When I look back on my childhood, some of my fondest memories are of watching my grandmother cook. Like most Asian grandmothers, she never had any written recipes and measured and did everything by touch, feel, smell, and taste. Her taro root cake, or yu tou gao/wul tow gou, was always one of my very favorite things. She never skimped on Chinese sausage, Chinese bacon, shiitake, mushrooms, dried scallops, and dried shrimp, and she always steamed them and would serve them as is. She never fried them the way most Chinese households do, though I do this now when I make it because… who can resist these slices lightly pan-fried?

Remembering how good this tasted growing up, it was always such a miserable experience to select it during dim sum at any Cantonese restaurant and see what they called taro cake; the restaurants always skimped on the filling ingredients. Without the lush (and expensive) filling ingredients, the cake was never going to be as good as I remembered, so long ago I stopped ordering it to make it myself. It was no wonder I met so many people who didn’t care for Chinese savory taro cake; they weren’t having it in its prime form. It’s a massive labor of love, requiring soaking the dried mushrooms, scallops, and shrimp; steaming the Chinese sausage and bacon, a God-awful amount of cutting and mincing, then another batch of steaming and frying, but the end result has never left me feeling like I wasted time and could have just bought it outside. Homemade taro cake is unrivaled. When I see the sad cakes in bakeries across Chinatown, I can tell they were stingy on the ingredients, so no amount of money would be worth paying for those.

Some traditions are worth saving, and taro cake will be mine every Chinese New Year.