Day 2: Bringing the ingredients together

Today's lessons began early in the morning again. We ate a light breakfast then got to work. First up is to stir fry the glutinous rice. Everything else which was cooked yesterday were taken out of the fridge.  

Here's the ingredients which will go into the Bak Chang:

When we went to the market yesterday, the grocery stall sellers kept telling us to add salted duck egg yolks. We bought 10 and later on added another 10. They were halved so 40 chang will have salted egg yolks.

And then the lesson begins. Chim Poh had sorta showed me how to fold the leaves. We had problems identifying which sides of the leaves to stack (there is a coarser and smoother side, but it was even harder to tell then apart as we were wearing gloves). 6th Chim Poh told us to look at the stalks. Aha! That sure solves the problem. 

We were surpsingly fast and by 12pm, all the bak chang's were wrapped up. We made around 90 of them.

Chim Poh inspecting our work before it goes into the pot

Tying some tighter

Then into the 2 pots of boiling water they went. It's a good thing the Ipoh house has a big wet kitchen.

First round inspection (after an hour)

Look at the 2 giant pots:

It's a good thing we had a third stove too (charcoal stove). This is where water is boiled so that we could top up the pots which were cooking the chang in.

At long last, the chang are ready:

Ta-da.. this is the first chang tasted. It was not salty enough, but the taste was there. So we will learn to tweak the recipe to suit our tastes. Chik Kong tasted and said it was just right. I guess everyone has their own preferred level of saltiness for food.

Luckily, Kor Poh is around to help watch the other batches of dumplings and water level, while we showered and rested.