Tang Yuan from Chinese Cooking Demystified

Today I wanted to show you how to make a great Chinese dessert, Tangyuan, sticky rice balls. It’s an absolutely awesome snack - they’re made with a sticky rice dough that could be conceptualized as sort of akin to thicker mochi dough, they’ll have some sort of sweet filling, and are served in a hot sugary soup.

My personal favorite variety has a black sesame filling, which’s also one of the classics, so that’s what the recipe below uses. But you might also run into walnut, peanut butter, red bean paste… there’s really a million different fillings to choose from. Also, there’s a ton of variation in the sweet soup that it’s served with - we went with a Cantonese version with ginger and slab sugar, but I’ll toss a couple more options in the notes below.

If you’re new to Chinese desserts, this would be one that I’d really recommend you try. Even if you’re not cooking it yourself, try to give it a whirl if you get an opportunity to eat it.

Video is here if you’d like a visual to follow along.

Ingredients, Black Sesame Filling:

So while nowadays many people use lard, this actually comes from an older technique… people would add finely diced pork fat to the filling and knead it til it all dissolved together. Now, we actually used seasoned lard in the video - while rendering 1kg of pork fat, we tossed in 2 cinnamon sticks, 2 star anise, and ~1tsp of whole cloves. You don’t need to walk that mile with us, but it’s a nice option if you feel like it. Also, if you happen to be a vegetarian (or you just plain don’t have lard on hand), you can also use coconut oil.

Ingredients, Wrapper:

You should be able to find this stuff at a Chinese supermarket, or barring that, find it on Amazon. The specific brand that we use (Erawan) is literally the top result on Amazon if you search glutinous rice flour, so this shouldn’t present too many sourcing issues.

The hot water will slightly cook the rice flour and make it easier to work with.

The total amount of water added can really depend on your flour. At the very least it’ll need 70% hydration, but some rice flours seem to absorb more. We used 80g/75% here - if you’re using the same brand we were (Erawan) that’ll likely be what you’d be aiming for too.

Ingredients, sweet ginger soup:

The filling and the dough makes for 20 tangyuan total. This soup is enough for one serving, which is about five tangyuan. I’d imagine you’d freeze and save the extra tangyuan (they freeze real well, and there’s no need to dethaw before boiling)… but if you’d like to eat them all in one go, quadruple the soup quantities:

Water, 2 cups.

Ginger (Jiang ), 50g. Sliced, slightly crushed.

Slab sugar (Hong Tang ) -or- dark brown sugar. IIRC you can also find slab sugar in Latin American grocers under the name jaggery, though please correct me if I’m wrong. If you can’t find it, feel free to sub in dark brown sugar.

Process, Making Tangyuan:

Toast the black sesame seeds over medium low heat for ~5 minutes. Slightly pre-heat a dry pan or wok until it’s slightly warm, then toss in the sesame seeds. Continuously stir and toss the seeds in order to prevent them from burning. You’ll know they’re done once you can hear them popping - they sound sort of like popcorn in the microwave, but muffled. Pailin (of HotThaiKitchen fame) has a nice tip here… if you have some on hand, you can toss in a couple white sesame seeds in with the black, so you can also tell when it’s finished by the color of the white sesame.

Remove, and let the sesame seeds cool down to room temperature. Transfer the seeds over the a baking tray, spreading them out.

Add the sesame seeds and sugar to a mortar. Pound and grind for ~10 minutes until it’s reached a powder-y consistency. So right, I know this is annoying, but doing the job in a blender or food processor tends to give a grindy consistency to the end product.

Add in the lard, and continue to pound for 10-15 minutes until it’s smooth and pasty. More annoyance, c’est la guerre. Just be happy we’re not doing the super traditional method of kneading in finely minced pork fat til it dissolves.

Quickly freeze for ~10 minutes, then portion out into ~10g pieces, and roll them into balls. Return to the freezer for AT LEAST one hour. Freezing will allow us to work with this much easier. You should have 20 balls in all. Toss in the freezer again - you’ll need these balls to be firm in order to wrap the tangyuan.

Start the dough wrapper: combine the 50g of glutinous rice flour with 70g of hot, boiled water. Mix it in with a chopstick until smooth and vaguely batter-like.

Add in the remaining 150g of the glutinous rice flour, and break apart the clumps. Slowly add in 70g of cool water bit by bit, mixing in with the flour. Evaluate, then add more water if needed. Again, what you’re looking for is texture. Is it super shaggy? Is there leftover rice flour? Add in more water. To reiterate, in the end we went with an extra 10g for 80g total.

Knead for ~3 minutes until you arrive at a texture that’s playdough-like, then cover with a damp towel and rest for 5 minutes.

Portion out the dough into 15g pieces, then roll into balls. Cover with a damp towel until you’re ready to wrap. The dough has a nasty tendency to dry out - if it dries out, it’ll be an absolute nightmare to wrap. Try not to let this hang out too long before wrapping.

Once the filling balls are firm to the touch, wrap the Tangyuan. As always, I… suck at explaining this sort of stuff in writing, so check out 2:44 in the video for a visual if you’re planning on making this. Take a wrapper, and using the heel of your thumb, press into the dough to get a flat bowl-like shape. Then take the filling, toss in the center, and wipe your hands clean on a towel to make sure you don’t stain black sesame on the outside. Make a ring with your thumb and finger, and using your purlicue (i.e. that space between the thumb and forefinger) press the wrapper up and over while pushing the filling down into the dough. Close everything up, pinch any cracks, roll into a nice ball… and as you’re working cover with a damp towel to prevent them from drying out.

Freeze any unused Tangyuan. Again, these guys freeze really well - you even boil them straight without thawing.

Process, Boiling Tangyuan with Sweet Ginger Soup:

Place the Tangyuan in boiling water, then lower the flame to medium low. Simmer for ~3 minutes. Tangyuan are delicate, so you’ll want this going at a simmer.

Once the Tangyuan are just beginning to barely float, add in a bit of cool water to bring the temperature of the pot down. Let it come back up to a simmer, then repeat for three times total. You might recognize this technique from making boiled dumplings. It’s basically a way to keep things at a simmer, I still haven’t figured out if there’s actually any advantages to doing it this way. But I’ve learned there’s often stuff that backs this up, so hey, if it ain’t broke…

Once the Tangyuan are obviously floating, transfer over to a bowl of cool water. Keep them in the cool water until you’re ready to assemble.

Add the ginger and the slab sugar to a pot with two cups of water. Bring to a boil, then down to a simmer, and cook for 15-20 minutes, covered. You could obviously do this concurrently to save time.

Spoon the soup into a bowl, nestle in your Tangyuan.

Other sweet soups to use with Tangyuan:

Osmanthus Syrup (Tang Gui Hua ): Ok, so up in the Jiangnan/Yangtze River Delta region they’ll make this stuff with Osmanthus syrup. Same sort of process, just go with one part syrup to eight parts water. If you can’t find the syrup itself, you can sub it by mixing together one part dried Osmanthus flower (Gui Hua ) with five parts honey.

Laozao Fermented Rice (Lao Zao ). This is a nice boozy one if you can find laozao fermented rice. The soup is one part fermented rice, one part white sugar, and ten parts water. Sprinkle in some goji berries for good looks.