can't remember much what I ate in Taiwan, it was such a long time ago. I remember stinky tofu (臭豆腐， chou doufu) we bought somewhere in the mountains. It was delightfully flavourful, nothing stinky at all. I also remember the spicy steamboat (火鍋, huǒ guō ) we had in Taoyuan. Precious little, in other words. So it was about time I had refreshed my memories, when this Taiwanese Food Fête cropped up in my scheduler.
A long journey to W2, so away from my hunting grounds. I don't even know what the area is called. Somewhere-in-the-West. The top floor of a council-run community centre looks like a big student canteen, only today there's no bangers and mash on the menu. Instead, I am starting with "tea leaf eggs" (茶葉蛋, cha ye tan): eggs boiled with tea leaves, aniseed, cinnamon, fennel seeds, cloves and Szechuan peppercorns. Sound better than your scrambled eggs? It tastes better too!
It's about 12PM now, just the right time for some gyoza or jiao-zi as they are properly called in Chinese. See, normally it's a lunch kind of food, part of the dim sum family. This particular kind is called 煎餃, jian jiao, stuffed with dog's meat. Not! Just yanking your chain. It's just your common-or-garden fried dumplings with chicken and veg.
You-fan (油飯 ), "oil rice" is a Taiwanese specialty. It is steamed glutinous rice with mushrooms and chicken, flavoured with five-spice and soya soy sauce.
Pig's blood cake (豬血糕, zhu xie gao) sounds gorier than it actually is. From a distance, it resembles a chocolate ice cream on a stick. The main ingredient is glutinous rice, which helps keep its shape. It is coated with crushed peanuts and chopped coriander leaves immediately before consumption.
Candied fruit （拔丝水果， basi shuiguo) is a traditional Chinese treat sold from street stalls. A pretty healthy snack, unless you are one of the white-sugar-hating brigade. Now, 'tis time to retreat to my den and digest all these Taiwanese goodness before my kundalini-yoga class starts.
he wonder of Da Shan, Monkey Head Mushroom!" Gaudy red characters on a package in my local Chinese shop cried for attention. They got mine. I had no idea what was so wondrous about this weird-looking fungus but I would just google it once back home.
It turned out the characters did not lie. Decoction of this mushroom (猴頭菇 - hou-tou-gu) is used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat or prevent such conditions as indigestion, thrombosis, dementia, neurasthenia as well as the ulcers and cancer of the stomach, duodenal and oesophagus. It is known to reduce to level of lipids in blood.The secret behind such an astonishingly wide strike zone is ascribed to the polysaccharides that address the root of those seemingly unrelated conditions.
It is one of the Four Culinary Treasures of China, the other three are bear's paws, trepangs and shark fins. It is also known as Lion's Mane Mushroom, Bearded Tooth Mushroom, Hedgehog Mushroom, Bearded Hedgehog Mushroom, pom pom mushroom, or Bearded Tooth Fungus. Its Latin name, Hericium erinaceus, is only used in scientific literature while the Japanese name, yamabushitake (山伏茸) frequently occurs in commercial contexts.
ow do people become food critics? For some it is the lucky combination that gets them the job: liking free meals and being friends with the editor. Issue in, issue out they churn out rambling nonsense but who cares: the content is there and the advertisers pay.
I don't have good referrers for my quest for good Chinese food in London. I don't yet know any Chinese people here. That is why I read what food critics write. Or, more correctly, I have just stopped doing that. Because many of them do not seem to know peanuts about food.
I just went to Bao Zi Inn, a Chinese eatery in Newport Court, Covent Garden, based on a review in Time Out. Granted, there are differences in opinions. But how can you praise to the skies veritable muck that, despite your insisting on the opposite, has just the names of the dishes to do with authentic Szechuan cuisine? While in London's Chinatown at best you can have forgettable meals, this one is several notches beyond that.
Despite Time Out's claim that Bao Zi Inn has brought about a culinary revolution, I witnessed all classic Chinatown fodder crimes:
stodgy noodles in flavourless broth;
snivel-like starch-based "gravy";
main ingredients pre-cooked in bulk in the morning;
dishes made of combinations of 2 and 3.
Our spinach salad was made well in advance and had a stale taste of overmature vinaigrette. It also contained a handful of peanutsboiled into perfect tastelessness - nice touch! Six miserly pork dumplings (I recognise the type I sometimes buy frozen) came in sesame oil with dry chilli concoction sold for 3 quid a bottle in the supermarket round the corner. They were accompanied by a bowl of water they had been boiled in with a few shavings of spring onions sprucing up its sad appearance.
Two skimpy spoonfuls of mapo doufu had no trace of aubergines or mince, just silken tofu and pre-made "Szechuan gravy". The same gravy was dolloped on overcooked soba in our "spicy Szechuan noodles", perhaps the most uninspiring and insipid since a bowl of instant noodles at a railway station in the Russian countryside back in 1999.
We stood up from the table half hungry and 35 quid poorer but the worst was the horrid aftertaste of a trashy Chinese eatery.
ince the topic of aphrodisiac food seems to have attracted quite a bit of attention here, I will write more about these magic tablets. Although not technically food, they are pure herbs.
While in the West Viagra brings short-term benefits without addressing the root of the problem, the Chinese have taken a more holistic approach. Nan bao (男宝), meaning 'male treasure', is a mix of herbs that fixes your whole system so that you have more sexual drive. It takes two weeks to finish the treatment course, but its benefits lasts long.
Nan bao can be bought in most Chinese pharmacies. It is not covered by most basic insurance policies but then again you do not need a prescription for it.
ice with seaweed and egg?" Marina flinches back, half in astonishment, half in politely hidden disgust. This lovely Russian girl is displaying surefire symptoms of an early gastritis, so I have made her congee or okayu （おかゆ）- a watery rice gruel reinforced with a beaten egg and some shredded kelp for nutrition. This is what is given to children and sick people in Pacific Rim Asia from Japan to Indonesia. But for Marina this is a sacrilege. The Russian rice kasha she is more used tois made with milk, sugar and butter, a far cry from my low-calorie savoury concoction.
Variations of this breakfast gruel are encountered wherever rice is a dietary staple. It is more on the watery side in China, flavoured with fish sauce in Thailand, rather bland in Korea, made with coconut milk in South India. In Singapore I had it with frog meat, in Hong Kong with a thousand-year egg. The recipe below features in my breakfast at least a couple of times every week. So here how it goes.
Rinse a handful of rice in running water. Add half a handful of shredded kombu, whatever dried mushrooms you have (torn in small pieces) and 6-8 cups of water. If you have some cooked rice leftovers, use those without rinsing.
Bring the pot to a boil, reduce fire and simmer until it reaches the porridge texture.
Add a beaten egg and a handful of green leafy vegetables.
Once cooked, flavour with fish sauce or shoyu, garlic powder and finely chopped ginger.
n Russian, it is called "sea cabbage" or laminaria and is normally the base ingredient for an uninspired pickled salad. When Yeltsin and his cronies were busy plundering Soviet assets, canned laminaria salad was one of the few items always available in food shops. This seaweed's taste would have forever associated for me with Yeltin's hunger winters, had I not rediscovered it upon moving to Japan. The Japanese know a myriad highly delectably uses for it and it is in Japan that I grew to love this multifarious kelp.
For hundreds of years in Buddhist Japan a ban on meat consumption ban was in force, so people had to come up with something else than veal or chicken stock for cooking. Kombu, as it is known in Japan, is one of the three main soup bases (dashi). It is of gentler flavour than the other two, which are made of dried flakes of skipper mackerel (katsuo) and shiitake.
When it is sold dry it comes in two ways: shredded (on the picture) or in sheets. It is always covered with sharp-tasting residual sea salt and hence is high in iodine. When consumed over a long period of time, kombu is known to reduce grey hair and darken your natural hair hue. Thanks to it, through the years I have gone from light brown to dark brown with not a silver hair in sight.
I use it to make stock for miso-shiru, to make congeeor o-kayu for breakfast, to prepare delicious beer snack tsukudani.
sometimes think how I would contact Chinese export companies and offer my services in developing (or just using) proper English names for Chinese food ingredients. After all it's all about, in my friend Yasmin's words, "branding, branding and once again branding". Give something weird and unknown an attractive name and watch it sell like hot pies.
In the Chinese shop where I do my groceries this lovely mushroom is unpretentiously called "dried white fungus". I can vividly recall the expressions of puzzled disgust on the faces of my good friends Muhabbat and Jitte, when I suggested they add some to their shopping basket. Not many people want to eat what sounds like something you get on your toe-nail in a public bath.
A fancy name would make it so much easier to sell. You don't have to be very inventive: just translate the Chinese name directly into English: "snow ear" (雪耳). Got your attention, huh? Or "silver ear" (銀耳). Same reaction, innit?
It is mostly used for desserts. Prized for its gently crunchy texture, it hardly has any taste of its own, so I use it in some savoury dishes like spicy seafood noodles or Korean udon. In Chinese medicine it is considered a longevity booster, mainly for its blood-vessel de-clogging working.
ot bean sauce" just does not cut it for me. It sounds bland and unimaginative. Toubanjanis the name. It tastes just like its name: "Thud-bang-shhhaaa!!!" Your mouth stays widely gaping at this very open "a", while you are dashing around looking for some water to douse the fire.
I came across it in my student years in Japan and I call it by its Japanese name. However, this mighty sensual assault on your taste buds was invented in China's Southwest, Szechuan, as dou-ban-jiang (豆瓣酱).
There are two types of it: plain and spicy. I am no big fan of the plain version (it is just smelly and salty), but the spicy one la-dou-ban-jiang (辣豆瓣酱) is one of my favourite condiments. It is indispensable in mapo dofu (麻婆豆腐), the Szechuan numbingly hot toufu, mince and aubergine stew, as well as dandan noodles (擔擔麵). I also like to top steamed rice with it when I am going through a cook's block. It works superbly plain as dressing for avocado.
Korean gochujanglooks and tastes somewhat similar to it but had a different flavour because in Korea they use ground sticky rice instead of beans and the fermenting process is different.
nown in the past as Jew's ear, these days it is safer to call it kikurage (キクラゲ) by its Japanese name. Its alternative name, jelly ear, is not very widely recognised, while the Latin name, Auricularia auricula-judae, is too cumbersome. The Chinese name hei mu er(黑木耳) will hardly ever catch on, will it?
Once I had to ask Floyd to buy it for me in a Chinese shop. None of the names seemed to work although hei mu er proved outside Floyd's linguistic abilities. Finally, he gave up on seeking help from the shop's people and, after quite an effort, managed to locate it himself. The bag said "Black Fungus".
Kikurage is sold dry in most Asian stores. It expands a lot when soaked in water (takes about 30 minutes). The pictures below is the same mushroom as above before soaking! It has a faint earthy flavour and gently crunchy, agaric texture for which it is mostly prized. I don't know what kind of coincidence it is, but kikurage is only popular in the traditionally Confucian countries - Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan and Vietnam. It is not particularly click with the rest of Asia.
In traditional Chinese medicine hei mu er is believed to possess anti-thrombosis properties, that is, it de-clogs your arteries and veins. By extension, it is believed to promote longevity. Polysaccharides that it contains have a tumour-preventive effect.
I use it in a variety of dishes: from sashimi (it is one of the few mushrooms you can eat raw) to noodles and sweet-and-sour chicken. It does not need much cooking and can be added just a couple of minutes before the dish is ready.
ruly, truly, one man's food, another man's poison. I remember how I scared my Moscow friends when I brought a bag of bean sprouts to fix some Chinese food for them. They decided they were in for a feast of creepy Asian worms.
Bean sprouts are widely used in Pacific Asian cuisines. They are known as moyashi (もやし) in Japan, dou ya (豆芽) in China, kongnamul (콩나물) in Korea, tauge in Indonesia (and Holland), thua ngok (ถั่วงอก) in Thailand. In Iran, they are traditionally prepared for the New Year's festival Navrooz. There they symbolize the power of new life.
In Thailand, folk wisdom has it that bean sprouts, when consumed raw, increase sexual drive. It come as no surprise if you consider all the life energy of enzymes and vitamines of freshly sprouting seeds!
I use them for a number of dishes: from Indonesian gado-gado to Chinese mapo-dofu. I can chew them raw much to the consternation of my friends. But I don't mind as it defo gives me a huge perk once in between the sheets! +wink wink+
eahorses, shark fins and swallow nests - the Chinese can make a soup out of anything.
To start from something less challenging, why not try flower buds and tree mushrooms. This light consommé (金針木耳滾魚湯) is fish based but you can substitute fish with stir-fried shiitake to make it veg(etari)an.
Here how you go about fixing it. It is really done before you can say Jack Robinson.
Soak a handful of dried daylily buds (金針) and a handful of black fungus (木耳) half an hour in advance.
Cut a couple of large tomatoes into large wedges.
Slice a 3-inch piece of fresh ginger and fry it lightly in cooking oil.
Add a medium sized fish, e.g., sea brim (or shiitake for veg(etari)ans) to the oil and fry it until done.
While it is frying, bring to boil a pot of water (2-3 litres).
Shred the soaked black fungus and drain the daylily buds.
Add the fish (or shiitake), fungus, buds, tomatoes and ginger to the boiling water.
Season with fish sauce or soya sauce for veg(etari)ans and a dash of ground white pepper.
Reduce the heat and allow to simmer for 10-15 minutes.
ating flowers seems like an elves' and fairies' pastime. However, there are millions of regular humans in East Asia who do that at least once in a while. Well, the Chinese do not sustain on petals and pollen, but on occasion do consume dried daylily (or tiger lily) buds (金針).
They go by kam-jam or golden needles in Chinese grocery stores but I really like their French name: fleurs de lys séchés. I imagine French royalists (all 14 of them) cringing when somebody boils their totem flower with sea brim and ginger.
They - dried daylilies, but, perhaps,French royalists too - need to be reconstituted in cold water before consumption. Normally half an hour is enough. The water comes out sour-ish and not very pleasantly tasting so I just dump it. The buds themselves taste quite like asparagus without its characteristic funk. I use kam-jam in mapo-tofu, seafood noodles and mushroom noodles. There is also a delicious fish soup recipe where daylily buds feature prominently.
They can be consumed fresh too. My Mom picks them just before they blossom out and stuffs them with something reminiscent of a very light celery-flavoured chicken salad. I will publish recipe once I talk her into divulging it.
onsidering the amounts of food the Chinese consume daily, it is amazing how they never get fat. The secret may be down to the fact that in China you graze on small pieces every day instead of stuffing your face full 2 or 3 times a day.
In China as well as throughout Pacific Asia there is a culture of xiao chi (小吃), street food that you can buy at any time of the day.
In London's Chinatown you may be pressed to find a decent restaurant (most of them churn out shameless muck) but the xiao chi is as good as in China. This vegetarian baozi tided me over until dinner. It is steamed and full of veggies: mostly pak choy. Try to grab these babies instead if burgers and chips for lunch, cycle around everywhere and you'll be as slim as Chinese!
By the way, Americans spend 100 times as much money per capita on healthcare than the Chinese but their average lifespan is about the same.
bowl of noodles is my favourite lunch - a dose of taste, flavour, liquid and nutrients. It makes me feel like a well fed, watered and weeded plant. I do not buy pre-packaged ready-made instant broths but make instead my own. It is really a no-brainer and can help you clean up leftovers from the fridge. Here is what I fixed myself for supper tonight.
Make broth by bringing cold water to nearly the boiling point with a 4-5-cm piece of dried konbu. Remove the konbu.
Put a curl of dry egg noddles into the boiling water. Cook 6-8 minutes until just a notch beyond al dente.
In the meantime, toast sliced garlic and sliced shiitake in a bit of vegetable oil until fragrant. Add daylily buds and sauté lightly. Add fish sauce or soya sauce for veg(etari)ians.
Tip 4 into 3. Reduce the heat and let simmer for a couple of minutes. Serve with chopped coriander leaves, spring onions or fried tempeh.
am always on the lookout for new herbal teas. This time I spotted this bag in a Chinese supermarket. Its strange name was what caught my eye: Dehydrating Tea (去濕茶) .
Now you drink tea to replenish liquid in your body, not the other way around. I consulted my Singaporean friend Han-sheng, aka Hon-sang, if you choose to call him in his native Cantonese. He is an accomplished graphic designer and a very erudite man, versed in both Oriental and Western cultures.
According to him, the Chinese drink this herbal tea in summer, when our water intake understandably increases. As a result, our yin aspect, the moist and inactive element, goes up. This makes us feel battered and listless. Hui Sup tea (去濕茶) is made of herbs that increase the dry and vigorous yang aspect without depriving our body of the essential liquid. Quite a trick , isn't it: drying up by drinking?
"So what do you do living on the equator, where the summer never ends?", I kept quizzing. "We just drink it year around." There is no outwitting the Chinese.
For those of you who can't get hold of it where you live but want to fix a yang-boosting infusion themselves here's the ingredients breakdown:
Artemisia capillaris (20%)
Flos gossampini (30%)
Flos puerariae (17%)
Rhizoma dioscoreae (13%)
Honeysuckle (7%)
Juncus effusus (4%)
Rhizoma alismatis (9%)
Bombax ceiba or wood cotton flowers (木綿花) can also be added to the mix as they clear excessive heat from the internal organs and help regulate the kidney function.
ontrary to what you might think Young Cheng Restaurant on Shaftsbury Avenue was not named after the Chinese youth who founded it back in 1993.
In fact, it's the Chinese nickname for Guangzhou City. So there is a clue: here you get mainly Cantonese fare.
It is easy to write ecstatic or indignant reviews: words just flow and flow. With Young Cheng neither is the case. The lamb and ginger hot plate and lemon-crusted shrimp we had were... okay, I guess. There was really nothing to tip the balance between good and bad here to the either side. Just one thing: the portions were quite smallish. But then the rice bowl was just big enough to make good for that. The seating was crammed but the service was prompt. For every minor drawback there was a tiny compensation, freezing the overall experience in the twilight limbo of nothingness. Even the bill was neither cheap nor hefty.
All in all, it falls into place with all my impression of London's Chinatown so far that fluctuates somewhere between hideous and utterly forgettable. There might be some great Chinese restaurants there but I am yet to discover them.
And as always, the dinner was saved by delightful company. Rie is a multilingual business culture trainer. For all her stellar education and career, she is a spiritual person. It is so much fun talking to her, switching between languages and topics from reincarnation and pantheism to branding and. Driven and passionate, she's the exact opposite of neither-nor. Next time we will find some place that won't block me for words to describe it.
alking about Chinese cuisine is like talking about European cuisine ignoring the difference between, say, Norwegian, French, Polish and Greek food. In China, culinary varies enormously from region to region. On my first trip to China, I would move on to a new place every 2-3 days and I could never get the same food that I liked in the city before. A weirdly enjoyable kind of frustration.
There are eight main cuisines in China if we leave ethnic varieties like Tibetan or Uighur as well as urban fusion styles from Beijing or Shanghai out of the equation. One of the Eight Great Traditions is that of Sichuan (Szechuan).
It hails from the Southwest of China and is the spiciest of them all. There is even a special word for Szechuan kind of spiciness, numbing hot: 麻 (má). This comes from the use of the so-called Szechuan pepper - dried flowers of a special tree that however is not related either to black pepper or chili peppers. They cause a mild numbing sensations to the taste buds.
Mapo dofu is perhaps the most famous Szechuan dish. I first tried it in Japan but my real encounter with it took place in Laos. The country's capital Vientiane is more of an oversized village with a handful of colonial French buildings. Laotian people love, nay, can only eat spicy food so the scraggy man from Chengdu who runs the only Szechuan restaurant in a thatched shack never runs out of customers.
Those were still my vegetarian days so after short negotiations in broken Chinese and Laotian he agreed to cook mapo tofu in front of me. Here I will share his recipe with you. It can be made either vegetarian or with meat.
The basic requirements for this dish are that it should be: numbing hot (麻), spicy hot (辣), hot temperature (烫), fresh (鲜), tender and soft (嫩), aromatic (香) (aromatic) and flaky (酥). This is achieved with a succession of the following.
Cut a medium sized aubergine into longish (5-6 cm) slivers and put on a plate to dry.
Cut a 400-500 g block of hard tofu into 1 cm cubes. Allow to drain and dry a bit.
Heat a thick-bottomed pot or wok. Add 4 tbsp odourless vegetable oil and wait until it's hot.
Add the tofu, gently stir and make sure it's all covered by oil.
While the tofu is frying , peel and slice a few cloves of garlic.
Once the tofu is blonde yellow, scoop it out in a bowl and add garlic to the oil.
Once garlic is golden yellow, add half a teaspoonful of Szcechuan pepper, one tsp of white and one tsp of black sesame. Fry briefly until fragrant.
(This is optional but I really love this touch: add 5-6 pre-soaked and julienned dried shiitakeand fry until they start giving out flavour.)
(Also optional but it gives the dish a smokey flvaour: add a nice dash of qingjiang vinegar and let it boil out.)
Add 100 g minced meat: pork, veal or beef. Fry briefly until it's not red any more. Make sure it does not end up chunky. Vegetarians: use pre-soaked TSP (texturised soya protein) mince and soya sauce instead of fish sauce.
Add the aubergines and fry for another 5 minutes. Add the tofu.
Dissolve 2 tablespoonfuls corn starch in half a litre of water. Add into the pot and gently mix.
Add 4 tablespoonful of doubanjiang and a glug of fish sauce and a glug of Chinese rice wine. Gently mix. Bring to boil, then reduce the heat.
Add a handful of bean sprouts and half a handful of pre-soaked golden needles.
Allow to simmer for 15-20 minutes more on a very low heat. Allow all the juices to dissolve and mix. It is even better to let the stew sit on the stove for an hour or so.
It is very easy to make it veg(etari)an: use TSP (texturised soya protein) mince and soya sauce instead of fish sauce. Let Sa Ding Ding's Mantra accompany this fragrant meal:
o, they are going to have JUST noodles?" thought I watching Taipei's smart office crowd going down on their lunch. For an Asian outsider, noodles may not sound like a meal. In Russia noodles are considered lowest grade junk food popular amongst trumps, students and washed-up bachelors.
That is all because nobody cares to fix them properly relying solely on whatever they find in the instant packages. However, with a bit of imagination it is very easy to recreate the kind of gorgeous meal I saw in Taiwan. It is healthy, filling and delicious, a little constellation of delightful chunks and pieces. The recipe couldn't be more simple: put everything in a bowl, pour boiling water, microwave for 3 minutes. Below are the ingredients I usually use.
Dim sum is supposed to be lunch food only, something you grab in between business appointments. At dinner you are expected to take your time with your family. Since I am not burdened with either, I can do as I please. So when I'm lazy I just fix me dim sum.
I line a bamboo sieve with a banana leave. Its gentle scent transfers to the dough with hot steam and make simple lowly buns a culinary delight.
While the pot is steaming away, I make my own Thai-style dip:
"Increasing intercultural understanding through the appreciation of world cuisines." I hope that my blog will inspire people to open their minds and try other people's food where they live or travel.
can't remember much what I ate in Taiwan, it was such a long time ago. I remember stinky tofu (臭豆腐， chou doufu) we bought somewhere in the mountains. It was delightfully flavourful, nothing stinky at all. I also remember the spicy steamboat (火鍋, huǒ guō ) we had in Taoyuan. Precious little, in other words. So it was about time I had refreshed my memories, when this Taiwanese Food Fête cropped up in my scheduler.
A long journey to W2, so away from my hunting grounds. I don't even know what the area is called. Somewhere-in-the-West. The top floor of a council-run community centre looks like a big student canteen, only today there's no bangers and mash on the menu. Instead, I am starting with "tea leaf eggs" (茶葉蛋, cha ye tan): eggs boiled with tea leaves, aniseed, cinnamon, fennel seeds, cloves and Szechuan peppercorns. Sound better than your scrambled eggs? It tastes better too!
It's about 12PM now, just the right time for some gyoza or jiao-zi as they are properly called in Chinese. See, normally it's a lunch kind of food, part of the dim sum family. This particular kind is called 煎餃, jian jiao, stuffed with dog's meat. Not! Just yanking your chain. It's just your common-or-garden fried dumplings with chicken and veg.
You-fan (油飯 ), "oil rice" is a Taiwanese specialty. It is steamed glutinous rice with mushrooms and chicken, flavoured with five-spice and soya soy sauce.
Pig's blood cake (豬血糕, zhu xie gao) sounds gorier than it actually is. From a distance, it resembles a chocolate ice cream on a stick. The main ingredient is glutinous rice, which helps keep its shape. It is coated with crushed peanuts and chopped coriander leaves immediately before consumption.
Candied fruit （拔丝水果， basi shuiguo) is a traditional Chinese treat sold from street stalls. A pretty healthy snack, unless you are one of the white-sugar-hating brigade.
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