Hue's Tet rice cake hub
More than a dozen households in an alley in the central town of Hue have made and sold sticky rice cakes for decades.
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| Banh chung is a traditional Vietnamese rice cake made from glutinous rice, mung beans, pork and other ingredients. The cake is wrapped in dong leaves (Phrynium placentarium), a large Asian variety, or banana leaves into a thick square to represent the ground based on the old belief that the Earth was square and the sky round. |
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| Banh chung must be cooked for 12 hours to make sure they are well done and the lard is absorbed into the rice, bringing a nice, fatty flavor. |
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| Sticky rice is collected from farms in Hue. |
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| Many use banana leaves to wrap a banh chung instead of dong leaves. |
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| A heap of leaves and rice wait for the next process. |
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| Each worker is in charge of a different process. |
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| The cakes are nearly ready for cooking ... |
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| ... they just need to be secured with plastic strings. |
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| They are put into a large pot to be boiled |
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| Finished pieces of banh chung in front of a house for sale |
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| he cake is usually served with pickled Each workshop has 4-8 stoves working 24/7, churning out 1,000-2,000 banh chung cakes every Tet. The finished cakes are packed and sent to hundreds of locations around the country via airplane to appear in time at year-end parties. |
