Ba-wan served with sweet sauce
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Type | Dumpling |
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Course | Dim sum |
Place of origin | Taiwan |
Main ingredients | Dough (corn starch, sweet potato starch, rice flour), pork, chicken, bamboo shoots, shiitake mushrooms |
Ba-wan (Chinese: ; pinyin: ròuyuán; Wade–Giles: jou4-yüan2; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: bah-ôan; literally: "meat circle") is a large-sized Taiwanese dumpling and street food, consisting of a 6–8 cm diameter disk-shaped translucent dough filled with a savory stuffing and served with a sweet and savory sauce. The stuffing varies widely according to different regions in Taiwan, but usually consists of a mixture of pork, bamboo shoots, and shiitake mushrooms.Changhua-style ba-wan is considered to be the "standard" ba-wan as it is the most famous and most widely imitated of all styles of ba-wan.
The term "ba-wan" is a non-standard romanization derived from Taiwanese Hokkien. In the township of Lukang, Changhua County, ba-wan are known as bahhoe (; ròuhuí; bah-hôe; "meat return") because they take on the block-like shape of the character 回.
The gelatinous dough is made of a combination of corn starch, sweet potato starch, and rice flour, which gives it its chewy, sticky, and gelatinous texture and a greyish translucent hue. Ba-wan are initially cooked by steaming; however, they may also be served after being deep fried to give them a "skin" or gently poached in oil to heat them without drying them out.