RICE RICE RICE
This entry was posted on 11/29/2006 6:39 AM and is filed under Hong Kong.
Yum Yum Yum! Our favorite Hong Kong street food...
Hong Kong Rice Balls
We
had this amazing culinary experience and wanted to share it with
you. We were in a metro station yesterday and came across a
little place called RICE. Very small with 3 girls working
there. They had 6 wooden buckets on the back counter filled with
different kinds of rice. Purple rice, brown rice, red rice, mixed
grain rice, wheat germ rice and ice lake gourmet rice. Then they
had a very long case in front of the customer with all these little
stainless containers, each with a different kind of filling.
There were 16 kinds of meats - i.e. dried pork, hot dog sausage, smoked
duck breast, grilled honey chicken, satay beef, ham, spicy beef,
etc. Then there were 28 other choices. Seafood: sweet
shrimp, dried fish, tuna fish, crispy shrimp, etc. Vegetables:
i.e. kimchee, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, seaweed, sweet corn, sour
cabbage, sweet yam, sliced cucumber, tomato, etc.
There is a
little order menu and a pencil and you choose your kind of rice (or
combination of rices) and your choice of 6 fillings are included with
each rice ball!
They take a ball of rice out of the tub - weigh
it and then put it on a little piece of saran. They wear gloves
and press the rice out into the saran in the shape of a pancake.
They then add all of the fillings on top. It's very full.
Then using the saran, they stretch and pull the rice until it covers
the filling all up. Because the rice is warm, it seems to cover
up the filling pretty easily. Then the whole ball is wrapped in a
little saran bag and given to you , still warm. We decided on 3
different vegetarian varieties and each was fantastic. Of course,
all of their fillings are Asian oriented - no cheeses or Western stuff.
It's
a unique concept. The filled rice balls were cheap - only $2 US
each. If you can't decide on a filling they have a menu with some
choices already decided for you. They also sell lots of rice
drinks and pure juices. Rice cookies and crackers too. They
have 16 of these places, all of them located in Subway/train
stations. They have a franchise hotline here in Hong Kong and a
web site www.qqrice.com.hk
Here's a picture of the store:
and of the wooden pots that held the different kinds of rice:
and of some of the bins from which you could select the stuffings:
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