Ba-Wan Pork Dumpling 肉圆

Ba-Wan Pork Dumpling (肉圆), in Taiwanese bah-oân, is a Taiwanese street snack: a flat, translucent round of starch dough about six to eight centimetres across, wrapped around a pork filling and served under sweet and savoury sauces. It is sold across Taiwan, and English Wikipedia notes that ba-wan can be found in most of the island's night markets.

Where it comes from

Tradition places its birth in Beidou (北斗) in Changhua County (彰化县) in the late 19th century. The story credits Fan Wan-chu (范万居), a temple scribe who, after the floods of 1898, soaked sweet potato, kneaded it and cooked it with vegetables as relief food for flood victims. His descendants added meat, and a third generation settled on a wrapper of sweet potato starch and rice batter with bamboo shoots and lean pork inside. Chinese Wikipedia marks this story as unsourced. From Beidou the snack spread around Taiwan and took on local variations. In Lukang (鹿港) it is called bah-hôe (肉回), after the way the batter is spread around the bowl that holds the filling.

How it is made

The wrapper is made from sweet potato starch, potato starch (太白粉), rice flour or tapioca starch, which gives the chewy, gelatinous texture Taiwanese call 'Q'. The filling is mainly pork and minced pork. Depending on the shop it may also hold bamboo shoots, shiitake mushrooms, egg, dried scallops or chestnuts. Ba-wan are first steamed. Chinese Wikipedia puts the dividing line at Changhua: north of it they are mostly deep-fried or poached in oil, and south of it they are mostly steamed.

How it is eaten

Each ba-wan is served with both a sweet sauce and a savoury sauce, plus a little crushed garlic and coriander. Styles differ from town to town. The Hsinchu (新竹) version is smaller, with a filling coloured red by red fermented rice (红糟), and it usually comes with a meatball soup or a thickened fish soup. In Nantou (南投), people eat the wrapper first, then pour the free bone broth over the filling left in the bowl.