Giang Xa Village in Hanoi’s Hoai Duc District is famous for its delightful ‘bac’ cake (fried cake made from sticky rice, ‘gac’ fruit and green bean), a delicacy which has existed for more than a hundred years.
The cake has a fragrance of sticky rice, light sweet of 'gac' fruit and buttery taste of green beans mixed with sugar (Photo: vtr.org.vn)
To have a tasty tay (locally known as a big bac cake at about 50cm x 10cm), a maker has to carefully choose ingredients such as nep cai hoa vang (special sticky rice grown in Giang Xa Village), gac fruit (a type of perennial melon), green beans, brown sugar, pork loin fat, banana leaves and bamboo strings.
The sticky rice is soaked in warm water for 2-3 hours before being ground into a wet powder then divided it into two halves, one used to mix with gac fruit, and the other is left to remain white.
The most important steps are to knead the wet powder for it to become plastic and fry it on a cast iron pan by hand.
The last step is to wrap the cake by alternately mixing the gac fruit cake and the white cake, adding sugar mixed with boiled and ground green bean between these layers, on banana leaves and to tie it with bamboo strings. It takes five to six hours to make such a tay cake.
Each tay cake can be cut into 10 pieces. Each piece looks like a beautiful flower with the red colour from gac fruit, the white colour from sticky rice powder and the brown-yellow colour of green beans.
The cake has a fragrance of sticky rice, light sweet of gac fruit and buttery taste of green beans mixed with sugar.