Homemade Sesame Balls Buchi Recipe [麻糰] (2024)

After writing about a Chinese restaurant in my previous post, I got in the mood to talking about a dessert that’s often served in local Chinese restaurants after a heavy multi-course meal. No, we’re not talking about Mango Sago, though that’s pretty much a staple too. I’m actually talking about the Buchi, or the Fried Sesame Seed Balls that usually have colourful pieces of toothpick stuck on them to make them easy to pick up and pop in your mouth. I know it’s the mooncake season and other blogs are probably writing about mooncake recipes, but let’s be real: I like buchi a lot more than mooncakes, so here we are. 🙂

This little critter has a TON of names. Traditionally it’s called 麻糰 [ma tuan] or 麻圆 [ma yuan] depending on where you are in China. But since the latter actually insinuates something round in its name, I decided to go with the first name to label these, because clearly my amateur hands are terrible at keeping these round from start to finish!

In English, these are known simply as Sesame Seed Balls, which if you translate literally in Chinese is another name still: 芝麻球 [zhi ma qiu]. Again, the word ‘ball’ in the name refers to something round. Some of my sesame balls actually ended up having some strange shapes, but don’t be fooled: They all tasted delicious! I wish I could read the Chinese names to you though, because the English letters really don’t give much justice to proper Mandarin pronunciation. Whatever you want to call them, these crisp on the outside, almost gooey on the inside balls are pretty darn addictive.

In the Philippines, these are simply called Buchi. There are two versions of buchi that exist here, and the other is like this semi-flat filled round that kind of looks like a fat pancake. This is the Chinese restaurant version, which I prefer because anything with toasty sesame seeds is just YUM in my book. They smell amazing and contribute this lovely nutty flavour.

I learned this once again from one of my all-time favourite cookbooks, and I’m so glad I decided to do this Homemade Sesame Balls Buchi recipe, because, my rookie mistakes notwithstanding, these were absolutely scrumptious!

The process of making this is interesting. You start by cooking a brown sugar syrup that you use to create the dough. This also helps to sweeten it and attain that kind of gooey texture once the dough touches the hot oil. The dough is not really hard to work with as long as you have a bowl of water on the side to keep it moist, since the dough does crack every once in a while, thanks to the moisture that escapes the dough from using a hot brown sugar concoction. If at any point you find the dough cracking, just wet your hands a little in the bowl before handling the dough again. The most crucial part is really this glutinous dough that wraps around the filling.

Speaking of filling, I used some smooth red bean paste to fill my buchi this time around. You can go with black bean paste as well, or even chopped peanuts, but in China they usually use lotus paste for this. No idea where you can buy that one, though in Manila the red bean paste can be bought from the Japanese stores in Cartimar. I think most buchi I’ve eaten in Chinese restaurants is filled with black bean paste.

Another note on the dough, the trick is not to make it too thick as you wrap it around the filling. You don’t want to be chewing through a thick layer of dough just to get through to the filling, but don’t make it too thin either so that the sweetness of the red bean filling has a balancing counterpart. Just slightly thinner than what I have made would be good, since the dough does expand while it’s being cooked.

The most gratifying part of this recipe is without a doubt the frying portion. You pop these in the hot oil after rolling them in sesame, and little by little these pale white balls turn into these lovely golden brown rounds of crispy joy! In the instructions below, the cooking process involves kind of pressing the balls against the wok to help the sesame seed balls expand further. This is the step that deformed some of my balls at first, so what you’ll want to do is to make sure you press the whole thing with the back of your spatula, and rotate it to press another portion of the ball to round it back up if you think the shape has become uneven. I got the hand of it after a few tries.

The fact that I’m getting over my general disdain for fried foods may or may not be a good thing…

The thing that I truly love about having this food blog is being encouraged to try new things I normally would just take for granted. I’ve eaten so many of these things in my lifetime but I never really thought about trying to actually MAKE it at home. And now thanks to this blog I’m making all sorts of things at home these days. Things I never really expected, most of them. 🙂

And honestly you guys, these taste exactly like the ones in the restaurants. Maybe a teeny bit better? They’re just SO GOOD. But of course, as it is with almost all fried treats, they are always best the day they are made. Literally they are at their best and crunchiest just minutes after being cooked. I like eating these warm.