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Young sticky-rice flake – a specialty of Hanoi autumn
Autumn comes bringing about so many wonderful things to the beautiful capital city – Hanoi. If you visit the city this time, you will have an ample chance to enjoy its creative and scrumptious cuisine. How about spending a day visiting the place making one of the most famous cuisine in Hanoi – Vong Village. Now, let’s discover the making of young sticky-rice flake with GoAsiaDayTrip:
1. What is young sticky-rice flake?
Wandering around the small and winding streets of Hanoi these days, you can easily encounter many vendors selling something wrapped carefully in lotus leaves when handing to customers. You may wonder which kind of food is it. What is that lightly green flake? And here it is – young sticky-rice flake.
Young sticky-rice flake is a fine product making from young sticky rice grown in Vong Village. From the end of September, the villagers will cultivate their rice to prepare for making young sticky-rice flake. Its green color is the natural color of young sticky rice when cultivated from the village fields.
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2. Where is Vong Village?
So you may ask, where is it food made? The answer is young sticky-rice flake is produced in Vong Village which is now in Dich Vong Hau Ward, Cau Giay District, about 10 km from the city center. The village seems to wear a new coat with a new village gate, new road leading to the village center, with new higher houses.
The name of the village has its own uniqueness as well. According to the elderly people in the village, a long time ago, when they divided the area of Vong Village, it is the main feature of the village with only a round road, meaning you can visit the whole village by simply going around that round road. If you go out of that circle road, you will go into the area of different villages.
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3. How do villagers in Vong Village make young sticky-rice flake?
The main ingredient to make young sticky-rice flake is the young sticky rice cultivated from the village fields. Let’s see how the yummy food is made:
First, people will separate the pluck grains from the rice plants. Then, they will scatter them in a yard for a few days to make it dry. After that, the unhusked rice will be washed and prepared to be roasted. The villagers share, in the peak season when there is a huge demand for rice flakes, they need to get up from 4 AM to produce the product and the whole family will join hands.
The rice is then roasted over a small fire and stirred constantly to make it cooked well. When the green grains become white and release fragrance and easy to be husked, then they will stop roasting. And the rice is now ready for pounding process. In the last process, people will sift the pounded rice. To have the finished product, people need to sift it for three times.
Then, the young sticky-rice flakes are wrapped in lotus leaves to keep their fragrance and softness. The food is then sold at about 160,000 – 180,000 VND.
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4. How does the young sticky-rice flake taste?
You may now be curious of how it tastes right? When tasting the young sticky-rice flakes, you will first smell its unique and sweet fragrance of young sticky rice seemingly like they are just cultivated from the rice fields. Then chewing it, the kinda buttery taste comes to your mouth and the more you chew it the sweeter feeling stays in your mouth.
You can enjoy the young sticky-rice flakes with banana. The great collective flavor surely induces you to try for more.
Because the makers normally don’t use preservatives in their product, so it is better that we consume the young sticky-rice during the day. In order to bring more choices for eaters, the makers also produce another product from the young sticky-rice called sticky-rice cakes. The cake has a green and glutinous wrapper filled with milled sweet and peas and some coconut. It is the young sticky-rice flakes and cakes that have helped the villagers in Vong Village to earn their living.
Vietnam is well-known for its wet-rice civilization which becomes an inseparable part of the country culture. Viet people are also creative enough to lift up this culture to a new height with the creation of vast collections of food made from rice. Remember to try out this boldly cultural beauty of Vietnam – the young sticky-rice flake when in Hanoi in autumn. For more interesting facts about Hanoi, consider some of our related articles below:
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