Chinese Soups – A Tiny Sampling Of A Vast Menu

Tags

Beijing, Breakfast, China, Chinese, Eggs, Meat, Sichuan, Soup, Vegetables

Soups, or tang, play a huge role in the Chinese menu – they are served at breakfast and every other meal. Typically, there is a whole soup section on even a small street eatery’s menu, and contrary to the concept of a soup as a starter, it is treated as a main dish and comes in a huge bowl that will serve 2 to 3 people, if not more.

Ingredients and the level of spiciness vary widely between each soup, although there appear to be some favorites. I’ll present a brief sampling that contains most of the soups I had while in China:

1) A dish you will find almost anywhere (including Chinese textbooks!) and that is a traditional, homey meal all across China, is xi hong shi ji dan, or tomato & egg soup. Some are essentially egg drop soup with cubes of tomatoes, others have whole omelets in broth, and yet others are almost more of a tomato bisque with some egg swirled in.

Here’s a version I had in Beijing, which started my love affair with this dish:

In Chengdu, I got the slightly bizarre omelett-in-soup variety:

In Leshan in Sichuan province, I got a much more tomato-soup like version:

2) In Chengdu, I had a lovely soup consisting of broth with baby bok choy leaves – sounds plain, but really wasn’t! Plus, I did the Chinese thing and added some dark rice vinegar 🙂

3) Also in Chengdu, we had a lovely pork and mushroom soup that was earthy and flavorful:

4) In Beijing, in a tiny restaurant near Beihai Park, we got what I think is pretty much hot and sour soup with pork, as one knows it from Chinese restaurants around here:

5) In Emeishan, we had another batch of kelp soup, or hai dai tang, similar to a breakfast dish we had in Wenchuan. This was slippery to eat with chopsticks, and only for those that like chewy seaweed, but I loved it:

6) And finally, from Tangshan, a dish called yun nan guo qiao mi xian, or “noodles that cross the bridge”. This is a specialty containing extremely long rice flour noodles with meat of seafood balls (my version had shrimp balls) as well as some vegetables in a mild, clear broth that can be spiced up with pepper-oil. This is super filling, super cheap, and delicious dish!

So, as a bottom line, tang, or soup, is always a great, warming, filling option you’ll find anywhere, it’s low in calories, healthy, and flavorful, and you can hardly go wrong (Well, except maybe that omelet-soup…). Since you most likely will face many a menu that has no English whatsoever (or random English, with dishes translated as “not food”!), finding the character for tang can be an easy way to point and always get something good, with a surprise element.

What are some of your favorite soups? Are soups strictly a winter food for you? I didn’t expect I’d love hot soups in the heat of China, but it was actually really refreshing and helped me adjust.

A Traditional Beijing-Style Dumpling Restaurant

Tags

Beijing, China, Chinese, Dumplings, Food, Meat, Vegetables

While we were in Beijing, my friend showed us a traditional Beijing dumpling restaurant right around the corner from her work. Of course we went along happily!
The restaurant consisted of several completely separate rooms along a corridor, each of which was slightly different, but all felt kind of cozy with tons of plants, traditional clay figurines and muted lighting (sorry for the low quality pictures!). Many of the waitresses had traditional, complex braided hairdos that added to the flair of things.

We ordered a variety of dishes to share, starting with asparagus and chicken in a brown sauce that opened my eyes to the world of green asparagus. You see, in Germany we usually eat the white kind, and I had been suspicious of the green version. Now I’m a dedicated fan!

We also had a dish of baby bok choy and mushrooms that I loved so much, I tried to recreate it at home for a lunch staple, and I’ll post the recipe soon! Mildly savory and buttery soft bok choy with earthy mushrooms and ginger. Delicious!

And of course the dumplings. We each chose a filling, of which there was an entire separate menu with about 15 pages. Any meat, seafood, vegetable, sauce and combination thereof were available!
Beijing-style dumplings are boiled, not steamed or fried, and come with died wrappers (white, orange, green and purple). Unfortunately the colors don’t correspond to the fillings, and all three orders came in a colorful mixture, so that it was a take-a-bite-and-see experience. I think we each got at least one of each, and I liked them all very much. My wife had beef ones that were great, mine were a mixture of vegetables and mushrooms, and my friend had another meat-vegetable mix.

Going to a dumpling restaurant is a great, interactive meal if you have a small group of people, and all the dishes were absolutely delicious. Two thumbs up! On top, in pretty much any Chinese restaurant you’ll get a huge selection of vegetables that easily make your dinner much healthier than what you’d ever get overseas as Chinese cooking!

Do you like dumplings? What variety is your favorite kind? Have you been successful at keeping them from falling apart when making them yourself, unlike me?

Donghuamen Night Market in Beijing – Curiosities on a Stick

Tags

Beijing, China, Chinese, curiosities, Fish & Seafood, Food, Fruit, Meat, Snacks

Yes. That would be me eating fried snake on a stick.

Probably the most memorable novel food experience on our China trip was the Donghuamen night market that pops up every night on Donghuamen Street in one of the luxury shopping areas of Beijing, China. The market serves pretty much anything you wouldn’t normally think to eat on a stick. Don’t believe me? Take a look: This stand had English labels, but you could mostly tell what things were. And if in doubt, vendors waving sticks at you and yelling “Testicles!! Lady, testicles!!!” at you enticingly is a good indication of what might await you. There were indeed testicles (from cocks and bulls, I believe), and also snakes, eels, whole baby sharks, centipedes, silk worms, honeybee cocoons, sea stars, sea horses, sea urchins, various squids and other cephalopods, stinky tofu (essentially tofu gone bad, and believe me, your nose will tell you if you’re even getting close!) and plenty of other things.

As a customer, you select as many of these items as you want and the vendors will dip them into an intensely flavored spice rub and either fry (most common) or grill (much rarer) them for you. While it’s certainly a lot to process for your brain, everything tastes pretty much just like that incredibly overpowering spice mixture, though things like silk worms and scorpions might add a textural component to the experience. It’s neither too diet-friendly nor too tasty, if you ask me, and not even because I don’t enjoy snake/squid/what-have-you, but simply because that spice rub was probably 95% salt and 5% hot spices. Nevertheless, it’s something any curious foodie should try at least once when in Beijing!

Now, once the foodie quota is met, you can distract yourself with steamed or fried bao zi (stuffed buns) served with a variety of dipping sauces:

And for a sweet finish, there are fruit, also served on a skewer, though not fried or rubbed in salt:

The Donghuamen night market has been around since the early 1980s and is a popular draw for Chinese and foreigners alike, though the Chinese tend to seem more enthusiastic about the offered wares in general. Do expect to be aggressively advertised to by testicle-sellers if you are foreign, and maybe be advised that “bu yao!” means “I don’t want it!”. Other than that, it’s certainly a memorable experience to try out one night in Beijing, and will provide you with glorious photos to show whenever people ask about your trip.

Chinese Breakfasts – An Overview

Tags

bao zi, Beijing, Breakfast, Chengdu, China, Chinese, Congee, Eggs, Emeishan, Sichuan, Soup, Vegetables, Wenchuan

Breakfast, the most important meal of the day, right? Well, Chinese breakfast is nothing like American breakfast (or European breakfast, for that matter), and comes in many forms. I’ll attempt to give a basic overview over what you may encounter, focusing on the less figure-threatening options.

One of the most common things you’ll see, though not necessarily in hotels, is congee or konji, a very thin, watery rice porridge. Don’t think oatmeal consistency, think soup:

Congee itself is pretty flavorless, but what makes it delicious is the toppings that you add. Those range from fruit to fish, but the most common options will include all kinds of salty pickled vegetables (somewhat like pickled sushi ginger). This is not typically a breakfast that appeals to most Westerners, but you can get quite used to it. Due to the high water to rice ratio, the caloric count really isn’t too bad.

From here on, I’ll show pictures of various breakfasts I had on our trip. Let’s start with a breakfast I had in a little breakfast street kitchen in Wenchuan, Sichuan province:

This is a pretty typical assembly consisting of a tea egg or cha dan (a hard-boiled egg soaked in tea, soy sauce and spices), pickles, kelp soup or hai dai tang, and bao zi (stuffed steamed buns filled with either minced vegetables or meat). The bao zi clock in higher on the caloric scale with about 100kcal for a small steamed bun (fried bao zi are much, MUCH worse!), but one or two nicely beef up your breakfast. The kelp soup, consisting of long, noodle-shaped strips of seaweed in a clear broth, has about 85 calories per cup, and is especially nice on a cool morning. To enjoy this dish, you should definitely like the chewy texture of kelp.

Next, breakfasts in Chengdu, Sichuan province, at our hotel, which also served Chinese-style breakfast:

As you can see, there is broth and a tea egg again, and also some boiled baby bok choy (delicious!). There are also two cold dishes consisting of lettuce and Sichuan peppers (certainly wakes you up in the morning…), and the omnipresent wintermelon, a bitter melon shaped like a long, pockmarked cucumber that is incredibly popular in China. Very vegetable-heavy dishes, though larger buffets will have meat options and bao zi as well.

Same hotel, other morning. The same vegetable dishes, plus a small cake made of bean paste and seeds. I think this would have been better warm, but the one I got was pretty much cold and very gelatinous. I didn’t finish it.

Our hotel in Emeishan taught us that Chinese businessmen at breakfast are basically hyenas. I kid you not, there were war cries and head-first dives supported by copious use of elbows. To be fair, when I faught back with the same methods, I earned graciously given respect and managed to still get food on my plate before everything was gnawed down to the bone. This restaurant had very few meat options, so I loaded up on cauliflower (pretty much just steamed without flavour), pickled cucumber, pickled tomatoes and pickled napa cabbage (yes, pickles are essential for breakfast in China).

And the final breakfast also was from Emeishan: a hard-boiled egg (no tea involved), pickled cucumbers and napa cabbage, kelp strips in a Sichuan pepper marinade (cold, but it got me sweating profusely!) and a delicious, warm eggplant stir-fry with peppers that was less rabidly spicy.

And there you have it – I also just ate fruit from stalls or street carts on mornings where we didn’t get breakfast or there were no options that appealed to me, and there are also copious little carts that pop up around breakfast times that will serve bao zi and similar items in steamer baskets.

What is your preferred breakfast? Being German, I’ve always preferred a savory, cold breakfast, but how do you respond to that? And as always, if there is anything specific you’d like to ask, shoot!