Green dumplings are actually a kind of pastry, which are usually made by people in Jiangsu and Zhejiang around the Qingming Festival. But now Qingdao has been hyped up as a Netflix pastry, so many pastry stores have started to make this pastry all year round. But in the old days, the dumplings were only available in April, around the Ching Ming Festival, for ten days.
The main special feature of the dumplings is that they are made with mugwort, an ingredient that can only be found around the time of the Ching Ming Festival. In fact, it's because mugwort has a special odor, the same as the mugwort that will be hung in front of your house around the Qingming Festival, and that's why it's made around the festival, with the symbolism that it's meant to ward off evil spirits and prevent disasters. But now many bakeries have improved the green dumplings, and since some people aren't used to the taste of mugwort, they've switched to spinach for color.
The traditional green dumplings also have only one flavor, which is bean paste filling, but nowadays many flavors have been derived, such as meat floss filling, egg yolk filling, black sesame filling, mango filling and so on. The first thing you need to do is to prepare the mugwort, then clean it with water, put it into boiling water and boil it, then use a juicer to crush it.
Then you need to prepare the glutinous rice flour, sugar and mugwort juice for mixing, and then knead the glutinous rice dough until smooth can be put aside. The traditional filling is bean paste filling, which is actually very simple to make, and can be bought on the market nowadays. First press the red beans in a pressure cooker for an hour, then take the red beans out and press them in a blender to make a smooth red bean paste.
Put the oil and sugar in the pot, and after the sugar is sautéed, you can put the mashed bean paste into the pot, and keep stirring, and wait until the bean paste is clumped together, then you can get out of the pot and let it cool. And then the previous preparation of wormwood skin into equal amounts of small groups, bean paste is also divided into equal amounts of small groups, and then wrapped with wormwood can be, eat directly in the pot steam can be.