Sticky sweet rice cake sandwiched by sweet potato and taro, and fried to a golden crispy perfection — fried nian gao 年糕  (Rice cake) is a favorite festive treat that's a must have to usher in a 年年高  as they sound similar to a "more prosperous year". 

Our version is wrapped in a thin sheet of spring roll skin, and fried to perfection with the BRUNO Air Fryer, meaning they're super easy and healthier to make! They also resemble miniature gold bars, making them extra auspicious and lucky! 

Delving into the deets

Dimensions

• Cut your nian gao, taro, and sweet potato into 6 cm long batons, this is a manageable length for rolling later on. 
• Cut the tubers thinner, this allows the veggies to steam faster and gives the spring rolls more of that desired gooey, chewy profile.
• It is hard to cut out completely uniformed batons of the various ingredients, as the components are often unevenly shaped. Don’t worry, as long as they are of somewhat equal length, you won’t see a noticeable difference once they are wrapped.

Salt 

• After they're cooked, season the veggies with salt to help highlight their flavours and contrast the sweetness from the nian gao. We used Maldon sea salt for this as its large flakes resulted in pleasant pockets of salinity.    

Recipe

1. Set up your BRUNO Multi Grill Pot with fill it with the water then turn the heat to HI and cover the pot. 
2. When the water is boiling, place the steamer rack in it and use tongs to place a heat-resistant plate with the taro and sweet potato batons on it into the Grill pot. Cover it and let the tubers steam for 5 minutes. 
3. Turn off the heat and remove the taro and sweet potato. Sprinkle it with sea salt to season it.
4. In a bowl, use a silicone brush to mix the corn flour with the remaining water into a slurry. 
5. Stack one sweet potato baton, one nian gao baton, and one taro baton in that order. 
6. Place the stack on a spring roll wrapper and roll it up, leaving 1 quarter of the spring roll sheet unrolled. 
7. Using the silicon brush, apply the corn flour slurry to the unrolled portion of spring roll skin, as well as on the left and right flaps of unfilled wrapper.  
8. Fold the left and right sides over the the top of the roll and gently press them down to seal up the side of the spring roll. 
9. Continue to fully roll up the spring roll.
10. Brush on a light coat of oil on the spring roll.
11. Repeat steps 5 to 10, rolling up the rest of the spring rolls until your ingredients are used up.  
12. Fill your BRUNO Air Fryer basket with one layer of nian gao spring rolls. Try to space them apart so the spring rolls don’t touch one another. 
13. Place the fryer basket into the Air Fryer, and set the temperature to 190 ℃, and the timer to 12 minutes. 
14. When the cooking is done, remove the spring rolls with tongs. 

Serve the nian gao while it is still hot. Reheat in the air fryer (5 minutes at 180℃) if you consume it later, so the spring rolls are crispy and ooey gooey~