Lian Rong

Considered as a luxurious Chinese ingredient, Lian Rong is a dessert ingredient made from dried lotus seeds. To make this lotus seed paste, take some dried lotus seeds (those hard, pale, dime-sized bullets of little flavor) then you you have to soak, stew, grind it to a paste. After that rigorous process, you pass it through a cheesecloth and add sugar. Then comes the tricky stage.

Dry-cook the sweetened paste in a huge wok, teasing out the nutty, caramelized flavors without burning it. When done right, the fruit of the exhausting labor is rich, velvety lotus seed paste that can be stuffed in fluffy white buns or in mooncakes.