Simple Chinese Rice Dumpling (Zong Zi or Bak Chang) 包粽子

Duanwu Festival or Dragon Boat Festival is coming. It falls into 28th of May in year 2009, which is next week! We miss the Rice Dumpling made by our grandmothers, which contain succulent pork. So we decided to try it ourselves.

Ingredients:

For 10 rice dumplings.

1. Sticky (glutinous) rice 500g

2. Bamboo leaves 20 pieces (2 pieces per dumpling)

3. Chinese five spice powder, dark/light soy sauce, rice wine, sesame oil, salt.

4. Pork belly (must be fatty) 300g - 400g

5. 10x dried chestnuts

6. 10x dried mushroom

Instructions:

1. Cut pork belly into small cubes and mixed with ingredient 3 to taste, marinate overnight.

2. Soak dried chestnut & lotus leaves overnight. Soak sticky rice for 2 hours, mushroom 30 minutes.

3. Made the leaves into a funnel shape, put 1 spoon of rice into leave, then put meat, mushroom and chestnut, put 2 spoon of rice to cover it, and made it into dumpling, this is hard to learn, but try watching and learning from those experience in doing so. Some general tricks are: don't fill too full (to avoid breaking the leaves once expanded), don't fill too lose (breaking apart), and dozens other rules.

4. Boil with water fully covered for 1.5-2 hours.

Results:

1. Out of 12 dumplings, 1 is breaking apart, another has rice coming out from the leaves, so it's achieving success rate of 83%, not bad for first try. :)

2. The meat part taste very good, but the rice part is not salty enough, probably put more salt into rice next time or mixed rice with soy sauce.

Hope that Qu Yuan will like it in heaven. :p

Reference:

http://eatfirstthinklater.blogspot.com/2006/05/making-chinese-rice-dumpling-bak-chang.html