I was Googling shrimp skin or dried shrimp skin, then my old blog post for cabbage and dried shrimp rice back in 2012 popped up as the first search result. Can you believe it? That was a long long time ago! I checked on the older post content and the ingredients used are almost identical to the recipe I'm about to write here. Well, it's a family recipe learnt from Mama Yu, of course the ingredients should be the same. Nearly 10 years after, let's call this current blog post an upgrade with hopefully better images for the cabbage rice.
Mama Yu's cabbage rice 余媽媽高麗菜飯 -
Ingredients (about 6 portions)?
- 3 rice measuring cups uncooked short grain white rice
- 1 regular measuring cup dried shrimp skin 蝦皮
- 1 small box/0.7 lb ground pork
- 1/2 medium small cabbage
- 1 tablespoon soy sauce
- Some black pepper
- Some olive oil or preferred cooking oil
How?
Take the cabbage, we are going to use the leafy part only. Omit the tougher stems, which can be finely chopped and make a stir-fry for another dish. As for the leaves, tear by hand to large bite size pieces. Rinse and dry well, perhaps with the help of paper towel.
Rinse and soak the rice grains for 10 minutes. Drain out the water.
Take a big pan or a wok, drizzle at least enough oil to coat the bottom, about 2 to 3 tablespoons. Turn to medium high heat.
Add in dried shrimp skin and give it a quick stir-fry, till that crustacean aroma starts to fill the kitchen, but not over-drying the shrimp skin.
Add in ground pork. Once the pork just about cooked through, like the meat turns white color, add in 1 tablespoon of soy sauce. This time need to keep cooking the pork till almost dried up. The color will then turn to slightly brown color due to longer searing time and soy sauce. Scoop out the pork and shrimp skin mixture, set aside for later use.
Continue to use the same pan or same wok, drizzle in 1 extra tablespoon of oil if the surface appears too dry. Transfer torn cabbage over and cook till almost wilted entirely.
Add in drained rice and give it a few tosses.
Scoop the rice and cabbage mixture to rice cooker, then top with pork and shrimp skin. Pour in some water, just a little bit, about below where the meaty part meets the rice. Simply press the start button and let the rice cooker continues the work.
Once ready, grind some black pepper over and fluff the rice. Taste and see if need more salt. Otherwise, serve with extra black pepper on top if preferred.
Note that I only used 1 tablespoon of soy sauce for the entire rice recipe. This recipe is more like a lightly salted rice that you can either serve as it is, or with other dishes on the side. So there is no need to make the cabbage rice as salty as main entrée kind of flavor.
I'm still amazed that I've wrote a nearly identical recipe from nearly 10 years ago. This time around, I care more about preserving the family taste. Happily speaking, I think I truly captured my mom's cooking this time. More like 90% similarity in taste, but still have some work left texture-wise. Overall, I think even Mama Yu herself will give me a high score on this one.
Other Taiwanese rice recipes:
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