Chinese New Year recipes: traditional radish cake cooks up good luck

Loh bok goh – often called radish cake or pudding, turnip cake or pudding, or carrot cake (mostly in Singapore and Malaysia) – is available year-round, but is especially popular at the start of the lunar new year because it’s supposed to bring good fortune in the coming months. I love it freshly made and hot out of the steamer, sliced then pan-fried (which is how dim sum restaurants serve the dish) and stir-fried with XO sauce.

Loh bok goh

My mother’s technique of making this is to grate the radish, boil it in salted water, drain it (but reserve the liquid), then add rice flour and some of the liquid back to the radish, along with the stir-fried “mix-ins” (Chinese sausage, dried shrimp and dried mushrooms) before steaming it. But when I was making this with food stylist Nellie Ming Lee, she taught me her family’s method, which is easier, so that’s the technique I use now.

1 large loh bok (white radish), about 1.3kg
2-4 dried shiitake mushrooms, about 30 grams
25 grams Chinese dried shrimp
2 laap cheong (Chinese sausage)
250 grams rice flour (do not use glutinous rice flour)
20 grams fine sea salt
½ tsp finely ground white pepper
Toasted sesame seeds
Cooking oil, as needed

Put the mushrooms and shrimp in a bowl, add about 300ml of hot water, then leave at room temperature until fully hydrated. (This can take several hours, depending on the mushrooms; if you prefer, soak them in the fridge overnight.)

Trim off the top of the radish, then peel it. Grate with a large-toothed grater. You should have 1kg; if you have more or less, multiply the kg weight of the grated radish by 0.01 to determine the correct amount of salt. Put the grated radish in a bowl, add the salt and mix well. Leave at room temperature for about an hour. Drain the radish through a colander. Take handfuls of the drained radish in your hands and squeeze to remove excess moisture, then put the solids in a bowl.

Drain the hydrated mushrooms and shrimp, but reserve the soaking liquid. Squeeze the mushrooms to remove excess liquid, then cut off and discard the stems. Cut the caps into 5mm cubes. If the shrimp are large, cut them into smaller pieces. Quarter the laap cheong lengthwise, then slice into 5mm-thick pieces. Heat a wok over a medium-high flame and oil it very lightly. When the wok is hot, add the laap cheong and stir-fry until the pieces start to brown. Add the shrimp and mushrooms, stir-fry for about a minute, then set aside to cool.

Strain the mushroom and shrimp soaking liquid into a measuring cup. Add 250ml of the soaking liquid to the bowl containing the radish and salt, and mix it in. Mix in the rice flour (adjusting the amount as needed, if you had more or less grated radish) and the white pepper. Add most of the laap cheong, shrimp and mushrooms, reserving some for scattering on the top of the loh bok goh. Spray a 23cm round pan that’s at least 5cm deep with pan-coating. Stir the ingredients thorough­ly before scraping into the prepared pan. Scatter with some sesame seeds and the reserved laap cheong, shrimp and mushrooms. Place over a rack in a steamer, cover with the lid and steam on high for about an hour and 15 minutes. Check the water periodically to make sure the steamer doesn’t run dry.