Freeze-dried Fruit – Chinese-Style

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China, Chinese, Fruit, jackfruit, rambutan, Snacks

In a candy store in Beijing I found dried, unsweetened fruit, including some that I had never had before! The first one I tried was dried jackfruit, which was incredibly popular fresh as well, but with such an overpowering scent that it was reeeally a problem (there is a reason it is nick-named the “stinkfruit”).

This reminded me somewhat of banana chips, though with more tartness, but I don’t think it’ll ever become my favorite food in the world. At least I didn’t feel compelled to try the fresh fruit afterwards!

The other variety I tried was rambutan, a gorgeous looking fruit in a wild, red peel that is related to lychees. I had really wanted to try it fresh, but it was unfortunately not in season when we were in China.

Holy cow, this was delicious! Incredibly sweet, melting in your mouth. I’d definitely recommend rambutan to anyone interested!

I have to say, I’m getting tired of the apple/pear/peach/banana freeze-dried fruit snacks I find here (though I highly recommend my favorites, strawberry-banana
and apple cinnamon
!), so these were a really welcome change. The rambutan I’d get here any day if I could!

How do you like your fruit chips? Fried? Baked? Freeze-dried? Sugared? Or can’t you warm to them at all?

Food Blogger Cookie Heaven!

Tags

FB Cookie Swap, Food, Meringues, Snacks, Sweets

That’s right, I participated in the Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap 2011, and just look at my awesome haul!

From XXX I got YYY

From XXX I got YYY

From XXX I got YYY

I sent out these cinnamon-spiced butterscotch-chip pecan chocolate cookies that I lightened up to get an amazing 40 kcal per cookie treat! In case you try to keep the cookie damage low over the holidays, like me, here are the nutritional stats to my best estimate: 40kcal, 1.75g fat, 5g carbs, 0.5g protein per cookie. Sound too good to be true? It kind of is, if I may pet myself on the back.

Ingredients:
– 3/4 cup sugar
– 1/4 cup margarine
– 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
– 1/4 cup fat-free egg product like Eggbeaters
– 1 1/8 cup all-purpose flour
– 1/2 tsp cream of tartar
– 1/4 tsp baking soda
– pinch salt
– 1/2 cup butterscotch chips
– 1/2 cup chopped pecans
– 2 tbsp baking cocoa
– 3 packets sugar substitute like Splenda or Sweet’N Low
– 1 tsp ground cinnamon

Steps:
1. Heat over to 350F
2. Combine egg substitute, sugar, margarine and vanilla in a large bowl and beat on medium speed until you have a creamy consistency.
3. Add flour, baking soda and cream of tartar and stir well.
4. Stir in the pecans and butterscotch chips and divide into 1-inch balls (I used a tablespoon for portioning). You should get about 3 dozen cookies.
5. In a small bowl, combine sugar substitute and cinnamon, then roll the dough balls through the mixture.
6. Place the dough balls about one inch apart from each other on ungreased (!) cookie sheets.
7. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes. The cookies should be lightly browned and set into a cookie shape. Immediately move them to a cooling rack.
8. Congratulate yourself on being “good” this Holiday season and dig in.

Chinese Street Food & Snacks – A (Small) Sampling

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China, Chinese, Food, Ice cream, Meat, red beans, Sichuan, Snacks, street food

When in China, most likely you’ll be on foot or on a bicycle (at your own risk!) when not in a taxi. There’ll be lots and lots of walking, and you’ll see snacks everywhere. Who could resist? Here’s a list that merely scratches the surface of the matter, but with options that are healthy and delicious and a little more exciting than simply stocking up on fresh fruit and sugar-free chewing gum (though the gum variety is worth checking out!).

One of my favorite snacks I had while walking in the streets of Chengdu, where small fry kitchens and food carts abound:

This was a sweet cake made by preparing a paste from glutinous rice meal and water and steaming it wrapped in a corn husk, similar to a tamale. The cake was moist and while it was sweet, it didn’t just coat your mouth in sugar stickiness. Wonderful! 🙂

When we were in Leshan, a city in Sichuan that hosts a 70 meter high buddha carved into a mountain covered in temples, we made the mistake of thinking of the trip as a road stop along the way and lugged our luggage up and down the mountain for 2 hours in the boiling sun. To cool down, we went for ice cream. Ice cream comes in odd varieties in China (for example corn ice cream in the shape of corn on the cob), but a traditional, locally made variety looks kind of like a white popsicle:

Unfortunately, nowhere on the wrapper does it list the flavor, and I have been racking my brain ever since what that flavor was. Mildly sweet, not at all overpowering, it was great and refreshing. The best I can come up with is a subtle resemblance to coconut, but I don’t think that was it. If anyone knows, *please* let me know! This is a wonderful snack on one of the many hot Chinese summer days for relatively few calories compared to milk- or cream-based ice cream.

Staying in Sichuan, we decided to hike up Mount Emei, one of the four sacred Buddhist mountains in China. Let me tell you, an 11 hour hike covering 14 miles, steeply uphill on stairs, not paths, to reach the summit at 10,100 feet, left me in dire need of protein to refuel. I opted for beef jerky.

Little did I suspect that even beef jerky comes in the Sichuan variety. They must have just rubbed this stuff in Sichuan pepper paste! Well, I was very alert after, and it was actually very tasty, even though my water consumption went way up afterwards. Jerky is a staple in convenience stores and snack shacks or carts in rural areas, so be on the look out for it if you need a protein kick and are tired of eggs. Not low in fat or salt, but not too bad.

And the final snack I found at a little street kitchen in the hutongs of Beijing. I *adored* this:

What you see here a paper thin meringue-like containers shaped as a triangle. The filling is your choice:

I went with red bean paste, because I love all things red bean. Not too sweet, perfectly balanced and light, this is a fairly low calorie snack with protein and sweetness! Of course, if you opt for a cream-base filling, that doesn’t hold true. And as an added bonus, they come in the most adorable little paper bag:

What are some of your favorite snacks? Do you eat snacks on a regular basis, or try to avoid them? Anything you found while traveling that you wish you could get back home?

Donghuamen Night Market in Beijing – Curiosities on a Stick

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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 Sugar-Free Chewing Gum

Tags

Chewing Gum, China, Chinese, Snacks

If you are anything like me, sugar-free chewing gum is a major food group for you, if only to keep you from nibbling on everything else that you might encounter. Let me tell you, the Chinese rival the Americans in gum availability and selection, even the sugar-free kind!

The flavor profile is definitely different than what we typically see here, but the brands are similar. Above is a selection of Chinese Wrigley’s Extra! gums, including cantaloupe, grapefruit, strawberry and blueberry flavors. And that ominous looking bottle happens to be Pepsi Max, if you’re wondering. But more on diet drinks in China some other time.

Now this is a bit off the beaten track, and I was only able to find these gems (in my opinion) in the small town of Wenchuan, that was completely rebuilt after the 2009 Sichuan earthquakes. Lotte is a Korean brand that also is everywhere in Japan, and here you see sugar-free coffee-flavored gum and drops. Most people I know have judged this to be completely disgusting, but I *loved* this stuff back in Japan and was ecstatic to find it again in China, if only once.

As with tea, the Chinese are big on flower, or hua, flavors. On the right you can see some rose-flavored sugar-free gum, and I’ve also seen lotus and lilly flavors. On the left is another Lotte variety, “Black Black + X”, which seemed to be mainly caffeine with an unidentifiable flavor that may or may not have been meant to be licorice. Not one I’d recommend…

This is another cantaloupe-flavored sugar-free gum, with actor/singer Wang Leehom on the front (kudos to my friend living in China, who adds that his face also graces water bottles!). This gum came in little chewy cubes with blue pieces meant to help clean your teeth. Not bad! I only came across this brand once, though, in Chengdu.

And mentos! Mentos were everywhere, and this particular version was shaped like the mints, but consisted of sugar-free gum with a liquid sour juice center. Very refreshing! The bottle had three mixed flavors, my favorite was the green gum filled with red juice.

This final example was a mixed box of mango, peach and rose sugar-free gum, and came with the most gimmicky dispenser mechanism I have ever seen:

You had to pull up the top, let it drop down again, and you’d end up with one or two pieces of gum resting atop a center column that wasn’t mobile. Not too practical, but a fun discovery nevertheless.

As you can see, you won’t have to import your gum if you go to China and are afraid you’ll go into withdrawal.

Most nutritional information is given per 100g, as is also common in Europe, so it will be difficult for you to just check calories to determine whether a bottle of gum is sugar-free or not. A few of the bottles/packs will have the English word “sugar-free” printed on (see for example those little cubes with the actor on the bottle), but the easiest way to identify them is to check the ingredients. If it says “Xylitol”, you know you’re looking at artificially sweetened gum. By the way, most artificially sweetened items in China are made with xylitol rather than the sweeteners we’re used to see in the United States (mannitol, sorbitol, aspartame, stevia, sucralose, etc.). Xylitol is used here for dental care products with a sweet flavor though!

So, what crazy gum flavors are your favorites, or what would you like to see explored on the Western gum market? I sure vote for coffee…