Preparation
20 minutes
Cooking
45 minutes
Difficulty
Easy
The Đoan Ngọ festival is coming on May 5th, and if you don’t know what cake to make, let’s get into the kitchen with TasteVN to make Tro cake for your family right now. This cake can also be given as a gift to relatives and friends!
Ingredients for Tro Cake For 25 pieces
Glutinous rice 500 gr Mung beans 100 gr Sugar 30 gr Salt 20 gr Lye water 500 ml (you can find it at the market or in stores selling Chinese cooking ingredients)
Tro Cake or Gio cake, gio ú cake is a traditional cake of the Vietnamese people during the Đoan Ngọ festival, an insect festival held annually to pay tribute to ancestors. The following recipe for Tro cake will help you make delicious Tro cakes at home.
How to make Tro Cake
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Soak glutinous rice
You need to rinse the glutinous rice several times until it is clean, then remove it and place it in a bowl.
Add 1 liter of water and 500ml of lye water to the bowl, and soak for 20-22 hours.
Occasionally during soaking, you can test by gently squeezing a grain of glutinous rice; if it breaks slightly, it has soaked enough.
After the glutinous rice has soaked in lye water, rinse it several times with cold water until it is clean. You can add a little salt (for 0.5 kg of rice, use 20gr of salt). Let the rice drain.
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Make mung bean filling
Split mung beans have been peeled and cleaned, soak in warm water for about 1-2 hours to soften.
Next, add the mung beans to a pot, add a little water and cook for about 30 minutes until the mung beans are soft (or you can also steam the mung beans until soft).
When the mung beans are still hot on the stove, add 30g of sugar, use a wooden spoon to stir quickly to make the mung beans fine and fluffy, or you can put the mung beans in a blender, turn on the blending mode until the mixture is smooth.
Put the mung bean mixture in a pan, stir over low heat until the surface is slightly dry. (Adjust sugar according to your preference for sweetness).
Then turn off the heat, let it cool, and roll into round balls.
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Wrap the cake
Normally, you can use bamboo leaves, dong leaves, or banana leaves to wrap the cake.
You shape the leaves into a funnel, then add 1 tablespoon of sticky rice at the bottom, add the filling in the middle and then add 1 tablespoon of sticky rice on top.
Roll the leaves together and use string or twine to tie tightly. Continue wrapping until you run out of rice.
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Boil the cake
After wrapping the gio cake, you place it in a clean pot (note that the boiling pot must not have grease). Fill with water and boil for about 3 hours until the cake is tender. When you see the water level dropping, you can add more water so that the pot does not run out of water.
When the cake is cooked, rinse it under cold running water and then hang it in a cool place.
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Make molasses to dip the gio cake
You can put white sugar in a hot pan, simmer until the sugar melts into a golden brown liquid, the sugar completely dissolves, and becomes a thick syrup. Or if you have molasses available at home, you don’t need to cook it, just peel the gio cake and dip it in the molasses.
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Final product
The gio cake has a chewy and fragrant outer layer, with a sweet mung bean filling. When eaten, dipping the gio cake in sweet molasses will make you want to eat it over and over!
Tips for successfully making sticky rice cake
- To make delicious cakes, you should choose the yellow flower sticky rice variety, remove all the ordinary rice grains mixed in, wash the rice with clean water, and let it drain.
- If you want to make the lye water, you can use the thạp nhạp plant (a type of plant that grows in the forest, very common in the mountainous provinces of the North) along with the fruit of the xoan tree to burn into ash. Then, filter out the water. However, you can also buy ready-made lye water. You can mix the lye water at the following ratio: 1 tablespoon of lye water with 1 liter of clean water.
- The string used to tie the cake should not be too tight so that when boiled, the sticky rice grains can expand and cook evenly.
- The cooking pot must not be greasy because having grease will prevent the cake from cooking properly.
See more
Sticky rice cake has a distinctive delicious flavor but goes through quite a meticulous process, so it requires skill in choosing ingredients and making the cake. I hope you can make those sticky rice cakes that are extremely delicious and appealing for the family during the Dragon Boat Festival or simply as daily snacks. Wishing you success!
