Yellow Millet Steamed Buns

Yellow Millet Steamed Buns

　　Yellow Millet Steamed Buns are a type of festive food eaten by people in Yanchuan during the New Year.

As the Lunar New Year approaches, families take out one or two dou of freshly milled yellow millet, soak it in clean water overnight, and the next day when the sun is out, they take the millet that has been drained for about an hour and grind it repeatedly into yellow millet flour on a large millstone. Then they add the very crucial “old starter dough,” wrap it up well in quilts on a very hot heated bed, and let it ferment overnight. By the next morning, when the rooster crows, it’s time to steam the Yellow Millet Steamed Buns.

Steaming Yellow Millet Steamed Buns is truly a tense and labor-intensive task.

There are two types of Yellow Millet Steamed Buns: those without fillings (known as “hanzi”) and those with fillings.

The filling for Yellow Millet Steamed Buns is also quite special. Its basic ingredients are cowpeas and red dates. Cooked cowpeas and red dates are mashed together forcefully to create a bean-date paste, which becomes the filling. Buns with more dates are sweeter, while those with fewer dates are less sweet.

The Yellow Millet Steamed Buns without fillings are the easiest to steam. Just pinch off a piece of the yellow millet dough, roll it into a round ball, and place it in a circle in a pot of steaming hot water. In about ten minutes, they’re ready. The buns with fillings are a bit more complicated to prepare: you first need to make a dough skin, then wrap a small lump of the date paste filling inside before putting them into the pot to steam. Once steamed, they are ready to eat.