biangbiang面 is the noodle dish with the name nobody can write. Each noodle is a single belt of dough — as wide as three fingers, as long as your arm — slapped against the counter until it stretches, then dropped into boiling water and dressed with chili, garlic and aContinue Reading
开水白菜 translates as “boiled cabbage”, which is either the most modest name in Chinese cooking or the most arrogant. A single heart of napa cabbage, sitting in what looks like plain water, served as the centrepiece of a banquet. The cabbage is ordinary. The “water” is not. It is 川菜Continue Reading
胡辣汤 (hú là tāng) is how Henan starts the day. A thick, dark, peppery soup — closer to a gravy than a broth — ladled out of a huge pot before seven in the morning, eaten with a stick of fried dough and finished with a slug of vinegar. ItContinue Reading
杨枝甘露 (mango pomelo sago) is Hong Kong’s most imitated dessert. A thick, chilled bowl of mango and coconut, studded with translucent sago pearls, mango cubes and the tart little sacs of pomelo that stop the whole thing from turning into a smoothie. It is sweet without being heavy, and itContinue Reading
冰粉 (bīng fěn, “ice jelly”) is the dessert that gets Chengdu through summer. A bowl of barely-set, translucent jelly drowning in dark brown sugar syrup and buried under crushed peanuts, fermented rice, chewy rice cakes and dried hawthorn. It is cold, faintly sweet, and the only thing anyone wants whenContinue Reading
麻辣臭豆腐 is stinky tofu’s gentler, soupier cousin. Instead of being fried until crisp and dunked in sauce, the tofu is simmered in a numbing mala broth until it swells and drinks the liquid in. Twenty minutes in the pot and the notorious smell softens into something deep, savoury and faintlyContinue Reading
Stinky tofu (臭豆腐, chòu dòufu) is the most misunderstood food in China. It is fermented tofu with a smell that arrives before the plate does — and a taste that converts sceptics faster than almost anything else in Chinese cooking. Walk through any night market from Changsha to Taipei andContinue Reading
Xinhua Sanhetang (新化三合汤) is the soup people from Xinhua county in central Hunan will argue about the longest. The name means “three-in-one soup”, and the three are beef, ox tripe and ox blood — simmered in a sour, fiery broth perfumed with 山胡椒油, the oil pressed from the fruit ofContinue Reading
Youtiao (油条) is the smell of a Chinese morning. Walk past any breakfast stall before eight and you will find a cauldron of oil, a basket of pale dough ribbons, and a cook who never stops moving: stretch, drop, roll, lift. Ninety seconds later the ribbon is a long, golden,Continue Reading
Zhajiangmian (炸酱面) is Beijing’s noodle — thick wheat noodles topped with a dark, glossy sauce of pork and fermented soybean paste, then buried under a heap of cool, crunchy vegetables. It is not a banquet dish and never has been. It is what a Beijing family eats on a hotContinue Reading