stir fried sticky rice cake 炒年糕 - part 1

This is a difficult dish to make. Stir fried sticky rice cake 炒年糕 (lian gao) is a stir fry dish with glutinous rice cake, which is also called lian geo (年糕), meaning new year cake. It is a dish enjoyed during Lunar New Year holiday. I have write a post a few years ago on Stir fried sticky rice cake 炒年糕 (lian gao) a few years ago.

The challenges of making this dish is due to the sticky nature of glutinous rice. The slices have the tendency to stick together and turn into unmanageable globs when you try to stir fly them. They also tend to stick to the wok. Because of this inexperienced cooks tend to use too much oil.

glutenous rice stick (call year cake 年糕) sold in a Shanghainese grocery store in Hong Kong

glutenous rice stick (call year cake 年糕) sold in the store front of a Shanghainese restaurant in Hong Kong

Just about any ingredients that you would make a stir fry dish may be used with stir fried rice cake. However the difficult is moisture control, as well as cooking each ingredient to the right doneness without over or under cooking it. If you start the rice cake "raw" and cold they take a while to heat up as well as the need to absorb liquid to get to just the right toothsome doneness.

If you try precook the rice cake slices by themselves they will tend to stick together into a sticky mess. They will stick tenaciously even to non-stick pans. What really helps is to select a vegetable like cabbage to fry with them. The cabbage will release the liquid needed to cook the rice cake slice, as well as help separate the slices.

None of the ingredients I use for this dish was premeditated. They all happen to be what I have in the refrigerator and freezer, so the recipe is an improvisation as with most of my cooking.

Ingredients:

• glutinous rice cake slices
• Taiwanese cabbage
• marinated beef slices
• Gulf shrimps cubed
• sea scallop cubed
• ginger julienned
• garlic
• black pepper
• sweet mini peppers
• Serrano peppers
• Asian basil
• fish sauce
• shiitake mushroom slices
• soy sauce
• oyster sauce
• cooking oil (I used coconut oil this time)  

it is too easy to use too little cabbage which I did as they shrink a lot

it is delicious and I had two servings of this

With the leftover rather than just heat some up in the microwave I took the opportunity to add a lot of cabbage and mini sweet peppers. I fried the cabbage lightly than poured in all the leftover into the wok. This refrying warms up the whole batch as if it is just freshly made. I also added some more seasoning to compensate for the additional vegetable.

you can see the appearance improved significantly with more cabbage and red peppers

Glutinous rice cake is quite dense so you get full with just a small serving. The entire batch I made is enough to serve three to four.