Chinese Rice Cakes for the New Year

During Lunar New Year, also known as Spring Festival in China, the beloved Shanghainese stir-fry of sliced nian gao (rice cakes), protein (often pork), and vegetables glossed with an umami-rich sauce is regal fare, sharing banquet table space with other auspicious dishes—such as ingot-shaped dumplings, longevity noodles, and majestic whole fish—and bringing growth and good fortune with every bite. 

“Nian gao symbolizes getting better every year, whether it’s in your job, or your school, or your life,” said Susanna Yu, the San Francisco–based author of the blog Smelly Lunchbox.

The rest of the year, it’s a busy cook’s fallback meal. The oval-shaped slabs, made from a rice-based dough, are utterly neutral, store well in the fridge or freezer, cook through in minutes, and soak up the flavors of everything around them. But without a doubt, the most enchanting feature is their singular texture: a stretchy, slippery, sink-your-teeth-in chew that requires a satisfying jaw workout to chomp through and makes any dish prepared with them pure comfort food. 

“You can whip them up with anything,” said Yu, comparing rice cakes’ versatility to rice in a stir-fry. Yu frequently requested them for dinner as a kid, and her mother, who emigrated from Taishan, a city in China’s Guangdong province, to the Bay Area in the 1980s, would prepare them with Chinese sausage or sometimes strips of marinated pork and whatever vegetables were on hand.

A typical batch of chao nian gao features a heavy ratio of rice cakes to the other components: pork, wilted leafy greens such as napa cabbage, and dried mushrooms that are lightly coated in a salty-sweet sauce. The stir-frying goes fast, so the bulk of the process is ingredient prep, starting with the meat.

Cooks use a variety of cuts, from shoulder to tenderloin, julienning the meat and soaking it in a dual-purpose mixture of Shaoxing wine, soy and oyster sauces, white pepper, vegetable and sesame oils, and a touch of cornstarch. The highly seasoned liquids flavor the meat and help it retain moisture during cooking, and the oils and cornstarch turn the mixture into a light batter that tenderizes the meat, insulates it from the heat of the wok, and gives it a silky feel.

I opted for pork tenderloin, which slices easily and is naturally tender, and marinated it in the cornstarch-based mixture before stir-frying.

From there I briefly soaked some dried xiang gu in hot water so that they were soft enough to slice thin. This Mandarin term for shiitake mushrooms means “fragrant mushroom”; xiang gu have a distinct aroma due to a compound called lenthionine that develops as the mushrooms dry, making them taste entirely different from fresh versions. 

I then rinsed the rice cakes (defrosting frozen ones first) in a bowl of cold water, agitating them with my hands to loosen any excess surface starch that would cause them to stick together when cooked.

One of the great perks of sliced nian gao is that they don’t require precooking.

I stir-fried the aromatics, pork, mushrooms, and cabbage (sliced thin crosswise so that it would wilt quickly and soak up the flavorful sauce); added a touch more Shaoxing and oyster sauce to gloss the mixture, plus chicken broth to help everything cook through and infuse rich, neutral savor throughout; and spread the rice cakes across the wok in a single layer to minimize any sticking and encourage even cooking. I covered the vessel, and after 2 minutes of steaming, the cakes were nearly tender but retained every bit of their slippery, elastic chew.

A couple more minutes of uncovered cooking thickened up the sauce so that it lightly glossed the wok’s contents. With a last-minute handful of thin-sliced scallion greens, this New Year staple turned one-pot dinner was on the table—and then gobbled up in a flash.