refreshing to see a white-colored mint-flavored food — more evidence of this brand's commitment to natural dye — and to get a mint chocolate chip ice cream that relies on the quality of its cream rather than the chocolate chips to mask the natural flavors. This mochi bravely presents as a plain vanilla mochi, but it offers so much more — the chewy exterior, the creamy mint, and the shock (and subsequent pleasure) of biting through a stray flake of chocolate. We plan on stocking our freezers with mint chocolate My/Mochi for many months to come. Long live mint chocolate.