Taro has always been a favorite treat to our family... well, as least for my mom and my brother. The dry powdery texture of it often bothers my dad and me. And this is why we like these taro balls - the taro are processed and added starch to give it a smooth and chewy texture.
The first steps of making this nice treat are peel, cut up the taro, and steam it till you can use a pair of chopsticks to snip and break the pieces apart. At my first batch I cut the taro to 1/3 inch slices, but then realize the slices stick together and I might as well steam the whole taro as one. So for my second batch I cut it to cubes, which allows steam to get into every corner and cook everything through.
Now comes the fun and labour intensive part of mashing the taro. I tried to use a electric blender but because of the lack of liquid taro pieces are flying everywhere and that is when I hoped I had bought the potato ricer that was on sale. It ends up a big spoon (rice spoon) is not bad for the job too. It you prefer some texture then don't mash the taro too much and leave little pieces.
All you need to add to the mashed taro are a little bit of sugar and some starch. The sugar is just to highlight the taro flavour so you don't need too much - eventually you are eating this with sugar water so a little bit is all you need. For the starch, different recipes tell me different things. This time I went with the Potato Powder and sadly did not turn out so well - not enough binding strength so the balls falls apart if you cook it too long. So Tapioca Starch might be a better choice. You don't need too much starch since the starch will also take away the natural flavour of the taro, so just put enough so the taro paste can form into a dough and not stick to your hands.
I was busy making the dough and forgot to take pictures... but basically I form it into a large cube and just cut the dough to small 1/3 inch cubes, sprinkle with more starch to prevent them sticking to each other, or spread it out on a baking sheet and set in the freezer till harden. And here they are, a pile of taro balls... or cubes... whatever shape I want them to be, okay? Traditionally you roll the dough into a long finger-width stick and cut diagonally so it become small elliptical pieces. But because in the dough I have small un-mashed pieces of taro for texture which make rolling the dough very difficult, so cubes/chunks will do.
Cooking them is very easy, just brown sugar and water (plus ginger if you want an extra kick), and throw the balls in, cook till they float to the surface (actually pretty quick). The starch on the taro balls actually thickens the sugar water quite a bit. So cook the balls separately if you prefer a thin sugar water drink.
In theory you can also make yam balls with the same recipe, but unfortunately for me I left the yam in the steamer while I was working on the taro dough, so the yam absorbed all the steam. Too much liquid means I get yam paste instead of yam dough.
But anyway, dispite of all the unfortunate events, sugar water makes everything tastes good.
