Home-made Bakchang

Today being the actual day of the Dumpling/Bakchang Festival (5th day of the 5th month, chinese lunar calendar), I also joined in the fun by making some bakchangs (ham yook choong - in cantonese) for the family.

Making the bakchangs is not really a difficult task...more tedious would be the preparatory and cleaning-up works, haha!

First of all, you need Glutinuous Rice (that being the main ingredient for the bakchang!). You have to soak it overnight and then fry it in some oil with some shallots and garlic... and flavour it with salt, pepper, 5-spice powder, light & dark soya sauce...
Here are the rest of the ingredients that go into the bakchang...

Chinese mushrooms - soak to soften them, then lightly fry them in some oil with garlic and salt...
Water chestnuts ...soak them overnight, then lightly fry them in some oil and salt...
Salted eggyolks...(for easy handling, boil the salted eggs first, then use only the eggyolks)
Dried shrimps...
Chinese sausages...(this is optional...but I like the taste of it in my bakchang!)
Belly pork ...sliced & marinated with salt, pepper, light & dark soya sauce, chinese wine...
Dried oysters...you can either leave them whole but I prefer to chop them up like this...
...and of course you need the Bamboo Leaves to wrap the dumplings! Wash, boil and soak the leaves to soften them before use...
This is how you wrap the dumplings...twist the bamboo leaves into a cone, put in a tablespoon of the glutinuous rice, then arrange all the other ingredients on it before topping-off with another tablespoon of rice...fold the leaves and tie the dumpling with a hemp string...

This is how the dumplings look, all tied-up, before boiling ...
Boil the dumplings for about 2 hours...

This is how the cooked dumplings look like......and ta daaaa!... time to dig in!

*Note: In case you're wondering about the portions, well... 1 kg of glutinuous rice can yield about 20-30 bakchangs, depending on the size. I used 2 kg and that resulted in 40 pieces of bakchangs (quite huge ones, bigger than the average man's fist!)