Name: Arianne Guan Toleno
Recipe Name (original/English): Zhi Ma Qiu / Sesame Ball
Cooking Time: 30 minutes
Serves: 12
Country/Region: Taiwan
Type of dish: dessert
Ingredients:
2 cups sticky rice flour
½ pound sweet azuki bean paste or peanut butter or pumpkin paste
½ cup raw white sesame
½ cup water
¼ teaspoon baking soda
Oil for deep frying
Sugar, to taste
Directions:
- Mix sticky rice flour with sugar, baking powder, oil, and just enough water to make the dough stick together.
- Divide the dough and azuki paste into 24 parts. Wrap the filling with the dough to make a ball, dip the ball in water then roll the ball in a plate with sesame.
- Heat the oil until bubbles form in the middle when you stick a chop stick in. Throw the sesame balls into the hot oil.
- When they start to expand and surface, try pressing them down with your spatula, this way they will expand more. When the ball stop expanding and the sesames are mostly golden, turn up the heat for about 1 minute.
- Fish up the sesame balls, drain the oil, ready to serve!
Anecdote:
My hometown in Central Taiwan is home to a lot of snacks and cuisines. Close to midnight when most of the city is asleep, the snack alley by the temple is still teeming with hungry stomachs. As a kid, my parents often took me to the temple when there was a festival to see the lion dance, fire crackers, a folk craftsman who painted stories with syrup on a huge heated iron surface (and of course when he is done you get to eat the hardened candy figures in the story), and craftsmen who made all kinds of dainty funny characters with colorful dough. As a kid, I was always fascinated by the way the sesame balls slowly popped out, along with my anticipation, in the big hot frying caldron. Fried sesame ball to me is not just sesame ball; its simple taste and humble content contains all the exciting light, smoke, smell of food, and familiar vendors’ faces in that alley by the temple of my childhood.
