Buchi, my mom’s favorite. Well, it’s also my favorite sweet rice cake. It is a ball of rice cake filled with sweetened bean paste. I love the way it is, sweet, soft and chewy. I prefer the buchi of Chowking and Salazar’s. I think they make the perfect buchi.
I’ve tasted many buchi and tried many recipes but the buchi always turned out hard chewy and oily. I want my buchi to be soft and chewy. In one of my conversation with my friend, she made her buchi by steaming the buchi rather than deep frying it. Well, that’s something new to me and I can imagine how it will turn out.
Yesterday night I asked my mom to buy some galapong. It is made by soaking the sticky rice over night then grinding it and the result is sticky rice dough. You can buy sticky rice powder in the market but I haven’t tried using that. I still prefer the traditional market bought sticky rice dough.
Buchi’s filling is made of sweetened red bean paste but I’m too lazy to make my own so I bought a bottle of sweetened mung beans and purple yam. Yup, you read it right, purple yam. Initially I planned on doing a mung bean and purple yam filling separately but I ended combining the two as my taste buds dictated me too. I mashed the mung beans until I formed a paste, then, I added the purple yam and mashed them together. I flattened a dollop of sticky rice dough onto my palm and filled it with half teaspoon of the filling. I rolled it into a ball and roll it on toasted sesame seeds and steam. The result is soft and chewy buchi like that of a mochi that even for several hours will not turned stone hard. Plus, it’s not greasy.
Ingredients
1/4 cup Sweetened Mung Beans
1/4 cup Sweetened Purple Yam or Ube Halaya
1/2 kilo Sticky Rice Dough or Galapong
1/2 cup Toasted Sesame Seed
Procedure
Grease hand with cooking oil. The sticky rice dough will be very sticky and messy to work with. Get a dollop or about 1 1/2 tablespoon of the sticky rice dough. Flatten on your palm and place 1/2 teaspoon of the buchi filling. Closed the flattened sticky rice dough and roll it between your palms to form a ball. Roll the ball on toasted sesame seeds.
Steam for 30 minutes. Don’t forget to attached a cloth on the steamer’s lid to absorb the water. We don’t want our buchi to absorb all the water, right?
