The child is ready to enjoy rice cake in Tangqi Photo: Shen Jianbiao
A master was making rice cake Photo:Zhuantang subdistrict
Seasonal treat
By Jin Yingying
As spring festival draws near, workshops in Hangzhou have begun to make niangao(年糕), or rice cake, a snack made from rice flour, which literally means new year's cake and is a homonym for getting higher in the new year.
In Zhejiang province, rice cakes are super popular as a festive treat during the Chinese New Year. The tradition of making and pounding these cakes during the New Year has been around for centuries. Here are two wonderful places to trace them in Hangzhou.
Waitongwu village,
Xihu district
The Waitongwu Rice Cake Festival has been a feast for over ten years, all in anticipation of the upcoming Chinese New Year. Grinding, adding water, steaming, and pounding in the stone mortar are the key steps to getting the perfect soft and chewy rice cake.
The real magic happens during the "pounding". After six rice cake masters, each giving it 20 good whacks, finish up a round, and voila, the rice cakes are done. The ones pounded by hand with wooden mallets get tastier with every bite. Trust me, they beat the machine-made ones at any rate. For folks in Waitongwu, the yearly festival brings back the taste of childhood and hometown memories. The festival usually goes on until around Jan 20.
Tangqi town, Linping district
In the yard of the Laodao Food Factory, people are getting busy with the handmade rice cakes. They're rather picky about the rice, going for a 7:3 mix of glutinous and non-glutinous varieties that are ground into flour with a stone mill. After mixing the flour with water, it's time to steam it up on the "tiger stove", using a wooden steaming rack.
What makes these handmade rice cakes special is the traditional "tiger stove". Eight pots cooking on one stove means some serious heat. They only burn wood, instead of coal, to keep that original glutinous rice flavor intact. After about 20 minutes of steaming, the glutinous rice flour forms a solid mass, ready to be pounded in a stone mortar. This part takes teamwork -- one master heaving a hefty wooden mallet, the other flipping the glutinous rice dough like a pro.
Before, they only made plain white rice cakes, but now, catering to different tastes, osmanthus rice cakes and loquat blossom rice cakes are added, each with Tangqi flavor.
Eating these handmade rice cakes offers a variety of options -- frying, deep-frying, steaming, boiling, or going classic with a sugar dip like brown sugar rice cake. They're also great in porridge or straight-up deep-fried.