Luo Bo Gao

Radish cakes!

Ingredients

• 1 large daikon radish
  
• maybe 1/4c dried mushrooms
  
• 3oz ground pork
  
• 3 scallions
  
• soy sauce, salt
  
• rice flour
  

Peel and grate the daikon radish finely (it actually wouldn't grate on the "fine" side of my box grater, so I went with the normal side - this will work fine). Boil some water, and pour it over the dried mushrooms to rehydrate. with a little sesame oil or neutral oil, start the ground pork cooking in a pot. Cook until just brown. Then fish out the dried mushrooms from the water (reserving the mushroom liquid) and chop coarsely. Add to the pork along with the scallions, chopped. Cook a little longer and then transfer to another bowl.

In the bowl in which you cooked the pork, add the daikon and the reserved water from the mushrooms. If there isn't much water, you may need to add a little more (or add a little soy sauce) until the daikon is moist but not drowning in liquid. I don't really have a good rule of thumb for this - you kind of have to experiment. Bring to a boil and simmer for 15 minutes. Remove from heat and add the pork / scallions / mushrooms and combine. Now add rice flour to the mixture until you get something resembling a pretty thick batter. For 1 daikon, I used about 1-2c rice flour. The first time I made this, I actually added more water so I could add more rice flour. This was a good idea - if the pieces of things in the batter are pretty big, adding quite a bit of rice flour will help your luo bo gao with internal consistency. On the other hand, too much might make for gluey radish cakes. You have to experiment, but if you can get 1.5c rice flour into your batter, I think you're in good shape.

Pour the batter into small loaf pans or basically anything you can then put in a steamer. Steam for 40 minutes, being sure to check the water level frequently and replenishing as necessary. When they're done, take them out and cool to room temperature, then chill for at least 2 hours. When you're ready to serve them, turn the "cakes" out and slice them, then fry lightly on a griddle to crisp up the outside. Serve with soy sauce.

Thoughts: The first time we did this, we got the texture more or less correct, which was pretty cool considering I didn't have rice flour (and instead just ground up rice in my coffee grinder - very tricky). But the flavor was a little bland the first time because we used fresh mushrooms. The second time, the flavor was great, but we used WAY too many dried mushrooms and the texture was way off. It's a work in progress. I think next time we'll use fewer dried mushrooms but we'll also use a little bit more rice flour.

Disaster Index: 3/10