tang yuan

DongZhi, is one of the important festival for Chinese, like any other festival, there must be a special food to accomplish the happiness and specialty of the day, one good example is, mooncake for mooncake festival! Can you imagine Mooncake festival without mooncake? Ah, it doesn’t seems right! So for DongZhi, the special food is Tang Yuan, or in English is called Glutinous Rice Ball in ginger soup. Tang Yuan itself is not sweet, but the soup is, and usually it is very sweet, well,  in fact it is meant to be sweet.

The traditional Tang Yuan is pretty simple, is just made by plain glutinous rice flour and cook in sweet   ginger soup. However, Tang Yuan now a days are much much different from the traditional one, some are stuffed with peanut, some with glated coconut, some with red bean… cooked in soy bean soup, in red bean soup, in anchovy soup(salted one)….many many more, you name it! All thanks to the creativity power of human! Ah, things changed, society changed, people changed, so what’s wrong if food changed also?

Actually, Tang Yuan not just for DongZhi, it is also a special food for Chinese wedding. The bride and the groom must have Tang Yuan on their wedding day or at least the night before. It is because Chinese believe after the couple had the sweet and round Tang Yuan, their marriage life will become sweet and round too (no conflict). Although it is a traditional belief and not proven by any statistic data, it is still maintained by most of the Chinese, ya, no harm keeping it, quite fun too! But the Tang Yuan cannot be chewed, the bride and the groom must swallow the whole Tang Yuan to get the good sign ( Well, after chewed, the Tang Yuan no longer round oh! Poor thing!)

I still remember ( I don’t think I will forget) I was very busy that year till I have totally forgotten about DongZhi (because i have left home to work in other city, nobody remind me about DongZhi, if you are far away from home, you know what i mean here). I was having lunch in one of the vegetarian restaurant near by my office, right after i finished my meal, the waiter served me a bowl of Tang Yuan and wished me Happy DongZhi and told me it was on the house! I got twice surprise, first, i totally forgot this important festival and secondly, the owner of the restaurant was so generous and caring! Suddenly I felt so touching and warm, who said this world is rude and cold? If everyone of us just give more love and caring or be more generous to others, even to stranger, I am sure everyone of us will live far far happier and peaceful than what we are having now!

Ok, i am going to make a half traditional and half modern type of Tang Yuan. I called it half traditional because i am going to make the plain glutinous rice ball with nothing stuffed inside, so this is traditional way; but since i am going to use gingko and nata de coco to cook the soup, so I called it half modern type of Tang Yuan. Well, let’s see how it goes!

Ingredient to make the glutinous rice ball soup:

To make the glutinous rice balls:

1. add in rice flour in a big bowl, pour in water slowly and mix well till form a dough that not stick to your hand

2. knead the dough for 5 – 8 minutes

   

   tang yuan dough

3. divide the dough into 2 portion, add in a dash of food coloring to one of the portion.

4. Bring water to boil in a cooking pot, pinch a small dough and roll to form a ball, drop in the rice ball into the boil water. Repeat. It float when cooked.

   

   when tang yuan float, means cooked

5. Scoop the cooked rice balls and put in a bowl of water.

To make the soup:

1. bring 800ml – 1L water to boil, add in gingko and cook for 10 minutes

2. add in pandan leaves, nata de coco, sugar and the cooked rice balls, bring back to boil.

   

   tang yuan in sweet syrup

3. Served hot or cool.

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