how to make zongzi (chinese sticky rice bundled in bamboo leaves)

I spent Monday making zongzi* with my grandma and returned today to do the second batch of them. I thought I would share the wealth with the rest of the world and put her recipe online. It took five hours start-to-finish, including a shopping trip to Marina Market in Foster City and a slow lunch of banh mi and fried fish, and an hour I spent walking Boo while the zongzi boiled, so I think a more efficient person could do this in much less time.

*Zongzi is what Marco Polo stole when he came to China and then the Spanish stole from the Italians and brought them over to Mexico, where they became tamales.**

**If you are not Chinese and did not grow up being told every time Italian food was mentioned or ordered that the Italians stole the idea of spaghetti from Chinese chow mein and the idea for pizza from Chinese da bing, then this joke will make no sense to you.

Grandma Hu's Zongzi Recipe (makes 16)

Ingredients
7 cups sticky rice (little plastic rice cups, not big cups!)
Lots (1/2 cup?) of soy sauce
1/4 cup rice wine
cooking oil
salt to taste
1 lb. boneless pork cut into 1.5" cubes***
4 T dried tiny shrimp
4 T dried fried shallots
One polyethelene bag filled with (16) chestnuts
Peanuts or pinto beans or some other bean-shaped thing of your choice
8-10 dried Chinese mushrooms
star anise
guai pi (which might be cinnamon)
bamboo leaves
cotton string cut to 3' lengths

Step 1: Gather Your Ingredients

Since my memory for Chinese names is terrible, I took pictures of everything we did so that I could reconstruct the ingredients when I go hunting around for them in Flushing.

***Once I was vegetarian, but this summer I have become a very poor vegetarian, to the point where I advise the web public on making pork zhong zhi. My excuse is that I am living with my family and the demands of culture outweigh the environmentalism/guilt of Byron****, though that doesn't explain why I stuffed my piehole with a very non-Chinese rotisserie chicken this afternoon while ostensibly "feeding Boo." Anyway, we hunted around for the proper slab of pork to cook and settled for the boneless pork butt, which the handy reference chart above the butcher's station taught me is not from where you and I would consider a pig's butt, but actually from what you and I would call a shoulder. Apparently you can also use wu hua pork, but we didn't.

****Only the Mandarin-speaking among you will understand what "Byron" (say it aloud) refers to.

Star anise, an integral spice. I think given how strong star anise and the earthy taste of the bamboo leaves are, one might be able to make this recipe vegetarian without losing too much of the flavor. Star anise is called "eight feet" in Chinese because it is an octopod! Not pictured is what my grandma kept calling "guai pi," which a sniff test revealed to be some form of sweet bark, like cinnamon, perhaps cinnamon, but I can't be sure.

You can also just buy five spice if you can't find the other spices.

Fried shallots.

Some people don't like chestnuts, but then again, some people club baby seals, so you can choose which camp you want to be in when deciding whether to include chestnuts in your zhong zhi.

Chinese dried mushroom. Not pictured are the rice wine (we got the cheapest kind), soy sauce, or beans/peanuts.

Step 1: Prep

(1) Soak the bamboo leaves overnight in water to make them pliable. You might want to change the water a few times so all of the panda excrement is washed off.

(2) Wash the mushrooms and then soak them in hot water until they are soft. Save the water to add flavor when cooking the pork. Same with the dried tiny shrimps.

(3) If you're using peanuts, boil them for a bit until they are soft. Personally I detest peanuts in my zhong zhi, and this time my grandma came up with an innovation all her own: pinto beans. She said that my relatives kept giving her these Mexican beans because they didn't know how to cook them, and she just boiled them until they were soft and used them in the place of peanuts. They're much tastier because they soak up all the spices and aren't nasty soggy peanuts.

(4) Cut the cotton string into 3' lengths. This step is not necessary but makes the wrapping go by faster.

Step 2: Prepare the Rice

(5) Measure out about 7 cups, or half a 5 lb. bag, of sweet sticky rice. Wash it a few times and then pour as much of the water out as you can.

(6) Pour in a bunch of soy sauce. I wish I could be more precise about this, but it just has to be eyeballed. It looked like my grandma poured in about 1/4 to 1/2 a cup, and she kept saying it didn't look brown enough, and then she tasted it and threw in a bit of salt for good measure.

(7) Add 2-3 T of cooking oil to the rice. This helps the rice not stick to the bamboo leaves.

Step 3: Prepare the Pork

(8) Apologize to your former college lover, who converted you to vegetarianism/veganism for a spell, for cooking, for the first time in your life, meat. (Yes, this was my first time EVER cooking meat! Hot dogs do not count. I have spent my entire adult life vegetarian and have maintained that vegetarianism by refusing to cook meat, since if I can't cook it, I won't be tempted to buy and make it.) And then...

(9) Hack your boneless pork butt into 1.5" cubes.

(10) Heat 2-3 T of cooking oil in a pan on high heat.

(11) Cook the cubed pork for ~5 minutes, until the outsides start to turn white.

(12) Add 1/4 c. rice wine and then ~1/4 c. soy sauce (my notes say to hold the Kikkoman bottle over the pork for fifteen seconds).

(13) Turn the heat down to medium high.

(14) Spices: add the star anise and guai pi, then add the water from soaking the mushrooms and the water from soaking the shrimp.

(15) Bring it all to a boil, then cover and simmer at medium high heat for 35-45 more minutes. You can poke the cubes with a chopstick and if blood squirts all over your face, then the meat is not yet ready. (I'm learning a lot about how to cook meat!) While this is happening, you should watch a very slow-talking Buddhist monk on television read quotes from some offscreen book and try not to fall asleep as your grandma tells you that even though we are Catholic we can learn something from the slow talking Buddhist.

(16) Then, when the "amituofo" (amituofo, amituofo, amituofo, amituofo - say this in different pitches and it becomes a song! om mani padme hum) song signals the end of the sermon, the meat is ready. Take the spices out because no one wants a mouthful of crunch star anise.

Be sure to use your 2003 Michelle Kwan calendar as a trivet.

Note: while you are cooking the meat, give the rice a few stirs so that the soy sauce is evenly distributed. The rice should soak up most of the liquid, giving it a nice, even brown color.

Step 4: Cooking Everything Else

(17) Combine all of your other ingredients...the time has come for them to acquire flavor. We used shrimp, peanuts, beans, and mushrooms cut into lengths. (You don't need to cook the chestnuts - they come pre-cooked and they are fine without the extra flavoring.) Here's grandma examining her two pots of cooked zhong zhi stuffing.

(18) Pour whatever leftover broth there is from cooking the pork over the other ingredients, then add soy sauce to taste.

(19) Heat on medium high with a little oil until most of the liquid boils off, about 15 minutes.

Step 5: Assembly!

(20) This is the trickiest step and cannot be described by the blunt instruments of the English language. It is best if you imagine the bamboo leaves to be people and allow me to describe the process in metaphor. Two bamboo leaves are in love. They are young and limber, perhaps only teenagers, perhaps in their early twenties; college friends, maybe. They drink all night with a group of their friends, all of whom are lascivious and single, all of whom expect to pair up by the end of the night. Our lovers know they are meant for one another because they are roughly the same size, and they are fresh and clean, not frayed at the edges. They twine and dance and have intercourse. They are genderqueer, and politically conscious, so their positioning is equitable and, like a mobius strip, there is neither heirarchy nor finity. One hugs another. The other accepts the embrace. Their world is full of possibility, and they cradle the space between them as if it can provide nourishment. Then a giant hand comes down and wraps our oblivious green lovers with one long piece of string, and then brings our lovers to their tasty, boiled deaths.

Step 6: Cook!

(21) Cover your zongzi in water and boil them for an hour to 75 minutes.

Step 7: Enjoy!

(22) You can eat them right out of the water or, since you are making sixteen and cannot possibly eat all sixteen of them unless you are a disgusting, disgusting person, you can just refrigerate them and eat them later. (You can also freeze them for indefinite storing - they'll just as tasty in seventy years!) If they're cold, you can just microwave the whole thing, no need to take off the bamboo leaves first. To eat them, cut the string off, remove the leaves, and add a little soy sauce to taste.

My very first zongzi - asymmetrical but still very tasty! I was much better by the end. The finished product should have the shape of a tetrahedron.

Anyway, with these flawless directions, you are ready to make your own zongzi! Please let me know how it turns out if you try to use this recipe.