Joong/Zong: Chinese Sticky Rice with Red Snapper

Me being a blogging noob, I didn’t realize that one had to authenticate in order to post comments.  This should now be resolved, so I expect to see a huge influx of comments that’ll bump the average comments per post from 0.45 to a solid 0.5!    Another telltale sign of my blogging noobiness is the recent lack of updates.  My bad.  Anyway…

Sticky rice is one of those magical things that when stuffed with a variety of sweet (Vietnamese sticky rice with banana) or savory fillings, wrapped in some sort of leaf, and steamed will always turn out delightful to eat even if it does look rather sloppy as is the case here.  Joong, or zong, is a typical Chinese rendition of tried and true sticky rice, filling, and leaf combination commonly found at dim sum places, Chinese bakeries, and Chinese markets.  I swear my dad calls it “dung,” which makes me laugh.  It’s almost as good as “tit.”

Nine times out of ten, when going out for dim sum with my family, we’ll grab a couple orders of sticky rice.  One to eat at the restaurant, and one to take home and eat later.  Chinese sticky rice is so comforting (and conveniently packaged) that many times when I was at home during for break during college, I’d make sure to order a couple extra to take back to campus.

Lotus leaves are traditionally used to wrap the rice and give the little package of goodness a subtle tea-like aroma and flavor.  I thought it was pretty cool how the water beaded on one side of the leaf.  It was like the entire side was waterproof.

Chinese sausage gives the package some fatty goodness and is essential to any respectable package of Chinese sticky rice.  I typically prefer the sweet variety of Chinese sausage as I find it has more depth of flavor and the balance between salty and sweet is quite nice.

 

Another typical ingredient for Chinese sticky rice are tiny dried shrimp.  These add a salty brininess to the rice and help bring out the flavors of the other components of the rice.

The sausage and dried shrimp are stir fried with the Chinese trinity of ginger, scallion, and garlic along with mushrooms, oyster sauce, sesame oil, soy sauce, and Chinese wine.  Traditionally, ground pork or chicken is used as the main protein in the rice with an accompanying egg, but I opted for some fresh red snapper just to mix things up.

The filling and fish are then sandwiched between the steamed sticky rice.  You may notice that the sticky rice doesn’t look as glutinous as it should be.  I’ve made many forms of sticky rice many, many times with no issues, but something went wrong this time and I’m not too sure what.  I’m pretty sure I soaked the rice for long enough before steaming.

 

Parceling up sticky rice is way easier than filling and wrapping tamales.  I think the next time I make tamales, I won’t be so exacting with the spreading of the masa.  The parcels then go for a steam to cook the fish and finish off the rice.  I’ve seen some recipes actually bundle the already-wrapped sticky rice in some foil and boil the package rather than steam it.  I’d like to try this technique some time since it seems like less of a hassle than dealing with my huge Chinese steamer.

I didn’t really follow a recipe for this sticky rice and did things mostly by taste, but this recipe seems decent for a non-steamed/wrapped version.  Using red snapper turned out pretty good, but I must admit that I prefer the traditional ground pork with egg for the main protein.  Even with the sausage, there just wasn’t enough fat in the parcel for my tastes.

Perhaps next time I’ll try using Chilean sea bass instead since is nice and fatty.  Imagining those flavors actually reminds me of a Chilean sea bass dish that my mom makes every time we visit one of my aunts.  It’s steamed Chilean sea bass topped with a Vietnamese ground pork topping of ginger, scallion, glass noodles, fish sauce, and oyster sauce.  There’s probably a little more to the topping, but those are the main flavors that I can recall.

Red Chile Pork Tamales

One of the things I always look forward to during the holiday season are my uncle Jose’s mom’s tamales.  During the family’s annual Christmas dinner, Vietnamese hot pot and prime rib are usually the stars of the show, but deep down everyone is praying that uncle Jose walks into the house with a bag full of his mom’s tamales.


With a hankering for tamales, I decided to adapt Rick Bayless’s recipe for red chile pork tamales.  I was set on making half the batch with meat from a pig’s head after the great experience I had cooking jook/congee with it.  It’s so hard to resist the many textures and flavors that the head provides.  On my trip to Marketplace on Oakton, not only did I find the usual pig’s heads, but they had suckling pig’s heads too!  Not only that, but they were priced the same as a normal’s pig’s head at $0.99/lbs!



Just like the jook, I used the skull to make some tasty pork stock and substituted it for the water and chicken broth in the recipe.  Also, as I’ve said before and the recipe suggests, freshly toasted and ground spices are always so much better.  I find this especially true for cumin, which was freshly ground along with the pepper.  However, one thing that didn’t work for me was using a food processor to blend the guajillo chiles with liquid as the recipe suggests.  In its defense, it does also say a blender can be used and I should’ve known better by the amount of liquid in the recipe.  Anyways, using a food processor lead to a splashy mess, so I transferred the chiles and liquid to a blender, which worked much better.



With the filling done, I turned my focus to the tamal batter.  Rick Bayless must have known I was making tamales, because the day I went shopping for ingredients he tweeted about his favorite brands of masa: El Popo and El Milagro.  I was set on using fresh masa for the tamales, but I was too lazy to go to a tortilleria or one of the several mercados around Rogers Park.  My next option was masa preparada, which is masa already mixed with lard and salt.  Unfortunately, the Food 4 Less in Evanston, which by the way stocks a good deal of Mexican products, only had pineapple-coconut flavored masa preparada made by La Guadalupana.  As a result, I had to settle with Maseca brand masa harina: dried and powdered masa which needs to be reconstituted with hot liquid.  I decided to use the freshly made pork stock instead of water to reconstitute the masa harina with the hopes that it would add another level of porky flavor to the tamales.



Regarding the lard, I would probably make my own fresh lard next time or go to a proper mercado to get some lard that isn’t shelf stable and not hydrogenated like the bucket-o-lard that I got off of the grocery store shelf.  After whipping the lard until it was fluffy, the masa is added and mixed until a small dollop of batter floats in cold water.



Filling and wrapping the tamales took a really, really, really long time.  I have experience wrapping sticky rice in banana leaves and lotus leaves, so I thought filling the tamales would be a cakewalk.  This was not the case.  Tamales take much longer because of the fact that you have to evenly spread the masa out.  I’m just glad I had an offset spatula to help speed up the spreading process.  The dimensions of the masa spread specified in the recipe was a little wide for my personal preference.  I prefer a thin and tall tamal as opposed to a fat and short one due to it’s fork-sized friendliness.



The first few tamales I ate actually kind of psyched me out.  The fact that I knew how much hydrogonated lard went into the masa made swallowing a little hard.  I thought it was kind of funny that I’m more psychologically averse to hydrogonated lard than I am to things like eyes, tongues, ears, and snout: all of which were in the pork filling.

Overall, the tamales came out pretty good for my first attempt.  Not quite at the level of uncle Jose’s mom’s tamales, but I don’t think I’ll be attaining that level of yumminess in tamal form until I start making tamales on a regular basis.

For my next batch of tamales, I’m thinking sweet rather than savory, much like the one I recently had at Parque de las Palapas in Cancun and similar to the sweet corn tamales I’ve had at Frontera Fresco for many a lunch meal.  The taste of the tamal I had in Cancun reminded me of Vietnamese corn che, che bap, that contains sweet corn, coconut milk, and tapioca or sweet rice.  Perhaps I’ll reconstitute the masa harina with coconut milk and fill the tamales with fresh, young coconut and sweet corn.

I also really want to try making a batch of tamales wrapped in lotus leaves, much like Chinese sticky rice.  When it comes to things wrapped in leaves or husks, I enjoy the flavor and aroma that lotus leaves impart over banana leaves and corn husks.  But the much loved pandan leaves would trump even the mighty lotus leaves if I could just get my hands on some.