Rise & Dine is a SAVEUR column by Senior Editor Megan Zhang, an aspiring early riser who seeks to explore the culture of mornings and rituals of breakfast around the world.

While visiting my grandmother in Jiaxing, the city in Eastern China’s Zhejiang Province where my mom grew up, I walked into the kitchen to find my uncle scraping the fat from the red-braised pork belly left over from the previous evening. The collagen-rich sauce was now solidified and jelly-like after its overnight stay in the fridge, a milky-white layer of fat covering the surface like ice atop a frozen lake.

I was still in college at the time and had just begun to take a greater interest in cooking, so I watched curiously as he coaxed the spoon around chunks of meat suspended in the gelatinous mixture, then deposited the fat into four soup bowls.

That wasn’t where I’d expected the fat to go. Growing up in the U.S., I’d witnessed on many occasions my aunties and uncles skimming the lard from pork braises and discarding it—to minimize caloric density, I guessed, or stave off blood clots. (Fat was America’s most vilified macronutrient in the 2000s, after all.) I asked my uncle if he didn’t plan to do the same. He gaped at me with an expression between bewilderment and horror. The thought of tossing out all that concentrated flavor was, as he put it, “fù zhū dōng liú,” a turn of phrase describing hard-earned achievements washing away and going to waste. (He loves using Chinese idioms dramatically.)

I followed my uncle around the kitchen as he heated up homemade broth on the stove, then boiled water in another pot to make noodles. As the two vessels bubbled away, he swiftly chopped scallions and deposited seasonings like soy sauce and MSG into each serving bowl. Minutes later, he handed me a portion of steaming yang chun mian (mian means noodles).

I spooned some broth into my mouth, expecting it to be unctuous from the fat. On the contrary, the taste was light and delicate, yet full-bodied and savory. The scallions chimed in with bursts of pepperiness, and the springy noodles (long xu mian, or “dragon whiskers” noodles, so named for their thinness) had a satisfying chew. I couldn’t believe how seemingly quick and simple the process had been, or how a mere handful of ingredients could conspire to create such balanced, complex flavor.

Chinese people have long esteemed the coastal Jiangnan region—whose name translates as “south of the Yangtze River”—as yú mǐ zhī xiāng, or land of fish and rice. The area includes the buzzy metropolis of Shanghai and nearby cities like Jiaxing, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Shaoxing, and Zhenjiang, where abundant waterways supply the local communities with bountiful aquatic fare, as well as fertile terrain for produce. The region’s delicate, understated dishes allow the flavors of its mainstay ingredients—from seasonal greens and freshwater crabs, to preserved foods like Shaoxing wine and Jinhua ham—to shine, explains Fuchsia Dunlop, author of the cookbook Land of Fish and Rice. “It’s about using seasoning lightly,” adds Lillian Luk, who was born and raised in Shanghai and now runs the pop-up Shanghai Supper Club in London. “You’re [only] trying to coax out whatever the ingredient’s unique taste is.” 

Jiangnan cooks have applied that philosophy broadly, even to initially foreign ingredients. According to Miranda Brown, professor of Chinese studies at the University of Michigan, when the capital moved south to Hangzhou during the Southern Song Dynasty (1127 – 1279), it prompted an influx of northern wheat-based delicacies like dumplings, spring rolls, and noodles. Over time, dishes that fused those concepts with the subtle seasoning styles of the south proliferated in the region. With its frugal, humble ingredients, yang chun noodles evolved into a popular breakfast item—as easy to make as it is quick and comforting to slurp down.

After that breakfast my uncle whipped up, I began seeing yang chun noodles everywhere I went in Jiangnan. Noodle vendors hawked it from street-side stalls, behind scribbled signage advertising a bowl for just 10 yuan (less than two U.S. dollars). Teenagers slurped it from plastic to-go containers while perched on the steps of their school. And there it was on the menu at Nanjing Impressions, an iconic national restaurant chain serving Nanjing specialties. It must have been the frequency illusion at work, waking me up to the ubiquity of this regional mainstay.

“If you ask Shanghainese people what they grew up eating [for breakfast], most people would think of yang chun noodles,” Luk surmises. My cousin Alex, who grew up near Nanjing and now studies in London, seconds this; whenever he misses home, the dish is “one of my go-to choices,” he tells me. Though yang chun noodles can cure homesickness any time of year, there may be no better time to enjoy the meal than spring. My uncle explains that the dish’s name likely derives from the term xiǎo yáng chūn (roughly, “little spring”): it’s a moniker for the tenth lunar month, when the weather tends to be balmy and spring-like despite it being autumn. Springtime also happens to be when green onions, which Luk considers an indispensable “magic ingredient in Chinese cooking,” are at their peak flavor. After the heaviness of winter’s rich meats and stews, a refreshing soup is the perfect palate cleanser to welcome a new season.

It’s been several years since my uncle made me wise to the gifts of lard. Since then, I’ve made this breakfast repeatedly, usually the morning after cooking some porky braise. The smell of the savory lard, salty soy sauce, and garlicky onions swirling together always transports me back to my ancestral homeland. I’ve also experimented with incorporating different textures into the dish over the years, adding toppings like blanched bok choy, rehydrated dried shiitake mushrooms, or soy sauce eggs. However, the beauty of this dish—what makes it emblematic of Jiangnan’s delicate, subtle style—is its pure simplicity. As my idiom-loving uncle might say, it’s best not to “huà shé tiān zú,” or draw feet onto a painting of a snake. The dish, like the reptile, is already complete.

RECIPE

Yang Chun Mian (Chinese Soy Sauce Noodles)

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The post I Make These Breakfast Noodles When I Want to Transport to My Ancestral Homeland appeared first on Saveur.

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“Ai-ya, I didn’t think my daughter would become one of those hippie types,” I overheard my mother say to a friend over the phone. I had decided to go vegan my junior year of college, and determined to learn to cook for myself, I looked up meal plans and recipes on Pinterest, followed popular bloggers, bought cookbooks, and stocked my pantry with lentils and chickpea pasta. I packed overnight oats to school and invited friends over to my tiny Houston apartment to make vegan pizza and grain bowls on weekends. I even started a recipe blog, posting photos on Instagram of the meals I made.

But it was different back at home, sitting at our scratched walnut table as my mom busied about the kitchen, preparing food for the holidays. My parents cooked mostly Chinese meals—a spread of shared dishes to go with rice—and they couldn’t understand why I would forgo a special dish of expensive seafood, or a stir-fry that had ground meat or a few pork slivers. “Just pick around and eat the vegetables, at least you still get the flavor from the meat,” my mom offered.

Over the winter break, I was determined to convert my family to a plant-based diet. I talked about the horrors of factory farming and the environmental footprint of meat and dairy. I pulled out my arsenal of recipes: Thai curries, walnut-meat tacos, creamy cashew pastas, and quinoa burgers. My siblings liked them well enough, but my dad gingerly bit into one patty and refused to eat the rest. “I’m cooking duck for dinner,” he announced. For Lunar New Year, our family gathered to make pork dumplings, as we did every holiday. It was my favorite tradition, and I usually helped make the filling, but this time, my dad looked up as he kneaded dough and saw me watching from the side.

“Rongrong, you aren’t participating?” he asked. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that my decision to go vegan wasn’t just about food or even a personal choice. My parents were immigrants; food was the way they taught us about our roots; certain dishes were central not just to my family’s memories, but also connected us to a lifetime of people and occasions and places and times that went before and beyond me. I wondered if my commitment to eat more sustainably meant I was turning away from my culture. Talking to my peers, I realized I wasn’t alone in these fears. It’s impossible to separate who we are from what we eat, and animal products are deeply ingrained in the food traditions of most cultures. How do you remove yourself from these traditions without a fundamental sense of loss?

But as I tried re-creating my favorite childhood dishes, I began to realize how much of Chinese food was inherently plant-based. And I learned that vegetarian and vegan cooking is its own cuisine in China, a rich tradition that had existed for more than 2,000 years, motivated by the Buddhist tenets of compassionate eating. On my trip to visit relatives in China one summer, I ate at temple restaurants, plant-based lunch canteens, and buffets, astonished by the flavor and ingenuity of dishes like clay pot tofu skin and delicate layered soups made with mung beans and shiitake mushrooms. This cuisine was beautiful, alluringly delicious, and rich in history—I wanted to learn more.

So, just a few months after I finished graduate school, I packed my bags and moved to China to go to culinary school. For the past few years, my journey to learn Chinese vegetarian cooking has taken me back to my parents’ hometown in Harbin, to Shanghai, to Chengdu, to Suzhou, and to Guangzhou,  where I trained as a chef at the only professional vegetarian cooking program in the country. It’s taken me to Taiwan, where I lived for a year, cooking and eating and learning from the vibrant Buddhist community who have preserved a microcosm of regional Chinese vegetarian traditions and developed new ones of their own. I’ve talked to old artisans who have been making tofu and soy milk skin for their entire lives, and have called up my parents to ask about our own family’s history, learning stories I was never interested in hearing before. Over the years, my dad has decided to cut most of the meat out of his diet for health reasons, and he’s always asking when I’m coming home so he can eat the food I cook. And unsurprisingly, my knowledge of Chinese culture has deepened. Becoming vegan didn’t alienate me from my heritage, as I’d feared, but actually motivated me to understand it even more.

In Chinese, 素 su translates literally to “vegan” or “vegetarian,” and you’ll see it on menus indicating dishes free of meat. But su also means simple, quiet and plainly unadorned, the elemental nature or essence of something larger. I began this book thinking I’d write about vegan recipes, but along the way I realized that this kind of cooking was actually at the heart of Chinese cuisine: the inventive transformation of frugal ingredients like vegetables, tofu, and grains into a breathtaking variety of simple and delicious dishes. China has eight major regional cuisines, each influenced by wildly different climates, agriculture, geography, and history, and each of the country’s twenty-three provinces has its own local vegetarian traditions and dishes. It’s impossible to cover them all, so instead I’ve drawn from my own experiences—this is a subjective compilation of my favorites.

Reprinted with permission from The Vegan Chinese Kitchen by Hannah Che © 2022. Photographs by Hannah Che. Published by Clarkson Potter, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

The post Chinese Vegan Cooking Has Been Perfected Over Millenia (And You Can Taste It) appeared first on Saveur.

Rise & Dine is a SAVEUR column by Senior Editor Megan Zhang, an aspiring early riser who seeks to explore the culture of mornings and rituals of breakfast around the world.

Laurence Louie’s phone rang. It was his mother calling from Boston, and she wanted to give her son one last chance to take over her Chinese bakery before she retired.

Louie, who was working as a chef in London at the time, had rejected his mother’s offer the previous times she’d asked. Having cooked in the kitchens of Oleana in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as the Turkish restaurants Oklava and now-closed Kyseri in London, he thought of himself as a fine-dining chef; now that he’d been furloughed during the pandemic, he had plans to open an eatery of his own in England. But Louie’s time away from professional kitchens had given him space to think about what kind of cuisine he truly wanted to cook. Increasingly, the food of his heritage had been tugging at him—specifically, the buzzing and homey Cantonese cafés his family would frequent when he was growing up in Boston. 

“Sunday brunch was always in Chinatown,” he recalls. For Louie’s mother, who immigrated from Hong Kong to the U.S. in 1973 and has only returned a handful of times since, those weekly visits to Boston’s cha chaan teng-inspired diners helped transport her back to her hometown. 

Cha chaan teng, often referred to as Hong Kong-style diners, are humble cafés that emerged in the former British colony around the 1950s and became a bastion of the cultural confluence that has come to define the international economic hub. Serving affordable versions of British-influenced food to the working class, cha chaan teng offered eclectic menus of hybridized Canto-European dishes like macaroni-and-ham soup and baked pork chop rice smothered in tomato sauce and cheese. “It was a lot of Hong Kongers’ first step toward eating Western-style food,” says Lucas Sin, the Hong Kong-born chef behind the fast-casual American Chinese chain Junzi Kitchen.

With their accessible prices, efficient service, lively atmosphere, and old-school charm, the egalitarian establishments are still popular spots today for people from all walks of life to grab a bite or beverage. “Everyone can just be themselves,” says Samuel Lai, a University of London PhD candidate currently researching the culture of cha chaan teng. Amidst ever-urbanizing surroundings, many of these old neighborhood joints have managed to remain microcosms of the 1950s and ‘60s. “When you enter those cha chaan teng, you feel like you enter that era of Hong Kong,” says Alison Hui, a Hong Kong-based illustrator who developed an art exhibition celebrating the iconic diners.

Louie and his wife decided to take his mother up on her offer. When he thought more deeply about “what kind of food I would want to honor the space and her legacy,” he says, it became clear to him that he wanted to salute cha chaan teng. “It’s close to my heart.” In September, he and his family opened Rubato in the Boston suburb of Quincy, where Louie infuses cha chaan teng classics with non-traditional flourishes—Hong Kong-style French toast topped with cookie crumb, and buttery bolo bao (pineapple buns) with a crispy fried chicken filling.

Through his homage to these diners, Louie hopes to help preserve the spirit of the establishments, many of which now face an uncertain future. “A lot of the old cha chaan teng in Hong Kong are struggling, and a lot of them have closed,” says Sin. (Mido Cafe, which opened in 1950 and was one of the oldest, shut its doors earlier this year.) As elderly owners reach retirement age, many are choosing to shutter their diners. While some want their children to pursue more lucrative career opportunities, others find the young generation uninterested in the prospect of taking over the family business, Lai explains. The role of Hong Kong-style diners in society, as community-driven establishments where regulars catch up with their neighbors and socialize with waitstaff, has also shifted alongside the advent of smartphones and social media. In today’s fast-paced, technology-driven society, “everybody looks at their phones,” adds Hui. Finally, economic strain related to rising rent and the pandemic have dealt blows from which many historic cha chaan teng couldn’t recover.

In the U.S., immigrant-run eateries reminiscent of these diners are facing similar challenges. “The places I used to go to as a kid, they’re not there anymore,” says Louie of Cantonese joints in Boston and New York City. 

Both in Hong Kong and among the diaspora, there is a growing desire to see these restaurants continue to thrive. “Nostalgic feelings are so heavy in Hong Kong,” says Hui. In the wake of Beijing forcefully imposing its governance in Hong Kong, many locals feel an urgency to hold onto traditional elements that epitomize the place’s distinct culture and diversity. Cha chaan teng are “something that is very Hong Kong,” says Lai. 

Many famed and cherished Hong Kong-style diners are still alive and well, supported by legions of regulars who continue to rely on the eateries’ brusque but efficient service and dependable, unchanging food. At Australia Dairy Company, Sin’s favorite cha chaan teng, he knows exactly what to expect every time he stops in for breakfast: “You sit down, they ask you two questions. The first question is ‘How do you like your eggs?’ and the second is, ‘What do you want to drink?’” he says. Minutes later, the meal arrives, prepared just as he requested.

In recent years, some newer restaurants have tried to tap into people’s nostalgia for cha chaan teng by replicating the menus of these long-standing mainstays while modernizing the business model. Many of these enterprises, Lai points out, fall short: “Nostalgia is hard to recreate,” he says, “and it entails much more than just the food.” When these new spots introduce elements like electronic ordering systems that minimize human interaction, “it changes the whole atmosphere,” he observes.

Overseas, some young chefs are eschewing imitation or modernization in favor of celebrating cha chaan teng’s unique magic, and folding it into dining experiences that also acknowledge their immigrant upbringing. Louie recalls that when he was developing the concept for Rubato, he asked himself, “How do I reconnect with something that’s my own?” For him, the answer lay in the very spirit of cultural synthesis that gave birth to cha chaan teng in the first place. He drew influence from both his American upbringing and his experience cooking other cuisines professionally to infuse Rubato’s menu with his own singular flair. “We’re not a traditional cha chaan teng, and we’re not trying to be,” he says. “Food is ever-evolving.”

Elsewhere in America’s Northeast, the Cantonese American restaurant Bonnie’s in Brooklyn also pays homage to Hong Kong-style diners. The tiles that deck the floor “are exact replicas of the classic cha chaan teng mosaic floor tiles you would still see today in Hong Kong,” says chef and owner Calvin Eng. “We also incorporated a lot of stainless steel touches throughout the space, which you see quite often in Chinese establishments because of its practicality.” The dishes being served on those steel countertops, though, aren’t typical Hong Kong diner fare. Eng serves up one-of-a-kind creations that meld different food cultures together: cacio e pepe with fermented beancurd, McRib-inspired cha siu sandwiches, and yuenyeung-style espresso martinis.

Cha chaan teng, which usually focus on breakfast and lunch foods, also sling all sorts of coffee and tea drinks, including one that marries the two caffeinated beverages: yuenyeung. “You have sweetness from the tea and bitterness from the coffee, tied together with this velvety evaporated milk,” Sin describes. The drink’s namesake refers to mandarin ducks, which are usually found in pairs in the wild; in Chinese culture, the birds symbolize marital union. The moniker, Lai explains, speaks to how the two beverages “mesh together and become a very perfect combination of the two.”

Those unfamiliar with yuenyeung might find the cultural mash-up surprising, Lai adds. “But here in Hong Kong, we embrace that.”

Recipe

Yuenyeung (Hong Kong-Style Coffee Milk Tea)

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The post These Humble Diners Embody the Unique Hybridized Culture of Hong Kong appeared first on Saveur.

In the summertime, my family likes to toss cold noodles with a dressing made from toasted sesame paste for an easy, refreshing meal. One of the first kitchen tasks my parents ever delegated to me when I was a kid was making that dressing. I shouldered the responsibility with relish—not only because sesame noodles are downright slurpable, but also because it meant digging into a jar of sesame paste and being able to lick the spoon afterward.

My childhood fridge could do without milk or eggs, but running out of sesame paste could prompt a late-night trip to the grocery store. Called zhima jiang in Chinese, the condiment is made from unhulled white sesame seeds that are toasted until brown, then ground into a thick and creamy paste. The versatile ingredient lends its rich nuttiness and earthy aroma to both sweet and savory dishes. My parents showed me how to layer it into shaobing (a Northern Chinese flatbread) dough, mix it into dipping sauces for dumplings and hot pot, and thin it out to drizzle over steamed vegetables. Whenever they cook with it, the sesame fragrance lingers in the house all day.

Tahini is sometimes listed as a substitute for sesame paste, but to me, the two aren’t interchangeable. Though tahini is also made from white sesame seeds, those seeds are usually untoasted or lightly toasted. By comparison, toasted sesame paste is more assertive and aromatic and also thicker in texture. 

Following my parents’ wisdom, I always have a jar of sesame paste in the fridge—and use it to jazz up noodles, pastries, and grilled meats. If I’m feeling ambitious, I’ll make it myself by toasting sesame seeds until golden, cooling them, then grinding them in a food processor with just enough sesame oil (drizzled in gradually) to make a paste. Here are a few of my favorite ways to use the condiment, whether homemade or store-bought.

Add Nutty Flavor to Noodles and Salads

The next time you’re churning up a dressing for noodles or a salad, start with a dollop of toasted sesame paste in a bowl. Thin it out with sesame oil and water, then add vinegar or citrus juice (for a hint of acid), a spoonful of chile sauce or flakes, and a splash of soy sauce. You’ll wind up with a sauce that coats everything it touches with fragrant creaminess. Try my quick sesame noodles cold or at room temperature—they’re my warm-weather go-to. 

Mix It Into Dipping Sauces for Meats and Vegetables

To make an easy dip for grilled proteins and vegetables, thin out the toasted sesame paste with something creamy and tangy such as full-fat Greek yogurt. My 30-second savory rendition would pair nicely with meat skewers or celery sticks, while a sweetened version can accompany apple slices or toast. (When I was a kid, it was always a good day whenever my parents packed me sesame-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch.)

Swap Out a Portion of Fat in Pastries

A recent revelation about toasted sesame paste’s limitless potential came to me in the form of baked goods. I realized that, because of its high fat content, toasted sesame paste can be swapped in for a portion of butter or oil in many desserts, to infuse the treats with extra nuttiness. I think sesame pairs especially beautifully with fruit in crumbles, pies, and tarts—I can’t get enough of these sesame blondies studded with dried red jujubes.

Recipes

Sesame Blondies with Jujubes

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30-Second Sesame Sauce

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Chinese Sesame Noodles

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The post Sesame Paste Isn’t Tahini—And It Might Be Your New Favorite Condiment appeared first on Saveur.

In her book, Essentials of Asian Cuisine: Fundamentals and Favorite Recipes, cookbook author Corinne Trang describes congee as a “way to stretch a meal in times of need.” Typically eaten for breakfast in China and other parts of Asia, this comforting recipe, which first appeared alongside Sushma Subramanian’s 2012 story “Feed a Fever,” is often mixed with meat, poultry, or seafood and gets a jolt of flavor from its garnish of scallions, chiles, and shallots.

The ease and affordability of this dish makes it a comforting sick-day staple.

The Best Rice Cookers Are Worth the Counter Space

We tried them all, from simple, one-button rice cookers to the fancy models with all the bells and whistles.

The post Congee appeared first on Saveur.

It appeared at first that I had arrived in Macau by time machine. The hotel’s name, Morpheus, seemed picked to evoke either Greek mythology or The Matrix, but the exterior of the $1.1 billion building makes it clear the proprietors had chosen science fiction. Designed by the late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, it looks as though a black block of liquid metal had three holes melted through it before it was wrapped in a fishnet exoskeleton. It’s even more difficult to describe the avant-garde dream space once you’ve stepped inside the lobby. Imagine a glass church built from fractals expanding skyward in chaotic harmony. It’s a bit like the city itself: ostentatious and awe-inspiring, a place that can bankroll wild ambition.

A tiny peninsula across the Pearl River Estuary from Hong Kong, Macau was a Portuguese colony for nearly five centuries. Twenty years ago, the city reverted to Chinese rule, and construction cranes quickly crowded its skyline. Gambling—thanks in part to American corporations such as Wynn Resorts and the Las Vegas Sands Corporation—boomed so unfathomably fast, it now makes Las Vegas seem like the nickel slots. The only territory under the Chinese flag with legalized gambling, Macau now brings in seven times more gaming revenue than Vegas. And so, new casino resorts keep shoehorning in; Morpheus is barely a year old, and it’s not even Macau’s newest hotel.

With only 12 square miles of land, virtually all of it developed, there’s no room for local farms for livestock or produce. Like the trading post it was during its 442 years of Portuguese colonial rule, Macau today is a crossroads where cooking traditions from all corners of the globe converge. Like much of traditional Macanese cooking—a hybrid of Portuguese and Chinese, with sprinklings of Indian, Malay, and East African—Macau is a stew of influences, a place that looks like Europe and sounds like China. But everything here is flown in internationally or trucked from mainland China, and any dish from any cuisine could magically appear before you—provided you have the means.

These days, the greatest demand is for high-roller Chinese food. On the second floor of Morpheus, the Cantonese restaurant Jade Dragon is a kaleidoscope of gold, silver, and crystal, all undulating walls and 12-foot-wide chandeliers. Thumbing through the menu, the existence of a $1,850 fish maw made me shudder at the items marked “market price.” But in Macau, a restaurant like Jade Dragon is not an exception but increasingly the rule. The restaurant was awarded its third Michelin star in December 2018, which automatically warrants a reservation among a certain set of wealthy Chinese visitors. Macau, a city with a population equal to Louisville, Kentucky, has eight restaurants with two or more Michelin stars—more than Chicago or Los Angeles. Cooks who swing for the fences have a receptive audience here.

Kelvin Au Yeung, the 39-year-old chef at Jade Dragon, took me back to his spotless glass-wrapped kitchen. He showed off a brick oven more suited to a Naples pizzeria, where a row of glistening barbecue pork char siu hung, glowing in the flames of lychee wood. While other Cantonese siu mei chefs might use pork loin, Au Yeung uses the marbled pork collars from acorn-fed Spanish Iberico pigs. What emerged from the lychee wood embers, my very first bite after arriving in Macau, was a sweet, crusty, luscious piece of pork char siu good enough to make my eyeballs roll toward the back of my skull and ruin all other Cantonese barbecue for me forever.

Around the corner from the Cartier and Prada billboards, the water-and-light shows, and faux Venetian canals is a sweltering Macau with a soundtrack of Cantonese, honking horns, and air-conditioner hums.

At the entrance of one alley was an orange sign advertising Riquexo, a restaurant that serves homestyle Macanese cooking from the ground floor of an apartment complex. It is not Portuguese or Chinese cooking, or even a straightforward fusion, but a singular cuisine formed over five centuries that uses Portuguese ingredients (olive oil, chouriço) alongside Cantonese (soy sauce, ginger, lap cheung sausage), and marries the two with flavors that have their roots in Portugal’s historical link to the spice trade.

With the notable exception of Fat Rice, the James Beard Award–winning Chicago restaurant, Macanese cooking is rarely found in restaurants, even in Macau—it is a culinary tradition of the home cook, kept alive by the precious few ethnic Macanese living here today. One of the last places to find it is Riquexo. Inside, an elderly woman named Dona Aida de Jesus sat by the cashier, sipping the murky broth of a lotus-root soup. At 103 years old, she’s at the restaurant most days as both an ambassador and for quality control.

All around de Jesus were black-and-white photographs from the Macau of yore. She spoke in a whisper, in short declarative sentences. I told her I came halfway across the world to meet her. She flashed a wide smile and asked a server to bring me a bowl of what she was eating.

“Macanese food isn’t like French cooking, which is pleasing to the eye,” said De Jesus’ daughter Sonia Palmer, who owns Riquexo with her husband. “It’s very down-to-earth.” On the top of my food list was minchi—every family has its take, but it is universally a humble minced-meat hash with crispy potatoes, sometimes with a fried egg on top, and almost always served with rice. The bacalhau à brás was more classically Portuguese, a scramble of salt cod and eggs. And the greatest revelation at Riquexo was galinha à Africana, or African chicken, a local dish of crispy boneless chicken thighs smothered in a sophisticated sauce of coconut milk, garlic, and peanuts. It conjured up the complexity of Oaxacan mole, but made from ingredients that arrived from Mozambique, Goa, Malaysia, and Southern China.

These days, the Chinese population greatly outnumbers the ethnic Macanese and, at least culturally, tends to not veer outside what’s familiar. I grew up 40 miles to the east, in Hong Kong, and used to take the hourlong ferry to Macau with my family, yet this was the first time I was tasting most of these dishes.

When I was growing up in Hong Kong, Macau was a Cantonese Key West—a sleepy resort town that took Hong Kong’s frenetic pace and slowed it down to half-speed. There were the seaside shanties hung with ropes of fish that were salted and drying the way they had been for centuries. I remember the pastel de nata egg tarts, subtly different from the ones I was used to, with caramelized patches of burnt sugar against the smooth, sunflower-colored tops.

But my most indelible memory of Macau happened at my family dining-room table. The Hong Kong people have a beloved dish called Portuguese chicken, something you would never find in Portugal. But the reference was clear: It came from our Macanese neighbors—baked chicken and rice with a curry–coconut milk sauce. It was just exotic enough for Chinese sensibilities that labeling it “Portuguese” sounded right, and it became the Cantonese equivalent of mac-and-cheese, a comfort food for generations in Hong Kong and abroad. I requested the sweet-and-savory casserole no less than once a week from age 7 through 17.

Before I left Riquexo, I asked where in town served a Portuguese chicken like the one I grew up eating. I was led next door to a place called Associação dos Aposentados, Reformados e Pensionistas de Macau. Better known as APOMAC, it’s a senior activities center for pensioners of the Macau government. Inside, you could tell from the hailstorm-like clacking that there was a game of mahjong underway. And then it appeared way in the back: a real-deal restaurant, open to the public, inside a social club for retirees, apparently serving the finest Portuguese chicken in town. APOMAC acts as a link for Macanese in ways greater than its original intention: It helps pensioners fill out paperwork and unearth the taste memories of their childhood.

In the case of Portuguese chicken, it was my childhood too. I last had the dish in high school. Several decades later, it sat before me, in a creamy turmeric-yellow gravy studded with potatoes and bony hunks of chicken. You can tell the story of the Portuguese explorers in that clay pot: Portugal to India, then around the Malay Peninsula to arrive in China. There was a plate holding papo secos, yeasty Portuguese rolls with a crackly crust that begged to be torn apart and sloshed through the curry–coconut milk sauce. I did just that, and one bite of comforting, delicious Portuguese chicken dialed back time.

One night I met up with a former Fat Rice cook named Rich Wang. He grew up in suburban Chicago, earned a law degree, and found himself miserable at his job. He sold a plan to his parents that one day he’d open a fine-dining Taiwanese restaurant in Chicago, but first he needed to walk away from his lucrative law career and learn to cook. Macau, a rapidly growing playground of immense wealth, beckoned.

Wang works at one of the largest casino resorts, at a luxury Chinese restaurant striving for Michelin stars. He had been in Macau for three months, living like a college student in a shared dorm with Filipino, Nepalese, and Thai cooks. I tagged along with Wang to dinner on his day off. Dona Aida de Jesus’s African chicken was five minutes away, as was $285 beef chateaubriand at Joël Robuchon’s place, but our destination was his favorite hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant, Fei Chai Man.

“Macau is, oddly, very open to outsiders like myself,” Wang said. “For a Chinese city, definitely. Because they need people like us.” By “us,” Wang meant workers who’d arrived to Macau with certain skills, English speakers preferably, and could cater to big spenders.

A simple plate of noodles arrived at our table. They were topped with a layer of shrimp roe from the brackish waters of the nearby Pearl River Delta. Locals say the shrimp roe here are brinier and more intense, and indeed, these noodles bore magnificent pungency, something like blue cheese from the sea. Wang ordered another local Chinese-Macau favorite, water crab congee, a thin, light-colored rice porridge with a bright-orange crustacean shell lurking beneath the surface.

“You’ll see that in Macau, there is no limit,” Wang said. “The prices they are charging here would not work for people in New York City or Paris. There are places that use A-5 wagyu in a stir-fry. I mean, who does that?”

The next morning, a deluge of rain seemed to affect everyday life not one bit. It certainly didn’t keep drenched customers from patronizing a covered stall called Sun Sin It Lat—“Fresh and Hot”—where a mountain of fried chicken was piled high next to rows of lotus-leaf-wrapped sticky rice, pork chop buns, and stacks of dumpling-filled bamboo steamers. Both styles of egg tarts were on offer: the Hong Kong style with glossy canary-yellow tops, and the Macau version, closer to Lisbon’s, with a flakier crust and tops pockmarked with caramelization.

The Macau pork chop bun is just that: a slab of fried pork chop nestled in a roll. The innovation at work is sandwiching the pork chop inside a pineapple bun, the much-loved Cantonese breakfast pastry. (No pineapples are involved—it’s named for the diamond pattern crowning the buns.) It’s a Macau specialty that’s both cliché tourist food and something locals actually eat. If you can appreciate the novelty of a doughnut burger or a McGriddle, the appeal of the pineapple bun pork chop sandwich is evident: meat meets sugar, fried meets baked, and crisp meets pillowy, a contrast upon contrast in hand-held form.

A few blocks away at Sun Hong Fat—a Cantonese-style cha chaan teng, a casual diner-style restaurant with a split Chinese and Western menu—the pineapple bun pork chop sandwich was made even richer, with cheese and an omelet also packed between the bread. Just as over-the-top was Sun Hong Fat’s take on French toast, stacked and fried to the height of a Kleenex box, the bread pieces held together with a layer of peanut butter. At a diner like this, you might find hints of the colonial past—maybe the spiced Portuguese sardine bun, quite simply two canned sardine fillets on a toasted bun. But most people living in Macau have Cantonese ancestry, and it’s a safe bet most have never heard of minchi or bacalhau à brás. They’re certainly not regularly ordering the prix-fixe menu at the casinos. In some sense, Macau could be a satellite neighborhood of Hong Kong. So, it’s not incorrect to say that for the majority of people who live here, casual Chinese—stir-fried beef noodles, macaroni and ham soup, wonton noodles with beef brisket—is the true food of Macau.

What doesn’t exist in Hong Kong, however, is the type of elevated Macanese food served at La Famiglia, in the village of Taipa. Its chef, Florita Alves, calls Riquexo’s Dona Aide de Jesus her hero. Alves, third-generation Macanese, only pursued cooking professionally after her retirement from a 30-year career monitoring Macau’s central bank. One of her sons was a partner in a struggling Portuguese-Italian restaurant, and Alves had earned enough renown as an interpreter of Macanese cuisine to do monthlong guest-chef stints at the Four Seasons. And so La Famiglia was reborn as a Macanese restaurant last year with Alves and her husband, Vitor, at the helm.

As a steady lunch crowd filled the restaurant downstairs, Alves brought me to her third-floor private dining room and gave me a crash course on the home-cooked dishes of her youth. Alves’s take on minchi had pork marinated with three soy sauces, pan-fried in olive oil—a Portuguese touch—cooked to caramelized crispness, then served on shoestring and cubed potatoes, and topped with a sunny-side-up egg. There was tacho—a generous winter stew of chicken, cabbage, salted duck leg, Chinese lap cheung sausage, jiggly hunks of pork knuckle, skin, and beef brisket. The broth tasted of its color, gold. Roasted chicken, deeply marinated in a garlic-and-pimento rub, had been perched upon a bed of Moorish-style rice with sultanas, hard-boiled eggs, and crispy shallots. But her pièce de résistance was the capela (“chapel” in Portuguese), a meatloaf meant to resemble—if you squint your eyes—the top of a church dome. It was a combination of pork, chouriço sausage, olives, bread, and character,” said Alves as we dug into serradura, a local cream dessert topped with crumbled cookies meant to resemble sawdust. “When the people lose their identity and culture, they are empty, like a body with no soul.” Money means convenience, and in Macau, virtually any food is one phone call away—sushi, pad thai, burgers, pastas, anything.

But the story of Macau has always been about money, and how it changes a place. The Portuguese were not motivated by altruism when they came here to trade. And though the city is far from the worst of the ills colonialism has brought into the world—no major settlement existed here until the Portuguese arrived—its political history is still marked by coercion, and it was an important node in an unjust system for centuries.

For a time, the flows of capital and power meant it was a town where Macanese, Portuguese, Chinese, and outsiders could coexist in shared prosperity, a place to raise children and where a home-cooking culture could flourish—but one ruled by a tiny European country halfway around the world.

Most recently, money has created a place where casino restaurants can charge four figures for a single serving of abalone and, for at least a little while longer, kitchens like that at La Famiglia can serve a cuisine that could come from no place else on Earth.

The post Macau Is Home to a Cuisine Found Nowhere Else On Earth appeared first on Saveur.

In a maze of green, Xiao Zai Hui’s vivid red hair is a beacon. Her ebullient laugh is a guide through the dense, vertical foliage of 40-foot bamboo stalks. It’s been four years since she began a life of harvesting bamboo here—on a plot of land her husband’s family has owned for generations—and her skills are sharp. She stops and crouches at the base of a towering bamboo stalk, searching below the soil for a shoot that’s yet to break the surface.

Though the bamboo must be dug up from under the soil, Xiao begins by gazing upward. The key to finding the ripest, biggest shoots is identifying the plants with the leafiest tops.

The bamboo she finds here in China’s Shunan Zhuhai National Park, in Sichuan province, will be the base for a variety of her favorite soups and stir-fries, many of which she will prepare for the touring guests she and her husband, Chun Wein, host in the spare rooms of their home. A hotel of sorts, catering to the quickly growing population of Chinese urbanites looking to escape the dense crowds of their home cities, this type of country home has its own special name: long jia le (“le” here means “happiness”). In the park, which encompasses Xiao’s family’s house, the 11,000 acres of preserved land filled with wild-growing bamboo is known colloquially as the Bamboo Sea. It was once an untouched paradise that only locals ventured into—20 years ago, Xiao and Chun would walk a narrow, mossy footpath along the unpaved roads to his family’s ancestral home—but these days, tourists arrive by the busload, seeking seclusion and fresh air, and helping to create a new industry for bamboo gatherers like Xiao and her husband.

Although the plant grows year-round, Sichuan bamboo is harvested in two distinct seasons. Springtime shoots, called chun sun, push through the soil, exposing themselves for would-be harvesters to easily find. In winter, harvesters dig below the ground for the new shoots yet to emerge, called dong sun. Come summer, the shoots, which look like densely packed conical flower buds, develop into thick, towering, inedible stalks. The mature bamboo grows in dense clusters that weave along a thick, cordlike root, and doesn’t put out leaves until it’s reached its full height. To the untrained eye, the leafy tops all look the same, but Xiao can identify at a glance which stalks have started to develop their underground dong sun.

When she finds a spot, she takes her chu tou, a heavy wooden pick, and begins her search through the soil with short, shallow strokes, careful not to damage any part of the plant. She digs up a shoot, a golden cone roughly 6 inches long, and tosses it into a woven basket, then continues to dig. New shoots grow off the mature rhizome­—which branches out laterally, almost like a ginger root—so Xiao knows she will find them close together. As she unearths more, she rips them from the ground and tosses them over her shoulder into a basket with a move both natural and practiced. At the end of the day, she’s found 12 pieces of different sizes, most of which came from the same root. Xiao says that this is a particularly good haul.

Because of its visibility in spring, much more bamboo is harvested at that time than in winter. Xiao looks for spring shoots about as high as her knee, but any taller than that and they will soon be on their way to becoming as tall as trees. The bamboo grows so rapidly here that a waist-high shoot could surpass Xiao in height in the span of just 24 hours. The abundant spring shoots are typically peeled and promptly steamed to preserve their freshness, and Xiao will slice these steamed pieces and dry them in a wicker basket for future cooking. Winter bamboo, however, is more elusive. If it breaks through the surface, it will rot and die in the cold, which makes it all the more precious. Bamboo harvesters can make significantly more money off winter shoots than spring ones.

Spring bamboo can be peeled quickly with a few strokes from a cleaver, the shell falling from the shoot to reveal a tinge of purplish pink. Peeling winter shoots, however, is more involved: Xiao will take a cleaver to the bottom, pulling it and any dangling roots off with a sound like ripping Velcro. Then, she’ll make a slit from the bottom to the tip, peeling back the outer layers like an onion until all that’s left is a snowy white cone. She’ll deftly slice off any tough, brownish parts, and the remaining shoot is ready to cook.

Unlike the sweeter, more subtle spring shoots, cold-weather shoots are a bit hardier, with a more complex flavor that tends toward bitter. Depending on household preference, some people will boil it right away to tame its intensity, while others believe the bitterness is tempered elsewhere in the cooking process. To Xiao, a root that tastes distinctly bitter is a root that’s been poorly prepared.

She and other home cooks use shoots from both seasons interchangeably in their dishes. Once cooked, their textures and flavors are quite similar, if somewhat difficult to describe. Xiao always comes back to xuan, a Chinese word with no English equivalent, but that evokes a complex savoriness akin to umami. Chinese cookbook author Ken Hom describes the taste as “fresh, almost grassy, and sweet.” It somehow straddles all of these, in addition to absorbing and enhancing the flavors of the ingredients it’s cooked with, especially in broths, hot pots, and soups. You can seemingly boil it forever without it losing its crisp tenderness, combining a mushroomlike chew with a surprising snap.

The bamboo sea is located in the heart of Yibin, a prefectural city in Sichuan with a total population of around 4 million. In Chinese, Sichuan province is often referred to as tianfuzhiguo, or “the land of plenty,” for its fertile soil and agricultural diversity. It’s earned a global reputation for spicy food, but the flavors here are nuanced; mala, for instance, which refers to the local blend of fiery chiles and numbing Sichuan peppercorns, is a balance of floral, almost citrusy flavors ignited by a deep, intense heat.

In Yibin and nearby Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital, just a few hours’ drive away, bamboo is everywhere—and not just in the kitchen. Trucks carry bundles of the sturdy stalks through the streets of nearby towns. They are used to make everything from building scaffolding to broom handles, chopsticks to chicken coops. For Xiao and Chun, the bamboo has also helped keep their family together.

The two met while working in factories in Shanghai, Xiao having left her family’s small-town farm near the Bamboo Sea in search of greater opportunities. When their first child, Chen Xingyu, was born, Xiao moved back home to take care of him, while Chun lived and worked in the city to support them—a situation all too common among Chinese parents of their generation. Chun worked hard, and Xiao ultimately brought Xingyu to join him in Guangzhou, where they had another child, despite the heavy fines imposed when China’s strict one-child policy was in place. Their income was comfortable, but they missed their families back home, and by 2014, they had saved enough to build a new house on Chun’s family’s land in Yibin—­making a living from harvesting the abundant bamboo and renting their spare rooms to the growing groups of tourists. Xiao laughs as she recalls how naively she once wandered through the forest when she was first learning to forage here, digging fruitlessly for winter bamboo, only to have someone else find a treasure trove of the bright young shoots just a few feet away. It’s an art, she has learned, that takes time and practice.

Running the family’s guesthouse, Xiao also came into her own as a cook, preparing simple, local specialties—most of which include bamboo in some form—for their tenants throughout their stay. She took a cue from nearby restaurants that serve xiong mao yan, or “panda meal,” an extravagant spread meant to emphasize the variety of ways you can cook and enjoy bamboo. Depending on the season, almost all of the dishes incorporate winter or spring shoots, either the fresh ones displayed in heaps at small markets, or packaged versions: parboiled and ready to use, or dried, to be reconstituted in water.

But the pale shoots are hardly the only item on local menus. A few varieties of edible fungi that grow exclusively on bamboo are prized here, not unlike European truffles. Locals have tried for ages to cultivate and farm this fungus, Chun explains, but so far it has proved impossible—it springs up at random due to the unique conditions of the environment.

One particularly rare and expensive version is called zhu sheng. The mushroom, which has a life span of just half a day, begins as an “egg,” partially submerged beneath the ground. Xiao says this stage, called zhu tai, is the most precious, as its window for harvest is extremely limited. “The people who search for this fungus know when this will happen,” Xiao says. “During just two hours in the morning on the day they’re growing, they’ll be on the lookout.” Once harvested, it must be dried immediately to prevent it from distintegrating. From the egg, a dark brown cap rises upward, before the mushroom sends out a lacy veil around itself. The cap is called zhu maodu—which means “tripe,” named for its similarity in texture—and is often used independently in regional stir-fries.

In the kitchen at Qicai Shanzhuang, a restaurant near Xiao’s home, shelves are lined with more than a dozen containers filled with bamboo—both spring and winter shoots—and bamboo fungus. The pieces range in color from a translucent tan to dark brown; some fungi are porous like a honey­comb, others squishy and absorbent like dark-green sponges.

“The beauty of bamboo,” Xiao says, “is that it’s extremely versatile, and adaptable to taste.” In a popular bamboo soup, which is also cooked with the veil and stem of the zhu sheng, the bamboo absorbs the flavor of the bone-in chicken broth as it cooks, while also infusing the delicate soup with its fresh, grassy essence. The mushroom, cooked in the milky-colored broth, becomes chewy and tender, while the veil, which has softened until it melts in your mouth, is spread out across the top like a white web.

Bamboo shoots are cut into a variety of shapes and tossed alongside the fungi into stir-fries, which vary among cooks but nearly always include some form of chiles, pickled ginger, and garlic. Popular combinations also include sweet peppers and locally foraged hua jun, or “slippery mushrooms,” while more ­exceptional versions might feature la rou (cured, smoked pork belly) or grubs. And, of course, there are plenty of sides to go with these dishes, such as you cai, a stalky green often simply stir-fried with chiles, garlic, and Sichuan peppercorns.

Cooks in the area also use the bamboo stalks and leaves too. Along the perimeter of the Bamboo Sea, a man had built a contraption out of two bamboo ladders and a bar strung across them hanging over an open fire. Suspended from the bar were pork ribs being prepared in a popular but painstaking way—slow-smoked over burning bamboo stalks for 10 days or more. Outside his small cottage, the smoke rose upward, swirling into the bamboo’s leafy green heights.

Recipes

Chinese Bacon and Morel Mushroom Stir-Fry

The post What It Takes to Be a Bamboo Harvester in China’s Sichuan Province appeared first on Saveur.

The erkuai bao youtiao lady comes to Luofeng Street every morning. She sets up her cart across from the elementary school and begins grilling round tortilla-like pieces of erkuai, a tender rice cake that is a beloved specialty here in Yunnan, China’s southwesternmost province.

First she toasts each piece over homemade charcoal, carefully flipping them until they are hot and blistered all around. Then she slathers each with sauce—either a spicy paste made from fermented beans and chiles, or one made from a mix of ground sesame seeds and peanuts. Finally, she wraps the erkuai around a youtiao, a long piece of fried dough, and pops it into a small plastic bag. (The bag is so thin, you have to hold it by its tiny handles, as if you were carrying a doll’s purse, to keep from burning your fingers.) Erkuai bao youtiao is a popular breakfast here, and a bag costs less than a dollar.

Six years ago, I lived on this block, in a sixth-floor walk-up with ornate wooden window screens that framed the pulsating rainbow LED lights of a small hotel across the street. Every morning my husband would pop down to the corner (if anyone can “pop” down six flights of cold concrete stairs) and pick up these treats for us, which go surprisingly well with coffee.

Erkuai is an ingredient made from local varieties of rice that is steamed, ground, or pounded, then kneaded and pressed by hand until it is dense and firm. This simple base can then be used in a surprisingly wide variety of ways: rolled into thin circles and grilled over embers, cut into cubes and deep-fried, or stir-fried in thin triangular slices. It can also be shredded into long, noodle-like strands, called ersi, that can be stir-fried or added to soup. In its many incarnations, erkuai is one of the most popular ingredients in Yunnan. A standard in every restaurant and home in the city, it’s served in various forms for breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinner.

On Luofeng Street alone, there are half a dozen ways to eat erkuai. Street vendors and small shops sell the grilled circles for breakfast. For lunch, noodle shops boil thin ersi and add them to soups with stewed meat, chile-bean sauce, and numbing Sichuan peppercorns. At dinner, restaurants cut erkuai into thin slices to stir-fry with combinations like pork and scallions or a mix of vegetables and serve it alongside local classics such as steam-pot chicken with goji berries and xiao chao rou (stir-fried pork with garlic chives). When I lived in Yunnan, I used to eat erkuai in some form almost every day.

Rice cakes are not unique to Yunnan. Versions made from sticky rice are found everywhere from Korea (tteok) to southern China (nian gao) to Japan (mochi). But because Yunnan’s erkuai is not made with sticky rice, it is tender and toothsome rather than sticky and chewy, and therefore the dough can be used in far more ways and cut into far more shapes. Despite erkuai’s simplicity and versatility, I’ve never seen it outside Yunnan. When I moved back to the U.S., erkuai was one of the things I missed most. I had heard about how it was made, and it didn’t sound particularly complicated. So while traveling in Yunnan doing research for my book Cooking South of the Clouds, I set out to learn more about the history, try its most famous incarnations, and hopefully learn to make erkuai at home.

I began my journey in Guandu Ancient Town, just south of Kunming, near Dianchi, China’s sixth-largest freshwater lake. The town was an important trading center during the Tang Dynasty (618–907), where boats crossing Dianchi unloaded goods. These days, Guandu is a tourist destination filled with souvenir shops and restaurants. It is also home to the Guandu Erkuai Techniques Exhibition Center, which was opened in 2011 to demonstrate and preserve the traditional way of making the rice cakes.

At the center, I met up with founder and director Yang Yong, who let me peek into the exhibit, an old-style erkuai-making facility that has a large glass wall so visitors can watch the process. The setup has the feeling of a museum diorama come to life, with employees dressed in traditional local clothing—bright blue jackets and black vests. Yang showed me the steaming station, a series of wooden baskets set over wood-fired woks, then moved on to the main attraction, the mudui. This contraption is made up of a 12-foot log lodged into a stone wedge that holds it about a foot off the floor, making the whole thing into a kind of seesaw. One end of the log has a thick piece of wood sticking out of it toward the floor, and below it is a sturdy stone basin. All together, it acts like a massive mortar and pestle.

To make erkuai, cooks there steam rice in big wooden buckets, then dump the hot rice into the basin. A handful of employees—all men—stomp on the end of the log to activate the pestle-like action. Once the rice is thoroughly mashed, the cooks knead it into oblong loaves, roughly 5-by-9 inches, and put them onto shelves lined with bamboo mats to firm up.

Erkuai has been eaten in this part of Yunnan for around 400 years. There are lots of stories about how erkuai came to the area, but Yang thinks the most reliable is that it arrived with soldiers from central China. “The main reason it became so popular is that it’s easy to carry,” he explained. “Soldiers could take it out and heat it or roast it when they needed to.” Those same qualities made the ingredient popular in Guandu: “Residents around here were all fishermen, and erkuai was convenient for them to bring out on the boats and heat on a little stove,” Yang said. According to local lore, if your wooden fishing boat suddenly sprang a leak, you could even make a patch with erkuai that would hold up well enough to get you back to dry land.

After learning about erkuai’s origins, I wanted to study its most famous preparation, a dish called dajiujia. So I headed to Tengchong, a city in western Yunnan, on China’s border with Myanmar, to try it at the source.

Tengchong sits less than 45 miles from Kachin State in Myanmar, on the western edge of China, nearly 1,500 miles from Beijing. For more than two centuries, the region was a major border crossing on the Tea Horse Road, a network of trade routes also known as the Southern Silk Road that crossed Yunnan, connecting Tibet to China and Southeast Asia and central China to Myanmar and India.

For much of that time, trade went through the town of Heshun, a collection of ornate Qing Dynasty stone houses.

Today, the town has been updated to appeal to travelers and is full of guesthouses and shops. Many of Yunnan’s most picturesque towns have received this treatment in the past 20 years or so, as the province has transformed from a little-known backwater to a desirable vacation spot. When I arrived in town, the rapeseed fields just outside town were in bloom, and dozens of tourists were posed among the golden flowers, selfie sticks aloft.

Locals still travel relatively freely between Tengchong and Myanmar today, and some cross-border commerce was evident in Heshun’s main food market, where Burmese ladies with golden thanaka paste on their cheeks and foreheads sold freshly foraged greens and bowls of pickled wild hawthorn covered in dried chiles. A few blocks away, locals snacked on a dish that is as popular across the border as it is in western Yunnan: xidoufen ban ersi, or golden pea porridge mixed with either rice noodles or ersi. Handfuls of boiled ersi are served in paper bowls and topped with a scoop of xidoufen, a mixture made from ground yellow peas. The vendors offer half a dozen toppings, including scallions, cilantro, chopped tomato, peanuts, sesame seeds, and an aromatic oil made from ginger, black cardamom, star anise, and Sichuan peppercorns. Customers take home bowls or head to low folding tables in the alley to eat.

But as my mission was dajiujia, I made my way to a restaurant I had heard about in the countryside called Jing Nong Zhuang, or “Golden Farm,” to meet with a local guide named Bing Li. The reason dajiujia is so famous, she told me, is its origin story. According to legend, in 1661, the emperor Zhu Youlang was fleeing from the Manchus and took refuge in the city. He arrived in Tengchong tired and hungry, and a cook quickly stir-fried some erkuai with the ingredients he had on hand. Zhu ate the dish gratefully and decreed it would be called “dajiujia,” or “saving the life of the emperor.” The recipe varies a bit from cook to cook, but it always includes pork, egg, tomatoes, and some kind of greens. The version served at the restaurant included fatty pork belly, egg, tomatoes, spinach, and sliced mushrooms. It was, indeed, a spectacular combination, but what was most striking to me was the texture of the erkuai itself. The slices were much denser and firmer than any I had had in other parts of Yunnan, without the springiness and tenderness I’d always been drawn to. Curious about the difference, and wanting to know more about how erkuai is produced today, I tracked down a small factory in the town of Dali, another center of erkuai production.

The factory of the Dali Zhao Family Dingcheng Food Factory is a few miles from Dali, surrounded by fields. In a large courtyard, I met Zao Dingcheng, a young man in his early 30s, who had offered us a tour of his facility. Zao’s family has been making erkuai here for a century, and he is the fifth generation of his family to run the business. He began working for his father at 16, and now that he is in charge, he has expanded and modernized with new equipment.

Zao pulled on rubber boots and took me into the workshop. Inside the factory, a few workers were preparing rice, soaking it in a trough then steaming it in large bamboo baskets set over vents that release jets of steam. The heat and moisture are powerful enough to cook more than 650 pounds of rice at one time. Once it was cooked, the workers fed the rice into specially made grinders that turned it into a smooth dough. They kneaded it, still steaming, until it had the texture of soft clay. Lastly, they pressed the mixture into small loaves, and rolled it out into thin circles or fed it into a large machine that flattened it into sheets to make noodle-like ersi.

Zao offered me a taste of the freshly made erkuai and pulled a handful of dough from a still-warm batch. The dough was wonderful—softer and more tender than any I had eaten in the past, with a subtle, sweet flavor from the rice. As much as I loved all of the versions of erkuai I’d tasted over the years, the fresh stuff was a revelation. The difference between this and the versions I’d had in Guandu and Tengchong came from the rice, Zao explained. Each region uses a variety of white rice that grows well in that climate, and as a result, locals have become partial to their particular style of the stuff: Cooks in Tengchong prefer hard cakes that remain very firm when cooked, while cooks in Dali are partial to a softer, chewier style. The erkuai I’d gotten used to in Kunming and the surrounding areas was texturally somewhere in between.

After the tour, Zao took me to his office and showed me documents related to the history of erkuai. Like Heshun, he told me, Dali was also a major trading center on Tea Horse Road, frequented by mule caravans loaded with tea, salt, precious metals, tobacco, spices, silks, and other valuable goods. Erkuai was particularly popular with traders and merchants along the Tea Horse Road. Anyone who did business along this route would have been familiar with the ingredient. But at the time, erkuai was relatively difficult to make, requiring the kind of time-consuming labor I’d seen in Guandu. Ersi was even trickier because you first had to make loaves of erkuai, dry them, and then painstakingly cut them into thin slices and, from there, into strips. The process was arduous enough that the ingredient was mostly made at home in small batches for individual meals.

Today, thanks to the new machines I’d seen, ersi is actually easier to make than other forms of erkuai because the process is almost entirely automated: The machine rolls the dough flat, and all you have to do is feed it into a shredder reminiscent of an Italian pasta cutter. Using this new system, Zao can make up to 6 tons of ersi per day.

That afternoon, I wandered through Old Town Dali, looking for as many preparations of ersi as I could find. The most classic here is lushan pa rou ersi, a soup topped with meltingly tender stewed pork shoulder and finely chopped pork belly cooked with chiles. In the center of town, at an eatery packed with families tucking into large bowls, I ordered zhu ersi (boiled ersi), a soup topped with a spicy sauce of beef cooked in chile-bean paste, lightly pickled mustard greens and daikon, and fragrant garlic chives. The spicy, umami-laden flavors permeated the broth and clung to the springy boiled noodles, leaving my lips tingling wonderfully with chile and the faint numbing feeling of Sichuan peppercorns.

Erkuai, however, is more difficult to make at home than I had initially hoped. The grinding can easily wear out home kitchen equipment, and the subtle range of textures can be hard to reproduce. Plus, the traditional rice is not widely available in the U.S. Was this process why erkuai hadn’t spread across China and the world despite all the centuries that it had been a staple for traders and merchants? Or was it actually due to Yunnan’s distance from China’s centers of power? Perhaps both. But recently, other foods that used to be considered hyperregional—such as northern China’s crêpe-like jianbing and Sichuan’s chile-covered crayfish—have jumped their traditional boundaries and made it big across the country. Some of Yunnan’s other dishes, including “crossing the bridge rice noodles,” are starting to become trendy in Shanghai, Beijing, and even New York. Surely if selfie-stick-wielding tourists posted pictures of themselves eating erkuai, others would want to try it too. Now that producers can make it much more easily, and Yunnan has become a popular destination, is erkuai next?

Yang Jian, a 38-year-old native of Kunming, has a small factory called Ying Fung Shao Erkuai just outside the city. The factory (one of five he has opened across Yunnan) is dedicated to making just the round, grillable version of erkuai—the kind I used to enjoy for breakfast.

Like Zao, Yang uses industrial-size steamers and grinders, which allow him to produce substantially more erkuai than he would be able to using traditional methods. While in his factory, I watched women in light-blue smocks, hairnets, and face masks roll out hundreds of perfectly round pieces of erkuai, each about 8 inches across. The factory also makes sauces to spread on top, as well as signs with the company’s logo, which Yang sells, in an arrangement similar to a franchise, to the owners of snack stalls all across town.

With approximately 300 retail locations across the province, Yang is also thinking about how to expand to other parts of China, though he hasn’t yet figured out if it’s feasible. Presumably, expanding would mean building factories in other cities, as he has done across Yunnan. He might just have a shot at turning one of Yunnan’s most ancient and venerable staples into a well-known dish throughout China and beyond.

Maybe in a few years, my husband and I will be able to hop in our car and drive down to Oakland’s Chinatown to pick up a freshly toasted piece of erkuai for breakfast, just like we used to.

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It’s a common saying that in order taste the true flavor of a place, do what locals do. In Shanghai, it’s the early morning breakfast market.

In the 1840s, Shanghai, situated conveniently right on the Yangtze River Delta, officially became a port, open to international trade. It transformed Shanghai from a fishing village into a commercial center. Not only is it often hailed as the “Paris of the East”, domestically, it’s known to be the shining city of opportunity, where jobs abound. As people from all over China came to Shanghai, they brought with them their food, and instead of opening brick and mortar restaurants, they opened more flexible and much less fiscally risky food stands.

Today Shanghai is a modern city, with many international influences. Yet pockets of old Shanghai exist, seen in the ben bang cai (本帮菜) Shanghainese food, in the Shanghainese dialect (distinguishing the locals), and in the rituals, such as wind-drying meat every winter or making sticky rice balls to celebrate the new year, still practiced and passed on from generation to generation. Nowhere is this more evident than in the daily breakfast markets.

My mom and my dad were born and raised in Shanghai. They moved to America for graduate education and took my siblings and me to spend summers in the city. We would stay with family in Shanghai, so we ate a lot of home-cooked meals, but the exception was always breakfast.

When I think of these trips, I remember the hot, blanketing humidity. I remember the heady aroma of the herbal ointment we spread over our numerous mosquito bites. I remember the juicy pork baozi, the wontons that we ate almost every morning. We would wake up to find my aunt already back from her morning market excursion, offering bags with steam still floating off the fresh buns. Of course, my aunt would buy too much, thinking we’d eat three baos for breakfast each (and sometimes we did).

My mom has told me that in the past, when money was tight, breakfast was simply congee or leftover rice with fermented toppings like radish or tofu. The breakfast foods that are so accessible today were a luxury that many couldn’t afford. Today, eating breakfast out is as commonplace as eating congee at home. Young professionals grab some on the way to work. Schoolchildren pick some up on the way to school. Elderly folks go for their morning walk and then buy too many bao for their families.

There used to be more vendors selling breakfast street foods, with portable carts and stands peppering the sidewalks. However, more and more are forced to move to make space for more skyscrapers, high-rises, or are shut down due to stringent vendor regulations

One vendor told me that there used to be many more sidewalk vendors selling anything from soy milk to pan fried dumplings, even freshly-caught fish. Now, you need expensive business licenses, and many simply packed up their things and left. Today the culture of breakfast food survives – the good stuff is just harder to find.

These markets are where you’ll find the classic, traditional foods of Shanghai, as well as the locals who cherish them. They allow you to immerse yourself in Old Shanghai culture. Sit down elbow to elbow with a stranger, with a steaming bowl of soy milk. Help yourself to toppings of tiny dried shrimp, scallion, chili oil, and fried dough. Get a piping bowl of noodles and slurp it while standing up. Order a ball of sticky rice and make your way to your next destination, enjoying the hefty portion.

Where to get them:

The easiest way to find the perfect Shanghai street breakfast is just to wander. I’ve found that the path to metro stations are usually peppered with breakfast vendors, but beware: the ones right next to the station can be a little iffy. Sometimes, shops that sell one thing during the day will convert to a breakfast stand in the morning before business hours. If you don’t have time to wander, here are a few intersections to head towards:

Intersection of Chang le Lu Road (长乐路) and Xiang Yang Lu Road (襄阳路) in the Xuhui district.

Intersection of Da Pu Road (打浦路) and Qu Xi Road (瞿溪路).

Intersection of Shun Chang Lu Road (顺昌路) and Yong Nian Lu (永年路) in XuHui district, near the Madang Lu metro stop on line 9.

Huang He Lu Road (黄河路), next to People’s Square.

Wu Jiang Road (吴江路小吃街), Jing An District, near NanJing Xi Lu station on line 2.

8 Shanghai Breakfast Foods

The Four Warriors
Chinese foods are often given poetic names, elevating the food and sparking imagination. The most classic Shanghai breakfast has such a name: the Four Warriors, si da jin gang (四大金刚). The Four Warriors by themselves refer to the legendary gods from the Han dynasty, guards of Buddhism. In the context of breakfast, The Four Warriors refer to four specific treats – an homage to Old Shanghai, an indispensable symbol of the breakfast culture: glutinous rice rolls (ci fan, 粢饭), soy milk (dou jiang, 豆浆)、fried crullers (you tiao, 油条)、and sesame pancake (da bing, 大饼).

Ci Fan (粢饭), Glutinous Rice Rolls

Dou Jiang (豆浆), Soy Milk

You Tiao (油条), Fried Cruller

Da Bing (大饼), Sesame Pancake

Bao zi (包子) Bun

Wontons (馄炖)

Shaomai (烧卖)

Dou Fu Hua (豆腐花), Tofu Flower

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On a rainy Monday morning last autumn in the Chinese city of Suzhou, it was warm and dry inside Ren Xiaochen’s noodle shop, Yu Mian Zhai. Three young rich guys, who had parked a blue Maserati on the curb, tucked into bowls of wild duck noodles. They were missing out: Autumn brings rain in this part of eastern China, but more importantly, it brings hairy crabs, and hairy crabs mean crab soup.

An ancient city best known for its canals and Chinese gardens, Suzhou is less than half an hour from Shanghai on China’s sleek new bullet trains, and it’s perhaps eastern China’s best place for a bowl of noodles.

Ren, an accountant who retired to pursue her love of cooking, worked in silent coordination with her cook, Xu Hongden. She spooned tiny quantities of soy sauce into bowls as Xu briefly cooked crab roe in a wok with shaoxing wine, ginger, and sugar. After blanching, Ren spooned dark orange shrimp roe over the precisely folded noodles, while Xu singed a handful of spring onion greens that Ren had thrown on just before. Ren gave the noodles one last splash of her proprietary shrimp roe soy sauce, then out they went, chewy thin noodles with a distillation of the best parts of the region’s crabs.

The noodle masters of Suzhou claim that Shanghai is too hectic for good noodles. Here, life moves at a more leisurely pace, one that allows them to brew deep, flavorful stocks with hens, ham, crustaceans, and herbs. Many of Suzhou’s residents, who typically eat noodles for breakfast, get up extra early to make sure they are getting the tou tang, the clearest and purest stock from the night before.

For Ren, it’s not an issue—her chef cooks all the noodles in a small amount of fresh stock, making every batch tou tang. Ninety percent of her customers are regulars, and they return for the ever-changing menu: three-shrimp noodles in early summer, crabmeat noodles in later summer, and crab roe noodles until winter.

When asked why the noodles in Suzhou are so much better than in Shanghai, a city of superlatives, Ren thought for a moment before answering. “It’s the water,” Ren said. “And the time. People in Shanghai are too busy. They don’t have the time to do it right.”

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Imagine the lovechild of a crepe and a burrito with aspirations of being a breakfast sandwich, and you have, in essence, jianbing (literally: “fried pancake”). What a cigarette and coffee is to Paris and the bacon-egg-and-cheese is to New York City, the jianbing is to Beijing: a ubiquitous breakfast, available streetside, capable of restoring your darkest morning to its brightest self. Why is China in love with this savory pancake? Reporter Yulin Lou gives the answer in the video above.

Hundreds—and perhaps even thousands of years old—the jianbing is simple stuff. Start with a wheat flour batter spread paper-thin over a massive circular griddle, much like a crepe. Top with an even layer of beaten egg. Paint on myriad sauces—oyster, hoisin, chile oil—then apply toppings of chopped fried crullers, scallions, cilantro, hot dogs, crab sticks—anything goes in a jianbing. Then fold up, wrap in wax paper, and dive into a kaleidoscope of textures and flavors.

That’s part of the joy of jianbing—nearly anything goes, and the more bits and bobs, the better. At Tao Rice Rolls in Flushing, New York, where the jianbing come out reliably flavorful and not-too-greasy, the house specialty is pickled mustard greens, a welcome rejoinder to the layers of starch and egg.

Fortunately for jianbing lovers, the savory pancake is making inroads into the U.S., particularly in New York. But we have a long way to go until there’s a jianbing vendor on every corner. Until then, off to Beijing we go.

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