Crisp Daikon Rice Cakes with Egg and Scallion Recipe (Banh Cu Cai Bot Chien)

If you visited my other site this week, Asian Dumpling Tips, you’ll notice that I went on a daikon rice cake jag. I test drove a recipe for the dim sum favorite from The Dumpling cookbook and then developed a vegetarian version based on ones at Slanted Door restaurant in San Francisco. I have to admit that watching Charles Phan battle Cat Cora on Iron Chef America inspired the vegetarian daikon rice cakes. Plus I’m attending the CIA’s World of Flavors conference this weekend in Napa and the theme is street food and comfort food. All that converged and as I pondered how to repurpose all the daikon rice cake in my fridge.

Bingo -- one way to use up some of the cake was to spiff up a Vietnamese street food favorite called bánh bột chiên (fried cakes, literally), which is made of crisp fried pieces of plain rice dough, with scrambled eggs, scallion and a tangy-sweet-spicy soy dipping sauce. Bot chien is a Chiu Chow (Triều Châu, Chinese people tied to Chaozhou, an area bordering Guangdong and Fujian provinces) invention and quite popular among school children as an after-school snack. Earlier this year, I had the dish at a Dynasty restaurant in San Jose, California, during their dim sum service. I noticed on Yelp that a small number of Vietnamese restaurants offer the dish too.

I have to be frank about traditional preparations of bột chiên – they seem rather bland. Graham Holiday in a 2004 post on Noodle Pie concurs. The cakes themselves aren’t seasoned with much but rely on the panfried crispy-chewy texture and richness of the egg to carry the day. Sometimes, the cakes and eggs are served with raw shredded daikon or some daikon and carrot pickle (do chua).

Given the pairing with fresh and/or pickled daikon, why not use the daikon rice cakes? They have more flavor than regular bot chien, which Houston Wok says is sold premade in the big state of Texas. I’ve not seen that much in California’s Vietnamese markets.

So I cut up some daikon rice cakes and gave it a whirl. The resulting banh cu cai bot chien was pretty darn good, especially after dipped in the sauce. Try it out. Both the traditional (with dried shrimp and sausage) and vegetarian (with shiitake mushroom) can be used for this recipe.

RECIPE

Crisp Daikon Rice Cakes with Egg and Scallion
Banh Cu Cai Bot Chien

Serves 1 as a snack

8 ounces daikon rice cake, traditional or vegetarian
1 large or jumbo egg
2 generous pinches of salt
1 generous pinch of black pepper
1 scallion, white and green part, chopped
2 to 3 tablespoons canola oil

Dipping sauce:
1 1/2 teaspoons regular (light) soy sauce
1 1/2 teaspoons dark soy sauce
3/4 teaspoon unseasoned rice vinegar
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar
1 Thai or Serrano chile, finely chopped, or 1 teaspoon Sriracha sauce, homemade or store bought

1. Cut the daikon rice cake into pieces the size of dominos and a good 1/2 inch thick. Set aside.

2. Beat the egg with the salt and pepper. Then stir in all but 1 tablespoon of the scallion. Set aside.

3. Heat half the oil in a medium skillet over high heat. (You want these cakes extra crispy because the egg will soften it later on. Use high heat!) Add the radish rice cakes, wide flat side down. . Let them fry, undisturbed, for about 4 minutes, until crisp and golden brown. They’ll stick at first but will eventually release. Turn them over to brown the other side.

4. While the cakes fry, combine both kinds of soy sauces, vinegar, sugar and chiles to make the dipping sauce. Taste and adjust the flavor to ensure a savory-sweet-tangy-spicy finish. Set aside.

5. Add the remaining oil to the skillet, then decrease the heat to medium. Pour in the egg. Allow it to set for about 15 seconds, then use a spatula to repeatedly turn and stir the cakes so that they get coated with the egg. Once the egg has set and cooked through, about 45 seconds, transfer to a serving plate. Enjoy with the dipping sauce.

Comments

[nutrition sportive]

Hello
Hey this seems very delicious.I have never tried this recipe before.I always try different types of food in recipe weekend.This seems easy to cook.Thank you very much for sharing such tasty recipe of Crisp Daikon Rice Cakes with egg and Scallion.

[Fran]

Singaporeans have a dish like this using fried daikon radish cake. It's called Chai Tow Koay (aka Char Koay Kak). It has the same eggs but with the addition of chillies, bean sprouts and other goodies.

[David]

Hi Ms. Andrea,
WOW THANK YOU FOR THE MENTION A COMPLETE HONOR!!!! I couldn't agree more about the actual Banh Bot being bland. It's the dipping sauce that makes the appetizer. However I will give the Daikon a whirl, it's right next to the regular Banh Bot. Thanks for sharing!

[Michelle]

Oh yum! My husband and I used to get this all the time at noodle houses when we lived in the South Bay; haven't had any since we moved to the Delta. I will definitely have to get my hands on some daikon cake and make this at home. I'd forgotten how much we loved it. Agreed -- the sauce completely makes this dish.

[Andrea Nguyen]

Hey there -- thanks everyone for the comments.

@Fran -- that's so interesting that the Singaporeans enjoy a radish cake version. I'm sure the Chiu Chow cooks tweaked it to reinvent the dish at the hawker stall.

@David -- my pleasure for the shout out. You have cool info on banh bot chien on your site. Keep it up!

[Sarah]

Yum! Bot chien is the ultimate comfort food for me. My family is Chiu Chow from Vietnam. I love it garnished with the pickled daikon. I can find the big brick of rice cake in some Southern California stores to make at home. I will actually splash some of the sauce into the pan while the rice cakes are frying to give them some extra flavor.

[anh]

When we were in VN last year I remeber getting bot chien on a number of occassions! It's always been one of my favorite snack foods, but unfortunately the ones here in America never have the same soft pillowy texture inside and crisp exterior. For some reason all the ones I've had over here had been soft and mushy, and if you ask to have it fried crispy then you risk ending up with a tuff and chewy exterior once the eggs are added. Needless to say bot chien has never been good for me in the US. Hopefully I can pay around with this recipe and see what comes of it.

As for premade blocks of bot chien in southern Cali - there is plenty in all the viet supermarkets. They are usually sold right next to the fresh packaged noodles =)

[Andrea Nguyen]

I'm going to have to look a little harder at the Viet market for packaged Bot Chien!

Anh -- frying the bot chien till it's crispy takes time and cooks may be unwilling to do that. Leave out the wheat starch to yield a softer result. However, I do see some Viet recipes put cornstarch or tapioca starch in to firm up the rice flour so the wheat starch serves the same function. Do report back on your progress!

[Jennifer]

I love this dish and your version looks wonderful!
It isn't surprising that this dish is also popular in Singapore due to the large Teochew (Chiu Chow) population there.

Also, just wanted to mention that the Teochew aren't an ethnic minority (they're Han Chinese after all) but simply a different dialectal group.
Also, they're from north-eastern Guangdong (bordering Fujian).

[Andrea Nguyen]

You're absolutely right, Jennifer. Chaozhou is right on the border between the two provinces. I'll make the correction. But it's hard to figure out who's Han and who's not. That's a controversial issue and I'm not Chiu Chow so I can't speak for them.

[Jennifer]

Hi Andrea.
Thanks for the correction :)
I'm Teochew and when I say Han Chinese, I mean those who are officially recognized as one (Sichuanese, Cantonese, Teochew, etc all fall under the mainstream Han Chinese group) as 'minority group' would be considered something like the Bai, Dai, etc.
I don't mean to get into a whole history lesson but all those people from different dialectal groups do have a unifying origin so I suppose 'Han' is the easiest way to group them (the reality being that 'Han' is only one group of people who were their ancestors).

Anyway, great recipes and I'll be buying your Dumplings book some time this month!

[An Hong]

To make this, one would definitely need to use some super non-stick pan. I was in love with this dish since some 40 years ago in Vietnam. As such I clearly recall watching the street vendor preparing it. He had a large flat frying surface which he greased it with perhaps lard. I think the key here is not to do high heat, but medium-to-low heat for a long time, perhaps 6 minutes or more on each side. I don't know how he got the height-side fried, but he did, although there was no depth of oil on this surface. Some version turned out yellow-fried and other more reddish, most likely from sprinkled ground annatto. Near the end (10+ minutes), he would optionally add green onions and would then gave the fried flour some shots from two spouted bottles, one of soy and the other of red vinegar, and a little flipping. On the side he would crack some eggs, break yolk and 10-second scramble before infusing the while-wet eggs over the fried cake pieces. He would not overcook the eggs. Yes, he had pickled daikon-and-carrots on the side, as well as this pre-mixed sauce of the soy-redvinegar-sugar. Perhaps he no longer exists in Saigon, but he was there then.

My recommendation is to use the simple plain daikon cake. The one laced with fried shrimp has not worked well in my experience. Sprinkling it fried cake with temperate amount of soy sauce and red-vinegar toward the end would add flavor. No need for salt.

[Ann]

Wow! Thanks, An Hong, for the detailed description. I was a very young child around almost 40 years ago as well and what you described was exactly the memory I remembered but haven't been able to describe in words nor recapture all these years. It sounded as if you were describing the exact same vendor and his method that I remember. I used to live on Nguyen Kim street in Saigon. My childish mind must have captured the feelings, flavor, and picture to store in the memory bank. However, I did not remember all the details and therefore could not describe them and certainly haven't been able to figure out how to recreate them. I have been trying so very hard over the years to recapture that elusive flavor but neither the dim sum nor the radish cakes in Vietnamese stores came close. Now, thanks to your detailed description of the vendor's method (especially scrambling the eggs on the side) and Andrea's recipe, I have enough information to try once more to recreate the smell and taste of what I considered a taste of paradise from my childhood. I am very grateful to you for writing out the details.

[Mai]

Hi Andrea,
I've always loved this dish since I was a child in Vietnam. I'll try to make it using the daikon rice cake, but I'd also like to use the plain rice dough. I don't live in TX, and I don't think I can buy it ready made where I live. Would you have a recipe for making it?

[Queens]

Crisp Daikon Rice Cakes with Egg and Scallion Recipe:
This weak i will try it.