Yam Cake

This is my first attempt at making a dish i learn at the dim sum course...

The receipe my instructor gives out is superb!!! Her hints and tips are so good, its almost impossible to fail...

The receipe below yields one tray 21cm baking tin but 1 yam the size of my hand sold in supermarkets is approximately 1kg with skin on. I bought 2 so after removing the skin, i have approximately 1800gm of yam so i made 3 portions and yield 4 baking tins of yam cake.

With 300gm more yam, i simply add them to the fried diced yam without increasing the amount of flour and it worked out fine.

What do you need

Ingredients A:

Rice Flour 300gm

Tang mien flour (Wheat Starch) 75gm

Water 300gm/330ml

Ingredients B:

Yam without skin 500gm

Dried scrimps 50gm (Wash, Soaked, diced)

Chinese sausage 1 piece (Skinned, diced)

Chinese mushroom 4 pieces (Wash, Soaked, diced)

(Keep all the water from soaking scrimps and mushroom and use its as 'water' later in the cooking)

Seasoning:

Salt 20gm

Msg 20gm (i omit totally)

Sugar 40gm

1/4 tsp pepper

1/4 tsp five spice powder

1 tbsp sesame seed oil

Preparing the yam:

Skin yam with potato peeler. Wash whole. Take 300gm of yam, slice thinly and place in baking tin with water covering it slightly. Steam until its soft and mash-able. Steaming takes approximately 15 mins. Pour out access water before mashing. Mash immediately while its hot. Slowly add more water if required. You should get a fine mash.

For the remaining 200gm of yam, dice into 1.5cm by 1.5cm cubes.

Fry in oil until golden brown. Set aside.

How to do it?

In a separate bowl, whisk ingredients A and seasoning until you get a smooth mixture.

Armed with the ingredients below, we can now start to cook the yam paste.

Heat wok with oil (i used oil from frying the yam earlier combined with shallots oil from frying shallots. Fry dried scrimps, chinese sausage and mushroom until the mixture becomes fragrant and the oil becomes foamy.

Add fried yam (the foam will all disappear) to make it crisp again.

Adding 1000gm/1110ml of water into wok.

By now, the mash yam should have absorbed all the water and is a very thick and lumpy.

Add 200gm/220ml of water, mix well and you will get a watery yam paste again.

Add yam paste into the wok, mix well. Bring to boil.

Take bowl with ingredients A, whisk up the flour and seasoning that has settled to the bottom of the bowl. Scoop 2-3 ladles of the soup from the wok into the flour mixture and mix well.

This will increase the tempreature of the flour mixture.

Turn off heat.

Pour flour mixture into wok and quickly mix well. You will get a lumpy, sticky yam paste.

Scoop yam paste into baking tin (greased with oil).

Steam over water for at least 45 mins. Only place the tin into the wok after the water has boiled.

The final product. Dont worry about the yam cake being soft and wobberly when hot.

It will harden when cooled.

Flip the yam cake over onto a plate (it will slide out effortlessly from the tin cos we coat the tin with oil) to cool faster.