Taiwan Night Market Sweet Potato Doughnut Holes Recipe (Sweet Potato Balls 地瓜球)

Hey guys, what's up? It's Mike Chin and welcome to my kitchen. Sorry, I haven't done a recipe video in a while, but as most of you know, I just moved from New York to San Francisco and I'm still settling in. My kitchen's a mess. I'm missing a lot of cookware. But this recipe we're doing today is so simple. You really don't need a lot of stuff. Now, if you watch my vlog channel, if you don't, you should. You know that I went to Taiwan and I visited quite a few night markets. And a very popular food item at all night markets which are essentially like sweet potato donut holes. These things are round, puffy, crispy on the outside, soft and tender on the inside. And everyone I met in Taiwan loves them. I've had them and I'll tell you guys, they are absolutely delicious and super easy to make. All you need is some sweet potato. Of course, I prefer the white kind. Then, of course, you need some cooking oil. You need some sugar. Granulated sugar is preferred. I know this is probably not something readily available at every single supermarket. So I'll put a link on Amazon where you can get these. And another thing that's essential to this recipe, you need some sort of cooking tool like this. It's kind of like a ladle, strainer kind of thing with a bunch of holes on them. They usually sell these at Chinese supermarkets for like a dollar or two. All right, let's get started. First thing we're going to do is peel our sweet potato and we'll use a cup or eight ounces of it. After you skin your sweet potatoes, like I said, take out eight ounces of it or about a cup and then just slice them up. The reason we're slicing them is because we're going to put them on a steamer and we're going to steam them until they become mushy sweet potatoes. The sweet potato slices will be done in about 20 minutes and then just stick a fork or chopsticks in there. Make sure it's cooked all the way through. Then transfer all that into a big mixing bowl. Now, you've got to do the next steps when the sweet potato is still hot. Otherwise, it may not completely bind with the sugar and flour. So as soon as your sweet potato gets out of the steamer, toss in a teaspoon of granulated sugar. Take a fork and give that a nice mix. Now, add three quarters of a cup of your sweet potato flour into the sweet potatoes. You may need to add a little warm water in here to bind everything, but don't add too much, just a tiny bit. Just so the potato and the flour all bind together. Now, let's get our hands dirty. When your dough is nice and smooth and holding together, we're going to cut this in half. Take one piece and just roll it into a noodle. However thin you roll your sweet potatoes is going to determine how big your sweet potatoes balls are. After you roll them out, cut them into pieces into the size you want them to be. Take a piece in your hand and just roll it into a little ball. Go to your stove, take your wok or whatever you're frying with, fill it up with oil and just enough so that all the little donut holes get submerged. Turn the heat on low and let your oil heat up. When you think the oil is ready, you can do the simple chopstick test. Put a wooden chopstick in there. Are bubbles forming? Yep, then we're good to go. Carefully slide all your little sweet potato donut holes in there. And just stir it around so they don't stick to each other. And we're going to cook it for about three to five minutes until all the sweet potato balls rise to the surface. Now that our sweet potato balls have floated to the surface, we're going to cook it like this for another two to three minutes until they're a little more golden brown. Make sure at this point you're cooking and stirring because we want these things to cook evenly. After you cook it like that for two to three minutes, turn the heat on medium and this is where the fun begins. We're going to, in the beginning, ever slightly squeeze these little balls. You're going to see bubbles coming out and that's why we needed this ladle spoon thingy. You're going to see that these things are going to start growing when you squeeze the air out of them. Just squeeze and cook, squeeze and cook for another couple of minutes on medium heat and gradually you're going to increase the pressure. Finally, after about a couple minutes, turn the heat on high. We're going to cook it on high for another minute or two and now we're going to squeeze pretty darn hard. At this point, your sweet potato balls are not going to break so you can give it a lot of pressure. There you go. Fried sweet potato balls or sweet potato donut holes depends on what you want to call them. Looking at this, nice and crunchy on the outside. Let's give it a try. That's awesome. The key to this is they're not supposed to be that sweet. They're supposed to have a very natural sweetness from the sweet potato. So these things are going to be crunchy on the outside, soft and warm on the inside, slightly sweet, very nice sweet potato flavor. Ah, that crunch. If you've got a bit of a sweet tooth, you think it's not sweet enough for you, by all means, add two teaspoons of sugar. But I'm telling you, try it with one teaspoon of sugar. It's not going to be very sweet, but it's sweet enough to make this really tasty. You're not going to feel that guilty knowing there's like a ton of sugar in there. Of course, it's deep fried, but you know, at least there's not a lot of sugar. Gotta try this, guys. If you can't make it all the way to Taiwan, you want to go to the night market, this is one of the favorite items from the night market. You can make it right at home. Again, all the ingredients, everything is in my description box. Try this out. Let me know how you like it. Thanks for watching, everybody. See you. Oh, hey, it's me again. I know a lot of you see me film these recipe videos, and you're wondering, does it really taste as good as Mike say it is? Maybe all these recipes are horrible. Well, let's find out. Because I make so much of these sweet potato balls, I'm going to share with my friends and they can give their honest opinion. Okay, they're my friends. It might be a little biased, but let's see what they think. Have a sweet potato ball. I already took one. Try it. It's your first time eating sweet potato ball? You like it? Yeah, it's like chewy and... So I'm not paying you to say this is good. Okay, here, try it. Well, you gotta sniff it first. It smells good. That is really good. That's really good, right? That's really good. Now, would you like a sweet potato ball? Yeah, this is Taiwan street food. You like it? I make it. Wow, all right. Yeah. See, see, she didn't even know me that well. You want another one? Yeah, yeah, you can have another one. It's like, it's like really soft and a little bit sweet and aromatic. Yeah, it's crunchy on the outside. Very nice, right? Here, you have a sweet potato ball. Oh, thank you. Oh, these are very hot. Yeah, yeah, because people might not think my recipes actually taste good. I just want to make sure. They're very good. It doesn't need any sugar. Here, I'll leave it on the table for you guys. There you go. Go make it for yourself. See ya.