Making Abacus Seeds or Suan Pan Zi

Eversince I’ve had that overpriced hakka dish, Suan Pan Zi or Abacus Seeds at The Curve, I’ve vowed to make them myself one day. That was a year, maybe two ago.

Making tong yuen was actually a sort of warm up exercise to revive my dormant cooking l33t skills. And after the 1st two failures in making tong yuen, I thought Suan Pan Zi was never going to happen. At last, I did manage to make them, so my confidence came back.

Making Suan Pan Zi was the single hardest, most painful thing I’ve ever done in the kitchen. It didn’t help that my boyfriend’s kitchen is as bare as bare goes. I should have bought a motherf**cking kitchen mixer before I embarked on this, cause using my bare hands was FRUSTRATING. Those online recipes made it sound sooooooooo easy but it’s all a LIE.

Anyway, here are the instructions on how to make Suan Pan Zi or what I like to call Journey to the World of Pain. You need dried shrimps, minced pork, yam, tapioca flour, cloud ear/black fungus, salt, pepper, minced garlic and oyster sauce

No sizes or measurement again because I keep it real like that. Which also meant I ended up with more than 3 extra portions :P

#1 – Dried shrimps

Wash and soak em.

#2 – Yam

Peel, wash and slice em thinly.

#3 – Tapioca starch.

Don’t buy the wrong flour!

#4 – Cloud ear/black fungus.

Wash and soak in water till soft. Then julienne.

Now on to how I made the dish…

#5 – Boil the yam.

Throw the sliced yam into a pot and fill it with water to just cover the yam. Boil!

#6 – Mash the yam.

When the yam’s gone soft and mushy, mash the bugger…water and all. Your goal is to get a watery mush. Not water. So pour away the water if it seemed too much.

#7 – Add the tapioca flour into the mush.

The recipe said that you should add the yam mush into the tapioca flour, but obviously I had to go against instructions.

And this is the beginning of the hardest part..you have to mix in the tapioca flour into yam mush and you need a kitchen mixer to do that. If you don’t have one like me, you absolutely must have some semblance of muscle tissue in your arms and here goes, ASBESTOS HANDS. Shit is f**king hot!

Recipe said wait for mixture to cool down for 5 minutes before shaping them into abacus seeds but it lied! It didn’t cool down after 5 minute, more like 35 minutes -_- So you use a wooden spoon like I did, please.

Mix in tapioca flour handful by handful till a malleable dough is formed.

#8 – Malleable dough.

Truth is, the dough never stopped getting sticky so I found working it in the tapioca flour itself was so much easier. Don’t worry about the excess flour on the outside.

#9 – Now shape em buggers.

Shape into a ball, then press the middle down flat.

#10 – Boil em buggers.

As usual, boil in water till floatation occurs, and you get abacus seeds!

Remove the abacus seeds from the water…put them somewhere to drain. Now start up the wok, fry some garlic, whack in the dried shrimps…

Oh shit, I FORGOT the minced bloody pork.

Yeah, so I had to switch off the stove and then started to mince the pork, REALLY QUICKLY. Then added some pepper to flavour, switched on the stove again…let the shrimp and garlic sizzled again and threw in the pork. Yeah.

When minced pork is not so pink anymore, add in the julienne cloud ear fungus. Fry a bit more, then throw in all the drained abacus seeds. Mix em in till the abacus seeds separate from each other.

Add salt, pepper and oyster sauce.

Voila..

#10 – Suan Pan Zi

Behold, my first attempt at making Suan Pan Zi or Abacus Seeds.

#11 – Eat your vegetables.

Don’t forget your greens. I fried up some yau mak in fermented tofu to balance the carbs out.

May I say so myself, my Suan Pan Zi was damn good. Sticky, crispy and flavourful. Better than the one served at The Curve. But yeah, it was bloody hard to make. I was thankful it turned out well otherwise I would cry. I really would.

My hand is still hurting…but it’s worth it. You’re worth it.