Flour, sugar, and leaveners might be the essentials of any pantry, but for me sago is as much as an essential as those ingredients. Sago has been a staple of family's kitchen and now mine as well. It's the main ingredient of mango sago (and all the other desserts of my sago series), my favourite version of dessert soup, as well as these kabocha salted egg yolk snowskin mooncakes I've been making for years. In my family's kitchen, sago is mostly used for crystal sago cakes, little steamed cakes filled with custard or bean paste. Sago is what makes the cakes special — because when steamed, the sago becomes translucent and chewy, ready to show off the filling that is inside of it. In my family's kitchen, the sago cakes are shaped and steamed inside a muffin pan, but for Mid-Autumn this year, I'm shaping them with a mooncake press to make sago mooncakes.
Sago pearls are not the same as tapioca pearls (commonly found in bubble tea), and can't be used interchangeably for this recipe. Sago pearls are small and white, and become completely translucent when cooked in water. Cooking the pearls completely submerged in water is the more common preparation for sago in Chinese desserts, but for these sago mooncakes, the sago pearls are first soaked in hot water, formed into a dough for the mooncakes, then steamed until they are no longer opaque. The sago pearls form a deeply satisfying chew, but what I think makes these sago mooncakes even more special is that you can see the filling of each mooncake without cutting into them. Using custard will produce a yellow sago ...