Onde Onde

Onde Onde

Runny Palm Sugar Filling.

Pandan Flavoured Onde Onde
Recipe:
500g Sweet Potatoes (yellow flesh, preferred).
10 Pandan Leaves, wash and tie 3 leaves into a bundle and cut the 7 remaining ones into small pices, set aside.
75g Plain Flour, sifted.
½ teaspoon Salt (each for dough and coconut shavings).
400g Palm Sugar (they come in cylindrical block form).
1 Coconut without skin, grated (old coconut with hard brown skin). You will need to steam the coconut shavings with 1 teaspoon of salt and let it cool before rolling the balls.

Method:
1. Mix ½ teaspoon salt with coconut shavings well and lay them on a plate and steam for 5 minutes. Set it aside to cool. You can do away with this step if you are eating immediately. Steaming the coconut is to prevent the coconut from spoiling if you are preparing this treat in advance for tea time guests.

2. Shave or grate the palm sugar into thin slivers or tiny chunks. Set aside in a cool place.

3. In an electric blender, blend the 7 pandan leaves with 1 tablespoon water to extract juice. Sieve the juice and set aside.

4. Peel the sweet potatoes and cut into small pieces. Put the sweet potatoes and 3-piece bundled pandan leaves in a pot of water and boil until the sweet potatoes are soft.

5. Discard the water and pandan leaves and mash the sweet potatoes while hot with fork or potato masher.

6. Add the pandan juice from step 3 to the mashed sweet potatoes and mix well.

7. Add the sifted flour and salt into this mixture and mix well again to form a smooth dough. You may add more flour if necessary but limit the usage or the balls will be too doughy when cooked.

8. Take a lump of the sweet potato dough and flatten it into a round about 5cm in diameter and put a few slivers/chinks of the palm sugar in the centre. Pinch tightly to seal the dough and shape into a ball by gently rounding it between your palms. Keep a damn cloth over the prepared ones to prevent drying. Repeat until all the dough is used up.

9. In a large pot of boiling water on medium high heat, drop the filled sweet potato balls and stir gently to prevent the balls from sticking together. Do this in batches.

10. When the balls float to the surface, they are cooked. Ladle them out with a perforated ladle and dunk into the shaved coconut while still warm so the coconut can stick to them.

11. Eat them warm with a cup of plain black tea and be careful of the runny filling.

Kueh Onde Onde - an old school Nonya afternoon tea snack.

If you cannot find old coconut for grating, you may buy dessicated coconut from the baking section of supermarket but they will taste different as the packaged ones are sweeter and more moist.

Old Coconut Shavings.
Photo credit: Google Images.

Grated Coconut and Coconut Milk used for Asian Kueh Kueh Making now available in supermarket.

If you cannot find pandan leaves:
1) use ½-1 teaspoon pandan essence to substitute the pandan juice add into the mash.

2) use ORANGE coloured flesh sweet potatoes. The rest of the ingredients and method are the same. The balls will be orange in colour this time :)

Pandan Essence.

Happy snacking :)