Cooking The Books

The Street Food of Hoi An - Sweet Stuff

Name:  Che and other unknown ones

Time of Day:  All day

Location: Everywhere, the stalls walk around.

Cost: 5,000 dong each (c.15p)

The Rest: Small bowls of sweet dishes were everywhere in Hoi An.  Ladies started with 2 or 3 big saucepans (catering size), crockery and chairs hung over their shoulders and went home when it was gone. 
 
We tried these three times, two were glutinous rice and beans with ginger - once with brown beans, the second time (pictured) with a darker red bean.  These are called che.  Both times the rice was very broken down and some snotty white sauce was spread on top.  Both times the texture was thick porridge, bland from the beans but brought to life with a really strong ginger taste and lots of sugar.

The third time lacked the ginger and was just intensely sweet (Asian sweet teeth are pretty damn sweet) rice and some other starch.  Good but not as good as the ginger flavoured dishes.

Chao Long Beancurd Skin

After Guilin we headed to Yangshuo, home of my least favourite street in China, the horrifically tacky and touristy Xi Jie.  I'll admit it does have one thing going for it as it's where I bought my pork belly keyring.  Outside the touristy town though you're surrounded by rice paddies and the most beautiful karst limestone peaks dotting the landscape.  With this in mind we made a move a few kilometres out of town to Chao Long village.

First evening there I was walking down the road and could've sworn I saw hundreds of sticks of beancurd skin hanging from beams on a roof top.  It was dusk though and in the half light I couldn't be sure so made a note to return in the day time with my camera.  I've wrote about beancurd skin before.  I love the slightly leathery texture and like all tofu it takes on flavour well, if ever it is on the menu I'll make a beeline for it.  Returning to the hostel I noticed Chao Long beancurd skin on the menu, which confirmed my suspicions and also elicited an order.  Alas they were out of stock.

The next day, around lunchtime, I headed down with my camera and luckily caught them at work.  The wife was inside, stirring away at a big vat of simmering soy milk, fired with wood from the pile outside.  On the roof the husband hung strip after strip over wooden beams to be dried in the sun.  It was a veritable cottage industry beancurd skin factory.  Alongside the owners there was also one of the staff from my hostel present who'd popped down to grab some of the raw ingredients for the restaurant.  Luckily she spoke English so I found out the buckets of the waste product, a white soy bean pulp, that lay around there were waiting to be used as feed for the pigs.  As well as using her translation services I got in my order for lunch and headed back to the hostel with her.  Ten minutes from factory to plate has to be a record.

The Chao Long Beancurd Skin turned out to be the skin along with red and green peppers (the green had chili heat in a bell pepper sized package) and tomatoes in a light sauce, finished with the spring onions that make a closing appearance in so many Chinese dishes.  The beancurd was certainly better than the prepackaged stuff I've had.  I've procured the recipe from the chef, albeit minus any weights or measures, so hopefully after a bit of experimenting I can post it up in the future.  It's definitely worth a try.

Jian Bing

Pancakes are a widespread food.  I don't know who first came up with the idea of cooking a batter in a pan but now they're everywhere - sugar and lemon in England, crepes in France, maple syrup laden in the States and sour injera in Ethipoia to name a few.  China wasn't to be left out this list and so over here we get a few types, one of the most interesting being jian bing.  Whilst pancakes tend to be pretty simple affairs, as all the aforementioned testify, these streetfood delights are a bit more complex.

First the batter is spread like a crepe.

Once dry on top an egg is broken on and brushed to the edges.

Dali Potato Pancake

I never envisioned my Chinese blogging to be a list of similarities between Chinese food and European food but it seems to be becoming that (I'm sure the border crossing into Sichuan will stop that though - watch this space).

Whilst the potato plays nowhere near as big a part in Chinese cuisine you do see it on most menus.   Here, for the most part, it's treated so differently though.  The potato (tŭ dòu in Chinese, literal translation of earth bean) is just another vegetable and as with most vegetables this means brief cooking.  Like we'd eat our carrots al dente the Chinese like a bit of bite in their spud.  None of this soft, floury middle - a nice bit of crunch.  Normally this means a shredding and a simple, short, stir frying.  The addition of some black vinegar, chili and soy is a common recipe.  The crunchy potato is weird at first (were you told you couldn't digest it?) but forget what you're eating, and eat it purely for the taste, and it's very good.

Whilst this may be very different to what we're used to but in Yunnan we came across a preparation of potato very similar to one I know well - the Dali potato pancake.  For all intents and purposes a Swiss rosti.  Shredded earth bean is washed of starch (some restaurants had bowls of shredded spud sat soaking in water) then simply seasoned and fried into a big, round, thin pancake.  Crisp on the outside and (by Chinese standards) soft in the middle.  It comes to the table already cut (somehow my short depth of field in the shot above has hid this fact very well) and everyone tucks in, grabbing a wedge with chopsticks and nibbling away.

Bai People - Baba, Market and Local Tofu

Getting slightly outside Dali one leaves behind the new "old town" and sees a far more traditional way of life.  One of the nearby Bai minority villages runs a market every five days and luckily for me it coincided with our couple of days there.  Not one to turn down a wet market we hired a guide and cracked on.

As we went down the cheap route with our guide there was no private car and we used the local bus for transport.  Half an hour outside Dali we passed through Xizhou.  I'm not sure if this place lays claim to inventing a flatbread called baba or if it's just known for having good baba but it's definitely famed for them.  Lining the main street were a number of identical baba sellers, all having nothing more than an umbrella and a big wicker basket full of the delicacies, and luckily for us our bus pulled up alongside them.  Notes were passed from hand to hand down the rather crowded bus (a few minutes later we had to get out the bus, get a taxi past a police checkpoint and then get back on the bus once we'd cleared the overloading check) and then baba made the return journey.  They came in sweet or salted and we took the salted - an oily, soft, salty, layered flatbread studded with spring onion and with the surprise of some minced pork on top.  Whether they invented it or not it was damn fine street food.

You'll have to view the market shots on Flickr until I can get pictobrowser working again - click here

I love a good wet market and this was a good one.  The food was interesting but reasonably normal - well beside the live piglets and chickens - but the people were amazing.  The bright colours, headresses and altitude weathered skin were more reminiscent of the altiplanos in Peru than what I thought of as China.  I'll stop here as with any market I think it's better shown off with pictures than words.

There were a few street food stalls at the market and one I had to sample was the local tofu.  Sat beneath a muslin cover was a big slab of freshly made tofu, not the usual white but a yellow, a colour that, I was told, comes from the yellow beans it was made from.  The texture of the tofu was reasonably fim with some pieces having the added support of a darker skin.  To stimulate the tastebuds a bit it was topped with pickled veg, chickpeas and rather a lot of chili.  As with most things so far in China it was pretty damn warm.