Taro Cake - Wu Tau Gou Recipe - Delicious Not Gorgeous (2024)

chinese taro cake recipe

taro cake, or wu tau gou, is a savory steamed cake filled with starchy taro, salty lap cheong (chinese sausage; i grew up eating this in sticky rice) and chew dung gu (shiitake mushrooms; i throw these into everything, especially steamed egg). it’s really soft when it comes out of the steamer, so cutting it into slices and pan-frying it makes the wu tao gou the perfect soft on the inside, crispy on the outside texture.

if you’ve gone to dim sum, chances are, you’ve had taro cake (wu tau gou) or turnip cake (lo baak gou). they’re usually served in square slices, the pasty white steamed cake peeking out between crispy golden brown bits. besides the obvious difference (taro cake uses taro, turnip cake uses turnip), they’re also made a little differently. taro cake features cubed taro, so the final product is chunkier; turnip cake uses grated turnip, which melts into the rest of the cake, making a softer, more hom*ogeneous texture.

the water to rice flour ratio: 2.5 parts water to 1 part rice flour

• there are taro cake recipes floating around with all sorts of ratios: 4 parts water to 1 part rice flour, 1 part water to 1 part rice flour, and everything in between.
• this recipe (aka my grandma's) straddles the line and is closer to 2.5 parts water to 1 part rice flour, making for a batter that's easy to mix (those 1:1 batters feel like you're mixing cement), and helps you end up with a cake that's bouncy and a little chewy.
• it looks way too loose, almost as if the mix-ins are floating in a pool of liquid, but the taro soaks up the excess water so the final taro cake isn't soupy.

the cooking method: pressure cooker

• i personally don't have a steamer, so i usually make do with a skillet, a mini circular rack that helps me raise the cake pan up a little, and a lid. this works, but it takes forever (2+ hours) because the skillets at my disposal are shallow and i can't add much water at once.
• the most recent batch i made was in a pressure cooker, with the aforementioned mini circular rack place on top of the pressure cooker insert and the cake pan on top of that. it took 15 minutes on a high steam and a natural release. using a pressure cooker ⅛ of the time that it normally takes for my skillet to do its job and no active water level checking for me make this method a no brainer for me, even if the mix-ins floated to the top of the taro cake and weren't as nicely distributed.

the final taro cake is bouncy and a little chewy, a good foundation for all the other goodness mixed into it. you can add whatever you'd like to the wu tau gou; here, i've added lap cheong for that salty, fatty meat vibe, while the shrimp is less aggressive but still adds to the base flavor. the shiitake mushroom and taro add chewiness and starchiness respectively, and there's pickled mustard greens on top for a little crunchy salty pickly bite.

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