HANOI – In the 8th lunar month is also the time when people in Me Tri village, Nam Tu Liem district, are busy making nuggets.
These days, people in Me Tri ward harvest rice early in the morning to make nuggets. Rice from sowing to harvest about 90-100 days, is cut when there is still dew, creating the sweet and aromatic taste of the nuggets.
The rice for making nuggets is the yellow-flowered sticky rice, people click on the grain to check if it shoots out white milk, it will be harvested quickly; for more than 1-2 days will be old.
In the past, Me Tri people usually only made one rice crop a year in the 8th lunar month, now due to good conditions and water sources, they can grow one more crop (May).
Nguyen Thi Luoc’s family’s nuggets factory has dozens of elderly people who come to sort leaves and flowers. They were all once making nuggets, but because they had no fields, they could not follow the profession.
Each person sitting for 4 hours in the morning can collect from 20 to 30 kg of rice.
After removing the leaves, the worker threshed the grain by machine, the rice stem is used as a broom.
Ms. Luoc (68 years old) washes the rice seeds and filters out the flat seeds. The berries will sink under the sink.
Young rice grains are roasted by firewood to easily control temperature and plasticity.
Each batch roasts continuously for 2-3 hours. The roaster must constantly test the plasticity by squeezing the beans.
The rice grain is put into the press, pounded and filtered. If in the past a healthy person could only pound 10 kg of nuggets a day, now machines can pound hundreds of kg depending on the amount of rice harvested in the day.
“With 56 years of experience in the profession, I think August’s nuggets are the best because the weather is dry, the morning dew is cold, making the nuggets sweet and fragrant,” said Ms. Luoc. Her family has four generations of making nuggets.
Ms. Luoc sat to pack the nuggets and sold them at home for 150,000 VND/kg.
From the age of 12, Ms. Luoc followed her mother to sell nuggets around the streets of Hanoi. “Now that I’m old, I can’t carry goods to sell, but only wholesale and sell to acquaintances,” she said.
Me Tri com has a sweet, aromatic, and flexible taste. Hanoians consider Com as a gift of autumn, which can be eaten with bananas, persimmons or processed into many dishes such as tea, rolls, sticky rice, wine… Follow vnexpress