Ant egg cake is made from glutinous rice flour, ant eggs, and the young leaves of the fig tree. Every year at the beginning of summer, the Tay ethnic people in Cao Bang province go to the forest to find black ant eggs to make cakes.
Ant egg cake is one of the unique cakes of the Tay people, in the northeastern mountains of our country, in Bac Kan and Cao Bang. The main ingredient to make this cake is ant eggs. This type of cake is usually only made at a certain time at the end of April and May every year because this is the strongest growth time of forest black ants.
After being washed, put in a frying pan with ground pork, dry onions, crushed roasted peanuts and a few finely chopped palanquin leaves. In particular, the leaves to wrap ant egg cakes are not banana leaves, dong leaves like many other cakes, but use young fig leaves to wrap. When eating, the user eats fig leaves.
To make a delicious ant cake must go through many stages. The cake is made from upland sticky rice, cleaned and soaked in cold water overnight, then drained, ground into powder and kneaded with water.
After kneading until the dough is very flexible and smooth, the glutinous rice flour will be rolled into a half-inch thin layer, the size of a square about the size of a hand, then put that piece of glutinous rice into a fig leaf, sprinkled with the filling on top of the dough.
Finally, put the next piece of fig leaf on the surface of that cake, wrap the leaves so that the cake and the filling are completely wrapped without being exposed to the outside. The cake is steamed about 45 to 50 minutes before it is cooked.
The cake when eaten will be cut into small square pieces displayed on a very eye-catching plate. Diners will see the greasy taste of the filling combined with the soft dough. Especially, this cake will be eaten with fig leaves to have more heat-clearing, liver-cooling effects, very good for health.
To get young ant eggs, people have to go to the forest to find nests of good ants such as black ants with small bodies, sharp tails, often nesting on trees such as bamboo or gloves. Ant eggs are usually as big as a grain of rice, milky white in color, thin and round.
If you have the opportunity to come to Cao Bang as well as the Northeastern mountains of our country, do not forget to enjoy this unique cake and buy it as a gift for relatives and friends to enjoy.
Currently, in Hanoi, cakes are also sold by some sellers for 10,000 VND to 20,000 VND / piece, depending on the size of the cake and the number of cakes ordered. Follow Dân trí