Otsuka Ray Fights a Rock-Hard Sweet Potato Through a Nearly Three-Hour Meal-Prep Stream

INDEPENDENT — Otsuka Ray, a single-mother VTuber, set out on Tuesday to stock her freezer with dinners and ended up spending most of a nearly three-hour cooking stream on a dessert she had never made before: sweet potato rolls built on a recipe that uses store-bought pudding.

Her daughter, Reika, was at kindergarten, so Ray streamed the preparation herself. She started with the dessert, peeling and soaking the potatoes and microwaving them, then moved on to a heap of mushrooms of several kinds. She wrapped them with shiso leaves and cheese in thin slices of meat, wrote reheating instructions on each package, and froze them, explaining that she had lost track of what was in her freezer before and now labels everything.

“I have to mix this with the feeling of being the blender. I am the blender.” — Otsuka Ray, stirring the sweet potato filling by hand

The potatoes would not cooperate. When she tried to blend them, they were far too hard, and the blender would not break them down. Viewers suggested chopping them smaller or steaming them, and she took the steaming advice. She turned to other dishes in the meantime, including a shrimp dish and a frozen fish-and-vegetable dish left over from an earlier stream, which she ate as her lunch and called one of the best she had made on a cooking stream.

At about two hours and 23 minutes she tried the blender again and it finally worked. She mixed in the pudding, rolled the filling in spring-roll wrappers and finished the batch minutes before she had to leave, noting that a few wrappers tore and that she was working against the clock. She said the recipe was supposed to be quick and that the early mistake with the potatoes cost her the time.

Chat helped throughout, and 16 paid messages came in, many described as contributions toward the day’s ingredients. Ray thanked them by shaping her lunch rice into a heart. She closed the stream to collect Reika, saying she hoped her daughter would enjoy the sweet potato rolls, and told viewers she would be back after the pickup if time allowed.