Taiwanese Taro Balls Dessert Recipe with Tapioca Starch

Taiwanese taro balls and sweet potato balls are a classic dessert that's mildly sweet, chewy and filling. We often pair it with soy milk, grass jelly, and red beans. 

When steamed, the taro root creates a purple-greyish hue. Hence, some people also call this dessert purple potato balls. Meanwhile, sweet potato produces a light orange hue when cooked. When served together, the colours balance, providing an aesthetically pleasing taro ball and sweet potato dessert.

Here's our recipe for this delicious, beautiful three-coloured Taiwanese dessert from Juifen.

Jump to:

• Taro and Sweet Potato Balls Ingredients
• How To Make Taro Balls
• Taiwanese Taro Ball Recipe with Sweet Potato Balls
• Cooking Tips
• How To Store
• How To Enjoy
• Calories

Taro and Sweet Potato Balls Ingredients

For our taro ball recipe, you'll need the following ingredients. 

• Taro
• Purple sweet potato
• Orange sweet potato
• tapioca flour or sweet potato starch
• Water, add as required
• Sugar (optional)

If you can't find taro root, try looking for it under a different name, dasheen. Sometimes, you will also find in the frozen section in Asian grocery stores rather than in fresh produce section. 

We also recommend that you buy purple sweet potato with purple flesh so that the final dessert is a brilliant hue of purple.

You can use sweet potato starch or tapioca flour for our recipe. If you use tapioca flour instead of sweet potato starch, you will get a slightly chewier, elastic texture to sink your teeth into. On the other hand, sweet potato starch produces a much softer product.

How To Make Taro Balls

To make taro balls, steam diced dasheen, smash them, and add sugar to the mixture. 

Next, add tapioca flour and then knead to form a spherical dough. You can add water if the mix is too dry and flour when the mixture gets too wet. 

Finally, boil them in hot water for a few minutes and serve hot or cold based on your preference. 

Cooking Tips

Here are some cooking tips to help you make this traditional Taiwanese dessert at home.

Steaming your root vegetable

For 150 grams of each root vegetable, we steamed for 30 minutes. 

If you steam the root vegetables separately, you will find that the sweet potatoes will take longer to soften. We recommend steaming sweet potatoes for about 30 minutes.  Taros will soften much quicker via steaming. Based on experience, it only takes about 15 minutes for taro to soften.

Mashing

Mash the root vegetables separately to not mix the colours. If you have limited bowls or want to reduce the amount of washing, we recommend mashing and kneading them in the lightest colours first. The purple one stains much more than the white and orange ones.

You want to mash the steamed root vegetables while they're still hot. If you wait too long, they will harden and become more difficult to mash.

Adjusting the amount of flour and water

You may need to adjust the amount of flour and additional water used because the water content in the root vegetables will vary. Also, the dryness of the tapioca flour will vary based on the brand. In addition, the humidity level of the kitchen will vary based on where you are based (country, climate).

The amount of tapioca flour mentioned above is the amount we recommend you start with. You will have to adjust the amount of additional tapioca flour and water as you mix and knead the taro and sweet potato balls.

You need to decide how much additional tapioca flour and water to add based on the texture of the dough as you knead them. 

If it is too dry and crumbly, you will need to add more water. We recommend starting off by adding the water in 1-2 tablespoon increments. If it feels too soft and does not hold it's doughy shape, then add more tapioca flour. We recommend adding the flour in 1 tablespoon increments.

Making them chewier

Our taro balls are also not as chewy as the ones served in Asian dessert shops. If you want a chewier texture, then add more tapioca flour as you knead the dough. The doughier it feels, the chewier the final results are.

You might not need to add as much to dasheen as it has more starch content than sweet potato does. For example, in one instance of us making the taro balls, for 150 g peeled taro, we added 60 g tapioca flour and an additional 2 tbsps of water. However, for the same amount of orange sweet potato, we added about 85 g of tapioca flour but no additional water. The orange sweet potato we used naturally had absorbed and retained more moisture.

Amount of sugar to add

The amount of sugar we use is very little compared to what you find high street stores serve. We prefer ours not sweet so that we can taste more of the natural flavours of taro and sweet potatoes.

How to get smooth round shapes

Lastly, to achieve a smooth round shape, roll the flour mixture into a log of 1.5 cm in diameter. Then, cut them out and dust the dessert generously with flour.

Don't worry if there are some visible cracks on the taro balls once you cut and shape them into small pillows. They won't be obvious once you cook them in the boiling water.

Once cooked, the taro balls will expand about 1.5 times their size. Bear this in mind as you cut and shape them into pillows. They do not have to be perfectly spherical to look delicious.

How To Store

Allow the taro balls to rest in the open for about 1 hour before storing them in a container. They will release some moisture over time. Make sure to add more tapioca flour in the container to prevent them from sticking together.

While this dessert is best eaten fresh, you can freeze the dessert in an airtight container filled with baking paper.

So, how do you cook frozen taro balls? First, you need to boil them in a large pot and stir until they come to the surface. After a few minutes of boiling, strain them and transfer them to ice-cold water. 

How To Enjoy

You can eat this simple Taiwanese dessert hot or cold. Many Asian grandmothers recommend drinking a soothing ginger syrup taro ball soup regularly. Ginger is supposed to be good for warming the body and boosting vitality. Another way to eat it is over-shaved ice, which is common in Asia, where the summer season is extremely hot. 

Generous helpings of the Taiwanese dessert are layered over thin toppings of shaved ice to make a nice cold treat. You will also see the taro balls in coconut milk, which is good for balancing the flavour of creamy coconut milk.

You may also have seen the dessert in boba tea. What is the difference between taro balls versus boba? The former has a melt-in-your-mouth texture. This difference is because the root vegetables used to make these desserts are different. Many bubble tea shops usually use cassava to make the boba in your boba tea, which results in a springy texture.

Grass jelly and sweet condensed milk are other toppings that are usually added. Check out our grass jelly recipe to make a cooling base for your desserts. 

Calories

Our taro balls have approximately 250 calories alone without any soup.

However, many consider this traditional Taiwanese dessert a healthy treat. This is because it contains minimal added sugar and no added fat. You can serve this easy to create simple Taiwanese dessert on a hot day or cold night.

We hope you like our recipe. Please follow us on Instagram @honestfoodtalks for more Asian desserts.