Pork Zong-Zi (肉粽子)

Zong-zi is a special food for “Dragon boat festival”. Zong-zi is like dumplings, you can put variety of things inside, you can make it sweet or salty. Our favorite is the meaty one. We make them throughout the year for snacking or quick meal.

Ingredients

Glutinous rice (sweet rice) - 5 lb, soak in water for 2-4 hours

Dry shiitake mushroom - 5 oz, soak in cold water for 20 minutes or more, keep the soaked water

Bamboo leaves - 10 oz soak in water overnight, clean and trim the stem end of the leaves.

Pork belly with no skin - 2 pounds
Shallot - 1/2 lb or more
In a typical Chinese cooking fashion, the following ingredients are all depends on how salty and strong flavor you want, there is really no right or wrong combination.

Soy sauce 

Dark soy sauce

Salt

Sugar 

Five spice powder

Bay leave

Garlic

Ginger

Star anise

Steps

1. Preparation is important. The night before, soak the rice, mushroom, bamboo leave. Cut the pork belly in small pieces, marinate with soy sauce, dark soy sauce, sugar and salt overnight.

2. In a cooking pan, add oil and diced shallot, brown the shallots. Be generous with shallots because it add good fragrance. Put browned shallots on the side.

3. With low heat, add oil, garlic, ginger, bay leave, star anise in a cooking pan, saute until brown; pick out the browned spices, add mushroom and pork in the pan to saute until half cooked. Then mix in the cooked shallot. 

4. Take out the meat and leave all sauce in the cookie pan, add glutinous rice (drained), saute the rice for a minute so that sauce is absorbed by the rice. If there is not enough sauce or saltiness , add more soy sauce and five spice powder.
5. Wrapping the rice and meat into triangle shape and tie with cotton string. Make sure the rice is well covered before you cook it. There are many YouTube video on how to wrap Zong-zi.

5. Put Zong-zi in the Instant-pot or other pressure cooker, add the mushroom soak water, some soy sauce and salt, then add water to make sure all Zong-zi is covered. Cook at high pressure for 1 hour.