Jiufeng Red Rice Cake

Jiufeng Red Rice Cake

　　Red rice cake is an essential festive delicacy for the people of Jiufeng in Pinghe. According to local custom, families always make red rice cakes during holidays and festivals, and after making them, they place them in front of ancestral altars and shrines to deities for worship. This is because the people of Jiufeng believe that the color red symbolizes good fortune and prosperity, and since the fermented rice cake requires fermentation in the making process, it carries the auspicious meaning of "prosperity" or "growth."

　　The ingredients for red rice cake consist of an outer layer made from glutinous rice flour mixed with rice noodles or wheat noodles, or sweet potato, along with red yeast rice for coloring, all kneaded into a dough. Using only glutinous rice flour to make the dough won’t work, as it’s too soft and the resulting red rice cake will not be firm enough. There are mainly two types of fillings for red rice cake: one is sticky rice, and the other is red bean paste.

　　The steamed sticky rice is stir-fried with ingredients such as shiitake mushrooms, dried shrimp, lean pork, and Chinese sausage to make a fragrant sticky rice filling. A thin piece of red rice cake dough is flattened, a spoonful of sticky rice mixture is added, then wrapped and tightly sealed before being pressed and molded in a red rice cake mold. Once the mold is opened, a disc-shaped red rice cake is formed. The process for making red bean paste filling is similar, but there are two types of red bean paste: one is made from red beans. The beans are soaked in water until their skins can be removed, then pounded into a paste in a stone mortar, or directly ground into powder and mixed with sugar to form the paste; the other is peanut filling. Roasted peanuts are shelled, crushed in a stone mortar, and then mixed with white sugar to create the filling.