It's nearly Dumpling Festival!
We’re a week away from Dumpling Festival and I’ve been busy soaking bamboo leaves, procuring caul fat from the butcher’s, braising pork, and wrapping lots of dumplings (well I’ve only made 20, but it’s quite an endeavour when you’re making it alone). The first time I ever made glutinous rice dumplings was the first year I moved to Australia. Wex’s grandma makes *the best* dumplings - they’re refined over decades of practice - and they are unlike any I’ve tried in that they have, tucked away in one corner of the pyramid, red bean paste wrapped in caul fat.
For the uninitiated, caul fat is what lines the internal organs of an animal. It can look unsightly, like a bunch of rags, but take the time to unravel it and you’ll see that it has a beautiful lacy pattern - porcine lace, I’d like to think. The benefit of caul fat is that it wraps around any filling easily and melts away when heated, leaving a thin but transparent membrane. When I got the caul fat from my butcher last week, he told me that the Greeks wrap the fat around meat on a spit, so that the meat stay juicy as it slow-roasts.
In glutinous rice dumplings, caul fat’s function is to keep the red bean paste from smearing all over the other ingredients, consolidating it in one spot for a sweet hit. It might sound odd to have sweet bean paste in a savoury pork dumpling, but it seems that the boundary between sweet and savoury has always been a fluid one in Asian cuisines.
I brought some of my bakzhangs for a Malaysian friend living nearby; she’s now in her 60s and has been living in Australia for the past 40 years. She was telling her husband that she couldn’t recall the last time she had one of these. It was incredible watching her eat. There weren’t any tears or overt expressions of emotions, but she sighed and slumped in her chair contentedly as she told me that her mother’s bakzhang, too, had sweet bean paste, albeit in the form of mung bean rather than red bean. Honestly, you don’t know how emotional an eating experience can get until you live overseas. I’ve had one food moment where I literally teared up at a familiar taste, but watching someone have a moment like that can be as moving, and testament to the power that food has, beyond sustenance.
It made me grateful that I’d made the dumplings, even though they are a lot of work. (In fact, the bean paste I used had been bought last Dumpling Festival, because I chickened out at the thought of the labour involved - please don’t be alarmed, it was vacuum-sealed and has a long shelf life!) The process went by smoother than I imagined - this is my fourth year making it, and somehow your fingers retain muscle memory and get better and faster at wrapping these intricate things. I’m even thinking of making a second batch! There’s duck in my fridge now, and I’m seriously toying with the idea of a braised duck dumpling…
Bak Zhang
Makes 20