Glutinous Rice Ball Soup (Tang Yuan)

Glutinous Rice Ball soup or "Tang Yuan" is traditionally eaten during "Dong Zhi" celebration by Chinese. "Dong Zhi" is celebrated every year following the Chinese lunar calendar and simply means and marks the start of winter season. The round rice balls are a symbol of sweet reunion, harmony and unity within the family.

It is a simple dessert and it can be commonly found in Singapore. Basic "Tang Yuan" consists only rice balls/ dumplings and sweet syrup. I used to eat this type of "Tang Yuan" cooked by my mum when I was young.

Some people might add in different fillings (red bean, sesame, peanut paste & etc) or colouring to the rice balls to make them more appetizing and flavourful. There is even a variety of soup (peanut soup, sesame soup, red bean soup & etc) to go with these rice balls. The combination of these different types of rice balls and soups makes it a more interesting dessert.

A week back, I found a very interesting glutinous rice ball soup recipe whereby the skin is made by swirling the filling in a bowl of glutinous rice flour, layer by layer. Normally, the skin is made by adding to the water to the flour to form a dough. The dough is rolled and then the filling is wrap with the dough skin. Hence, I thought i should give it a try although I find it involves a lot of steps and patience just to make the skin of a single ball.

Other than that, I modified the syrup as I do not have brown sugar and mandarin orange peel at home. I just substituted those with cane sugar and omitting orange peel from my syrup.

Ingredients:

(yields 2 cups, 10 rice balls)

Glutinous rice balls
1 1/2 tbs peanut butter (I used crunchy type)

1 tbs sesame powder

1 tbs icing sugar

1 1/2 tbs roasted sesame seeds

200 g glutinous rice flour

Syrup

1/2 piece ginger (I used 4 slices as I liked more ginger taste in my soup)

75 g brown sugar (I used cane sugar and I reduced the amount to suit my taste)

1/2 piece mandarin orange peel

2 cups water

Method:

1) Mix well of peanut butter, instant sesame powder and icing sugar. Form the mixture into 10 small pieces and roll them into balls.

2) Roll and coat the balls individually with roasted sesame seeds. This is the filling.

3) Chill the filling in the fridge for at least 15 minutes.

4) To form the skin, roll a chilled filling into a bowl of glutinous rice flour. Make sure it is well coated.

5) Dip it into cold water for 1 second and then put it back into the bowl of flour and swirl it in the bowl to coat it with another layer of flour. Repeat this 10 times so that it becomes double the size of the filling. Make sure it does not crack.

6) Boil a pot of water. Once boiling, dump in the rice balls. Boil for another 5 minutes when rice balls are floating.

7) To prepare the syrup, dump in ginger, sugar and mandarin orange peel into 2 cups of water and bring it to boil.

8) To serve, scoop rice balls from water and put into syrup.

Recipe adapted from Chow Times

Outcome:

The filling is not similar to those hot spilling paste filling as normally sold in the stalls. It is solid. Somehow, it is something that I did not expect of. However, the combination of the solid filling and soft skin tasted special and is quite good. The only let down to this was the syrup. It tasted fine when taking it alone, but when combined with the rice balls, it tasted quite bland. It's entirely my fault as I reduced the amount of sugar needed. I will follow the sugar amount as stated above next time. Overall, it is an enjoyable experience and we also enjoyed having this as a dessert during tea break.