Other recipes call for diced daikon which yields tasty morsels of turnip that fall out of very soft rice cake. They are easier to grate and chop and have a milder flavor. Some recipes call for grated daikon which yields an easy to slice and handle turnip cake. Select daikons about 1 to 11/2 inches in diameter.I like the clear instructions from Ellen Blonder’s Dim Sum: The Art of Chinese Tea Lunch but I discovered a few lo bak go making tips along the way which led to the recipe below. I don’t recall my mom ever making turnip cake so I looked up recipes in cookbooks and online to learn on my own. It is also a special Chinese New Year dish because the Chinese word for turnip, 菜頭 (Cài tóu) sounds like 好彩頭 (Hǎo cǎitóu), which means good luck, and part of the Chinese culture is to eat things which sounds prosperous and lucky. We know to watch for the server carrying a tray of pan-fried morsels of dim sum will have little plates containing 3 pieces of turnip cake. Then the cake is sliced and pan-fried until the outside is crispy but the inside is soft and hot. What is turnip cake? It is a steamed rice cake with pieces of daikon in them, sometimes with Chinese sausages, dried shrimp, preserved turnips, cilantro, and/or green onions.
#Dim sum cake how to#
So what’s a food allergy mother to do? Learn how to make turnip cake in between visits to the dim sum restaurant and call making dim sum a hobby! Turnip cake “Lo Bak Go” made with a mixture of grated and diced daikon yields perfect results. Eating at a Chinese restaurant is not for everyone, but because our family can communicate with them in Chinese, understand the menu, and are not allergic to soy or wheat, it is a manageable dining out experience. My sons zero in on the servers who bring around trays of turnip cake, also known as daikon cake or lo bak go in Cantonese, and we often have to order two dishes as one is not enough. The owner understands our concerns as he has some food restrictions as well, the waitstaff take my boys’ food allergies seriously and practically dote on them with their kindness and concern. We no longer can go to any dim sum restaurant nor order anything we like but we do have one restaurant that we like to go to during their non-peak days and times. My sons, who do not speak any Chinese, can definitely speak “Dim Sum” and ask for their favorite dishes. It seems like a distant memory but there was a time when our family could go to any Chinese Dim Sum restaurant and order anything we liked to eat prior to our food allergy diagnosis.
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