Yesterday my mom made some zong for the Dragon Boat Festival. Zong is how you pronounce it in Cantonese but it’s basically like a Chinese dumpling filled with sticky rice/glutinous rice and wrapped in bamboo leaves. I used to call them Chinese tamales. Check them out here, not really in the mood to describe the history, origins, and variations of zong.
Anyway, I love zong! IT IS SO DAMN GOOD. And as y'all know, I LALALOVE my mama’s cooking. Anything that she makes is delicious. And I mean anything. So around this time of the year my mom would stock up on sticky rice and bamboo leaves and prepare for her epic zong-making endeavor. It’s so epic that I decided to document the whole process. This post might seem super long but it’s all pictures. No, I’m not going to teach you how to make zongs specifically but I will show you the process and it’s crazy. My mom stayed up super late Friday night preparing for it and she woke up at 6am on Saturday to finish her preparations. So without further adieu, here we go!
Mixing the glutinous rice with peanuts:
This is me trying to be “artsy” with my photographs.
The rest of the ingredients (from top to bottom): mung beans, pork belly, salted egg yolks, Chinese sausages. Basically errthang that taste good but is bad for your arteries.
My mom hates Chinese sausages (at least the ones that are made in America) but she still puts them in her zong because she knows I love them.
She had trouble buying pork belly because all the Chinese butcher shops were sold out so we got some that weren’t the best quality, AKA they were too fatty. She marinated the pork belly with Chinese five spice. Unfortunately, the package she used was not very strong so there wasn’t much taste. I’ll get into how it tasted later on.
My mom makes her own salted eggs by soaking the eggs in jars of salt water for weeks. I know, she’s amazing!
This is actually my favorite part of the zong, mung beans! Don’t ask me why.
This year, the bamboo leaves my mom bought were absolutely TERRIBLE. She normally uses two leaves to make one zong but this year she had to use at least four or five because they kept tearing and breaking when she was making the zong. It was so frustrating and she was getting so angry and discouraged because her zongs were turning out to be so ugly and I know my mom prides herself on the presentation of her culinary creations. I think you can tell by now that my mom’s zongs are not going to turn out too well (I know “zongs” is incorrect but let me use my Chinglish).
This is how you make a zong.
And then you tie it up super tight with string.
A lot of the time the zong will come apart when my mom is tying it up because the leaves will break. UGHHH.
As you can tell, she had to improvise and use a lot of leaves as band-aids. So sad.
My mom ended up making about 50 or so.
She boiled them for exactly three hours. Twenty something in a pot at a time.
I was super excited because my mom didn’t make zongs last year. It’s a lot of work and cleaning up takes almost as long as the preparation. So since my mom hasn’t made them in a while, she forgot to put mushrooms (which I love) and they give the zong an extra kick. Ultimately, the horrible bamboo leaves coupled with the missing mushrooms and the bland Chinese five spice made this zong-making endeavor somewhat of a disappointment. I’m telling you, my mom’s zongs are the BEST I’ve ever had and I’ve eaten some in China. But this year they’re ehhh. It’s not awful but it’s definitely not like the ones she used to make. It’s not her fault though. She didn’t know the leaves would be so crappy nor did she know that the Chinese five spice would be so bland. It’s like a B product but my mom always churns out A+++ dishes so I’m a bit sad, especially since I was highly anticipating them. You have no idea how much I was looking forward to eating her zongs but now it’s a big letdown. WARNING: very vivid and explicit analogy coming up, not for those who are squirmish (don’t say I didn’t warn you). Eating my mom’s OK-tasting zongs after my high expectations is like when you’re having sex and you’re about to orgasm but your partner just stops and that’s the end of it. Yes, food is that intense for me (and I should stop watching reruns of Sex and the City). However, my mom is thinking of making some more with better ingredients. Redemption. I’ll update you all on her comeback. Yet, for now, I’ll try to cope with my shock and despair over one of my mom’s most average culinary performances.
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