For Chinese people, Lantern festival marks the end of the winter. People usually will eat a very special kind of food to celebrate the end of a severe winter and get ready for the exciting spring! What is that call? YES! it’s Yuan Xiao (元宵)! It is a rice dumpling ball which has a sweet filling covered by sweet rice flour dough, and served in a clear broth. Just like many other Chinese dishes, even Chinese people ourselves have a hard time to name it right. Some people call it Tang Yuan (湯圓), some people call it Yuan Xiao. Usually, people will think of Tang Yuan as the smaller rice flour dough balls without filling and Yuan Xiao as the bigger version with filling, but it’s actually wrong. So, what is the difference? According to some Northerners I know, here is how you can tell: The main difference between Tang Yuan and Yuan Xiao is the way it is made. For Tang Yuan, you will knead the sweet rice dough and manage to wrap the filling in it. Since it’s made this way, Tang Yuan tends to be smoother at its surface and the soup tends to be thinner and has more variety of filling that you can wrap in a Tang Yuan. Yuan Xiao, however, is very different. It has a sweet solid filling and is made by shaking in flour, dipping wet in water and repeating the steps until the wrapping is thick enough. You can imagine that the texture is very different and it can only work with few filling that are hard enough. Today we will make Yuan Xiao instead of Tang Yuan, which is what you should eat for this Lantern Festival! Time to make the black sesame dumplings.

Ingredients

• 1 cup of raw black sesame seeds
• ¼ cup of unsalted butter
• ¼ cup of sugar
• ¼ tsp of salt
• 4 cups of glutinous rice flour

First, we need to make the filling. It is much easier if you can get some pre-made filling such as black sesame paste or red bean paste from an Asian traditional market. However, since not many of us have access to an Asian market, we are going to make it ourselves from scratch!

Buy a bag of black sesame seeds from any supermarket. Take a pan and dry roast the sesame at very low heat, with no oil! You don’t want to heat it too quick and burn them because sesame is too small to hand pick out the burnt ones. If you burnt your batch, you have to toss all of them away and start new. Carefully roast until you can smell the aroma of sesame, take one sesame out and see if you can crush it with your fingers. If it’s crunchy and flaky, you are doing it right! Transfer the batch to a blender to start the next step.

Although the roasted sesame looks dry, once it’s blended, it behaves very different. When the sesame is broken down, it will release its oil. The finer it gets chopped, the more oil it yields. You want to drive out the oil before you add other ingredients so the oil can be released out completely without interruption. While blending, mix them up in the blender with a cake knife once in a while since your sesame paste is not as fluid as juice or milk. Once you see it becoming oily, add ¼ cup of sugar and ¼ cup of melted butter and blend evenly. If you are a sweet tooth, feel free to add a bit more sugar. However, don’t add more than ¼ extra cup or I will call your family doctor 🙁 just kidding!

Once it’s blend evenly, depending on how moldable it is, you can cool it down a little bit before you roll them out as balls. If it’s too hot, it will be too soft to handle. Make them into 1 inch diameter balls and keep in freezer until harden, it has to be solid hard for the shaking process or the yuan xiao will crack.

Now you are ready to transform the sesame balls into yuan xiao! Take one dry pot with decent depth. Pour in at least 1 cup of glutinous rice flour in there. Drop in sesame balls and shake them in the flour! Make sure you shake it in circular instead of rocking back and forth. You want to make these round instead of some weird shapes at the end. Once it’s covered with rice flour, pick up with sifter and sift off excess flour and dip the batch in water bath for 1 second. Please be quick so it won’t lose too much flour that you just stuck to the surface. Once it’s not dripping, toss the balls back for second round of shaking. Sift those balls out and dip in water then toss it back to the flour. Repeat the steps until it’s thick enough, about 8 times, around 1.5 inch in diameter. If you observe some cracks, simply apply some water and gently press into some sweet rice flour to seal them.

Now the yuan xiao is ready to be cooked! You can either boil it or fry it – both are authentic ways of eating it. I prefer boil because it’s lower in calories, which I have to be very aware now. Boil a pot of water, once it’s hard boil, drop in your yuan xiao and cook for 5 minutes. The soup you cook yuan xiao should be served with yuan xiao together in a bowl. Now you have a bowl of yuan xiao at this Lantern festival! Enjoy! It marks the end of winter. Now, my friends, you are fully energized and ready to welcome the first day of spring!

5.0 from 1 reviews

Yuan Xiao (元宵)

 

Author:

Jeff Kang

Recipe type: Dessert

Cuisine: Chinese

Serves: 3 ppl

Prep time: 1 hour

Cook time: 30 mins

Total time: 1 hour 30 mins

Print

 

Yuan Xiao is sometimes called Tang Yuan but they are actually different! For Lantern Festival, you want to have yuan xiao to mark the end of a cold winter! It's the first day of spring and let's celebrate!

Ingredients

• 1 cup of raw black sesame seeds
• ¼ cup of unsalted butter
• ¼ cup of sugar
• ¼ tsp of salt
• 4 cups of glutinous rice flour

Instructions

1. Take 1 cups of black sesame, slowly dry roast in a pan without oil at low heat until aromatic
2. Put in blender and blend until oily
3. Add in ¼ cup of sugar and ¼ cup of melted butter
4. Blend until smooth, mix occasionally during the process to ensure even blending
5. Store in refrigerator until it stiffen. This is your sesame paste
6. Take out the sesame paste, roll into 1” diameter balls
7. Store in refrigerator again, keep cool before making
8. Take a dry pan with depth, pour in at least 1 cups of glutinous rice flour
9. Drop in sesame paste balls, shake until it’s covered with flour evenly
10. Put flour-covered balls in sifter, sift off excess flour
11. Dip into a water bath for 1 second and take out. Drain until no water is dripping
12. Toss back into pan, shake until it’s covered with flour again.
13. Repeat the process about 8 times until the diameter of the balls is about 1½”
14. Cook in boil water for about 5 min
15. Ready to serve

3.5.3208