Sesame #$!☠&☠^♠‡!!! Balls

Sesame balls (煎堆) are a Chinese snack food that are crisp, slightly chewy, and very fragrant. Balls of dough, covered with sesame seeds, are deep-fried in hot oil. They may have a sweet filling such as red bean paste. Or they may be empty inside.

I tried making sesame balls last Saturday.

I thought the deep-fried glutinous rice balls coated with white sesame seeds should be quite straightforward. Make a dough with glutinous rice flour, a bit of rice flour and sugar. Roll into little balls with a filling inside. Dredge in white sesame seeds. Deep-fry over low heat. Easy peasy.

So, the little balls were deep-frying away when I noticed that they were going from round to pear shaped. That meant the balls weren’t heating up and expanding evenly.

Uneven heat was a bad sign but I didn’t know then because it was my first time making sesame balls.

Suddenly, “KABOOM!”

One of the sesame balls exploded three feet into the air and shot out of the pot . . .

OK, I exaggerate. A sesame ball did jump out but it was more like a dull “boom!”

Still, there was hot oil on my right hand.

“Aaaaargh!”

I dropped the spatula immediately, turned off the stove, and darted to the tap.

Looking back, I’m amazed I was calm enough to turn off the stove.

As I rinsed my hand, two more sesame balls exploded spectacularly, shooting out of the pot like cannon balls.

I made another dash, this time to the freezer for some ice to put on my poor hand. My face was hit as well but it didn’t feel as bad as the hand which had been next to the pot. I guess the oil had time to cool down a bit as it flew through the air towards my face. (Or maybe the skin on my face is really thick?)

Soothed by the ice, I surveyed the kitchen through my oil speckled glasses. There were bits of oil, flour and peanut butter filling everywhere on the floor and walls. The ceiling was spared but “ground zero”, the top of the stove, had a big puddle of oil.

“#$!☠☠☠☠&☠^♠‡!!!”

I got some ointment for burns from my first aid box, grabbed an ice cold coke from the fridge, and scooted out of the disaster zone.

Safe in the living room, I started Googling “exploding rice balls”. Yup, these culinary missiles had attacked and claimed many victims before. A lot of unwary kitchen warriors, like me, had been caught by surprise.

The enemy came out of nowhere. We had no time to run or hide.

An hour later, my hand stopped burning as the ointment took effect. I went back to the kitchen to clean up, thinking I should call it a day. There were fragments of sesame ball on the counter top, actually looking quite good with just the right shade of golden brown. From a solid little lump, the dough had expanded into a ball with a hollow in the middle, before detonating and exploding into fragments. I popped one of said fragments in my mouth . . .

Hey, it’s good!

It was still crisp after my hour-long recuperation, and it wasn’t oily. If only it hadn’t exploded, it would have been perfect.

Believe it or not, I decided to have another go after tasting the fragment of sesame ball. “I almost succeeded,” I thought. I figured the rice balls exploded because there wasn’t enough oil, the oil was too hot, I wasn’t stirring enough, or all of the above. All I had to do was add more oil (stop stinging!), keep the temperature really low, and stir more. In went the remaining raw rice balls, and . . . out came the hot oil onto my hand. My right hand, again. 

“Aaaaargh!”

Surrender? Hell no.

I tried again the next day. This time, I had a towel draped over my right hand! Plus a different recipe which mixed boiled, cooked dough with raw dough, and used only glutinous rice flour, without adding rice flour. The balls still exploded, but they stayed in the pot instead of blowing up completely. Hey, that was an improvement!

The fourth attempt was a combination of the first two recipes. A mix of raw and cooked dough, that was made with rice flour and glutinous rice flour. And the balls were wrapped with an air pocket inside instead of without. The results are what you see in the photos. Not too shabby, I think, even though they were little ones around 6 cm wide. Did you know those made by pros are as big as footballs? Like this one:

Note the oil is so hot it’s smoking? Yet the rice ball doesn’t explode. If it did, it would really have gone “KABOOM!” I might try making one that big one day . . . after I put on a bomb suit!