Yangji Rice Cake
Yangji Rice Cake has been making delicious traditional rice cakes for over 60 years. Located across from the tourist help center in Luye Township of Taitung County, this vendor is a favorite of many tourists. Come take a bite and you’ll understand why it has such great popularity. Besides the traditional Hakka rice cake, the vendor also offers red turtle rice cake and radish pickle buns, each bite will have you coming back for more.
Yangji Rice Cake was first founded by the Hakkanese lady Chong Man-mei who is now over 80 years old. Chong sold the rice cakes by the family’s grocery shop and the rice cakes soon gained more fame and popularity than the original family business. About a decade ago, as Chong grew older, she passed the business to one of the decedent couples, Yang Gui-rong and his wife Tang Yun-xian. The traditional Hakka flavors and techniques were passed on to Tang and the store was officially renamed “Yangji Rice Cake” after the husband’s family name “Yang.” In 2021, Yangji Rice Cake joined Taitung’s bilingual reformation vendors and now offers bilingual menus so that foreign visitors can also peruse the menu with ease.
Yangji Rice Cakes are made from home-grown mugwort which is guaranteed to be pesticide free. The mugwort is picked fresh each day and processed with locally grown short grain sticky rice and eight additional spices to create the rice cake wrapper. The cakes are soft and chewy, yet don’t stick to your teeth. The cakes are filled with pickled radish, minced meat, mushrooms, and other natural ingredients. No preservatives are added and the rice cakes are all hand-made in house. Finally, the rice cakes are placed on pomelo leaves before steaming which gives them a unique additional fragrance. To stick to traditional cooking methods, the wok and steamer is heated by a wooden stove to create a nostalgic yummy snack.
While traditions must be kept, innovation is also just as important. Yang and Tang put their heads together to come up with many Taitung themed flavors, such as coffee, butterfly pea flower, pumpkin, and more. Not only does this create multiple bright colors of rice cakes, the unique and creative flavors bring a new and welcomed twist on the traditional rice cake snack.
Address: No. 232, Neighborhood 7, Yongle Rd., Luye Township, Taitung County
Phone Number: 089-550602
Hours of Operation: 6am- evening (no pre-scheduled day off)
Website: Fan Page
