As The Mid-Autumn Festival Arrives, All About Mooncakes

Chef and business owner Rachael Liu Martindale shares her expertise

Two years ago, when I lived in New Orleans, I tasted Mooncakes for the first time. Hong Kong Market, a former Target turned into a vast Asian supermarket, had a sprawling display of them inside its door.

Mooncakes are essential to the Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as Chuseok in Korea, which officially starts Tuesday.

The festival marks the harvest and is a time for people to spend time with their families, celebrate their ancestors and commemorate them.

Mooncakes have two main components: an outer skin usually made from flour, golden syrup, peanut oil and water, or similar ingredients, and some type of filling. They traditionally contain red bean paste or lotus paste, while another option is salted egg yolks, sometimes from ducks, otherwise from chickens.

Like modern versions of other old-school pastries, fillings for Mooncakes have evolved in many ways, and the flavors now echo those you’d find in ice cream or gelato. Mooncakes come in cookies and cream, matcha, mango, Nutella, raspberry, and even cheesecake. There are gluten free ones that use rice flour, making them a cousin of Japanese mochi.

“You can get really crazy with them these days,” says Rachel Liu Martindale, the owner of Q Bakehouse and Market in Ann Arbor.