I mentioned in my blog post on our Chinese New Year Hot Pot that I started a project of documenting my grandparents. Here’s the first installment of the series! I asked my grandma to teach me how to make one of my favorite Chinese foods… zhongzi. If you haven’t had these before, they are these amazing pyramids of sticky rice, mushrooms, pork and often a salted egg yolk all wrapped up in banana leaves. My grandma has been making them for as long as I can remember. We used to drive up to Oregon every summer because my grandpa has a summer house up there… and along the way, we would stop at a rest stop and eat zhongzi. I haven’t been up to Oregon in a few years, but my grandma still makes these once or twice a year and always makes a bunch because EVERYONE wants some. My sister and I toss them in the freezer so we have them ready to have as a quick lunch/dinner whenever we don’t feel like cooking. I’m so glad that I got my grandma to teach me how to make them AND documented it all, because now I can make them myself!

So my grandma had already done most of the prep work before I arrived. She soaked the banana leaves in the sink overnight. She had also soaked some dried mushrooms overnight and chopped them up in the morning along with some shallots. She insisted that it was important to use shallots instead of onions because they are more flavorful. Finally, she had soaked the rice in some water that morning. Apparently, 1 cup of rice makes approximately 3 zhongzi. We had 15 cups of rice here. My mom had bought the pork, and she bought some with the skin and fat on it. To make it easier to cut, we cooked it slightly.

Next we added some oil to a wok and started br

Once the shallots were nicely browned, we added the meat. We let the meat brown a bit as well before adding some soy sauce. We kept cooking the meat until it was pretty much cooked through.

Next, we added the mushrooms and cooked everything together. We also added the water the mushrooms had been soaking in, along with a little more soy sauce.

Last step of the cooking process was to stirfry the rice a little! We removed the meat mixture from the wok, making sure to leave the liquid behind to cook the rice in. My grandma said that people often do this in soy sauce, but we like to do it in the cooking liquid to give the rice a more complex flavor. We did add a little more soy sauce and oil to the wok 🙂

Now we were almost all ready to make the zhongzi! My grandma prepped the strings to tie the zhongzi with. She had some fancy knot that she did, but she said sometimes she just ties them all together with a regular knot because she doesn’t keep the strings anymore.

Folding the zhongzi is probably the trickiest part. You start with two overlapping banana leaves and start folding one side over at an angle and then sort of twist it so that the leaves end up parallel. I videoed my grandma doing this, because it’s a little hard to explain in words!

Once you have your nice little cone, you fill it partway with rice, add some meat mixture and add an egg yolk (which we didn’t have this time) before covering it all with a little more rice. You then pat down the top with the banana leaf to compact it a bit.

Now here comes the tricky part, which is finishing the wrapping. You fold the remaining leaves over, making sure there is overlap at the corners so that the rice doesn’t come off. Then you fold the rest of the leaves back over (doesn’t matter what side) and end up with a nice little pyramid, which you tie together.

Final step is to boil all of them together in a big pot for an hour, and you have delicious zhongzi that freeze perfectly!