Bakcang/肉粽

Be careful when handling bamboo leaves
as they are quite sharp and may leave you with paper cuts, or bamboo cuts

It’s been a while dear readers. I have again been occupied by my beloved research project and after a long time, rather than finding the time, I made the time to make another attempt at making bakcang and thereby taking the chance to capture my mother’s recipe in photographs for anyone who happens to stumble into my cooking blog and intrigued enough to recreate this in their own kitchen. Come on, if i can do this in my miniscule kitchen you can too!


After gathering all the ingredients that I could recall from our last cooking session together, I decided to call my mom to confirm that I had indeed got all the right and necessary ingredients, but as it turns out daddy knows best. Mom was napping and the next best option was to ask my dad on how to prepare a few ingredients to these bamboo leaves wrapped goodies. He sounded surprised when I told him what I was about to do and I could just see him raising his eyebrows in amusement as he asked “妳會做粽子?” (You know how to make bakcang?) … Well, not exactly but practice makes perfect, no?


I’m okay at making the filling, the glutinous rice, preparing the bamboo leaves but assembling needs refining. :P so I will share with you my mom’s recipe for bakcang.


For glutinous rice
you will need to soak 3 cups of glutinous rice at least overnight, then steam it for roughly 45 minutes in medium fire.


For the filling
you will need:

• 1 ½ bulb of garlic, minced
• Two handfuls of dried shitake mushroom, soak in hot water then squeeze as much as the water
• A handful of dried prawns, soaked in hot water twice, drained
• A handful of dried scallops, soaked in hot water twice, drained
• Peanut, soaked in hot water, drained
• A handful of dried chestnut, boiled, drained
• 100g chicken, diced (I prefer tenderloins but breast meat or thigh meat would also do)
• 3 teaspoon of five spice powder (which you can get in the herb section of your supermarket)
• 3 tbs of dark soy sauce
• 2 teaspoon of sugar
• 1 tbs of balsamic vinegar

First heat about ½ a cup of olive oil or vegetable oil in your wok until it’s smoking then stir fry the shitake mushroom until slightly browned. Add garlic, again stir and take care to decrease the heat so you don’t burn the garlic. Add the dried prawns, scallops, chestnut and peanut and stirfry again until fragrant. Add in diced chicken and continue to stir fry and season with five spice powder, dark soy sauce, sugar balsamic vinegar, Chinese cooking wine and salt and pepper to taste. Evaporate liquid and let cool before assembling.



So here’s the difficult part. Take two bamboo leaves that had been pre-boiled in water and a few droplets of oil, and overlap them longitudinally then fold as pictured. Fill with glutinous rice and fillings then top with rice. Now the folding bit is a bit too complicated to describe in words so the best I could do is to direct you to this youtube video. Unfortunately for non-Indonesian speakers, you will need to just watch, but really watching is all you really need to do. Good luck!