Tangyuan

Glutinous rice balls with a black sesame filling that runs when they are cut, served in a thin ginger syrup.

Not vegetarian — contains lard.

Ingredients

For the filling

• 100 g black sesame seeds
• 80 g caster sugar
• 70 g lard or unsalted butter, softened

For the dough

• 200 g glutinous rice flour
• about 170 ml warm water

For the syrup

• 1.2 litres water
• 60 g rock sugar
• 30 g ginger, sliced thin

Method

1. THE DOUGH IS STARTED WITH A COOKED PIECE. Take a walnut of the mixed dough, boil it 2 minutes until it floats, and knead it back into the rest. Glutinous rice flour has no gluten, so a plain dough of it cracks at every fold and splits in the pan; the cooked piece gelatinises some of the starch and the whole batch turns pliable. Nothing else here is difficult and nothing else matters as much.
2. THE FILLING MUST BE FROZEN HARD BEFORE IT IS WRAPPED. Soft filling smears into the dough as you close it and the ball bursts in the water. Frozen, it goes in as a solid pellet and melts to a running paste while the dough cooks.
3. Sesame seeds toasted dry over a medium heat, stirred constantly, 4 to 5 minutes, until they smell nutty and a few begin to pop. Watch them: they go from toasted to burnt in under a minute, and burnt sesame tastes of nothing but ash.
4. Cooled, then ground to a coarse paste.
5. Mixed with the sugar and softened fat to a thick black paste, rolled into 16 balls of about 10 g, and frozen on a tray at least 1 hour.
6. Dough: warm water into the flour a little at a time, mixed then kneaded, until it is like soft modelling clay and no longer sticky. Add the last water a teaspoon at a time -- it goes from crumbly to sticky very suddenly.
7. Now the cooked piece: a walnut-sized lump boiled 2 minutes until it floats, lifted out and kneaded back into the main dough while still hot. It will feel transformed.
8. Divided into 16, each rolled to a ball and then pressed into a disc in the palm, thinner at the edges than the centre.
9. A frozen filling ball into each, the dough drawn up around it, pinched closed and rolled smooth between the palms. Any crack will open in the water, so smooth them shut now.
10. Syrup: water, rock sugar and ginger simmered 10 minutes and kept hot.
11. Boiled in a separate wide pan of plenty of water. They sink and then rise. ONCE THEY FLOAT, GIVE THEM 2 MINUTES MORE -- a floating ball is not yet a cooked one.
12. Lifted straight into bowls of the hot ginger syrup, four to a bowl, and eaten at once. They toughen as they cool.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under China · All recipes