Steamed Yam Cake is also known as “Or Kueh” in the Chinese Hokkien dialect. “Or” means yam and “kueh” means cake. This is a savory snack that is popular in Singapore and Malaysia. We eat this snack mainly as breakfast. It goes well with a sweet brown sauce and chilli sauce.
Yam is a root veggie which not only provides a good source of fiber, it provides many vitamins and minerals that we lack as well. Among some of the health benefits, Yam helps in blood sugar control as it slows down the digestion and reduce sugar spikes. It also helps to reduce the risk of heart diseases, reduce body weight and improve our gut health.
Hence it is good to have yam as part of our regular diet. There is another Chinese sweet snack that uses yam as one of the ingredients, Bubur Cha Cha which you may like to cook too.
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Prep time 1 hour
Cook time 1 hour
Serves 1 tray
Ingredients required to make the Steamed Yam Cake
- 200 g yam, cut in 1 cm cubes
- 3 tbsp dried shrimps, soaked and minced
- 6 pieces dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked and diced
Batter
- 240 g rice flour
- 45 g tapioca flour
- 1 tsp chicken stock
- 1/2 tsp salt
- A dash of pepper
- 500 ml water
- 500 ml water soaked from the dried shrimps and mushrooms
Garnishing
- 10 shallots, sliced in rings
- 3 stalks spring onions, cut into small pieces
- 2 big chilli, cut into 1/2 cm slices
Method
Prepare the batter.
- Measure both rice and tapioca flour and put in mixing bowl.
- Add the chicken stock, salt and water, including the water used to soak the dried shrimps and dried mushrooms.
- Whisk the batter continuously until it is uniform. Set aside.
Prepare the ingredients.
- Wash and cut off the hard skin of the yam. Wear a disposable glove when handling the yam as the sap may cause itchiness to sensitive skin. Cut into cubes of about 1 cm. (Mine was cut a little too big).
- Chop the dried shrimps coarsely to minced it and cut the dried mushrooms into dices.
- Using the shallot oil (from frying the shallots), add in the shrimp and mushrooms to stir fry for 5 mins. Add in the yam cubes and continue to fry for about 7 mins. Set aside.
Cook the yam cake.
- Pour the batter into the wok pan over medium to low heat.
- Keep stirring the batter slowly in the wok pan until it becomes gluey.
- Turn up the heat and mix in the yam cubes, dried shrimps and mushrooms.
- Scoop the paste into a steaming tray, press to level the top. Set up the steaming pot, and put the yam paste to steam over boiling water for about 45 mins.
- Check if the steamed yam cake is cooked by putting a fork into the cake. The cake is cooked once the fork is not sticky.
- Garnish the cake with the fried shallots and spring onions, and let it cool down on cooling tray.
- Serve to eat when warm.
Note
- Instead of cooking the batter separately, you can also pour the batter directly into the wok pan after Method step 3 to stir the batter together until it is gluey. This is likely to be easier to manage.
- The excess yam cake can be put into food container to store in fridge to be consume subsequent days. You can either re-heat it by steaming or pan frying it.