Taiwan: Night Markets Bring Bliss

At MyLu, one of our first company "policies" was officially declaring August a month of stepping back and reflecting, using space and time to reflect on lessons learned and their implications for future decisions. As such, I decided there could be no better place to reflect than in Taiwan and China -- my food mecca.

First stop: the tiny but oh so delicious island of Taiwan. I have blogged about it before, but once could never be enough for what I consider a major contender for Culinary Capital of Asia.

Last year I visited with my dad and his side of the family, and this year with my mom. For both sides, food is an unending source of delight, entertainment and obsession. It is unclear where my fatkid genes come from exactly, but likely it is due to the unique combining of both gene pools. Case in point: below is a photo of my mother as a child. She is the one in the front. Notice what she is doing that others are not.



The first thing we did when we landed was go to one of Taipei's many night markets. My wonderful Aunt Xiao Ling brought us to the best dumplings my mother and I have ever tasted. Wrapped ever so lightly in paper thin dough, these little bundles of joy exploded with delicate flavors without over-whelming the taste buds.



They had meat with either chives or cabbage. That's really all you need in a good dumpling.


Next up, stinky tofu! This house didn't deep fry their stinky tofu, and made it in more of a Shanghainese style with Thai basil and shitake mushrooms in a hot and spicy broth.


After that we had to have some dericious oh-ah-jien (egg omelets with oyster and tapioca flour) and took home some shaved ice dessert home for later.

These are different kinds of jelly. On the bottom right is grass jelly, my favorite dessert for the summer because of it's cooling properties, wonderfully herbal, bitter taste and jello-like consistency. It's actually made of real grass!

Eating all this helped us overcome our first night of jet lag by inducing severe food coma and restful sleep and dreams of doing it all over again the next day...

There's No Food Like Home

Once upon a time (last month), my mother and Aunt #5 ventured to Gaoshong, the town in Taiwan where they grew up. There was some kind of seafood that was in season there, and they wanted to eat it. But more importantly they both had this decades-old craving for a special noodle - sa ca (a Taiwanese special sauce) rice noodles, to be precise - that their whole family had loved dearly when they were growing up there. They took a train from Taipei to the town, only to find their beloved childhood restaurant still in tact, but under construction. Seeing the despair on their fallen faces, a nearby witness of this tragedy informed them that the restaurant had another branch, but on the other side of town. The two of them immediately hopped in a taxi and scurried on over to said other branch, only to discover that they had just stopped serving for lunch. Desperate, they explained how they had come by train from Taipei, and before that they had flown all the way from New York -- ALL FOR THESE NOODLES, GODAMNIT! They begged and begged, and promised to eat the sa ca rice noodles only and nothing else. Pitying these poor fools, the restaurant indulged their request, and bestowed upon them two heaping bowls of noodles, making them the two happiest (grown-up) fat kids in all of Taiwan. And then they lived happily ever after.

The moral of this story is nothing will ever quite compare with the food you grew up eating. It will always have a special place in your heart, and it will always be the most delicious food you can imagine, especially when you move one gazillion miles away.

Last week I made a short trip to Taiwan and was able to confirm this phenomenon by the pure volume of food I consumed in the just 3.5 days I was there. Though I wasn't technically born there, I spent a significant part of my childhood in Taiwan and consider it home. Whenever I go back, my relatives always say I have "returned."

Of course, then, being from Taiwan makes it easy to crave desirously your childhood gastronomy -- the country is a food lover's promised land. If you visit, you will leave with the conclusion that it is the most food-obsessed place on earth. You would be correct.

Allow me now to share with you a little piece of my childhood:

First of all let me just explain my causal theory. There are no farmers' markets in Taiwan as far as I can tell. More accurately, all markets are essentially farmers' markets. All the food is fresh and largely unprocessed/preserved.






favorite breakfast food

Like a thin version of scallion pancake wrapped around an omelet. I actually got a modern version with bacon wrapped inside. Best. breakfast. ever.

beef noodle soup

Oh heavenly delight -- ordered "half beef, half tendon." Beef so tender it simply melts in your mouth, but the tendon is the real treat. Kind of like bone marrow, but more gelatinous and chewy.

loves of my life

Everyone already knows how much I love soup dumplings, but this takes love to a whole new level. Do you see the orange hue? That's crab roe (or, literally, crab yellow. a delicacy for us Chinese), so much of it you can see it through the skin. You will be a lucky son of a gun if you ever find that stateside (or anywhere else for that matter. Taiwan has arguably the best soup dumplings in the world, despite their origination in Shanghai)...

mah jong noodles

Sweet sweet mah jong noodles. Their simplicity is what makes them glorious -- just noodles coated with a sesame paste-soy sauce mixture, but this Taiwanese staple is one of my favorites. I made some tonight and threw in tomato and basil for experiment's sake. Modern day Marco Polo I am.

endangered pork buns

I'm pretty sure my brother Hans Tang actually cried tears of joy when he saw these. He used to eat FIFTY of these little water seared buns (think soup dumplings but pan steamed like potstickers) EVERY morning as a child. They are now endangered for some reason and have all gotten much larger. But cousin Arthur loves Hans Tang very much and brought him these special from one of the night markets.


oh-ah-jien

Although no one in my family speaks Taiwanese, we all know these words very well. Also native to Taiwan's night markets, they are gooey, oyster filled omelets, unlike any omelet you've ever had. And better, much much better.

stinky tofu!!

Yet another species of street food, it looks about as appetizing as it smells, but it tastes INCREDIBLE. Words can't do this mystery justice, so I'll stop trying.

food psychic

You also won't find scallion pancakes this light, fluffy, and flaky anywhere near the U.S. A minute after I bought mine, I randomly ran into Hans Tang on the street. He freaked out because he had just been saying how much he wanted those same pancakes, but he had just eaten lunch (bad excuse). He promptly took a few big bites out of mine. See, it's really not my fault -- my love for food is genetically programmed into my DNA, down to the types of street food I crave.


crushed ice desserts

This immediately makes me salivate. Fresh mango and taro with grass jelly and little glutinous balls over crushed ice. Party in my mouth, baby.

Funky Fresh Fruits:
something in the apple family


guava


passion fruit


dragon fruit


To be continued...

TANG

As we successfully manage to just completely skip fall the way Foxy Brown manages to just completely skip court appearances, we begin to head into hibernation season, and my thoughts inevitably begin to drift to the warm, comforting, motherly aspects of Chinese cuisine. Particularly, I dream of soup, which also happens to be my last name in Mandarin (tang, but pronounced tong). Like all aspects of Chinese cuisine, tang is widely varied - from the ultimate decadence of the south, shark fin tang, to watery peasant tang; sweet dessert tang with tapioca and taro, to weirdly bitter herbal medicinal tang. Tang is so pivotal that the Cantonese serve it both at the start and end of a meal. Most Cantonese restaurants in Chinatown serve both complimentary house tang and dessert tang. If you are not getting it (probably because you are not Chinese) you are missing out, and should ask your waiter for it.

Fish Ball Tang, one of my favorites.


Chicken Curry Noodle Tang



There are also those lovely little delectable tang dumplings, which are really not considered tang at all, and actually literally translates into "little dragon buns (more or less accurate). But because i love them so much, be so kind as to entertain me and pretend that they too are tang. Since so many people seem to have difficulty mastering the art of eating these little devils, i provide here my very own Food Genius trademarked pictorial tutorial:

First, pick up your chosen darling with extra care (if you pierce the skin it's all over), preferably ones with crab meat inside:


Next, tenderly bathe chosen dumpling in the vinegar and ginger provided, and delicately place it on your spoon. Puncture the skin ever so slightly so that you can carefully slurp up the broth inside, like so:



Finally, gobble down the remainder of the dumpling, and hope that you haven't just burned off all your taste buds, because that would be a damn shame for the rest of the meal:


It's not easy to find little dragon buns here like the kind they have in Shanghai or Taiwan, but I am always relatively pleased at Joe's Shanghai on Pell Street. It's also always a fun kitschy stop in Chinatown, especially since you sit family style with random strangers. When I went last year with some friends, we were seated with some clueless tourists and some equally clueless hipster boys.


Even though these dudes (there were four of them) were hipsters and clearly from some part of Williamsburg, I was shocked at the fact that they only ordered two bins of dumplings and nothing else. I wonder what they thought of us four girls when we had our own two bins, plus:

Duck


Clams


Fried Noodles


And My favorite Chinese vegetable - kong qing cai


Plus we had way more Tsingtao then all of them.


SUCKAAAS!!

The End of Ignorance

Gandhi had the caste system, Mandela had apartheid, Che had capitalist pigs, and Fukuyama had history. I, Isadora Tang, have the eradication of ignorance as my great calling in life. Ignorance of what, you, oh naive reader, may ask. Of how to eat good Chinese food, doi! HOW-TO-EAT-GOOD-CHINESE-FOOD, and how to do it well.

Most people of a non-Chinese heritage background seem to not know that a world beyond general tso's chicken exists. And if they do know about this world, they know not how to enter - "oh yes, i was told by a wise old man about the existence of this magical fantasy land. i am still waiting for peter pan to come take me there in my sleep one day." NO!! WRONG!! There is also that strange hybrid non-Chinese person that i have seen in my eating travels. He is the one that I am shocked to see sitting beside me and my Chinese brethen in our hidden gem of a restaurant, who manages his chopsticks with such masterful elegance, who exudes in all directions supreme confidence in his food-ordering ability. Then his dishes (or, as is sadly too often the case, his sole dish) are served, and my mother and i turn to look at each other, wipe the quizzical looks off our chubby faces, and proceed to laugh heartily over this white fool's sad misadventure.

You see my friend, eating good Chinese food is an art. With my guidance, we will, together, learn how to refine this fine and ancient art in the always-smells-like-fish-or-dorian-fruit mean streets of Chinatown, New York.


Chinatown for Beginners: Shanghai cuisine
Mondays host my weekly dinner with mom. This past Monday, since I was feeling under the weather, I requested that we duck into the first Shanghainese restaurant we could find, so I could immediately soothe my sore throat with some delicious soup of dumplings. We went to Shanghai Cafe, on 100 Mott Street. We couldn't agree on whether or not we had been there before, but we decided to give it a shot regardless.

The decor of Shanghai Cafe is typical weird Chinatown - neon purple ceiling lights, industrial metal tables and chairs, big log cabin like wooden booths, all mixed into one nonsensical aesthetic. What differentiated this restaurant was the very very friendly waitresses, who answered our probing questions politely and helpfully, and who oooh and aahhed over my mom's watch. This is indeed a rarity in Chinatown, and I feel obliged to pay the waitresses of Shanghai Cafe homage here. What strangely good service.

What We Ate


These soup dumplings were okay. I would say the skin was too thick, not even clost to paper thin. We also didn't order the crab-pork dumplings, which was our own fault - those were probably a lot better. But in terms of satisfying my craving and my throat, they did a pretty good job of it.


This dish is called "Shui Li Hong," or, as listed on the menu in English, "Bean Curd Skin with Preserved Vegetable and Green Bean" (trust me, the name is much more appetizing in Chinese). It's traditional Shanghainese fare, and delicious! Basically, its tofu skin lightly sauteed with edamame beans and this salted Chinese vegetable called snow vegetable that is only grown around Shanghai. This is one of my favorite Chinese dishes.


Okay, so this is not a great picture. I need a better camera, ok?
This dish is nian gao, or sticky cake. On the menu it's listed as "Shanghai Rice Cakes." Rice cakes are another Shanghainese specialty. They are little oval cakes that are made out of sticky rice, so have a very sticky texture. In the Shanghainese version, there is shrimp, chicken, bamboo, carrots, and onion. It is a hearty helping of gooey goodness


Soup is a big part of Chinese cooking, especially in Canton, where a woman's worth is measured by the quality of her homemade soup. Unfortunately, there were no Cantonese women to be found. This soup is called "Stuffed Bean Curd Skin & Puff with Minced Meat." Basically, it is like an eggroll made out of tofu skin and filled with meat, and a fluffy tofu variety also stuffed with meat. I was really disapointed with this soup - it was so salty that you couldn't even taste anything else, and the texture was just off. I would not order this here again.

Overall
Shanghai Cafe: B