How to Cook The Best Buchi Recipes (Sesame Ball)

Rice cake dish is very common in the Philippine Cuisines because Filipinos love to eat rice. They could create and experiment with recipes made out of rice. And that's when the best Buchi recipes (sesame balls) come into the picture. 

If you are not fond of the previous kakanin or rice cake recipes, we show you. This rice cake ball may capture your heart. It is very traditional and simple to remake if you want to try it. 

If you are not confident in recreating it and worrying about the details, steps on how to cook, ingredients, and much more insight about the recipes, luckily we have it for you! We looked and searched for all the things that you may want to know about the featured recipes. 

Get your pen and notes to start writing down all you need to recreate or remake this amazing dish that many people love to eat because of its texture, color, aroma, and fillings, where you could choose from different varieties. 

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What is Best Buchi

Buchi is one of the most popular recipes in Asia, especially In the Philippines. A hundred years ago, the Chinese settlement in the Philippines, making a way to integrate many cultures, traditions, and recipes from Chinese cuisine, particularly the Fujian and Cantonese recipes. And due to the integration of the recipes, it made this dish the most popular finger food dessert outstanding among recipes. 

It is a Filipino treat or dessert made of glutinous rice filled and stuffed with a sweet filling, rolled in sesame seeds, and fried until it becomes golden brown. This fried dim sum element commonly has fillings that fill the dish with different fillings, including cheese, chocolate, sweet black bean, yema, lotus, or red bean paste. In the United States of America, the featured dish is very well- known as sesame balls.

You could also find it in many Chinese restaurants served as a dessert and sold by the street food peddlers and vendors as an afternoon snack all over the country. It has many variants and flavors which depend upon your desired taste and texture. 

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Ways to Cook these Recipes

If you are looking for ways to cook a special rice cake ball featured here today, then we present to you some of the most common ways of cooking this popular dish. 

Steamed

Cooking in steam is another way to cook the dish recipes. It requires you to have steaming equipment and the right amount of heat. 

In this way of cooking, you usually have to set your steaming equipment such as the pot with a small amount of water in the stove and set the steaming basket. Then you could add your rice cake ball or Buchi inside the steaming basket and start cooking it in the low heat temperature. As the water boils below the steaming basket, it allows the dish to cook it slowly until it reaches the perfect cook you desired for a dessert dish. It would not be as crispier as the traditional way of cooking it. 

Stovetop

It is the most popular method of cooking the dish. As you desire to cook the featured dish using the stove, you have to prepare a pan where you have to put a great amount of oil then boil it until it reaches the perfect heat temperature to cook the rice ball. It differs from cooking it in a deep frying pan because it doesn't require so much oil since you would cook the ball in the shallow pan. 

After boiling the small amount of oil, gently place this dish ball in the pan and cook it slowly in the low to medium heat temperature to achieve the perfect cooking. 

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Other Delicious Variants and Recipes

Buchi is one of the good snacks that many people, especially Filipinos, would love to eat. So, to elevate this wonderful dish, you could look at the different variations we searched to help you pull off this great dish. 

Ube Flavor

This variation of the recipes makes the dish stand out because of the filling inside it. The ube gives a unique flavor to the simple rice dish like Buchi. 

Ube or purple yam is an ingredient used to make an ube halaya dish. It is a well-known Philippine dessert usually served as the main base of many different recipes like halo-halo or a filling in a certain pastry dish. 

With Yema Filling

Like the ube flavor of this dish, this version also makes the dish stand out because of the yema filling inside it. It gives the featured rice dish a rich flavor and taste, which elevated it to another awesome dish. 

Yema is a sweet custard candy made with milk, egg yolks, and sugar. It is an egg yolk based dessert that originates from the Spanish construction material. 

With Custard Filling

Another variation of the dish is the custard filling inside the dessert dish. The custard filling gives a bold flavor to the plain rice cake dish. 

Custard is a type of dish usually steam, baked, or cooked in a pressure cooker. Its base is cheese or cream cooked with egg yolk, sweetened milk, and sometimes thicken used by gelatin, cornstarch, or flour. 

Kamote Flavor

In this version, instead of using glutinous rice, you could use Kamote as a substitute for the dish's base. It is more convenient to use when you don't find powdered glutinous rice. 

You have to boil Camote, or sweet potato then mashed it. Afterward, shape it into a circular-round shape then, cook it like the process you cooked this original dessert dish. 

With Cheese Filling

Instead of serving this dish as a plain rice cake dish, you could add more cheese as a filling to it. The cheese filling would give the dish a savory and salty flavor. 

Cheese is a dairy product made from milk of different animals, including goats, sheep, buffalo, or cows. It has many kinds and types that you could use depending on your taste. 

With Red Bean 

Red bean is a paste made from red beans where after boiling the beans, you could either grind or mash it. You could add sugar or sweetening agent to it and serve it as a dessert or filling or make it a salty paste to add in the savory recipes as a side dish or an added ingredient. 

You could fill this dish in substitute to cheese, custard, or any other ingredient to use as filling in this variation. 

With Chocolate Filling

Chocolate is one of the most favorite desserts many people love. Its rich, bold, and succulent flavor make the dish stand out among others. 

You could either use a different combination of chocolates for chocolate lovers, including vanilla, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, or any other chocolate variation as a filling of the dessert dish. 

Fruity Munggo Buchi

This version is one of the popular versions of this dish in Chinese cuisines. Instead of cream, cheese, chocolate, or any other filling, they used fruits and beans to fill the dish. 

You could use any fruit combination along with the beans. Fill the dish with those filling and serve the rice flour cake dish. 

With Bukayo

This version has a similar process and cooking method to the others mentioned above. The only difference is the filling you used in the dish. Instead of cheese, chocolate, custard, ube, or yema, you could use bukayo to fill it. 

Bukayo is a sweet dish made from shredded coconut or coconut strips sweetened. Usually, freshly made bukayo is the filling used for the dessert dish. 

Moche

Moche is a type variation of this dish from Pampanga made with glutinous rice balls with bean paste filling. They usually boil it in water until it floats, then sprinkle sesame seeds or crushed peanuts. It is closely similar to the original version of the featured rice cake dish. 

Batangas Style

This version of this dish is slightly different from the original circular-shaped Buchi served during snack. It is a Batangas style Buchi, also known as balinghoy. The deep-fried the featured rice flour cake and made it crispy bite-sized pieces of kamoteng kahoy. 

The sweetened kamoteng kahoy or "balinghoy" of Batangeno is usually and commonly wrapped into bite-sized pieces using a molded orange wrapper made up of atsuete or annatto as the coloring to the food and. It is small enough to eat in one bite.

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Trivia 

Did you know that the ball rice cake known as Buchi is originally a Chinese dish known as Jian DUI? Yes, you read it right because it is a dish native in China and means fried pile. It is a type of Chinese pastry usually fried from ground glutinous rice flour, but others use artificial rice flour to buy. 

They coated the outside portion of the pastry with sesame seeds and made it chewy and crispy. Inside the rice cake pastry, there is a large hollow caused by the dough expansion. They usually fill the rice cake pastry's hollow with different fillings consisting of sweet black bean paste. Alternatively, lotus paste or commonly red bean paste filling. 

Buchi or Jian DUI's origin could trace back to the dynasty of Tang serving it as a palace food in Chang'an, known before as lüdui. This featured food item recalled by the Tang Poet Wang Fanzhi in a poem. 

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Tips for cooking these recipes

The featured dish is very easy to create and prepare if you know how you could pull off the incredible featured recipes. So, here are some of the practical steps you could do to recreate the dish perfectly. 

• If you would use glutinous rice, ensure that you wash and soak it overnight to soften it for better texture. 
• After soaking it in the water overnight, ground it down into a dough with water. 
• If you don't want to do grinding, which requires you more time and effort to do, you could purchase a bag of powdered glutinous rice flour in the market. 
• Use a small amount of water when creating the dough. 
• You could either boil or steam it when cooking the dish. 
• You could use an electric grinder to grind the glutinous rice after soaking it in the water overnight. 
• If you desire your dish to be crispier, you could try to add potato flakes.
• It may pop if you cook it using high heat temperature because instead of cooking the inside, the outer layer may cook faster. Remember that you could use medium to low heat temperature when cooking when frying to achieve your desired cook in your dish.
• Keep them plump and round. If the dish floats on top of the boiling oil, it means the dish cook is perfect. But, if you want to avoid or prevent it from deflating, later on, you should keep it on the pan a bit longer. You may use a fork or chopsticks to continuously spin the dish balls while frying and even cook until you satisfy yourself with the color and texture.

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Troubleshooting when cooking these recipes

You may follow some of the fixing solutions to save the featured dish you remake. Here are some of those steps to avoid ruining your dish so much. 

• Suppose your dough is a bit chewy, dense, and rubbery. You may add some water to the dough until it has a softer texture. 
• You could use a piping bag and put some filling to the dish if you forgot to put some. 

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Best Serve With

This featured dish is perfect with different recipes that would highlight its taste, texture, and flavor.

• Coffee- is one of the most popular drinks of all time you could serve with this featured rice cake dish. 
• Hot Cocoa or Tea- is one of the great drinks to serve with the featured rice cake dish. It helps to incorporate the dish's wonderful taste and flavor. 
• Pancit Guisado- is one of the good complimentary of the featured rice dish recipes. It highlights the taste and flavor of the dish. 
• Pancit Sotanghon- another dish perfect for serving and the featured rice dish recipes that highlight its bold and rich flavors. 
• Pancit Palabok- is a dish perfect for serving with the dish. It makes the Buchi's taste stand out. 
• Pancit Malabon- is one of the recipes you would be proud to serve along with the dish. It makes the dish stand out when you eat it along with the featured dish. 
• Dinuguan- is a savory dish that is perfect for eating with the rice cake dish recipes. It is one of the favorite recipes to serve as a main dish and appetizer with the dish. 
• Crispy Pata- is another cuisine perfect for serving along with the featured rice cake dish. It helps to eliminate the loathing and oily taste of the Crispy Pata. 

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Conclusion

Even if you don't love rice cakes, you would surely love this dish because it is simple, easy, and quick to remake. Children would also like it because of the different kinds of fillings you may stuff it. 

Buchi is a dish that you would be proud to serve on any occasion because of its color, texture, size, fillings, and taste. It has certain characteristics that you may want to discover. 

You could serve it during a snack or an afternoon chit chat with your family, friends, or even colleagues. You could also find it all over the country. It is part of the Filipino culture. If you love the Philippines, you would surely love to try, discover, and remake all the Filipino recipes, including the rice cakes, particularly the dish recipes. 

So, get together all the ingredients, call out your family and friends, and start remaking this incredible dish in the comfort of your kitchen. 

For more delicious recipe, visit Eat Like Pinoy!

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