What is "ba-wan"

n. A Taiwanese snack food consisting of a circular translucent dough filled with a savory stuffing and served with a sweet and savory sauce.

Ba-wan is a Taiwanese street food, consisting of a 6–8 cm diameter disk-shaped translucent dough filled with a savory stuffing and served with a sweet and savory sauce. The stuffing varies widely according to different regions in Taiwan, but usually consists of a mixture of pork, bamboo shoots, and shiitake mushrooms. Changhua-style ba-wan is considered to be the "standard" ba-wan as it is the most famous and most widely imitated of all styles of ba-wan.

The term "ba-wan" is a non-standard romanization derived from Taiwanese Hokkien. In the township of Lukang, Changhua County, ba-wan are known as bahhoe because they take on the block-like shape of the character 回.

The gelatinous dough is made of a combination of corn starch, sweet potato starch, and rice flour, which gives it its chewy, sticky, and gelatinous texture and a greyish translucent hue. Ba-wan are initially cooked by steaming; however, they may also be served after being deep fried to give them a "skin" or gently poached in oil to heat them without drying them out.