肉圓Ba-wan

The wrapper starts with sweet potato starch, to which shops add rice milk and other starches such as tapioca or 太白粉 (a refined potato or corn starch) in their own proportions to tune the texture. Heated, the batter turns into a translucent, sticky dough. Traditionally it is scooped into a shallow bowl or dish, filled with stir-fried pork from the hind leg or shoulder and diced bamboo shoots — some shops add shiitake, shrimp, dried scallop or egg yolk — and pinched closed. In Beidou the ba-wan are still shaped by hand one at a time, giving the triangular form and the fingertip marks on the surface.

The formed ba-wan are steamed first, after which practice splits. In Beidou some shops soak them in warm oil of about 60 to 70 °C (some use lard), which softens the skin and keeps them hot, while others fry them at around 180 °C for a crisp skin; central and northern Taiwan lean toward frying, and in the south clear-steamed ba-wan are common and skip the oil. They are served with a sweet-savory sauce, sometimes garlic paste, usually alongside a bowl of soup, and eaten with a bamboo skewer or fork.

Ba-wan is usually traced to Beidou in Changhua County and is often described as one of the few Taiwanese street foods born on the island. The Beidou township chronicle, in its entry on the long-running Ba-wan Sheng (肉圓生) shop, links it to the great flood of 1898, in the early years of Japanese rule (the 戊戌大水災): food was scarce, residents were eating sweet snacks made from sweet potato or cassava starch and sugar, and a man named Fan Wan-ju (范萬居) is said to have turned it into a savory snack filled with bamboo shoots, with pork added later. Some tellings describe him as a temple scribe who wrote the recipe down while possessed by a deity, to feed flood victims. According to the Michelin Guide Taiwan, Fan made the snack but did not sell it; his son Fan Ma-yi started selling it around 1935 in front of Beidou's Dian'an Temple.

These accounts rest mostly on family and shop memory, and versions differ on Fan's role, the first ingredients and even the exact place, so they are best read as local tradition rather than documented history. What is clear is that the snack spread across the island and that each area adapted it. A sweet potato starch wrapper is generally linked to the fact that sweet potatoes were a common crop in Taiwan. Today ba-wan is counted among Taiwan's signature snacks, and in 2021 the Michelin Guide's Bib Gourmand list included a Taichung shop called 台中肉員, which Michelin says was founded in 1933.