Bua loi

Small rice-flour balls coloured with real vegetables, boiled apart from the coconut milk.

Vegan.

Ingredients

the balls

• 250 g glutinous rice flour
• 100 g taro, steamed and mashed
• 100 g pumpkin, steamed and mashed
• 3 pandan leaves
• 120 ml warm water

the soup

• 700 ml coconut milk
• 100 g palm sugar
• 0.75 teaspoon salt
• 4 eggs, optional

Method

1. BOILED IN WATER FIRST, NEVER IN THE COCONUT MILK. The balls shed starch as they cook and that starch turns coconut milk cloudy and gluey. Boil them in plenty of plain water, lift them out, and add them to the milk at the end. The kluai buat chi on this site cooks its fruit IN the milk because banana sheds nothing; rice flour does.
2. COLOUR THEM WITH THE VEGETABLE ITSELF. Steamed taro gives purple-grey, pumpkin gives orange, pandan juice gives green. Each mash is worked into its own portion of flour with a little warm water.
3. The dough should be like soft modelling clay -- it cracks if too dry and spreads if too wet. Add water a teaspoon at a time.
4. Roll into balls no bigger than 1.5 cm. Larger ones stay raw and chalky in the middle.
5. Drop them into a wide pan of gently boiling water, in batches by colour so they do not stain each other.
6. THEY ARE DONE WHEN THEY FLOAT, PLUS ONE MINUTE. Lifted at the moment they rise, the centre is still flour.
7. Straight into cold water, then drained.
8. Soup: coconut milk, palm sugar and salt warmed until dissolved, never boiled.
9. The salt is not optional. Three quarters of a teaspoon is what stops this being flatly sweet.
10. Balls into the warm milk at the end. For the egg version, drop the eggs in whole and poach 3 minutes at a bare shiver just before serving.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Thailand · All recipes