Glutinous rice ball with sesame filling 芝麻湯圓

Experiment: Glutinous rice ball with sesame filling 芝麻湯圓

Introduction:
It’s the Chinese New Year’s Eve today. Usually families gather together and eat glutinous rice balls. I usually buy rice balls in the supermarket, but since I have time this year (this year’s new year’s eve falls on Saturday!), I decided to make it myself.

Materials: (make about 20 glutinous rice balls)
150g glutinous rice flour
100ml warm water
1/4 cup grounded black sesame
1/4 cup sugar
1/8 cup unsalted butter (or pork lard)

Soup:
1.5 litre water
4-5 slices ginger
3-4 tbs black sugar

Procedure:
Sesame filling:
1) Mix the grounded black sesame and sugar together. Melt the butter, and add in the grounded black sesame and sugar mix. Stir well until it becomes a paste. Add more butter in if the mixture is not sticky, or add more gounded sesame and sugar if the mixture is too wet.

2) Use a small spoon to scoop the sesame filling into small balls, and put them on a plate. Make sure that you leave space between each filling.

3) Put the filling into the fridge for a few hours, so that it becomes harder, and easier to be put into the glutinous rice balls.

Glutinous Rice Ball:
4) When the filling is hard(er), you can start preparing the glutinous rice balls. Slowly pour warm water into the glutinous rice flour, and mix it WITH A SPATULA. Mix it into a dough ball. Pour more water in if the dough ball is too try, or add more flour in if it’s too wet.

5) Separate the dough ball into smaller pieces.

6) Roll the dough intoa small ball, the press ih the centre so that the centre is flat. Then put the sesame filling into the cente, and close the glutinous rice ball. Roll it into a ball again.

7) Boil water, and put the glutinous rice balls in. When the glutinous rice balls are floating, then they’re ready!

Soup:
8 ) Boil the 1.5 litre water. When water boils, put the ginger and black sugar in. Feel free to add more sugar if you like really sweet stuff.


Result:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Discussions:
1) Make sure that you use unsalted butter, otherwise… it’ll be salty and sweet.
2) You can use raw sugar, cane sugar or brown sugar to substitute the black sugar.
3) Apparently using pork lard will make the filling smoothier… but… I think I’ll stick with butter.
4) If you can’t make the 20 glutinous rice balls at once, you can put them into the freezer. Just boil them (without difrosting) when you wanna eat again.