Vegetarian Abacus Seeds (算盘子)
this recipe made me calculate my patience in the kitchen :0
taking up big challenges of making dish requests has always been fun for me - I guess it kinda pushes me into exploring as many different cuisines as possible while exploring the food heritage and dishes centred around communities outside of my own.
recently, I got doubled down with the challenge of a Hakka dish I only ever made ONCE & one that I remembered to be laborious to make - Abacus Seeds (‘suan pan zi’). as if the challenge was not daunting enough for a someone who has very little patience, I was also requested to make it VEGETARIAN without the use of alliums (i.e. onion & garlic), for a 25 year-old Taoist priest who was observing a fast.
while it take some time & A WHOLE LOT of patience to individually form the dimpled ‘beads’ for 算盘子, it was also a therapeutic process & it really reminded me of how the process is sometimes more important than the outcome. I felt that my technique got better with every abacus beads I rolled & pressed. also, as I employed some help from the filming crew with preparing this, I imagined how much of a fun activity this could be with as a cooking get-together with friends!
in terms of keeping it strict vegetarian, I experimented with a variety of mushroom & vegetable, in tandem with Chinese vegetarian culinary tradtion of biologically mimicking the taste and textures of meat but using plant sources. I tried doing this by the combining lion mane’s mushroom with shiitake to introduce meaty textures while the vegetarian ‘ikan bilis’ garnish made of nori adds a ‘seafoody’ element, replacing dried shrimp (haebee) & dried cuttlefish which is usually found in the non-vegetarian version of Abacus Seeds.
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get ingredients for recipe here!: vegetarian oyster sauce, lion mane’s mushrooms , sambal
for more Singaporean plant-based recipes, check these out:
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