Come and Halva go if you think you're hard enough!

I've just been looking through some of our photos and found this happy memory.

Sarah discovered this Halva outside Dongzhimen Subway Station in Beijing, where dozens of Uighers were selling massive blocks of it from the back of bicycles.

Resembling an oversized breakfast bar, this Halva consisted of cashew nuts, almonds, peanuts, goji berries and dried apricot, held together with a luxurious honey cement.

Although it started of soft, chewy and pliable, the halva set like concrete over the coming days. The fear of losing a tooth, however, was nothing compared to the rich reward. Sarah and I spent several days munching through our own breezeblock.

Pure nuts.

And another!

Sorry for all the linkage going on here recently, but if anyone's interested a post I wrote whilst in China about the food in Yunnan has just appeared on Seoul Eats.

Much more entertaining however is the Alan Partridge clip that inspired the title for this post.

He must have a foot like a traction engine!

Yunnan Noodles

While it's neighbouring Sichuan that enjoys the reputation for China's spiciest cuisine, Yunnan province, in the south west of the country, has perfected the art of the noodle.

This diverse region of rugged mountains and tropical rainforests is home to almost half of China's 56 ethnic minority groups - and a good deal of it's best noodle dishes.

Noodles in Yunnan come in all different shapes and sizes. They can be flat, round, thick or thin. Sometimes they are simply shaved off a quivering getanious block with a cheese grater while you wait.

Most of these noodles are made of wheat, coming very close in appearence and texture to spagetti, but both rice noodles and sweet potato noodles are extremely popular.

Yunnan's most famous noodles are probably "across the bridge" noodles. This dish, named after the daily food delivery of a dutiful wife to her scholar husband, is a "do-it-yourself" affair, as you add various bits and pieces to a steaming broth.

Elsewhere, street stalls and hole-in-the-wall noodle shops do countless variations of cold noodles. These dishes are assembled rather than cooked, and usually involve raw onions, crushed peanuts and up to a dozen sauces, oils and pastes. The result is a tongue pleasing melange of flavours, and leaves just enough savory/spicy leftover broth to embarass yourself slurping.

There is an old Chinese saying: "If you want a good life, don't marry a beautiful women, but if you want good noodles, go to Yunnan." There isn't really, I just made that up. But there probably should be!

Lijiang Baba

Lijiang old town, in north western Yunnan, is the type of place that almost seems too nice. With its narrow streets, gushing canals and Naxi architecture there is no doubt that it is beautiful, but nevertheless many people seem to come away disappointed in the town.

What's missing, it seems, is the presence of any sense of the real China. Lijiang is too clean, ordered and touristy to come even close to authenticity. The Old Town looks and feels, for the most part, like a Las Vegas casino could have built it.

It's not surprising that this superficiality is reflected by bad food. With a few notable exceptions, allot of the dining options in the old town appear to be a case of style over substance. Most of the restaurants and cafes are way overpriced, and seem to be staffed exclusively by a breed of young arrogant types who consider any sort of service an infringement on their human rights.

Rise early in the morning however (before the town has had a chance to rouge up) and another Lijiang presents itself. At these hours, the tour buses have yet to arrive and people seem to be doing normal, everyday things. It's at this time that you're also likely to come across Lijiang Baba, the town's street breakfast of choice.

Lijiang Baba consists of a pancake-sized piece of dough, freshly rolled then dropped into a frying pan with about an inch of hot oil. Into the middle is cracked a whole egg and some chopped green onions are also added. The whole thing is then flipped and allowed to cook on the reverse. The result is a piece of eggy bread about the same thickness and texture of naan bread.

As breakfasts go, this one is close to unbeatable. All too often in China fried flatbread is stodgy and saturated with oil. Not so in Lijiang. Here the bread somehow manages to remain crispy on the outside, yet light and fluffy in the middle. The egg, for its part, is well distributed and along with the green onions adds a little flavour. The Baba also comes with two tart and spicy chilli sauces - a real wake up call.

By midday the Lijiang Baba stalls have by and large cleared away and the tourist onslaught is in full swing. In this respect Lijiang Baba serves a second purpose; that of giving you the energy to get the hell out of there!

Yakity Yak

The last week or so has been pretty interesting. Instead of cruising down the Yangtze with about 1 million other people, we decided to travel through the mountains of Western Shechuan and Northern Yunnan.

The area is part of cultural Tibet, and is about as close as you can get to Lhasa without a permit. Even so I was quite unprepared for just how different it would be. Once we got above the 3000 metre level China disappeared and Tibetan villages, prayer flags and nomads became the norm.

There's not much in the way of street food up there however. All I saw were either barbecued potato slices brushed with oil and sprinkled with chilli powder (fantastic) or processed sausage brushed with oil and sprinkled with chilli powder (gross.)

I did have the chance however (rather tackily I know) to chow down with the family of our thirteen year old nomad horse trekking guide.

On the menu were Tibetan bread, Yak milk, Yak cheese, Yak yoghurt and Yak butter. Almost everything was fantastic; the milk was warm and rich, the cheese sweet and earthy, and the yoghurt somewhere between the two. It was only with the butter that I began to fade - our hostess mixed it into dough with some barley flour to make something called tampa. The result was way to heavy for my feeble belly, but probably the perfect thing to get through the Tibetan winter.

Chengdu chompin

We've just been to Chengdu, the supposed "culinary capital of China." With such credentials one expects a vibrant, healthy street-food scene, but a recent a post from rasamalaysia.com warned me that this would not necessarily be the case.

Apparently the Chengdu authorities’ approach to street food is conducted with all the subtleness of a bulldozer in a hutong. Recent years have seen many vendors either shut down or forced to move inside. What's left is sparsely scattered through the city, with most of what's on offer limited to a few artificially constructed "food streets" close to the main tourist hotspots.

That's not to say the food there is bad. Skewered quail had been cooked, glazed and deep-fried (the latter perhaps to make the bones softer) and tasted of five spices.

I also managed to locate some dan dan noodles, one of the local specialities. These consisted of freshly cooked noodles placed on a bed of thick chilli oil, then topped with spicy ground pork. The result was probably the best noodle dish I've had since I arrived in China. The noodles tempered the heat of the chilli.


The same couldn't be said for this little stunner. Jellied minced beef was wrapped in a bamboo leaf then topped with sliced chilli and green onions. Much to the amusement of some passing Chinese, I broke into a serious case of the sweats while eating this. Definitely the spiciest thing I've had in a long time.

On the non-street food front Chengdu has much to recommend itself. Nearly everything you order comes loaded with fantastically mouth-numbing Sichuan peppers and hot chill’s. Top of the pile is of course the legendary hot pot, an outstanding act of masochism that will leave you wincing but going back for more.

Xian Part 2

Check this out: Quails eggs cooked on skewers in a takoyaki style grill rolled in chilli sauce then dusted with chilli powder and cumin.

Spicy, luxurious, and completely unlike anything I've ever eaten before.

Or how about this? Tender, cured beef and steamed bulgur. The result is one big-ass mound of meaty, savoury, fluffy stuff.

Xian is my kind of town.

Xian Part 1

We've just spent a few days in Xian, a historic city that most tourists use as a launching pad to see the terracotta warriors. As one of the only cities in China to retain its city walls, Xian maintains an ancient feel to it, and I got the distinct impression I was entering the heart of China.
It was in the city's Muslim quarter however that my senses really got to work. These busy, tightly packed streets sizzled and steamed with street food energy, making a meandering graze the only option really available.
My first stop was a dish whose provenance initially eluded me. Despite having the appearance of a large potato curry, closer inspection revealed the "potato" to be opaque and of a wobbly, jelly like consistency. It wasn't until I got up close and personal that I realised these chunks seemed to be closely related to glass noodles. Being slightly less dense than the noodles, the sweet potato starch (anyone?) pretty much disintegrated as soon as I put it in my mouth, having an odd cooling effect on the chilli, cumin and bean sprouts it had been cooked in.


Next was a stall specialising in meat-filled pancakes. The three fifteen year olds who ran it had an incredible efficient production line on the go (see picture.) The result was a neat, tasty, quesadilla sort of affair, the enjoyment of which was slightly hampered by its retention of a good deal of the oil it had been fried in.
My graze also took me by way of a dense, sweet, peanut cake, and a spicy, salty chicken kebab, and more street food than I could contemplate.
To be continued...

Shanghai None?

It's hard to spend time in Shanghai without getting the feeling of motion. Everything about the city seems to be in a constant state of change and evolution. Just walking down the street you get a sense of the people and money that have swept through the place. This is apparent in the neo-classical and art deco edifices that pepper the city, and the plethora of supertalls that are moulding the city's skyline in the Pudong area. It is also the driving force behind the frenzied construction ahead of the 2010 World Expo, which for all intents and purposes, looks set to be Shanghai's Olympic Games.
Yet for all the shape shifting and tourist baiting one key aspect of the city appears to be lacking. The street food. Bizarrely, for a city founded on foreign trade, Shanghai doesn't seem to have any central markets (with the exception of the Friday Muslim Market - which we missed) Neither did any local street specialities readily present themselves. Instead, the street food I witnessed in Shanghai tended to lean towards the lower end of the scale - temporary set-ups outside construction sites, or grubby grills set amongst piles of rubbish at the side of the road. As such most of what I came across didn't really appeal.


That's not to say there weren't notable exceptions however. I found these hard-boiled eggs close to our hostel. The eggs had been lightly cracked and simmered in what looked (and tasted) like soy sauce and water. The result was that they were tangy and marbled on the outside, soft and crumbly in the centre.
I also happened across some truly excellent lamb skewers. These things seem to be getting better and cheaper the more I travel through China. The ones I had in Shanghai boasted substantial chunks of meat cooked to order then coated with generous amounts of cumin and chilli powder. What I love most about these skewers is how hot, dry and immediate the spices are in your mouth, closely followed by the fatty goodness of the lamb.
Whether Shanghai's great leap forward will help or hinder its street food culture remains to be seen. Street food or no, however, it's an infinitely interesting city and one to which I've vowed to return.

Going yeast

The summer after I finished school I worked for a time at Belfast's Asian Supermarket. Whilst there I stacked freezers, lugged sacks of rice and put together orders for the city’s numerous Chinese restaurant owners. During this time I also became acquainted with Tsingtao, the German founded beer hailing from a city of (almost) the same name in Eastern China.
My acquaintance with this particular brew developed over the years and when I started researching our China trip I found that a visit to Qingdao would not only yield a trip to the brewery itself, but would also give us the opportunity to view some fine German colonial architecture to boot.
When I got there however, I soon found out the yeast had been busy in other ways too. Apart from the buildings and the beer, Qingdao is also possessed of some of the finest bread and pastry I’ve tasted during my time in Asia, much of it sold from open-air street bakeries and food stalls.
My first encounter with what is perhaps Qingdao's second most valuable asset, was at a hole in the wall pie shop. This unassuming set-up located some way away from the city centre sold pork and beef pies, charged with spices and encased in a flaky buttery pastry, the like of which would give any sausage roll or Steak and Guinness pie a run for its money.
Later, when perusing the market close to our youth hostel I discovered some other fine specimens. Ever had a pie lid that tasted so good it outshone the filling and left you lusting after more of the same? These long rectangular pastry fingers would probably have done the trick. Constructed from layer after layer of thin filo-style pastry and served warm and bready, these ubiquitous beauties were a staple of our time in Qingdao.
Also prevalent were a variety of flat breads. These ranged from thick doughy foccacia style offerings seasoned with salt and pepper and brushed with oil, to thinner more pliable versions similar in texture and appearance to potato bread and strongly flavoured with garlic and green onions.
Everywhere I looked there were people selling small cakes, biscuits, or buns so freshly cooked to eat them straight away would be to risk severe burning. The buns, paired with some sliced German sausage from a street side salad stall made the perfect sandwich, one that was repeated several times on the nightmare 20 hour hard seat overnight to Shanghai!
With all that bread going around, I didn't even have time to think about beer.

Donghuamen Night Market

Donghuamen Night Market

Throughout our time in Beijing, Sarah and I have been unwittingly drawing comparisons to Tokyo. Where Tokyo was expensive (a ride on the subway usually cost a couple of pounds) Beijing is cheap (20p gets you anywhere.) While free and affordable things to do in Tokyo seem relatively thin on the ground, Beijing heaves to the extent that we decided to extend our visit by two days. And whereas Tokyo is a a street food desert, Beijing has Donghuamen Night Market.

Donghuamen Night Market is probably best known as the place where you can get almost anything on a stick. It's a photogenic playground where one can chow down on black scorpion, nibble on snake or munch your way through a sheep's penis, and then eat testicles for dessert. It’s also home to a plethora of tourist-orientated street food, and whereas in the past I may have gone there in search of adventure, on Sunday night I was just looking for dinner.

I found it. Several times. First up I opted for a beef skewer. These long substantial kebabs cost about 50p each and came grilled and dusted with ground cumin and chilli powder. Having tried the lamb and chicken versions on the nearby Wangfujiing Snack Street, I knew what to expect. The meat was tender and well cooked, while the seasoning not only added flavour but also gave the skewer a wonderfully dry, powdery texture.

A couple of paces later I hit upon some Liangpi, spicy fried noodles. These thick, round noodles had been wok fried with bok choi and soy sauce, then topped with a liberal helping of lajiaojiang (chilli paste.) The noodles were good, red hot and possessed of that curious dry stickiness that seems to be the hallmark of Chinese fried noodles.

Next I found myself transfixed by a massive grill of oysters, The oysters had been halved and topped with diced green chilli, garlic, and what looked liked breadcrumbs. I ordered one, and it made a brief but memorable encounter, with the oyster sea-taste shining through above everything else.

Finally, I settled upon a variation on what the locals call a Beijing Sandwich. These thick pita rolls filled with chopped lamb, garlic and coriander were the subject of many fantasies for Sarah and I prior to coming to Beijing, and we'd almost given up on finding them! I'm glad we did. I'm not the biggest fan of coriander, but in this instance the herb breathed life into what could have been a heavy stodge-wich, while the chilli gave it a little fire to boot.
That was me for the time being. I didn't get to try lobster dumplings, steamed crab, barbecued squid, stir-fried beef wraps etc. I could have eaten a beetle on a stick, but with so much else on offer, why the hell would I want to do that?

Touchdown

Touchdown in Beijing: Pork Spine
Driving into Beijing I was a little apprehensive. Vast, drab buildings gave me the impression I was entering some sort of post-communist desert, while the thick, impenetrable smog that blocked out the sun put me in mind of the industrialised Victorian London so savagely described in my current doorstop of choice, Charles Dickens' Bleak House.
Yet beyond the motorway off-ramps and tower blocks, an entirely different world awaited. The ancient alleways and thoroughfares that characterise Beijing's hutong districts (in one of which our hostel is located,) abound with activity and so far have proved a fantastic introduction to Chinese life.
In Nan Luo Gu Xiang Hutong, the sights and sounds are many and varied. Shirtless and potbellied old men stand around smoking or playing games. Bikes and motorized rickshaws careen through haphazardly. All around, people seem to be engaged in either tearing things down or building them up.
Somewhat surprisingly, a modern vibrant edge to the city is also present here in the small independent boutiques and trendy speciality shops that sit easily among the traditonal craft shops and tea houses.
Included in the chaos (happily) is street food. I found these guys (what I assume to be pork spine) curled up and smoking on a one man grill, when we ducked into the side of the road to avoid a monsoon downpour.
The pork spine had been coated in a spicy and sweet spare-rib style sauce that was charred in some places and sticky elsewhere. The meat came off easily and in substantial chunks, but nevertheless encouraged the kind of cheek-smearing bone-gnawing that makes one's girlfriend stand a few paces away.
This was one grill, in one street, in one block of a thouroughly massive city. Tonight we're off to Wangfujing snack street in search of lamb kebabs and flat bread.
I honestly feel like I'm in heaven.