Zhongzi
(rice wrapped dumplings)
Zhongzi consists of rice combined with various fillings - pork, shrimp, sausage, egg, bamboo shoots, peanuts, chestnuts, and mushrooms, all wrapped in a bamboo leaf. What's actually in zhongzi depends on the tastes of the cook.
This is a traditional food eaten during the Dragon Boat festival in June and dates back to the Warring States Period (480-221 BC). There was once a poet in the Kingdom of Chu named Qu Yuan who attempted to warn his king that the Qin were preparing for war. No one listened to him, and when the Qin came and sacked the unprepared capital, Qu Yuan wrote a last poem and leapt to his death in the river. As he was a popular poet, his countrymen threw packets of rice into the river so that the fish would eat those instead of his body or, in some versions, as an appeasement to the dragon who lived at the river bottom.
This is a complicated dish to make. First you have to soak the bamboo leaves in water overnight. Then the meat and vegetables must be chopped and cooked, seasoned with soy sauce, spices and rice wine.
This dish calls for sweet rice, also called sticky rice, which is a short grained Asian rice which you may have run into in Thai restaurants. It is important not to wash the rice before you cook it, as this destroys the nutrional value as well as some of the stickiness. The rice is usually seasoned with soy sauce, and oil is added to keep the rice from sticking to the bamboo leaves.
Next, you make a cone from each bamboo leaf and stuff it. Some people mix the rice and filling, some layer them into the leaf cones separately. These are folded envelope style and tied together with cotton string. The packets are best cooked by steaming, which takes about three hours. They can be boiled, which is quicker, but they can fall apart or take on too much water to be really tasty.
Once the zhongzi are done, you drain them and hang them to dry. They can then be eaten as they are, or rewarmed in the microwave. They freeze well too, in case you've made too many.
Source
Michael Huang's Blog
Image by Midori, adapted by Feiyan Zhou in accordance with the GNU Free Documentation License
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