燒仙草: Hot Grass Jelly
cooking with steam season two, episode five, with Jess Wang of Gu Grocery
This is Yun Hai Taiwan Stories, a newsletter about Taiwanese food and culture by Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉, founder of Yun Hai. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, sign up here.
The second season of our Taiwanese cooking show, Cooking With Steam, explores Taiwanese food through the lens of 古早味 gu zao wei. This phrase translates to “ancient flavor,” but largely refers to pre-war Taiwanese foods that feel especially homestyle to me.
The final episode of Cooking With Steam’s second season is out! I team up with my friend and collaborator Jess Wang of LA’s Gu Grocery to bring you Hot Grass Jelly and Tang Yuan 燒仙草, one of my favorite Taiwanese desserts, and perfect for the winter weather.
Lantern Festival, falling on the 15th day of the first lunar month (March 3rd this year), marks the end of the Lunar New Year Spring Festival period. During this time, it’s customary to make a tang yuan dessert to enjoy with your loved ones—the roundness of tang yuan 湯圓 and the yuan 圓 in its name symbolize togetherness and unity.
In this episode, Jess and I make tang yuan as a topping for hot grass jelly, a thickened pudding made with grass jelly herb. I’d enthusiastically describe this as the opposite of ice cream: warm, heady, and full of sweet herbal notes. The toppings add texture of all kinds, from the crunchy, toasted walnut to the chewy, sweet bite of the tang yuan.
I always say that one of my favorite things about Taiwanese traditional desserts is the N U T R I T I O N. This one is made from beans, walnuts, rice, spirulina, and herbal tea, with a little bit of rock sugar.
The secret to making tang yuan, learned from Jess, is going by feel. You’ll see in the episode how we judge the dough (with cheese analogs?), and add water or rice flour as needed. As seen below:
COOKING WITH STEAM Season 02 Episode 05
Hot Grass Jelly and Tang Yuan
好蒸氣 第二季 05 | 燒仙草
Meet Jess Wang
Jess Wang is an artist, pastry chef, and fermentation educator based in Los Angeles.
After a decade of experience in restaurant and catering kitchens, she started Gu Grocery, a Chinese Taiwanese grocery that’s been operating in the form of pop-ups and workshops in LA for several years. She collaborates with her Taiwanese-born Wenzhounese mama, Peggy, to preserve old family recipes and develop new ways of making food. She’s about to take Gu to the next level with the opening of a brick and mortar grocery and deli in LA’s Chinatown.
I’ve learned so much from her over the course of our friendship, not just about Taiwanese food, but also how to thoughtfully engage in community and family while inviting people into traditional foodways. For example, while preparing her grocery to open, she’s been teaching tang yuan making classes throughout the Los Angeles Public Library system. We’re so happy that she was able to make an appearance on the show, amidst all she has going on, and so grateful for her time and knowledge (and also the hardboiled egg she peeled for me on set).
In her words:
Gu Grocery is a dream come true Chinese Taiwanese online store offering high quality pantry staples and a collection of everyday home goods. We regularly pop-up around LA to serve a bakery deli menu of sorts, featuring nostalgic snacks, some surprises, and familiar comfort foods to nourish you.
Our long term goal is to open a shop where we can continue serving our loyal pop-up customers while also meeting the needs of the diverse residents of the Chinatown community. Located in the heart of Chinatown, our future brick and mortar store will accept EBT and offer senior discounts.
You may be wondering what Gu means? Gu stems from the Chinese character for mushroom that is traditionally a symbol of prosperity and fertility. In Mandarin, it is also the word for Aunty, which honors the strength and generosity of women who have filled the role of intergenerational caretakers in our families 🍄
Inspired by our fungi friends and their crazy mycelium network - we believe in the power of a community and see ourselves as just a few among many spores in supporting you on your food journey. Whether it’s creating access to healthy food options or providing opportunities to learn about fermenting, cooking together is a wonderful healant. We invite you to join us in the heart of the Gu kitchen.
So much of this is inspired by and informed by Jess’s mother, Mama Peggy, whom we also adore. She came to Frankie Gaw’s First Generation Book Opening party (hosted at Yun Hai) and spent the whole evening celebrating with us (and went and got pizza for everyone too). Her generosity says it all.
If you’re ever in LA, don’t miss your chance to experience Gu Grocery at one of their many pop ups or their forthcoming space in Chinatown.
The Recipes
Hot grass jelly is really easy to make! The tang yuan are a cinch, too, once you’ve got a sense of how the dough should feel. Once you’ve got the basics down, it’s fun to play with colors (dragonfruit juice!) and fillings (black sesame!).
I love making a big batch of tang yuan all at once and freezing them. You can freeze them directly after rolling, and cook them from frozen too. Just separate them on a baking sheet or platter, and par-freeze them for an hour or two before transferring them to a container or plastic bag for long-term storage, to prevent sticking.
I prepare the grass jelly tea in a Tatung Electric Steamer, but you can also do it in a stockpot on the stove. The full recipes are posted on our site. Get the recipes or the grass jelly herb below:
Ingredients and Equipment
I love to show off my collection of ceramics, props, everyday objects, and kitchen tools on the show, many of them gifted by friends or collected personally over the years. Here’s a little more information on what I used this episode.
The HeySong 黑松 glass is a vintage piece I found while shopping in Taiwan.
The blue and brown bowls for holding the toppings and serving the final dessert were made by my friend and ceramicist Matthew So. The green colander for holding the non-dairy creamer is from a little hardware store I walked past years ago in Taiwan.
I brew the grass jelly tea in the 11-cup Tatung Steamer.
And, we used grass jelly herb that we import ourselves as the foundation of this dessert.
Please reach out with any other questions on sourcing or ingredients. Happy to help, as always.
Gratitude and Acknowledgements
We couldn’t have done this without the support and passion of our friends and community. So much love and gratitude to Night Shift, who produced this, and all our creative collaborators for giving the show its unique voice.
Credits
Produced by Night Shift and Yun Hai
Made possible by Tatung Taiwan
Team:
Lisa Cheng Smith, host
Jessica Wang, guest talent
Jessie YuChen, food stylist & guest talent
Nicole Wang, culinary assistant
Amalissa Uytingco, culinary producer
Sam Broscoe, producer
Alec Sutherland, director & editor
Nathan Bailey, director of photography
Rob Woods, camera operator
Taylor Dekker, camera operator
Alexandra Egan, art director
Kyle Garvey, sound mixer
Jinho Myung, editor
R. Hollis Smith, mix
Rebecca Alexander, hair and makeup
Dustin Wong, music
O.OO, graphics
Jil Tai & Ben Hill, motion design and title sequence
Rachel Watson, behind-the-scenes photography
Our Set
Our set features props from Taiwanese, Taiwanese-American, and international friends worldwide, creating those Taiwancore vibes we love so much at Yun Hai.
Thank you for the beauty Mikey Chen, Lillian Li, Emilie Liu, Debbie Carlos, Matthew So, Kelli Cain, Material Kitchen, Mogutable, Felicia Liang, Sam Tilney, Lulu Yao Gioiello, Grace Jung, Eric Sze, Julianne Ahn, Alice Chai, Stephanie Smith, Rio Chen, and Leh Lin.
And much gratitude to our friends who contributed to wardrobe: Everybody World, Judi Rosen, Whimsy and Row, RMS Beauty, and Christine Mai Nguyen.
Special Thanks
Russell Wang, Maggie Chang, Shirley Liu, Ivan Wu, Feng Hsieh, Hollow, Chris, Leon, Simon, Agnes, Jim, Lillian Lin, Jasmine Huang, Natya Regensburger, Jeremy Hersh, Cat Yeh & the entire Yun Hai Team, our partners, and our community.
Before I Go…
Join us at Yun Hai Shop (170 Montrose Ave), for a Lunar New Year party to ring in the Year of the Horse this coming Sunday, 2/22, between 12 and 4 pm. We’ll have a New Year’s toast at 2 pm, followed by a joss burning ceremony, led by our friend Kimberly Chou 周存安. Enjoy complimentary tang yuan (black sesame and peanut), Win Son pineapple cakes, Taiwanese snacks, hot tea, and more!
Lunar New Year QQ merch is coming for lantern festival! We’re going all embroidery this year and are in the process of perfecting the last samples. Sign up to be notified when these drop!
it’s a little horsey
And while you wait, don’t forget that our Hu Ye Tiger God Shirts by Emilie Liu are back in stock. Get yours before they run out!
A couple of very goofy Hu Ye Tiger God statues on display at the Tainan Art Museum this month. 
Emilie Liu’s faithful depiction. Photo: Jasmine Huang.
Thanks, as always, for all your love for Cooking With Steam! We’re excited to wrap season two and get to work on the next one.
going by feel,
Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉
Written with editorial support by Amalissa Uytingco, Jasmine Huang, Grace Jung, and Lillian Lin. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with friends and subscribe if you haven’t already. I email once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. For more Taiwanese food, head to yunhai.shop, follow us on instagram and twitter, or view the newsletter archives.