hello hi everyone! Wesley here. Today we’re adding to our series on Bay Area restaurant hacks with an attempt at Jian Dui, or fried mochi and sesame seed rice balls, inspired by Gourmet Delite in Oakland. Sadly, like many of the restaurants here in Oakland Chinatown, Gourmet Delite did not survive the COVID-19 pandemic, but I still thought I’d take the opportunity to pay homage to a dim sum restaurant that I’ve been eating at for the better part of 20 years.

For those not familiar, a Jian Dui is a dough ball made from glutinous rice flour that’s coated in sesame seed, and filled with a sweet paste. It can be filled with many things, but most commonly you’ll find these filled with either sweet red bean paste, or sweet lotus paste (today we’ll be going with the latter of the two, cause I have some leftover from the mooncake recipe that we did a few months back). Hope you try it!

It will be out on Friday June 4th, 2021, so bookmark the recipe here, and be sure to subscribe and hit the bell on YouTube to get notified when it’s out!

Woo Can Cook is a series where we reproduce fun foods and recipes from my childhood. Some of them are authentically Chinese and/or pan-Asian, but a lot of them are odd Americanized versions that I inherited from my parents and grandparents while growing up in the Bay Area/California.

We're live streaming every Mon/Tues/Thurs at 6:30PM PST, with new recipes out every Friday!