Lo Mai Gai 糯米雞 (Sticky Rice With Chicken)

Nei hou!  Today I'm writing about a dim sum dish that's relativly new to me: Sticky Rice with Chicken, "lo mai gai".  Introduced to me by one of my roommates that deems it a must-have, lo mai gai is sticky rice filled with chicken, shiitake mushrooms, chinese sausage, and other random goodies and then steamed in a lotus leaf.  Not only does the lotus leaf work as a super eco-friendly wrapper, but it imparts a really nice fragrance and taste to the rice.

The lo mai gai I'm dissecting today came from Clement Restaurant (7th & Clement).  I picked it up yesterday morning, and it served as the perfect thank-goodness-I thought-ahead-because-I'm-too-lazy-to-cook lunch today.  (Lo mai gai is one of the few dim sum items you can save for later and still have it be delicious.)

My immediate thought upon opening it was, "why is this called sticky rice with chicken when it's filled with so much non-chickeny stuff?"  After a minute of poking and prodding with my chopstick I was able to identify a small piece of chicken, 4-5 chunks of char siu (BBQ pork), chopped shiitake mushrooms, 2 inches of lap chang (Chinese sausage), some bits of ginger, and a lot of ground meat that I assume/hope is either chicken or pork but I really can't tell after 20 taste tests.  I'd like to think it's chicken just so "sticky rice with chicken" seems more appropriate, but it's pretty greasy with a thin layer of visible fat, so I'm guessing it's pork.

This bundle of bejeweled carbs is packed with flavor and definitely filling enough to be a meal on its own.  For me, I'm driven to eat it mostly out of intrigue and a strong desire to learn more about sticky rice dishes.  For the longest time I only knew of sticky rice in the form of doong, another southern chinese dish involving sticky rice, chicken and lap chang but it's far less saucy and far more sticky than lo mai gai.  My Po Po and Gung Gung (grandparents on my mom's side) make a large batch every year and it's one of my favorite things to eat!  Making doong is quite labor intensive and doesn't play well with my grandparents' arthritis so the tradition is fading out unless someone else in my family learns how to make it.  (I'm trying to find time for my mom and I to fly our to visit Po Po and Gung Gung so we can learn.)  This is not a dish that my family orders so I was completely unfamiliar with it until about a year ago.  When my roommate first brought home one of these sticky rices I thought it was a poorly wrapped doong and was shocked at how "brown" and flavor-packed the filling was.  Though it wasn't bad it certainly wasn't the doong sticky rice I was used to and I didn't decide to try it again until recently when my roommate brought another one home for me.  This time around I decided to do my research and learned that this leaf-wrapped sticky rice was an entirely different dish.  If I have to choose between the two, I still prefer doong.  Nostalgia is a great spice, almost as great as hunger, and doong is super flavored by it for me.  (Plus the mystery brown sauce and ground meat kind of freak me out, shhh.)