How to make Chinese Sticky Rice Or Glutinous Rice Recipe

Happy Thursday everyone!

Today I have quite a classic Chinese dish for you – Sticky Rice or Glutinous Rice (depending on where you are!).  It is a savoury dish, characterised by a sticky, stodgy white rice with lots of meat in it.  It is quite rich so is sometimes served as a dim sum, or wrapped up in some leaves. It isn’t the kind of thing you’d sit and eat a whole plate of, like Fried Rice, because the texture is quite heavy.

To start, you need Glutinous Rice. I don’t know how easy this is to find in a regular supermarket – hard probably, but if you go to a Chinese supermarket, then there’s loads of options and it is inexpensive:

Mother used half a bag, 1kg for this but this is a highly exaggerated quantity! For two you would need far less than that, more like a third of the quantity – we were feeding 6 adults though.

As always, wash the rice and put it in a rice cooker. Rice cookers are very handy (mine is a nice morphy richards one which doubles as a steamer and slow cooker). HOWEVER you can do this in a pot too as long as it has a lid. If you microwave your rice then WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE!??

Ingredients

In addition to the rice you will need:

Dried mini shrimps.  One bag of these will last you forever.

Soak these in hot water and leave it for a few hours if possible. We didn’t soak ours for long enough and they were a bit hard later on.

Dried mixed meats. You can buy this in a pack in Chinese supermarkets although they may need slicing. It contains pork type means mainly. Truth is I am not a big fan – they’re quite hard and fatty but in this dish they taste very good. They need to be fried to release the flavour.

Chinese Sausage, sliced and Shittake mushrooms, hydrated and sliced:

Fried Tofu/Bean Curd, sliced:

Spring Onions, sliced:

You will need the usual seasonings like salt, sugar, white pepper, sesame oil.

Method:

Put your rice (portion as with normal rice) in the cooker and – cook it! You don’t want to over cook it and this kind of rice does tend to stay a bit firmer:

Whilst that is cooking take your shrimps and fry them in oil.  Give them a good few minutes then add the dried meats.  Fry until lightly brown:

Now, add in this order:

- The Chinese sausage (fry for a few minutes)

- The Mushrooms (heat through)

- Tofu (mix in well)

- Add white pepper

- Add sesame oil

- Add Salt

- Add Sugar

How much of each? A liberal amount of each. You need to taste as you go but the sugar seems to really help with the flavouring.

Once this is fragrant and cooked through, check on your rice which should be cooked.

Now we will add the mixture to the rice cooker directly, followed by the spring onions:

Make sure you have enough room to give this a good stir!

Stick your chopsticks in and REALLY mix it well.  Don’t squish it, we don’t want the rice to break up but we do want the meat well mixed in. After this, replace the lid on the rice cooker and let it stand for 30 minutes before serving with soy sauce.

Finished: