Ultimate Guide to Joong (+ Visual Shopping Guide)

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My parents emigrated from Hong Kong to the lower east side of Manhattan in the late 60’s/early 70’s. My dad came by himself to pursue higher education, but my mom arrived as a teenager with her entire family of 8. The pair met while volunteering in New York’s Chinatown and eventually got married. When my dad’s job took him to Southern California, my mom’s siblings had put down their own roots so everyone stayed on the east coast.

My Popo, or maternal grandmother, still lives in Jackson Heights, Queens and out of my entire family, maternal and paternal, she has always been the cook of the family. My mom and her sisters joke that because my grandma was so insistent about her own kids getting a good education (she was unfortunately barred from learning past elementary school due to her status in her village), she sacrificed on her daughters becoming good homemakers.

And while it’s largely a joke…it’s also kind of true. While my mom has the ability to cook, she doesn’t enjoy it at all and I would say she’s pretty good, but keeps it very very simple. My Popo on the other hand would make more of the traditional Cantonese dishes that take time and energy to create, especially for such a large family, things like ham sui gok (fried chewy pork dumplings), lo bak go (steamed and fried turnip cakes), and, most nostalgic for me, joong (“sticky rice dumplings” — also called zongzi in Mandarin).

The name “sticky rice dumpling” is a bad translation, in my opinion, because these are nothing like the potstickers or gyoza you’re probably familiar with. Instead, joong, which are traditionally eaten during the Dragon Boat Festival each year around the start of summer, are more akin to tamales, which they are also sometimes compared to. Unlike tamales, joong feature fillings that vary regionally, encased in seasoned sticky rice, wrapped up delicately in bamboo leaves and boiled for hours.

For pretty much my entire life my Popo was the only one who would make these labor intensive bundles. None of my aunts or uncle really learned how. When we’d visit New York each summer, she’d preemptively cook and then freeze the joong so we could cram them into our luggage (sometimes my mom would bring an entire empty suitcase for this purpose) and bring them back to LA with us.

As I started to cook more and more complex dishes, which were often western focused at the time, I had a (kind of dumb) epiphany that I could make Cantonese dishes that seemed unapproachable, too. The first one I wanted to tackle was joong because it always felt so out of reach and special.

When my sister got married, my Popo and cousins flew out to California — a rare treat — and I requested that she teach us how to make joong finally. She was overjoyed — I sometimes wonder if she just never realized she could teach us, or maybe she thought no one wanted to learn, but whatever the case she was really eager. The joke in the family now is that I picked up joong making the fastest, and I’m now the best in the family besides her, of course. There’s a certain amount of stress and pressure that comes with feeling like you’re now the torchbearer for a family tradition though. I often find myself wavering between wanting to perfectly preserve my grandma’s version of the recipe (she uses super lean pork that almost takes on a jerky-like quality, for example) and wanting to morph the dish to fit my own preferences (making the joong with pork belly lends a nice fattiness to the rice and other ingredients, in my opinion). I usually end up doing both.

Joong is a special dish that takes a lot of time and energy but actually isn’t all that complicated. This guide will hopefully give you the confidence to try making these for yourself!

Shopping List / Ingredients

Pretty much all of the ingredients listed here can be found at a Chinese supermarket or well stocked Asian market, but even if you live in a particularly Asian area, stores can sometimes stock these ingredients seasonally. The holiday for eating these roughly aligns with early summer, so that’s when you’re most likely to find everything on this list. Otherwise, you may need to do some online sleuthing with sites like Yami Buy, Weee, or Amazon to round out your shopping list.

Keep in mind that this list of ingredients is mostly relevant to Cantonese or southern Chinese style joong, since that’s where my family’s from. Joong ingredients vary a ton regionally, and this doesn’t even include sweet dessert joong (not my favorite but I may do a separate post on that). Most of the filling ingredients are therefore optional, so feel free to omit what doesn’t suit you! For example, I’m not a big fan of peanuts but my grandma loves including them, so I left them on this list.

Dried Bamboo Leaves

These can be found in the dried goods aisle, usually along with the mushrooms and mung beans found on this list. For some reason (probably due to their clunky packaging) they’re often found on the bottom shelf of the grocery rack or on an end cap at the end of the aisle, so don’t get discouraged if you don’t find them right away. I always look for leaves that are as wide as possible and without any super visible holes or a ton of shredding. One package of these goes a long way, but they also keep for a very long time so it probably doesn’t hurt to get an extra, especially when you’re first learning.

Short Grain Sweet Rice (or Glutinous Rice)

This can be found, unsurprisingly, in the rice aisle. This is the rice that they grind up to make mochi powder and is pretty different than standard white rice — it’s much stickier (and not actually sweet on its own, so I’m not sure why it’s called that). There are long grained versions of sticky rice (this is what is used in mango sticky rice), but you’ll want to opt for short or medium grained for this recipe. The brand doesn’t matter too much but I usually go with Apple because that’s what my grandma told me to get, and it’s readily available.

Make sure you season your rice with salt (my grandma’s preference), soy sauce, or a combination of the two to ensure your final joong aren’t overly bland.

Marinated Raw Pork

You can choose a cut based on your preferences: either a lean cut for a firmer bite of meat (again, kind of like a jerky) or a fatty cut like pork belly for a more tender bite. Both cuts are used commonly in China, so it’s really up to your tastes.

This pork gets sliced into small pieces and marinated in a mixture of soy sauce, oyster sauce, cooking wine, corn starch, five spice (not traditional in my family but found elsewhere throughout China), and sugar, and white pepper.

Dried Shiitake Mushrooms

Shiitake mushrooms can be food in the dried foods aisle with the bamboo leaves and mung beans. The price of dried shiitakes can vary wildly depending on quality, with large mushrooms being the most expensive. For this recipe I typically opt for the smaller mushrooms because I’m frugal and I don’t find including larger sliced mushrooms makes much of a difference.

Dried Split Mung Beans

Mung beans are hands down my favorite filling ingredient, and when I’m lucky, my grandma will add extra to my joong. These can be found in the dried goods aisle alongside the mushrooms and bamboo leaves. Make sure that you’re getting the yellow split mung beans, and not the green ones, which are the same legume that just haven’t been shelled.

If there happen to be multiple options available (there often aren’t), I usually check the ingredients list and opt for the one that doesn’t have yellow dye in it, which manufacturers sometimes include to make the beans look more appealing on the shelf. I’m not someone who avoids the stuff at all costs, but if there’s a dye-free version, why not?

These are also commonly found at Korean markets.

Salted Egg Yolks

Salted egg yolks can be found in the refrigerated section near the regular eggs. These are duck egg yolks, usually, though my grandma makes these from scratch with chicken eggs, too. Salted duck eggs take a few forms — there are raw salted duck eggs, cooked salted duck eggs, and finally cooked salted duck egg yolks. While you could probably technically use the former two, I highly recommend looking for the latter, which will come vacuum sealed and looking like glowing orange orbs.

Chinese Sausage

Also called lap cheong, this is a mandatory ingredient if you’re a meat eater because it adds so much depth and dimension. I actually kind of hated this sausage when I was a kid and would eat around it in the joong but now it’s one of my favorite parts. Even if you don’t eat it directly, as the joong cook, the sausage fat and flavor will spread to the other parts of the joong and provide some seasoning.

These can be found in the refrigerated section, usually near other sausages, and sometimes near the tofu or fresh noodles.

Roasted Peeled Chestnuts

These are not only a delicious and healthy snack, but also add a lovely nutty sweetness to the joong. I suppose you could roast your own if you were feeling really extra, but the ones that you get at the store (near the nuts, usually) come peeled and ready to go. They also somewhat recently started selling packs of these at Costco and I grab a box almost every time I go.

Peanuts

As mentioned, these are not my favorite ingredient when it comes to joong, but it’s one that my Popo always includes — that is, except when she’s making them for me. If you omit peanuts, like I often do, you can add a little more mung bean, which happens to be my favorite part of the whole thing.

Large Aluminum Foil Tray

You’ll need a large dish or pan of some sort to soak your bamboo leaves, which can be up to 2′ long. I use a big plastic wash basin/tub I have from the Asian market, but you can also use a foil roasting pan if you don’t have a basin or very large basin.

Preparation and Folding

Soaking Your Ingredients

It’s really important to soak your dry ingredients to ensure your joong come out with the right texture. Some recommend soaking everything overnight, but the way my grandma does it is like this: she soaks only the bamboo leaves overnight in a big container, and everything else she soaks first thing in the morning and lets it sit for 2-3 hours. I’m not sure how big of a difference this makes, but I do it because she does.

Filling and Folding

As far as I’m aware, there are two main ways to fold joong, though based on the popularity of the dish and how widespread it is, I’m sure there are others. The two most popular, though, are what I call the tetrahedron and the pyramid. I don’t know if it’s actually a tetrahedron (it’s been a long time since I took geometry) but that’s what it reminds me of: a hard-to-describe shape that looks rectangular from some angles and triangular from others. This is the one that my Popo makes.

The other, the pyramid, is harder in my opinion, but that might just be because it’s the one I’m less familiar with. I have tried to learn this style a few times but I’ve failed each time and haven’t cared much to try again, mostly because I prefer the other shape for nostalgia’s sake anyway.

Folding isn’t too tricky but definitely requires practice, especially when it comes to managing where to hold the cone of leaves, how much to fill it, and how tightly to tie everything. I still usually have a couple joong out of the batch that will spring a leak during cooking which means I’m not at the level of my grandma yet. For what it’s worth, they still taste good even when they leak.

When in doubt, opt for under-filling versus over-filling your joong. Note that the rice will expand quite a bit, so it doesn’t necessarily need to cover every single bit of the fillings (though it should cover most).

When folding joong it makes a big difference to set up a tying station ahead of time. Trust me, once you start folding you’ll be a mess so you definitely want to think ahead. I usually put a baking sheet underneath an overhead cabinet that has a little bit of wiggle room on either side. Then, I measure out a bunch of twine into individual pieces, about 2′-3′ long each, and then bundle them together and loosely but securely tie them to the cabinet pull. If you were ever into making friendship bracelets as a kid, this is similar: you want one end to be tied to something stable (the cabinet) so that you can maneuver and tie off the rest of it with 2 hands.

It’s hard to capture good photos of this process so I recommend watching my YouTube video to see how it’s done!

Cooking

On the Stove

One of the worst parts of making joong is that if you do it the “proper” way, you’ll need to boil a massive pot of water on your stove in what is usually the first heat wave of the year. The stove method is what I usually follow and is best if you’re going to be making a big batch of joong to give away, but you really need a huge pot for this. I use my big canning pot, which works well.

Instant Pot

Otherwise, you can use your Instant Pot or other pressure cooker to shorten the cook time a little bit and hopefully keep your kitchen a little bit cooler.

In any case, you’ll want to try to keep your rice bundles submerged, so don’t be afraid to use a dinner plate or slightly smaller pot lid (as long as it’s not made of plastic) to weigh everything down.