Dajia Taro Pastry 大甲芋头酥
Dajia Taro Pastry is featured among the local specialties of Taiwan.
Dajia Taro Pastry (大甲芋头酥) is a round, flaky pastry with a sweet taro filling, tied to Dajia District (大甲区) in the northwest corner of Taichung (台中), Taiwan. Chinese Wikipedia describes taro pastry as a Taiwanese pastry snack that first appeared in Taichung, made at first from surplus taro, and later became a local snack.
How it is made
A flaky dough of flour and butter is wrapped around a filling of mashed taro, and the ball is baked in the oven. Taiwan's Workforce Development Agency, which teaches the pastry in an online baking course, calls taro pastry a basic mooncake and says the skill lies in making the water-oil dough and the oil pastry, wrapping one inside the other and rolling them. The Sun Mai (先麦) bakery stresses that its pastry is baked rather than fried.
Where it comes from
Dajia sits on the alluvial fan plain built up by the Dajia River (大甲溪) and the Da'an River (大安溪), and taro and rice are among its main products; Chinese Wikipedia lists Dajia taro among the district's specialty products. The Sun Mai bakery makes its pastry from local betel-nut-core taro (槟榔心芋).
Two bakeries are credited with the invention. Sun Mai grew out of a wedding-cake and bread shop opened in 1967 beside Jenn Lann Temple (镇澜宫) in Dajia. In a profile of its chairman Wu Sheng-chuan (吴生泉), Feng Chia University reports that a bumper crop of Dajia betel-nut-core taro went unsold in 1998 and that the bakery, trying to develop products from Dajia taro, made Taiwan's first taro pastry that year. Chinese Wikipedia calls A-Tsung Shi (阿聪师), a Taichung pastry brand best known for its taro pastry, the "father of taro pastry" and notes that it opened a taro culture museum as a tourist factory.
How it is eaten
Feng Chia University describes Sun Mai's taro pastry as a tea-time snack for locals and a gift that visitors to Taiwan ask for by name, and says it was chosen as a pastry for the state banquet at the 2004 presidential inauguration.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.