Sweet dumplings for Lunar New Year

This forgiving recipe yields mochi-like tang yuan

One of my favorite traditional Chinese dishes for Lunar New Year is tang yuan, the mochilike glutinous rice balls often filled with black sesame paste.

The holiday, which starts this year on Sunday, Jan. 22, is full of symbolic foods: dumplings for wealth, whole chicken for luck, noodles for longevity. The roundness of tang yuan is associated with reunion and family togetherness; the dessert is traditionally eaten on the 15th day of Lunar New Year festivities.

My interest in serving traditional holiday fare ebbs and flows every year, but my love of these chewy rice balls — oozing with filling and served steaming hot in ginger-scented soup — does not.

This year, I thought about another Chinese dessert my poh poh (grandma in Cantonese) always used to make for Lunar New Year: gok zai, deep-fried dumplings filled with coconut, peanuts and sesame seeds. Crisp on the outside, crumbly on the inside, they were a staple of my childhood. It felt like my poh poh would fry up hundreds, filling up jar after jar so we wouldn’t run out for weeks.

After she died, I didn’t taste another gok zai for years. My mom and I tried to figure out how to make them: guessing the texture of the dough, unsure of how long to fry them. They were OK. We haven’t attempted them again.

Last year, I noticed miniature versions at a bakery called iCafe in San Francisco’s Chinatown. I was so surprised — they’re not like deep-fried sesame balls or other treats you see everywhere, year-round. They made me remember what a wonderful flavor combination peanut, coconut and sesame is; the pleasure of the sandy texture.

So this year, I wanted to merge these two Lunar New Year treats: tang yuan with gok zai filling. Gok zai depends on crushed peanuts, but for this batch of tang yuan, I turned to crunchy peanut butter for that nutty flavor — and for its fattiness and binding power, allowing me to skip the traditional lard.

If you’ve ever tried to make traditional Japanese mochi, relax: Tang yuan is far more forgiving. Even if you can’t get a perfectly round shape, these sweet dumplings will still be delicious.

Janelle Bitker/The Chronicle Gok zai, crisp deep-fried dumplings, are a traditional treat during for Lunar New Year.