Eight-treasure rice

Editor's note: The eight-treasure rice is a dessert made of glutinous rice, together with 8 nourishing ingredients. A newly-steamed dish is soft and tasty, and sesame seeds and peanuts placed in the rice are stirring the diners’ taste buds.

Eight-treasure rice

In Yunnan province, there exists a sweet rice dish that is coupled with the eight ingredients of white sugar, sesame seeds, peanuts, dates and others. It is thus called the eight-treasure rice pudding.

As for how to cook the dish, Yunnan chef Jin Nuohua is a master hand. First, wash the sticky rice and soak it for an hour; cut up the dates into bits and carrots into slices. Next, stir-fry the sesame and peanuts till cooked; mash the skinned peanuts and sesame in a blender; and mix the mashed evenly with sugar, lard oil and bean paste for pudding fillings.

“Making sticky rice is seemingly easy, but it calls for skills to cook a fragrant dish,” said Jin, watching the fire. When the water was bubbling up, she poured the soaked glutinous rice into the wok, stirring the rice with spatula at times. “Cooking the rice calls for high heat, and once cooked it needs to be picked up instantly for a good taste.” When the sticky rice was half cooked, Jin skillfully fished up it for filtering and steaming.

Then the assembling begins. Sprinkle a handful of fried sesame seeds on the bowl bottom, and then put into certain pattern the cut date bits and carrot slices. The ingredients are all intended to be decorations of the sticky rice, and they can be placed in a bowl in no time.

Jin Nuohua uncovered the lid for a look, carried the steamer onto a table, and poured glutinous rice into a basin. Having mixed the rice with white sugar evenly, Jin half-filled the bowl and gently leveled the steamed rice with a spoon. She laid some chopped sesame and peanuts, filled the bowl with more glutinous rice, and put the whole dish into the steamer again.

Around ten minutes later, Jin Nuohua put out the fire, took out the eight-treasure rice from the steamer, and put it upside down on a plate. Taking away the bowl, Jin was greeted by a share of bright eight-treasure rice. She began to enjoy the dish with chopsticks. Jin was delighted by the glutinous rice, the shiny lard and mellow fragrance, which were followed by the tasty fillings of peanuts and sesame seeds in the middle of the dish.

Writing by Xu Hualing and Li Dan; Trans-editing by Wang Shixue