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Preparation
20 minutes
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Processing
1 hour 30 minutes
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Difficulty
Medium
Rice wine is one of the specialty dishes during the Tet holiday of the Vietnamese people. Especially, this dish is very popular and seems indispensable during the Duan Ngo festival. Let’s get cooking with Tastetutorial.com to make delicious sticky rice wine to treat the whole family!
Ingredients for Northern Sticky Rice Wine Serves 3
Sticky rice 500 gr (black sticky rice or brown sticky rice) Rice wine yeast 6 gr Water 500 ml Salt 1 teaspoon
What is Rice Wine?
Rice wine (or sticky rice wine) is a type of alcoholic beverage/food that is not distilled, made from sticky rice by cooking it into glutinous rice, cooling it down, and fermenting it with yeast.
This is a specialty dish during the Vietnamese holidays, passed down by ancestors with unique flavors characteristic of each region.
Rice wine is popular and seemingly indispensable during the Duan Ngo festival (insect-killing festival), and also appears on the altar during New Year’s Eve, during the Lunar New Year days.
How to prepare Northern sticky rice wine
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Prepare the sticky rice
First, rinse the sticky rice thoroughly. Next, soak the sticky rice in cold water for about 4 – 6 hours. After that, drain the sticky rice and rinse it again with cold water, then pour the rice onto a rack to let it dry and start cooking.
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Making Sticky Rice
Mix the sticky rice with a small pinch of salt before cooking it.
You can use various methods to cook sticky rice, here are 3 methods:
- Method 1: Use a steamer: Simply add water to the bottom of the pot, bring it to a boil, then pour the rice into the top tier, and steam for about 30 minutes until cooked. The steam will cook the rice evenly without worrying about it being dry or mushy.
- Method 2: Cook sticky rice like regular rice. Pour the rice into a rice cooker, add filtered water, ensuring the water level is about half a finger above the rice, and start cooking until the rice is done.
- Method 3: Cook using a pot as people used to do in the old days over a wood fire. The process is similar to cooking in a rice cooker, but you need to pay attention to the flame level, and when the rice boils, you need to stir it well to prevent it from sticking to the pot or burning.
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Grinding the yeast
After the sticky rice is cooked, spread it evenly on a plate or on a tray to let it cool down. Once the rice cools down a bit and is still slightly warm, you can start mixing the rice with the yeast.
While waiting for the rice to cool, you can begin to grind the yeast. When buying yeast at the market, it usually comes in solid form, so you need to grind it finely and sift the yeast powder through a sieve to make it smooth.
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Mixing sticky rice with yeast
Add the rice and yeast and mix them well together. You can mix with a spoon or, preferably, wear gloves for the best mixing.
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Put the rice wine into the jar
Put the rice mixed with yeast into the prepared jar, pressing the rice down a bit (not too tightly, to allow air for the yeast to work).
Finally, close the jar and let it ferment for about 3 – 5 days.
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Final product
The sticky rice wine is successful when you see liquid oozing out of the rice, with a slight yeast taste, the spiciness of the alcohol, and the sweetness of the syrup and sticky rice.
It’s very easy to have a delicious sticky rice wine recipe at home, isn’t it? Wish you success!
Tips for making delicious fermented rice
- The longer the fermented rice is left, the spicier and more flavorful it will become. Therefore, if you don’t want the rice to ferment too much, after it has fermented to your liking, you should store it in the refrigerator and wait until the Đoan Ngọ Festival to enjoy it.
- You can use various types of sticky rice: regular white sticky rice, black sticky rice, etc., but to make it delicious and traditional like in the old days, you should choose brown rice. This type of rice is only husked and not polished, so it doesn’t have a pure white color but rather a slightly yellowish hue. At the same time, this rice is also very nutritious and good for human health.
- The ferment for the rice wine is actually wine yeast, which you can entirely purchase from the market in the usual dry food stalls.
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Let’s enjoy the important moments under the beloved roof with family around the reunion feast on the Đoan Ngọ festival with this super easy-to-make sticky rice wine dish, everyone.
