Jiufen's chewy yuyuan of steamed taro kneaded with sweet potato starch, cut into stubby cylinders and served hot in sweet soup or cold over shaved ice
Origin: Taipei, Dajia & Taiwan
From the journey of Taro.
Yùyuán are the Taiwanese answer to the question of what to do with a starchy corm and a sweet tooth, and the answer is unusual: steamed taro is kneaded with sweet potato starch and a little sugar into a firm dough, rolled into ropes, cut into stubby cylinders, and boiled. What comes out has the springy, resistant, slightly slippery chew that Chinese calls QQ, a texture prized in Taiwan above almost any other and one that Western dessert vocabulary has no real word for. They are served two ways and the argument between them is seasonal rather than principled. Hot, they go into a thin sweet soup with red beans, mung beans, peanuts, and taro chunks, which is winter food. Cold, they go over a mound of shaved ice with the same accompaniments and a pour of sugar syrup, which is what a Taiwanese summer afternoon looks like. The town that made them famous had a strange route to it. Jiufen, on the steep coast north-east of Taipei, was a gold-mining settlement that emptied out when the ore ran down after the Second World War. In 1989 Hou Hsiao-hsien shot A City of Sadness there, the film took the Golden Lion at Venice, and visitors began arriving to see the stone staircases and hanging lanterns they had watched on screen. The taro-ball shops on the steps date from that revival, and Jiufen taro balls are now a category of their own. The taro itself is the point of pride. Dajia taro, grown on the Taichung coast, is the prestige cultivar of the island: dense, aromatic, and streaked with the violet flecks that give the balls their pale lavender colour. The colour is much fainter than the vivid purple of commercial taro-flavoured products, which usually owe their shade to the Philippine ube or to a dye.
Sweet potato starch is what gives the QQ chew and cornflour or tapioca starch will not reproduce it; it is sold cheaply by any Chinese or Taiwanese grocer, sometimes as a coarse granular powder that should be crushed fine first. Work the dough whilst the taro is hot, since a cold mash refuses to bind. The thirty seconds in cold water after boiling is not a nicety: it firms the surface and is why shop-bought taro balls have a snap that home ones often lack. Wear gloves when peeling raw taro. The same dough made with sweet potato or with pumpkin gives the orange and yellow balls sold alongside the taro ones, and a bowl of all three is the usual order.
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