City God Temple Ba-Wan Dumplings 城隍庙肉圆

City God Temple Ba-Wan Dumplings (城隍庙肉圆) are the Hsinchu (新竹) version of ba-wan (肉圓), the Taiwanese snack of a pork filling in a translucent starch skin, sold in the food stalls around Hsinchu's City God Temple (城隍廟). Their mark is a red filling: the pork is seasoned with red fermented rice (紅糟).

Ingredients

The skin is made from a slurry of indica rice (在來米) mixed with sweet-potato starch and potato starch, which gives it a see-through look and a chewy bite. The filling is pork seasoned with red fermented rice, sugar and soy sauce, with chopped spring onion. Hsinchu ba-wan are smaller than most.

Where it comes from

Several stalls in the City God Temple area sell them. One of them, Yingming Lin Family Ba-Wan (英明林家肉圓), stands inside the temple; Storm Media (風傳媒) describes it as a family business now in its fourth generation. In a 2017 interview with SETN (三立新聞), Hsinchu mayor Lin Chih-chien (林智堅) named red fermented rice ba-wan as one of three examples of the city's speciality foods, with duck noodles and shuirun cakes (水潤餅).

How it is eaten

The Lin family stall makes its ba-wan by what Storm Media calls a cold-oil steeping method (冷油泡法), so they reach the table warm rather than scalding. Its thick, half-transparent skins are very springy, and besides the traditional pork and spring onion it makes chestnut, taro and bamboo-shoot versions, each stamped with a red mark. They come with a well-seasoned red fermented rice pork filling and the stall's family sauce, and the pieces are small enough to try two or three flavours at one sitting. The stall also sells a soup of extra-large pork balls.