Surrounded: Dumpling shop owner Lee Li Ting, 38, who took over the business from her father, aims to sell over 2,000 pieces of the festive dish this year. She has been running the third-generation business for nine years as a way of preserving the family tradition. —THOMAS YONG/The Star
KUALA PERLIS: Growing up, Mah Mei See would eat a traditional Chinese dumpling served with brown sugar syrup. It was a staple of the Dragon Boat Festival that she never outgrew.
She has been making the dumpling to preserve the taste and texture just like those produced by her ancestors.
Mah, 37, said she started out by helping her mother Mow Fong Joo, 57, prepare orders every time the Dragon Boat Festival is celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese lunar calendar, which falls on June 22 this year.
“I am continuing the legacy of my ancestors to make ‘kee chang’, or as the Malays call it ketupat Cina, because I want to ensure the taste and texture is the same as what I used to eat when I was a child,” she told Bernama.
Mah is the third generation of her family to continue the tradition of making kee chang based on a family recipe passed down through the generations.
“The ingredients are very simple, which is glutinous rice that has been soaked overnight and then wrapped in bamboo or lotus leaves before being tied with dried banana fibre,” she said.
The mother of one said the dumpling is wrapped in a triangular shape and boiled in water for four to five hours to make it last longer.
“This will be served with brown sugar syrup and it can last for four days,” she said.
Mah said that at every Dragon Boat Festival, she needs as much as 150kg of glutinous rice to make the dumplings.
“I sell at a wholesale price of RM20 per kg for uncooked kee chang and RM23 per kg for the cooked ones,” she said.
She also sells frozen dumplings to meet the demand from Kedah, Penang and Johor.
The challenge in making the dumpling is getting the raw materials, namely bamboo leaves and dried banana fibre, which are increasingly difficult to obtain, she said.
Furthermore, there had been price increases every year.
These dumplings were made to honour an ancient poet in China named Qu Yuan, she said.
