The Family Lo Bak Go Recipe! | Turnip Cake (萝卜糕) | The Woks of Life

Hi everyone, today we're making lo bak go. It's a nice day and I've got my like red outfit on, getting ready for Chinese New Year and don't get me wrong we can make this lo bak go anytime, but always during Chinese New Year we make it. I've been making this in my early days, learned from my mom, was hanging out in the kitchen, asking questions believe it or not, and luckily I got her recipe in the head and we shared this recipe like over 10 years ago I think, it's one of our earliest recipes we published and over the years I've found that I've just been kind of like on autopilot cooking it and I've just been finding easier ways to cook it so I'm going to share that with you today. You know there are a lot of recipes out there on the internet for lo bak go and this past week I've been trying all of them, quite a few of them, see what types of techniques, what kind of ingredients they're using and just to improve ours, but you know at the end of the day I really came back to my mother's recipe and I like it and we're just going to stick to it. So some of you might be thinking lo bak go this is great and others of you might be saying what the heck is lo bak go, okay so it's actually a rice cake and the reason why it's called cake is because you know we put it in a pan and steam it and it comes out in a solid, a little bit of solid block and we slice it up like a cake and then pan fry it and serve it. The main flavor is this daikon radish so it has an unusual flavor if you've never had daikon radish you could say it's one of those flavors that you love it or hate it but mostly people love it. It has a little bit of lap cheong or Chinese sausage for flavoring, a little bit of shiitake and a little bit of shrimp flavor from the dried shrimp so all that is interspersed into this rice flour that makes up the bulk of the cake and you cut it up and it's just an iconic traditional Chinese New Year food. Now some of you may have experienced it at dim sum where they're pushing around the car. The thing about the dim sum version is that they don't have as much mushroom, shrimp and Chinese sausage or even scallion it's usually like this white cake they use very little daikon radish in as well and so that's why this make at home recipe is much better. So if you've never had a homemade lo bak go you're in for a treat and if you've never had a lo bak go out at dim sum after you make it at home you're going to go out to dim sum and you're going to be like what is this? Definitely a must make at home recipe for Chinese New Year or any time. Speaking of dim sum we've got a whole dim sum section in our book that has siu mai dumplings, taro puffs, scallion pancakes and of course lo bak go. So be sure to pick up a copy of the Walks of Life cookbook you won't be disappointed. It's also got Chinese New Year recipes like our poached chicken and our whole steamed fish so if you're planning a Chinese New Year menu be sure you pick up a copy and have it beside you while you're cooking your Chinese dinner this year. Alright so what actually do we need to make lo bak go? It's actually pretty simple. So it starts with the daikon radish so this is called daikon radish, Chinese radish, turnip and you'll see different types of these too you'll see round Korean radishes. For the lo bak go I like to get these big juicy radishes. You want to check the weight which means they're nice and juicy. One with a smooth skin not wrinkled and the winter time is the best time to buy these because they're sweet because during the cold weather they get the sweetness stays in the root vegetable. During the summer they're a little bit more bitter which is why we have a little bit of sugar in the recipe to counteract it. This is it, daikon radish, Chinese turnip. So this is actually a lot of radish we're only going to use a piece of this. Next is the dried shiitake mushrooms we use the small dried shiitake mushrooms they hydrate really quickly they're very flavorful there's a lot of types the kind that are flowery or faku that have the cracks in them the white cracks in them and those you kind of want to avoid because they take longer to soak they're thicker they have a thicker flesh but also. These are thin and in my opinion more flavorful perfect for robot go. People always ask me hey can I use fresh mushrooms you can they have a lot more water in them just when you're in the pan just make sure you dry them out when you're when you're cooking them. Okay dried shrimp you can get this at the Chinese supermarket not all dried shrimp is are created equal so look at the ingredients and try to keep it as natural as possible because a lot of these have different ingredients and additives so these are large pretty large dried shrimp but you can get away with the smaller ones but keep in mind the larger you go for these dried shrimp the more expensive they are. Okay so the next thing is Chinese sausage or lap cheong and make sure that you get I mean these days there's all kinds of flavorings and things so I like to get just the original flavor but make sure you don't get the duck liver sausage so if you see Kamyang Jang it's a good brand just make sure that they're not the liver sausage read the packet and they're the regular original flavor sausage and you're good. The next thing is the rice flour and I say rice flour and it's you can tell by the red package this is glutinous rice flour it has a green package you do not want to use that for this it'll ruin your lo bak go. Now glutinous flour is used for other things like sesame balls or like nian gao and Judy has a recipe for nian gao and I'm sure you're going to be making this for the Chinese New Year just don't use it for lo bak go. Cornstarch is needed a much smaller amount so cornstarch is a binder for your cake I'm going to explain that to you a little bit later put your seasonings in which is just sugar salt white pepper certainly last but not least is a scallion very simple that's all we're using. So remember the complete recipe can be found at our blog the walksoflife.com and the link is down below and we'll put it right here. So the first thing you got to do because it takes a little time is soak your dried shrimp and your shiitake mushroom a quick way to do it is use boiling water hot water I actually use water out of our tea boiler our hot water boiler for our tea which is about like just below boiling 208 degrees or so soaks it in about half an hour to an hour so get those soaking first the first thing we're going to do is peel the daikon radish and then we're going to grade it or we're going to use a food processor I'm going to show you both ways to do it now don't cut this off everybody likes to cut this off this is your handle actually and you're going to end up throwing this away anyways if you've got a long piece of radish kind of approximate don't don't peel the whole thing I peel part of it if this is 20 ounces then I still got this for storage it's better if you don't use the whole radish you can just cover it with plastic wrap or put it in a plastic bag and put it back in the fridge. Simple box grater and here's how you do it might seem like it's laborious and slow this is the easiest way to do it and in my opinion it's less cleanup I like to use a stainless steel bowl because I'm resting this grater on top of it and now we're going to measure it so this is where the beauty of the digital scale comes in I'm going to use a separate bowl I'm going to zero it out put it on ounces and I'm going to put daikon radish in there until I get 20 ounces I'm going to pour the water in because the water is part of it alright so I've got 22.5 ounces pretty darn close our recipe calls for 20 ounces of daikon radish but if you end up with a couple of extra ounces it's really no big deal so I always say use a box grater it's simple cleanup is faster but I know people are going to ask about the food processor so here's the thing with food processor it's got a small opening here big radish here so I got to peel the radish I got to cut it into pieces so I can stick it in there it is fast but you be the judge okay so to do it in the food processor you do need the grater attachment so we're going to have to change this out the moral of the story is if you're making one or two rice cakes just use the box grater if you're in production mode and you're making it for friends and family you want to make 10 rice cakes use the food processor sometimes what I do is I put the whole daikon radish on the scale I say it's about 51 ounces and I say well I'm probably going to need about half of this which is why I peeled half of it so that I can keep the skin on here and it'll store better in the fridge so I'm just going to cut about half of this which is about here and that should be enough okay that's what you get well you know it's kind of nice move this stuff out of the way we'll clean it up later next thing is to mince up all the mushrooms shrimp and sausage and the scallion and I actually soaked more than I need I'm going to squeeze them out of water and this is about approximately what you need now these mushrooms sometimes you want to cut the little stems off but they're not really that hard so I'm just going to leave them in there you just want to get these little bits into small minced bits and the reason why is if you get big chunks in there your cake your rice cake radish cake is going to fall apart because of the big chunks so you want little minced pieces that's good now the little dried shrimp do the same thing so you got a nice sharp knife okay so we're going to put these dried shrimp separately because these dried shrimp are actually going to the wok first because they need to be toasted okay the Chinese sausage make sure you give this a quick rinse well you never know where the sausage has been or but uh you know you just rinse off some of the surface it's the same thing about washing chicken do you wash your chickens people say no it's like well okay you got to trust you trust the butchers I guess that none of this was ever dropped on the floor none of this was exposed like I like to give it a rinse well I can smell the fragrance of these these lap cheong you see what I did with I cut them lengthwise and then I cut them in half to doubled up for just quicker processing one thing that I that people ask me is like oh I don't have Chinese sausage well you could use cured pork belly Judy has a recipe oh but I don't have those either okay so you could use salt pork you could use guanciale or you could even use bacon but keep in mind I'm smelling this and I smell the fragrance of the Chinese sausage and that's going to come out in your low buck gold so if you use anything else differently then you're gonna get bacon flavor are you gonna get guanciale flavor or salt pork flavor so just keep that in mind next I'm gonna cut the scallion everybody's done that before I kind of like especially if you have a big piece of scallion just to split it down to get smaller pieces so I've got these digital scale I got my bowl I got my rice flour cornstarch and I got some water so first thing I'm gonna do is turn on scale and zero it out I'm gonna put it on grams and I need 155 grams which is about one and a quarter cup of rice flour no measurements saying that hey I got around I got a pack the cup or what have you and who has who has this has this little cutoff spoon to fit me to fit into the cornstarch jar we do next I'm gonna add the water I'm gonna add about a cup reserve this rest of the cup cooking the daikon and stir this up until it's smooth our recipe calls for half a cup of water to add to the rice flour and cornstarch mixture but if you want a moister cake you can add more water so for every quarter cup of water that you add add an additional tablespoon of cornstarch so today we're actually adding half a cup so we added two tablespoons of cornstarch to make up for it so that's a total of three tablespoons of cornstarch and that's gonna give you a moisture cake make sure you there's no more lumps in here so I've checked out a lot of recipes lobaco recipes on the internet and they vary from using no cornstarch in their lobaco to up to half cornstarch and half rice flour now who wants to eat a cornstarch cake we want to eat a rice cake but I do think you need cornstarch in your recipe because cornstarch is a binder the more water that you put in to your rice cake the softer it will get but also it'll destabilize it and it'll start to fall apart cornstarch binds everything together keeps it solid if you like a softer rice cake you can put a little bit more water add a little bit more cornstarch people always ask me in the comments like hey how do you make it like in dim sum where it's soft and I get it it's soft for a few reasons there's no little bits of aromatic things like a shrimp and and lobster and it is just one smooth cake and there's quite frankly a lot less daikon radish so it makes it smoother so it's all like flour and it makes it more pudding okay all that said just follow the recipe for the first time okay it works I've been making this thing my whole life and this recipe is the combination of that all those things those lessons that I've learned it's in this recipe so follow it closely my guess is that'll be perfect okay we're set we're ready to go to the walk medium heat on walk don't really have to that that high add oil first thing you want to do we say cook it for about three minutes but make sure you don't cook it too long because everything will get crispy and hard and you don't want that so this is ready and I'm gonna put this side turn this on the heat add the daikon and we're gonna add a cup and a half of water I'm gonna cook this uncovered make sure you bunch this in the middle because the walk does get a bit hot and you don't want to scorch the radish and make the radish cake dark 10 minutes we're cooking it uncovered now this is cooking about medium heat so it's been about almost two and a half minutes or so I'm gonna move the daikon so it cooks evenly a nice scoop is good and you can see that the water is coming out of the daikon you add water so it doesn't dry and brown at the beginning but water is constantly evaporating and then when it cooks it also the daikon also supposed to end up with about roughly a cup of water in the wok it's been about 10 minutes and I'm turning off the flame and right now it's about a cup of water in here total so we're good the heat is off in your wok the wok is still a little bit hot I'm gonna pour in this batter make sure all batter gets in there now remember in this batter for our moist cake we put one cup of water and an additional two tablespoons of cornstarch for a total of three now I'm gonna stir this around mix it and we're gonna add our seasonings sugar salt and white pepper now we're gonna add our flavoring bits back now again we've got residual heat from the wok I'm gonna mix everything and you can see the batter is a little bit wet so I'm gonna turn the heat on okay so this is all thickened up and you want to make sure like turned on the heat a little bit this is the consistency of the batter that you want just like that and you're good we're gonna put that into our well-oiled pan make sure you're liberal about this oil you can put a piece of parchment in here but I don't think it's necessary so you know what you're worried about that a little more drops of oil and the key to having the cake separate from the pan is cooling it completely and if you refrigerate it even better it's gonna come right out it's gonna pull away from the sides after it cools so what I'm gonna do is just like any cake even when you bakers out there this is what you do make this flat now ready for the steam for your vessel I've always used this loaf pan because this loaf pan you can put it in and it gets a little bit thicker and you get nice thick pieces of lobaco which is nice steaming time is a little bit longer you can also use a cake pan round cake pan and steaming time is actually reduced will be 40 minutes because it's all personal preference whichever vessel you do use use lots of oil use a neutral oil put it in there brush it all the edges and all the top edges in case you spill a little rice flour on the top edges you do not need a piece of parchment paper we're not baking a cake here if you're baking a carrot cake or chocolate cake use the parchment here save it for that you'd be wasting it after you put a sufficient amount of oil in there you put the batter you steam it up you take it out let it cool it'll just dump right out okay I got my steamer pot here I'm gonna add more water to it because it's gonna steam for 40 minutes I got the shallow cake pan I'm gonna cover it so once that comes to a boil I'm going to put with the radish cake in for steaming start my timer and then turn down the heat slightly because I actually want medium-high heat on it I want a good steam but I don't want to go crazy steamer looks like it's ready starting to get steam on this we're gonna place the rice cake in put the cover back on okay so right now it's high and once we get a full roiling steam and the water is boiling I'm gonna turn down slightly so it's medium-high set the timer for 40 minutes but if I kept this on high heat it would be too much of a high temperature we just want to keep it steam it in a happy pace and then after 40 minutes do the chopstick test just like you do a cake test with a toothpick this is gonna be a chopstick test I'm gonna poke it in and when it comes out clean it's good so we got steam coming out of the vent hole and around the edges so that's when you know it's a perfect steam temperature if you don't have enough steam any steam out of here turn it up if you got if it's like shooting out it's too hot even around even if you don't have a vent hole so the other thing is that you have to check out our post on ways to set up your steamer because you could use a wok you could use this you use a big pot there's several ways to do it bamboo yeah you could also use a bamboo steamer okay timer went off 40 minutes shutting off the steamer take off the cover carefully to make sure the water doesn't drip on it okay and then we're gonna do the chopstick test you're gonna stick chopstick in there comes out clean which is pretty clean right there is not sticking good it's done let's take it out careful hot put it counter let it cool off now after it cools off it'll pull off the sides don't try to take it out now otherwise you're gonna have a mess this has to set so it has to cool off to room temperature and probably best put it in the refrigerator before you try to take it out of the pan and you're not you're not gonna have any problem all right I have a lobaco that we made yesterday and we took it out put it in the fridge put on a plate put it covered and you can store this in the refrigerator for quite some time you could freeze it I'm just gonna slide this guy off cutting board and it's definitely easier to cut well I think you know overnight or until it's until it's set really so overnight is best until it's ready to handle it's it's just going to be a little bit more difficult to handle if it hasn't set overnight in the fridge so what I'm gonna do to make it easy is I'm gonna cut this in half okay so it's so I have this easier to work with here so I'm gonna cut these about like let's say a half inch and you can you can be it can be a little bit fun about this and cut them into little cubes or what have you and you notice that that it does start sticking a little bit to the knife especially if you want to go for a moist version right so but you know it's still fine for now but if you find that it's really sticking and it's getting annoying you can just rinse your knife with water and reset it that's the way we do it cut it into these little pieces like that and then these are ready for the pan okay so we're gonna brown these in the pan we're gonna add a little bit of oil to the pan brown them on both sides lightly so there's a little bit of a crust on them which is very nice and then serve this with oyster sauce and or soy sauce or sesame oil whatever you like we just usually serve it with oyster sauce on the side and enjoy it all right got the pan going using a nonstick pan today you can use a cast-iron pan get a good amount of oil in there you want to get a nice crust on here okay don't get it off too high heat because you want a nice golden color if you really want a purist about it you can cook them on all four sides six sides would be a push since I don't think they'd stand up on end but the more oil you put in the nicer it's gonna be I'm gonna they don't get they're not sticky that's beautiful okay okay they're done and ready to plate that's it so this version that I did has a little bit more water liquid I added a tablespoon cornstarch so it's more pudding like and if you like it that way then great if you like it firmer just do one tablespoon of cornstarch use a little bit less water but this is delicious this is so light that's your lobaco recipe the only one you'll ever need so if you like this video visit us at the walks of life calm and get the full recipe for lobaco happy new year everyone I got you I got you healer check out the chopstick