ba zhang (肉粽)

*crap mode on*

粽子 aka ba zhang aka rice dumpling is a well-known delicacy among the Chinese. It's particularly eaten during the Dragon Boat Festival on the 5th day of the 5th month on the Chinese calendar...bla bla bla

*crap mode off*

I finally had the opportunity to make ba zhang after eating the 2 attempts of my housemates in making it.

Making ba zhang is a very tedious process and also very expensive esp in the UK

The preparation alone which involves cutting the garlic and shallots into small pieces, cutting the mushrooms, dicing the pork, chinese sausage and duck egg yoke and frying all the stuff takes more than 4 hours. Poor Stephanie had to all those.



So it's no wonder before we could even start wrapping the ba zhang, her face had the grumpy look:


This is the mouse. She was supposed to smile in this pic but I dunno why she didn't. Never mind, let's make her smile

oops. I think it's overdone ;p

wahahahaha...Esther is gonna kill me for this.

After the preparation, it's time to wrap the ba zhang! Wrapping ba zhang is a skill. Some can master it immediately some cannot. My first (actually second coz the first was wrapped wrongly) correctly wrapped ba zhang was horrible!

the lower pic, the ba zhang on the left is mine. The one beside was wrapped by Esther.

this was how it looked like after a few more practices

Steph wrapping

Finally after almost 3 hours with finished wrapping over 40+ ba zhang. Cindy and Melvin joined to help us wrap. Esther was MIA halfway during the wrapping.

photo credit to Melvin

The ba zhang carefully aligned on the table from small to big.

"好好, 大家排队好, 准备去sauna" - ba zhang queing up to be steamed

me and the ba zhang. "this is all mine!!! wahahahaha"

I'm still waiting for the ba zhang to finish steaming while writing this blog entry. Others have gone to sleep. It takes 1-2 hours (ideally 2 hours) for it to cook. Heard from Steph and Melvin that the texture of the glutinous rice is much better than last time. Hope it's good.


btw, just these few days, I've been eating nothing but ba zhang. What I ate these few days is definitely more than the total amount of ba zhang I ate when I was in M'sia ;p. I can feel the waistline getting bigger.