Making Radish Cake or Lo Bak Go

Cooked radish cake that had been steamed for an hour

When I lived in Hong Kong, my great aunt would make large round containers of radish cake, or lo bak go (萝卜糕) for Lunar New Year. When people came to visit (bai leen), she would cut several slices of radish cake and pan fry them over the stove to serve guests. We also ate it on the first day of Lunar New Year.

I finally got a chance to make it myself the other day with my mother. It's a lot of work, but fun to make at home.

Stir frying the meats and shrimp together first

My mother's recipe called for 4kg of radish, but we only had 2kg (two daikon), so I was tasked with grating them. I was surprised there was a lot of water from this vegetable, and I remember my great aunt saying the grated radish had to be squeezed to prevent the finished product from being too wet.

However this version did not require this step (thankfully!).

We also chopped up dried shrimp, and lap cheung or Chinese sausage and lap yuk (cured pork belly) that had been steamed. I diced the Chinese sausage into smaller pieces, and chopped off the fat from the lap yuk before dicing the meat. To add a bit more flavour we also shredded some conpoy that had already been soaking the day before.

In the meantime my mother mixed rice flour (not glutinous rice flour) with cornstarch and water.

Then adding the grated radish to the wok

To make the radish cake, we stir fried the meat and shrimp together, and then added the grated radish, including the water. In hindsight may be we should have added the floury mixture right afterwards to mix with the water to make it easier to combine all the ingredients together. 

We had stir-fried the grated radish for some time and the moisture was almost all gone before adding the floury mixture which made it quite hard to mix properly and started sticking to the bottom of the pan.

Nevertheless, once everything was thoroughly mixed, I portioned the mixture into two round pans that had already been oiled and then we steamed them one by one for an hour.

We ate the first pan and while the radish cake was pretty sticky when scooping it out of the pan, it tasted pretty good; perhaps it could have been seasoned with salt, or added some chicken stock to it for a bit more flavour. Nevertheless we were pretty pleased with the result!

Finally combining with rice flour and cornstarch

The following day we pan fried the second pan of radish cake and it tasted better of course.

Looking forward to making this again!