Pearl Meatballs (Sticky Rice Meatballs, 珍珠丸子)

Often a popular choice for special dinners and festive meals, pearl meatballs are surprisingly easy to make! I hope my tried and tested recipe will help you create them to a restaurant standard.

Season the meat

What makes great meatballs? I think they need to have a well-balanced taste and a tender, juicy texture. Here is a list of ingredients you need to reach the goal (see precise measurements in the recipe card below):

• Minced meat. Pork is traditionally used in this recipe. But minced chicken or turkey would work too.
• Salt
• Ground white pepper. You may replace it with either five spice powder or ground Sichuan pepper. In this case, reduce the quantity by half.
• Cornstarch. Other types of starch, e.g. tapioca, potato, sweet potato, can be used as substitutes.
• Light soy sauce.
• Sesame oil
• Egg white
• Ginger and scallions

Mix together all the ingredients above in a bowl. Use a spatula, or chopsticks like Chinese cooks do, to stir it in one direction until the meat becomes sticky.

🛎 Gluten-Free Adaptation: Light soy sauce is the only ingredient in this recipe that contains wheat. So you may replace it with gluten-free soy sauce or tamari to make this dish suitable for a gluten-free diet.

Add a little crunchiness

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you know how much I love to talk about the texture of food. In Chinese cuisine, the contrast of softness and crunchiness is greatly appreciated. Pearl meatballs deliver the same quality by including crunchy vegetables.

Water chestnuts are one of the best choices. For example, it’s essential for making the banquet dish Lion’s Head Meatballs. Not only does it provide a pleasant mouthfeel (Kou Gan/口感), it also adds a nice hint of sweetness to the overall savoury taste.

Canned water chestnuts are easily accessible in Chinese/Asian stores. Chop them small but no need to mince to a super fine paste. Mix with the meat until they are very well distributed.

🛎 Alternatives: Other crunchy vegetables, such as bamboo shoots, lotus roots, celery, etc. can be used as substitutes.

Shape the meatballs

Many years ago, I learnt from my dad a quick and efficient way to shape minced meat into round balls. To this day, whenever I make meatball dishes, I think of him with a big smile on my face (If you’re familiar with making meatballs and happy with your own technique, please feel free to skip this section).

1. Over the palm of your hand, place 2-3 spoonfuls of the meat mixture (wear a kitchen glove if you wish).
2. Gently close your hand into a fist while squeezing some mixture out through the opening between your thumb and index finger to form a ball.
3. Use a spoon to scoop it off. Keep feeding your hand with more mixture and repeat the procedure to shape more balls.

Just for your reference, the meatballs that I made for this recipe measure about 4 cm/1½ inches each.

If you’d prefer a visual presentation, check out my recipe for Winter Melon Meatball Soup which includes a tutorial video.

Coat with glutinous rice

Glutinous rice (aka sticky rice/糯米) plays an important role in Chinese cuisine. Sticky, gooey with a hint of sweetness, it’s used in many classic dishes, such as Sticky Rice Dumplings, Eight Treasure Rice, Stuffed Sticky Rice Rolls, etc.

In today’s dish, glutinous rice acts as a coating on the meatballs. After steaming, it becomes bigger, semi-transparent and creates a hedgehog-like look. But its most important contribution is to provide a subtly sweet taste and an interesting gooey texture.

It’s important to soak the rice beforehand. Two hours will be enough but you may leave it overnight too. Well-hydrated rice grains look slightly bigger and can be easily broken if pinched between fingers.

Once you’ve shaped all the meatballs, drain the rice then gently roll each ball in it to get an even coating.

🛎 Note: Despite its name being similar to the word gluten, glutinous rice doesn’t contain any gluten. Both long-grain and short-grain varieties work for this recipe.

Steam the dish

By now, you’ve done most of the hard work. The last step, steaming, is very straightforward: Bring water to a full boil then steam the meatballs for 15 minutes. They’re ready to be served!

As you can see from the image above, my setup for steaming is:

• Use a steamer rack to support a flat plate.
• Place slices of carrot on the plate then put the meatballs on top.

It’s perfectly fine to use alternative methods. For example, skip the carrot and steam the meatballs on their own, or directly place the meatballs inside a steamer basket without using a plate (you can line the basket with napa cabbage leaves).

How to serve

Pearl meatballs can be paired with many Chinese savoury dishes. Here is one example of how I’d prepare a dinner for four using ingredients of different nutrients and mixed cooking methods:

• Pearl Meatballs (protein, steamed)
• Cucumber Salad (vegetable, raw)
• King Oyster Mushroom with Garlic Sauce (vegetable, stir-fried)
• Egg Drop Soup with Tomato (protein, vegetable, boiled)
• Plain rice (starch, boiled)