Category: Homemade Recipes

Making Abacus Seeds or Suan Pan Zi

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
Dried shrimps
Wash and soak em.

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Making glutinous rice balls (tong yuen)

Took me 3 times to get it right but no matter, because at last I managed to satisfy my tong yuen craving which had been bugging me for the past week. The previous two failures were due to my own carelessness. I used rice flour instead of glutinous rice flour. The balls made with ordinary rice flour ended up hard as pebbles and still floury on the inside….they were disgusting.

So, ladies and gentlemen. Remember, to make tong yuen, tang yuen or glutinous rice balls…GLUTINOUS RICE FLOUR is your friend. Tepung pulut. Loh mai fun.

And while twittering about my tong yuen making adventure (or failures), so many people remarked how easy it is, how it’s not considered cooking cause it’s so easy, how to make them properly, etc. Talk about superiority complex! Some people do get it wrong, you know. People like me. People like me who make tong yuen until they’re on the verge of tears because the damn balls wouldn’t float!

And so, here is a pictorial guide in making tong yuens that will float when they’re cooked. First of all you need a couple of ingredients.

1. GLUTINOUS rice flour.
2. Water
3. Ginger
4. Gula Melaka (for the filling, of course you can put other filling also like azuki/red bean paste, peanuts, use your creativity etc)
5. Honey rock sugar (for the soup)
6. Pandan leaves (for the soup, optional, i can’t be bothered)

#1 – Glutinous rice flour.
Glutinous rice flour.
You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t given any quantity. I don’t cook like that. I eye, and so should you.

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