Hakka creative snacks
Whether or not Hakka cuisine is considered by some to be unsophisticated farmers’ fare, Hakka desserts are undeniably varied and outstanding, particularly the numerous snacks made with rice flour. They are de rigeur at wedding and funeral banquets and birthday dinners. They include vegetable buns and glutinous rice balls eaten at Lantern Festival, mugwort rice cakes eaten on Tomb Sweeping Day, dough dumplings eaten at Dragon Boat Festival, and faban and tianban sweet rice cakes eaten at Chinese New Year’s. Moreover no Hakka wedding, funeral or banquet would ever lack glutinous rice cakes.
Sticky (glutinous) rice is the foundation of all of these snacks. You first add water to glutinous rice flour to create a wet dough, and then squeeze out the water through a cloth to make a drier dough. Then you add any of various fillings to create a variety of pastries, sweet or savory.
Zheng’s deep feelings toward these Hakka pastries stem from her memories of busy life on the farm as a child. She explains that in order to provide farm workers with sustenance to keep them going between meals, Hakka farming society developed various rice-flour-based snacks. She remembers that her family most often provided rice noodles and silver needle noodles. “They just needed to be immersed in brown-sugar water, and they were ready to eat,” she recalls. “It was really convenient.”
Today Zheng is creating an improved “creative Hakka cuisine” with an emphasis more on refinement than on filling you up. Her pumpkin buns, red bean rice cakes, mugwort rice cakes, and vegetable buns all look beautiful.
Pumpkin buns and mugwort cakes have fillings that differ only slightly. For pumpkin buns, you fill the rice-flour dough with some healthy pumpkin puree, whereas for mugwort rice cakes you fill it instead with mugwort, which is particularly effective at warding off the ill effects of cool, moist weather, such as the plum rains of May.
Hakka red-bean rice cakes are sweet. The bright red color comes from red yeast, which helps to lower blood lipids. The filling is red bean paste. Vegetable buns usually have a filling of shredded daikon radish, shiitake mushrooms, ground meat, and dried shrimp. Zheng has recently tried using taro in the filling, which came out delicious as well.
Zheng also produces a food product known far and wide: Hakka shallot oil. Exactly how awesome is Sister Duan’s “Hakka Handmade Shallot Oil”? As soon as you open the bottle, its scent envelops you. It works well mixed in with noodles, rice, vegetables or stewed meat. The shallot oil is made by frying shallots and pork belly in lard. Most shallot oil on the market isn’t salty, but Zheng has added a little salt to her version, so it has a stronger aroma and a distinct mouthfeel.
Eating vegetable buns on the Lantern Festival is a Hakka custom.