Eversince I’ve had that overpriced hakka dish, Suan Pan Zi or Abacus Seeds at The Curve, I’ve vowed to make them myself one day. That was a year, maybe two ago.
Making tong yuen was actually a sort of warm up exercise to revive my dormant cooking l33t skills. And after the 1st two failures in making tong yuen, I thought Suan Pan Zi was never going to happen. At last, I did manage to make them, so my confidence came back.
Making Suan Pan Zi was the single hardest, most painful thing I’ve ever done in the kitchen. It didn’t help that my boyfriend’s kitchen is as bare as bare goes. I should have bought a motherf**cking kitchen mixer before I embarked on this, cause using my bare hands was FRUSTRATING. Those online recipes made it sound sooooooooo easy but it’s all a LIE.
Anyway, here are the instructions on how to make Suan Pan Zi or what I like to call Journey to the World of Pain. You need dried shrimps, minced pork, yam, tapioca flour, cloud ear/black fungus, salt, pepper, minced garlic and oyster sauce
No sizes or measurement again because I keep it real like that. Which also meant I ended up with more than 3 extra portions :P
#1 – Dried shrimps
Wash and soak em.