Chinese Turnip Cake (Lor Bak Go)

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Chinese New Years may have passed but that doesn’t mean we still can’t celebrate with Chinese Turnip Cake! I love ordering these at the restaurants and with our never ending obsession with buying daikon to make pickled daikon or Japanese dishes, it seemed to make sense to make turnip cake with any extra daikon that we can’t finish.

However, as some of you may know, finding Chinese recipes on the internet isn’t exactly the easiest thing and even when I do find one, I’m skeptical as to how credible the source is how ‘authentic’ the recipe is. Lucky for us, we’ve stumbled across the blog WoksOfLife and tried a few of their recipes and found them to be quite authentic and delicious. And thus, they became our default go to site for any Chinese recipes. When we decided to make Chinese Turnip Cake, lo and behold, we checked their site first and luckily, they had it (yay!)

The ingredients aren’t too hard to find – in fact, we would say most of them are staples in a Chinese household.

One key thing to note is to soak your dried shrimps and mushrooms ahead of time (at least an hour to 2 before your anticipated cooking time). If you’re impatient like me, I used boiling water to rehydrate these ingredients to speed up the process. Also, do not throw the water which those ingredients were soaked in away! They have a lot of flavour and will be used later on in the cooking process.

Once the shrimps and mushrooms are rehydrated, chopped them up into small pieces. Along with the chopped green onion and chopped chinese sausage, cook them in some vegetable oil over medium high heat for a few minutes or the chinese sausage starts to get a bit dark and crispy.

Once done set aside. With the leftover water from the hydrated shrimp and mushroom, combine it to see if you have approximately 1 cup worth of liquid. If not, just top it off with extra water and use that liquid to boil the grated daikon. Boil for approximately 10 minutes. Strain daikon and reserve 3/4 of the residual liquid which the daikon was boiled in.

Mix in the cooking liquid, cooked daikon, and cooked ingredients from earlier together with the dry ingredients until it forms something like a thick paste. Set aside for 30 minutes to allow the flavours to come together. Then, scoop the mixture into a greased pan – we used a square baking tray. Steam it for 50 minutes and when it’s done, it’ll look something like this – not that appetizing in terms of looks in our opinion…

Allow to cool for 30 minutes and when ready to serve, you may eat it as is or we like to pan fry ours so we just cut it up into squares and pan fry it on medium high heat in some vegetable oil. Voila you’re done! Serve with some hot sauce, hoisin sauce, and/or XO sauce.

Recipe below is adapted from Woksoflife.



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