Recipe: Taiwanese Taro Balls

Taiwanese Taro Balls Recipe

I love TARO balls! Fell deeply in love with taro and sweet potato balls during my first trip to九份, Taiwan. Renowned for their famous QQ balls! In Taiwan, they are basically served with red bean, cream milk, grass jelly and black pearls!

I decided doing some home-made taro balls as it is not cheap eating them outside with miser serving. I would love to see a mountain-ful of chewy taro balls. They are also known as yuyuan (芋圓) which is made with taro, or diguayuan (地瓜圓 or 蕃薯圓) which is sweet potato.

Ingredients

Taro Balls

• 1 taro about 1.5 pound
• 1.5 cups sweet potato flour
• 2 tablespoons sugar to taste

Directions:

1. Slice and cut taros into pieces and steam till soft (about 15 – 20 minutes).
2. Test the steamed taro by using a fork if the taro breaks easily, proceed to next step.

3. Smashed taro and add in sugar. Do this while the yam is still hot for ease-sake; it’ll be easier to mash and mix with sugar while it’s warm.

4. Add sweet potato flour to the mix and (optionally) a bit of water. Dough should be mashed up evenly, feeling elastic and smooth. If the taro mixture seem dry, add more water (1 spoonful), otherwise if it is too wet add in more flour.

5. Continue mixing all the flour with the taro mixture and continue kneading it until mixture becomes dough-like.

6. After which, you may roll up and chop taro mixture into cubes (like what I did) or roll it up like an ah balling! The texture, regardless of shapes will taste the same if taro mixture is properly mixed and kneaded.

7. You may toss taro balls in cornstarch, before cooking to prevent them from sticking together. Do place them to a container to store if you are not cooking them right away, as to prolong the freshness of the taro balls.

8. Cook the taro balls in a pot of simmering water for several minutes until they float. (If you are going to cook the frozen ones, there is no need to defrost them)

9. Toss the cooked balls into a bowl of iced water. By doing this, taro balls will be cooled down quickly and taste more chewy = QQ texture.

In this case, I cooked them with brown sugar (after Step 1-9)! I prefer cooking uncooked taro balls in water and cooked them again with brown sugar. In this case, the taro balls preserve it’s chewiness and the base of the dessert will not have additional flour taste.

Here you go! Yummy tummy taro balls! Best with grass jelly and coconut milk! This recipe is simple to follow and hope you all enjoy it as much as I did! 🙂