Ann and I went over to my mom’s place for lunch yesterday. As usual the table was filled with dishes from the best restaurant in town, which open only on weekends and public holidays. Mom’s cooking :). My mom had a project planned for the afternoon, making “chai kuih”. Wah… My favorite! Had been since when I was still a little boy. Before this my grandma made it, so today we tried our hands at making the traditional teochew chai kuih.
After lunch, we started by making the dough for the kuih. The ingredients for the dough are rice flour and warm water. When mixing the flour with warm water the mix clumped up and can be very sticky so it needed a lot of elbow grease to stir them. We had to keep kneading nonstop. When all the flour had dissolved, we transferred the sticky dough to a table surface to stretch it.
While stretching the dough, add some ordinary flour, some water and oil. It was hard to stretch the dough as it was still very hot. Me and my mom took turns to wrestle the dough till it was silky smooth. The dough was set to rest, while we made the fillings for the kuih. This teochew chai kuih is filled with Chinese chives (“Ku Chai” teochew name).

The chives were chopped up and mixed with cooking oil, liquid baking soda and salt to taste. It is a good idea to add more oil and salt as chives need them to taste nice. Ok, now is the “fun” part, I get to play with my food.
I took some dough about half the size of a ping pong ball and flattened it. I got it as flat as I could, preparing it for the filling. Here is the tricky bit, to seal the dough. Having no idea I just simply wrapped it up. Guess what? Ann was laughing her head off when she saw it. She said it looked like a caterpillar. I think it looked more like a bug. *lol*
Ann tried her hand at wrapping one, but guess what, it looked like a dumpling with holes. It was uglier than mine! Karma can be funny that way.
Sorry, no photo to show and no evidence also because she ate her creation after it was cooked. I think she wanted to bury the evidence. After all the wrapping, it was time to put all the kuih into a steamer and steam it. I asked mom, how to tell if it is cooked? She replied grandma said cook till you can smell something. Arr?! Smell something? Like what, burnt smell?? Haha… and we joked about what if no smell, how? I think it took about 15min to cook. Moment of truth came, mom transferred the still-hot dumplings onto plates and I chucked one into my mouth. Mmmmm….. tasted so good, like how grandma made it. Success!!