Cook: Turnip Cake (萝卜糕)

Homemade Turnip Cake

Crispy outside and soft inside

Since moving to Dubai, not every street food is readily available. When I am in Singapore, if I wanted a nice plate of turnip cake, I can just walk across the road and reach a hawker centre where I can indulge in them at a very reasonable price. However in Dubai, not everywhere serve nice turnip cake, and the price is definitely much more expensive when compared to Singapore.

So I decided to take some my own to see how easy/hard it is. I am pretty happy with the results as it turned out good for my first attempt. Although I took quite a long time shredding the turnip, but it is all worth it.

The ingredients required

INGREDIENTS (Makes 8 servings)

1. 2 radish/turnip --around 1kg 

2. 2-3 cups of water

3. 2 tablespoon of dried shrimp, soaked and chopped

4. 6 pieces of dried mushroom, soaked and chopped

5. 2 pieces of Chinese sausage, chopped into small pieces

6. 2 stalks of spring onion, chopped into small pieces

7. 230g of rice flour

8. 2 tablespoon of cornstarch 

9. 1 teaspoon of salt

10. 1 teaspoon of sugar

11. White pepper to taste

METHODS:

1. Grate the turnip and add two cup of water to the turnip.

2. Place them in a wok and simmer until the turnip is cooked, stir it every now and then so that the turnip doesn't turn brown.

3. Once it is cooked, scoop the turnip and squeeze the juice out. Place the turnip in a bowl and the juice in a measuring cup. Top up the cup with water so that you have two cups of water/juice.

4. Pour the water back to the turnip and let them cool down.

5. Meanwhile, add some oil to the wok and stir fry the Chinese sausage, dried shrimp, mushroom until they are cooked, then add in the spring onion and a little bit of soy sauce. Set aside. 

6. Now that the turnip is cooled down, add rice flour, cornstarch, salt, sugar and white pepper. Mix well. The mixture should look a bit like watery coleslaw.

7. Place the mixture into a steaming bowl. Do remember to oil the bowl so that the carrot cake doesn't stick to the side and easier to remove it after steaming.

8. Steam for 50 minutes and leave it to cool down to room temperature.

9. At this point, you can cut them up and pan fried.

10. If you would like the texture to be harder and easier to cut, it is best to leave them in the fridge for a couple of hours or overnight. 

11. Enjoy!