So it’s the Duan Wu Jie 端午节 again. Hee.. will be making a series of dumplings these few days and today we’ve just started with the “Kee Zhang” which is basically a plain rice dumpling which is “flavoured” with “kee” which is a yellow powder. After boiling the dumplings for 3 hours, you can eat them by dipping into gula melaka or white sugar. It basically does not have much taste by itself but it’s damn nice with gula melaka lor.
These are the bamboo leaves you use to wrap the dumplings.
You need to soak and wash them at least overnight for them to be soft.
The glutinous rice has to be washed and soaked. You then mix the “kee” which is essentially a
powdered form of an akaline(i’m not sure which one is it – CaOH?) into the rice.
For this kind of dumpling, before the soaking and washing, you need to select the white rice
out of the glutinous rice so that each grain will stick together in a nicer manner. .
Couldn’t manage to get a pic of the wrapping process cos my hands were wet
and sticky with the leaves. We don’t use grass strips to tie them up. You
basically use 2 pieces of the leaves to form a cone shape in the middle, fill it up with rice
, fold the sides of the cone and cup it over to get the 3D triangle dumpling.
With one hand holding on to the dumpling, you use the other to tie it up with the string.
(Ok, I know it’s a bit difficult to visualise)
Anyway this is the finished product, before cooking that is. You’ll need to
boil them for 2-3 hours. We use a big kerosene tin to cook over charcoal so that
we don’t have to cook in batches. Taste better too!!
3-5 hours later, this is what you will get.
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Unwrapped to find a golden rice dumpling…. Think now I know why people make this “kee zhang”.
Dipping it into gula meleka. Had the first bite already..hahah
A brief history of rice dumplings for you: The glutinous rice dumplings(粽子) are traditionally eaten during the Dragon Boat Festival, also known as 端午节, which falls on the fifth day of the fifth month on the Lunar calendar. This festival was originally planned to commemorate the death of Qu Yuan, a famous Chinese poet who died in a river. As a man known for his patriotism, Qu Yuan tried to warn his king against conquoring the land towards their Qin neighbors but his advice was unheeded. Depressed and disappointed with corruption in his country, he drowned himself in the Miluo river when the Qin Dynasty general Bai Qi captured the Chu capital, . Commoners respected him and packets of rice were thus thrown into the river to protect the poet’s body from becoming the fishes’ food. Drums were also beaten on boats floating to scare them off, thus starting off the origins of the dragonboat races today.
