These savoury dumplings are traditionally made in June to celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival. Here are tips, do’s and don’ts to improve your zongzi-making game.

Happy Dragon Boat Festival!

Legend has it that a long time ago, an official in the Chinese imperial administration threw himself into a river to protest bad policy by the Emperor. The common people wanted to keep fishes from eating his body, so they threw rice dumplings (粽 ; joong / zongzi) into the river so the fish would eat those instead. Politics were different back then, I guess.

The whole thing evolved into a festival where people race boats shaped to look like dragons (hence the name of the festival) across seas and rivers to the sound of drums and cheers. My dad used to compete in dragon boat races back in his day, and he says it’s a hell of a workout. Having seen the arms of some dragon boat racers, I have no reason to doubt him.

Sweat and testosterone aside, this is a food blog about (mostly) rice. So let me shift your attention from the rowers to the delicious, delicious carbs that fuel the rowers – zongzi.

Last year, I wrote a comprehensive guide on how to make these dumplings the way my grandma does, handed down the generations. This year I’m continuing the tradition by writing a beginner’s do’s and don’ts for those of you who want to start your own zongzi making tradition, or looking for ways to improve your skills.

This year, we made a bit more than 70 zongzi with 3kg of glutinous rice and 1.5kg of mung beans. It took the 6 of us an hour and a half to finish wrapping, and almost all day to cook them all and cool them down.

Please don’t ask me for any more details or the specific amounts – I don’t know, grandma doesn’t know, and frankly it doesn’t matter because it’s going to taste good regardless. Learn to cook the Chinese grandma way.

1. Plan ahead

Don’t think you can wake up this morning wanting zongzi and have them for dinner – or at least, not good ones. It takes time to pull off a zongzi party. Ideally, you’d want to allow a week to plan. From getting your party participants to agree on a date (and believe me, you’ll want extra hands on deck), to shopping for groceries, to preparing the ingredients, it all takes time.

The bamboo leaves need to be boiled and washed. The shiitake mushrooms need to be rehydrated overnight, then stewed in oyster sauce. The dried shrimp needs to be stir fried with garlic. The pork needs to be marinated. So on and so forth.

There’s a lot of work that can, and should, be done ahead of time. You’ll have plenty to do on wrap day, and you’ll be glad you got these tasks out of the way.

2. Mise en place

It pays to have everything ready and in place before you start wrapping your zongzi. Your hands will be busy, and dirty as well – however carefully you handle the ingredients, you’ll inevitably get greasy hands. Instead of having to wash and dry your hands between clean and dirty tasks, it’s much more efficient to have ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ teammates.

For this year’s party, we had 4 people ‘in the hole’ and wrapping zongzi while two people supported the effort. You need people putting pots to boil, watching the fire, keeping the wrappers supplied with materials, and preparing snacks.

3. Know your materials

Leaves and reeds are both natural materials, so some variation in size and quality is to be expected. Save the good, big leaves for forming the main structure of the dumplings in the initial steps. Leave the smaller, brittle or hole-y leaves for the later supplementary stages.

Likewise, the reeds vary in thickness and toughness. The ends are especially prone to snapping, so don’t try to use the entire length. Be gentle when applying tension, and leave enough length to tie the knot at the end. Two bands of two or three loops are plenty enough to hold the dumplings together. Of course, if you use kitchen twine to tie up your zongzi this wouldn’t be an issue.

4. Don’t overstuff (the dumplings)

Overstuffing has become a recurring theme on this blog. From breakfast burritos to chicken fajitas, it’s the first world problem that has plagued me since I started cooking.

It isn’t so big of a deal usually, but structural integrity is essential when wrapping zongzi. They need to survive 2 hours of boiling without bursting open, which would lead to the dumpling falling apart as well as creating a big mess.

Therefore, err on the side of caution and fill the zongzi less than you think you should. Besides, if they end up smaller than you intended, it’s more fun to eat two small dumplings than a single large one!

5. Beware of Finger-side Bias

So called because of my tendency to fill the zongzi in a way that results in the peak of the dumpling being off-center. Instead of being a nice and tall pyramid, the zongzi leans towards the direction where the fingers point when you fill it.

The problem is partly due to psychology. After I create the cone, I pinch the point with my fingers and start spooning in the fillings. I tend to fill it more towards my palm than outwards, because it feels like there’s less leaves that way and I worry that the fillings will spill out.

The way to combat this is to deliberately go against the bias. Counterintuitively, I tip the cone away from me and fill it more towards my fingers. If you need the sense of security from having the support leaves in place early on, so be it.

6. Follow the lines 

When it comes time to close up, reinforce the two sides with one bamboo leaf each. Pay attention to the markings on the leaves, and use them to guide you when you fold the sides together. Follow the lines to get nice, parallel sides. Don’t worry about excess material jutting out, you can always trim those off later.

The next two folds are more challenging, because you don’t have any lines to guide you. But try the best you can to close the dumpling up by folding perpendicular to the leaf markings. I haven’t gotten the hang of this yet, so I still can’t get my zongzi to form a square base. But practice makes perfect, I’ll figure this out eventually.

7. Don’t overstuff (the pot)

Economy of scale is a powerful thing, a point I’m sure many of you meal preppers understand and make use of on a regular basis. But I must warn you against the instinct to fill your pot as much as you can when you boil your dumplings.

First of all, you need some head space to weigh your zongzi down. Any dumplings that aren’t submerged gets steamed instead of boiled, and don’t get nearly enough heat to cook the glutinous rice properly. A plate works just fine, but anything that is heat resistant will also serve the same purpose.

Leaving some head space also ensures you against the risk of the pot boiling over, which is an inconvenience that is magnified in scale by the quantity that you’re dealing with. In short, bigger pot = bigger mess.

8. Anticipate downtime

There will be times where you want to take a break from the task of wrapping dumpling after dumpling. You’ll also have plenty of downtime in between finishing the last of the wrapping, and the first batch being ready to eat.

For example, we began wrapping at about 10am. The first pot got put over the heat at 10:30, and took half an hour to come up to a boil. It then took 2 hours to be ready, which means lunch at 1pm. But we were done making all the dumplings by 11:30, which left us with a good hour after cleaning up.

That wasn’t a problem for us. Sitting around the table and shooting the breeze is a fine way to spend an hour. But it wouldn’t hurt to have snacks and some other activities to pass the time, especially if you’re going to boil more than one batch.

9. Save the cleanup for last

As I mentioned in #2 above, your hands are gonna get dirty making zongzi. The same also holds true for the table and the floor, as you inevitably drop stuff, snip off extra leaves and twine, and so on.

Don’t worry about it, embrace the process! Get all the dumplings wrapped and into the pot, then take your time cleaning up the mess all at once.

10. Practice makes perfect

Like my grandma says, a zongzi is good enough if it doesn’t break apart during cooking. While we all know how pretty food tastes better, once these dumplings make it into your mouth any aesthetic concerns will soon give way to gustatory pleasure.

Let me normalise misshapen and ugly-looking zongzi. I have only been at this for 4 or 5 years. I might be at 100 zongzi all-time, if that. And I’m improving very quickly, so much that it’s evident within the same morning.

Here is the first and second zongzi I made that day, next to the third one on the right. It’s the same one you see in #5 where I discuss finger-side bias. Check out how the points become increasingly well-centered with trial and error. Now that I’ve figured that out, next year I’ll work on forming a square base. Maybe the year after that, I’ll refine how much tension I use to tie the dumplings up.

Another shot for comparison. Here’s my second and third zongzi of the day, and my grandma’s on the right. She has been making something like a hundred zongzi every year, for more than half a century. So, thousands of dumplings under her belt. Look at how seamless and crease-free her dumpling is compared to mine.

Finger-side bias is my dragon to slay. Your problem might be something else, but the approach is the same. By paying attention to the process, making thought-out adjustments and making notes on the improvements, you will inevitably get better over time.

The best way to get better at making zongzi is to get started, and even if you mess up your mistakes will still be delicious. So go back to the recipe, make a shopping list, get some friends and family together and throw yourself a dumpling party!

Keep browsing by categories, or by tags: