Sticky Rice with Braised Pork Sauce 米糕

Sticky Rice with Braised Pork Sauce (米糕) is a small bowl of cooked glutinous rice spooned with minced braised pork and its sauce and topped with fish floss, one of the rice snacks of Tainan (台南). The city's tourism website calls it the first choice for anyone who wants a traditional Tainan taste.

How it is made

Chinese Wikipedia contrasts it with oil rice (油飯): both use glutinous rice, but oil rice is stir-fried with oil and sauce after cooking, while this dish is served like a bowl of braised pork rice (肉臊飯), with plain glutinous rice under a ladle of braised pork sauce whose fat melts into the gravy. In a November 2023 release, the Tainan city government's Legal Affairs Bureau described the local version as laborious and quite different from tube-steamed rice (筒仔米糕): it needs good Taiwanese glutinous rice and pork cut by hand and simmered slowly over a low flame.

Ingredients

The Tainan tourism website lists house-made braised minced pork, fish floss, spring onion and garlic, and describes the result as fragrant and chewy without being greasy. The owner of a North District (北區) shop open for more than fifty years named Taiwanese pork, local glutinous rice, fish floss, peanuts and cucumber among its ingredients, and the Legal Affairs Bureau gave crisp fish floss and pickled cucumber as the toppings of Tainan migao. Wikipedia adds pickled radish as a topping, and a version that adds braised pork and peanuts, then the fish floss.

How it is eaten

Chinese Wikipedia ties the dish to an afternoon snack habit that Tainan took up when most people did heavy manual work: this bowl was a common snack, meant to be eaten well rather than to fill you up, and the habit is also why Tainan snacks come in small portions. The Legal Affairs Bureau names shops on Bao'an Road (保安路), Kangle Street (康樂街) and Guohua Street (國華街) section three among the city's well-known migao sellers.