China and I have a long-standing love-hate relationship.
At the end of the summer in 2013, when I compiled my top ten favorite meals from a trip through Japan, China, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia, I was surprised to find that four of them were from China. I forget how good the food can be when I’m distracted by how difficult China is to exist in on a day-to-day basis.
I’ve spent so many afternoons getting honked at by buses, pushed on the shoulder by crossing guards, jostled in front of by pretty much anyone joining a ‘line’, cigarette smoke blown in my face, spat in front of, told that an establishment does not in fact have what is printed on their menu or that it is actually twice as much as it states in print, only to end up, at the end of the day, eating local cold-water river fish lovingly stuffed with herbs and spit-grilled to perfection, or dumplings made with rare fungus and young leaves collected from the mountainside, or a zillion razor clams steamed in foil, for something under the equivalent of $2-3.
And then I can’t even go home and write about it, because the Chinese government blocks access to Google, Facebook, Blogger, WordPress, Reddit, YouTube, and many more websites that I didn’t know I found indispensable until they weren’t available anymore. For good measure, sometimes the internet just plain stops working altogether, or the people next door start having an earsplitting karaoke party.
So despite spending 75% of my time in China thoroughly annoyed, I keep coming back. And there’s another reason for that. The friend I travel with and visit in China is fluent in Mandarin, which opens up a whole new world to me in terms of access to things tourists don’t generally access, understand, or even know exist. I’ve eaten a variety of snails out of a paper cup in the shantytown district of Shanghai, listened to a blind masseuse thunder about socialism and visas as he elbows my kidneys and cracks my neck alarmingly, visited the North Korean border at Tianchi Lake in Changbaishan Nature Reserve (which required a bewildering number of train, bus and taxi transfers that could never have been deciphered in English), and been able to interrogate-by-proxy every street vendor whose wares are hidden in steamers or behind the counter rather than having to rely on what I can see (a-la-Taiwanese night markets). And while people in public will bodily shove you out of the way to enter a reserved-seats train one second earlier, I admit that the attitude of most once you’re actually in their house or business is brusque but accommodating, and eventually, curious. So I would gather I know more about Chinese food and culture than any other country I’ve visited, even though I still speak very little Mandarin, can only recognize a few characters, and never feel the pull to return to China once I’ve left.
Again, though, I keep doing it. During this two-week trip I visited the northeast (Dongbei) region, visiting Changchun, Yanji, and Baihe (the gateway town for Changbaishan). Changchun, the provincial capital, was my home base. Yanji is a majority-ethnic-Korean city near the North Korean border (apparently a very porous border as that border goes) and Baihe is basically a resort town built up to serve the hordes of tourists visiting Changbaishan (though, confusingly, they centered it over 30km away from the park).
I expected Baihe to taste like, well, a boring overpriced resort town, but actually I had three of my most interesting meals there, which was fitting given that this was also where I felt the resulting ‘earthquake’ of North Korea’s most recent nuclear test. Downstairs from our hotel, there was a restaurant who served, on two separate nights, a dumpling feast consisting of rare fungus dumplings and young, dark green mountain leaf dumplings, and a plate of small whole cold water river fish in spicy garlic-cilantro sauce. We enjoyed these new flavors (the former tasted like a Chinese medicine shop smells – in a good way) while listening to a couple scream at each other outside a convenience store across the street. I knew that I had failed to adequately suck the fish heads clean of meat when the waitress asked me, “Are you used to Chinese food?” which I know really meant “You eat that fish wrong!”
Yanji was a stop we were looking forward to, hoping to get some unique Korean food, but what we ended up with was naengmyon (cold noodle) soup with a random watermelon slice in it for dinner, and kimbap (Korean rolled sushi) slathered in pink mayonnaise for lunch the next day. Happily, once I wiped the Pepto-Bismol covering off, the roll was very good, stuffed with fish eggs and radish.
I had plenty of time in Changchun to explore, as well as a kitchen at home to cook with, but I am ashamed to report I used the kitchen for only one purpose: to hardboil duck, goose, and wild chicken eggs that I bought from what they call the bazaar. The egg lady’s wares were the first thing I saw in the massive stadium-like indoor market, and she seemed to have every kind of egg from every kind of bird in the region. She didn’t have an ostrich egg, but I also didn’t have 40 people to share it with, so that worked out fine. I learned after cooking them that goose eggs > duck eggs > wild chicken eggs >>>>> regular chicken eggs, mostly because of the high yolk-white ratio, which is unfortunate for me given that I spent years in Long Beach searching for duck eggs and finding nothing.
I heard that Changchun sources its seafood from North Korea, which is dubiously legal at best, but is a good explanation for why a very landlocked capital has so much shellfish on offer, from razor clams to cockroach-looking lobster hybrids to crayfish to tiny blue crabs to large red crabs to oysters. On two separate occasions, I bought heavy foil-wrapped packets bursting with razor clams and regular clams steamed in spicy red broth with accompanying glass noodles for between $2 and $3, and not one single clam was bad. They were all sweet and chewy with tender innards, and I ate so many at once that my mouth started to tingle (whether from a latent shellfish allergy that only emerges when I eat 50 clams or from the mala spice blend used, I’m not sure). I also tried a xiaokao place’s specialty roast fish, which came out on a scorching black platter and was an incredibly frustrating meal because the fish flesh was so sweet and flaky, and the skin so blackened and deep spiced, but the bones so numerous and tiny that they pricked me in the gums like little Novocaine needles while being too small for me to find and remove before they pricked me. I sucked that fish clean enough to avoid any passively judgmental comments by our waitress, though.
Another thing Changchun should not by rights have, but does anyway, is a wide array of fruit, including tropical fruit like mango, rambutan, durian, starfruit, and papaya. Every day for the last week I was here I would stop at the same mango juice stand and wonder why its room-temperature thick sweetness was so much better than mango juice in countries where mango-juice-vendors could literally reach up from their carts and pick mangoes from the trees.
Though my friend told me that Changchun normally has much more street food, and that many of the alleys and carts were closed for inspection, one alley did open on the last night and provide me with something I’d never seen before: a naan-adjacent blackened flatbread cooked stuck to the side of a kiln, lined before cooking with seaweed and pork. It crackled between the teeth more like papadam than like naan and was sweet for some reason, but not that sickly fake-buttery sweet many Asian bakeries slather on their bread and cakes. More like honey. And the lack of street food is less bothersome when many restaurants retain street-food-level pricing and cluster in open-doored rows along narrow streets, or create permanent stands in bazaars like the one featuring the egg lady. These close-enough-to-street-food establishments served me such interesting meals as bright orange carrot-infused wheat noodles with a thick mushroom dipping sauce, a hot, flaky fresh hamburger-sized pastry filled with ground pork and overflowing with very pickled sour vegetables, a miniature bright red numbing Sichuan-style hot pot with white fish and huge piles of potato, bamboo shoots, and leaves, garlic-topped grilled oysters, and durian pancake.
When we did go to fancier sit-down restaurants, it was usually to escape Chinese food and overpay for things like fig, goat cheese, and pine nut pizza, or bibimbap infused with cheese. I may pooh-pooh those things from the comfort and diversity of my home in the USA, but when my mouth burns from days of hot/numbing spice and endless oil, I will absolutely savor figs, pine nuts, and goat cheese, even if the pizza dough is lackluster by almost any standard. Also, what pizza place in the US would accompany their pizza with passionfruit-calamansi juice or a blueberry smoothie?
Today (well, yesterday: remember, Chinese firewall?), I board a plane to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, suitcase stuffed with dried strawberries and blueberries and freeze-dried figs (China is awesome at dried fruits, especially when it refrains from adding sugar). Ho Chi Minh City is one of my favorite places, food-wise, in the world, and I think I’ve eaten much of what it has to offer during my previous two trips, but this time I’m going to try and go further afield to the Mekong Delta and the Vietnamese-Cambodian border at Ha Tien and Chau Doc, as well as to Mui Ne and Da Lat. No matter what happens, I’ll make sure to eat lots of snails.
Showing posts with label street food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label street food. Show all posts
Thursday, September 14, 2017
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Sunny with a chance of quesadillas
The Loch Ness Monster of Echo Park Lake does not have a long, scaly neck or a coiling, curlicued body. She doesn't have green skin or big teeth. Her feet are (probably) not webbed, and she certainly doesn't have claws. She looks absolutely nothing like a dinosaur or a dragon.
And she's really damn good at making blue corn quesadillas.
I fondly dub the sweet, totally un-monster-like proprietress of the Oaxacan Quesadilla Cart 'Nessie' because she only appears when I'm not looking for her.
Want to brag to your friends that the best quesadillas on earth are made in your neighborhood, then take them down the street to prove it? Too bad. She's nowhere to be found.
But are you speeding down the street, late somewhere, with no quarters for meter parking? Or did you just eat a huge lunch? Perhaps you're on a jog or a bike ride and you didn't bring your wallet? Then there she is, under her big rainbow umbrella, cheerfully patting her ovals of soft masa dough barehanded, like she doesn't have any nerve endings in her fingers.
I've had many permutations of the charred, oozing blue semicircles and can confidently say that the huitlacoche (corn fungus) is the best, its half-mushroom half-onion texture squishing satisfyingly within its cage. I pry the edges of the quesadilla open, its flaps giving only slightly less than soft taco shells, and dump in onions, nopales, and cilantro, cotija, and, if I'm smart, I remember to put the sauce on the inside so as not to make everything soggy.
Usually, I am not smart. The salsas on offer are so brain-scramblingly spicy that merely being in their presence must make me forget. The green is an everyday lip burner, but the red, oh, the red. You don't know whether you're choking or breathing.
The first time I dumped an ungodly amount of salsa over my quesadilla can perhaps be chalked up to a combination of adventurousness and ignorance, but every subsequent time can only be called stupidity. Or maybe not. I never regret doing it, for the flavor behind the pain is so worth it, and though I wince all the way home and every breath of air I puff climbing the hill burns, I still reliably over-salsa my plate every time I return.
Which is often, though accidentally every time. I have never set out with the intention of eating a quesadilla. But I have also never walked by her stand without stopping.
And she's really damn good at making blue corn quesadillas.
I fondly dub the sweet, totally un-monster-like proprietress of the Oaxacan Quesadilla Cart 'Nessie' because she only appears when I'm not looking for her.
Want to brag to your friends that the best quesadillas on earth are made in your neighborhood, then take them down the street to prove it? Too bad. She's nowhere to be found.
But are you speeding down the street, late somewhere, with no quarters for meter parking? Or did you just eat a huge lunch? Perhaps you're on a jog or a bike ride and you didn't bring your wallet? Then there she is, under her big rainbow umbrella, cheerfully patting her ovals of soft masa dough barehanded, like she doesn't have any nerve endings in her fingers.
I've had many permutations of the charred, oozing blue semicircles and can confidently say that the huitlacoche (corn fungus) is the best, its half-mushroom half-onion texture squishing satisfyingly within its cage. I pry the edges of the quesadilla open, its flaps giving only slightly less than soft taco shells, and dump in onions, nopales, and cilantro, cotija, and, if I'm smart, I remember to put the sauce on the inside so as not to make everything soggy.
Usually, I am not smart. The salsas on offer are so brain-scramblingly spicy that merely being in their presence must make me forget. The green is an everyday lip burner, but the red, oh, the red. You don't know whether you're choking or breathing.
The first time I dumped an ungodly amount of salsa over my quesadilla can perhaps be chalked up to a combination of adventurousness and ignorance, but every subsequent time can only be called stupidity. Or maybe not. I never regret doing it, for the flavor behind the pain is so worth it, and though I wince all the way home and every breath of air I puff climbing the hill burns, I still reliably over-salsa my plate every time I return.
Which is often, though accidentally every time. I have never set out with the intention of eating a quesadilla. But I have also never walked by her stand without stopping.
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Pole-vaulting over Vietnam's culinary bar
Vietnam's culinary bar is already set astronomically high, but it still manages to give me a meal that pole-vaults over it every so often.
Or, as it happens, an entire day full of such meals. Enter August 31, 2013.
I. Cơm hến
When a business gets popular in Vietnam, it often spawns a menagerie of copycats. Hotels featured in the Lonely Planet or the Rough Guide have twins popping up in the surrounding streets almost the instant the guides are published, hoping to draw patrons on name recognition. In Quy Nhơn, a by no means touristy beach town between Đà Nẵng and Nha Trang, a hotel called Lan Anh had no less than 5 different 'locations' around town. One even made sure to have a copycat Barbara's Backpackers next door, for maximum believability!
The reason I bring this up is that the restaurant I aimed for at lunch on August 31, a central Vietnamese specialty restaurant called Quán Nam Giao, was completely encircled by other Huế-style restaurants, touts-a-waving. I disdained them, thinking it was another copycat phenomenon (this style of food isn't terribly common in HCMC) but apparently I was actually walking through HCMC's Little Huế. Whoops!
I'd feel regretful about missing out on this great enclave but for the fact that I don't think any of them could have beaten what I had at Nam Giao.
Cơm hến is already one of my favorite dishes. A well-delineated mix of baby clams, fresh taro stem and sour starfruit, various strong herbs, and crushed peanuts and sesame seeds over rice that looks a bit like Vietnamese chirashi might look.
This doesn't mean it's easy to impress me merely by serving it to me. I've had in its birthplace of Huế and I've had it at Quan Vy Da in Little Saigon, a restaurant that can do no wrong with any dish it tries. It isn't easy to live up to either of these standards.
Nam Giao surpassed them.
I've never understood how certain flavor combinations were discovered. Who first paired clams with mint, or taro with starfruit? And then why would they have taken nuts, of all things, and crushed them on top? Every ingredient is so different-tasting that you'd think your mouth wouldn't know what to do with the confluence, but this particular combination meshed so well and so smoothly that I wouldn't blink an eye if I were told it had just grown naturally on the Cơm Hến Tree.
II. Gỏi đu đủ
Nothing I've eaten out of a plastic bag in a park has ever been this good.
Those aren't noodles. They're green papaya spears. And those aren't leaves (well, not all of them - some of them are mint, I think), they're sweet beef jerky slices. And that isn't mere orange oil, that is flaming-hot-pepper lava! It'll soak the sesame crackers and turn them into fire-cakes.
Once I got used to maneuvering my chopsticks through the bag's narrow neck and getting bites with a little bit of everything, I was able to enjoy the sweet caramel char on the beef fighting with the papaya's sourness until it was all washed away in a wave of lingering spice.
(Thanks to Joe and Hai at eatingsaigon.com for directing me here - I never would have found these ladies on my own. They stand at an unmarked stall on a busy corner not IN the park, but across the street from it. Rough Google location here.)
III. Bánh xèo
I really wish I had included something for scale, but let's just make clear that if I stepped on this pancake, only about 3/4 of it would bear the footprint. (And I wear size 11 shoes.)
A crackly outer skin, like seared paper, narrowed to impossibly thin widths at times, making it impossible to believe it held so much meat and so many vegetables together. They leave their shrimps' skins on, so it gets even more crunchy when you ensnare shrimp in your lettuce scoop. That's fine, because the pillowy pork fat leaves your teeth something rich to sink into afterwards.
Lots of people tell me they find bánh xèo too greasy, and I always wonder if they're eating it wrapped in, and stuffed with, vegetables and herbs, like you're supposed to. Most Vietnamese herb 'accompaniment' places are bigger than my head, and Vietnamese people will finish them, right down to the last leaf. If a dish isn't completely veg-i-fied with each and every bite, you're not doing it right.
I now proudly note that not one green speck of lettuce, mint, fish-mint, or basil remained on that plate after I was done cracking bites off this giant's-foot-sized pancake.
And not more than ten drops of nước mắm remained in the sauce bowl, either.
As we were leaving, I saw the kitchen. It was like a mass bánh xèo production assembly line run by one sweating woman. Stacks and stacks of these pancakes were balanced on a few aluminum platters, ready to be run out to the rapidly filling restaurant, while she flipped and filled at least 6 more in the three frying pans that surrounded her. While the menu technically has about 20 items, nobody really looks at it. It's a safe assumption that everyone will order the bánh xèo.
Or, as it happens, an entire day full of such meals. Enter August 31, 2013.
I. Cơm hến
When a business gets popular in Vietnam, it often spawns a menagerie of copycats. Hotels featured in the Lonely Planet or the Rough Guide have twins popping up in the surrounding streets almost the instant the guides are published, hoping to draw patrons on name recognition. In Quy Nhơn, a by no means touristy beach town between Đà Nẵng and Nha Trang, a hotel called Lan Anh had no less than 5 different 'locations' around town. One even made sure to have a copycat Barbara's Backpackers next door, for maximum believability!
The reason I bring this up is that the restaurant I aimed for at lunch on August 31, a central Vietnamese specialty restaurant called Quán Nam Giao, was completely encircled by other Huế-style restaurants, touts-a-waving. I disdained them, thinking it was another copycat phenomenon (this style of food isn't terribly common in HCMC) but apparently I was actually walking through HCMC's Little Huế. Whoops!
I'd feel regretful about missing out on this great enclave but for the fact that I don't think any of them could have beaten what I had at Nam Giao.
Cơm hến is already one of my favorite dishes. A well-delineated mix of baby clams, fresh taro stem and sour starfruit, various strong herbs, and crushed peanuts and sesame seeds over rice that looks a bit like Vietnamese chirashi might look.
This doesn't mean it's easy to impress me merely by serving it to me. I've had in its birthplace of Huế and I've had it at Quan Vy Da in Little Saigon, a restaurant that can do no wrong with any dish it tries. It isn't easy to live up to either of these standards.
Nam Giao surpassed them.
I've never understood how certain flavor combinations were discovered. Who first paired clams with mint, or taro with starfruit? And then why would they have taken nuts, of all things, and crushed them on top? Every ingredient is so different-tasting that you'd think your mouth wouldn't know what to do with the confluence, but this particular combination meshed so well and so smoothly that I wouldn't blink an eye if I were told it had just grown naturally on the Cơm Hến Tree.
II. Gỏi đu đủ
Nothing I've eaten out of a plastic bag in a park has ever been this good.
Those aren't noodles. They're green papaya spears. And those aren't leaves (well, not all of them - some of them are mint, I think), they're sweet beef jerky slices. And that isn't mere orange oil, that is flaming-hot-pepper lava! It'll soak the sesame crackers and turn them into fire-cakes.
Once I got used to maneuvering my chopsticks through the bag's narrow neck and getting bites with a little bit of everything, I was able to enjoy the sweet caramel char on the beef fighting with the papaya's sourness until it was all washed away in a wave of lingering spice.
(Thanks to Joe and Hai at eatingsaigon.com for directing me here - I never would have found these ladies on my own. They stand at an unmarked stall on a busy corner not IN the park, but across the street from it. Rough Google location here.)
III. Bánh xèo
Just around the corner from the gỏi đu đủ goddesses lies a much-lauded bánh xèo restaurant: Bánh Xèo 46A. I'm pretty sure Anthony Bourdain popularized it, and as leery as I am of places famous food dudes have popularized (they almost always go rapidly downhill afterwards), well, it's bánh xèo, so...
I really wish I had included something for scale, but let's just make clear that if I stepped on this pancake, only about 3/4 of it would bear the footprint. (And I wear size 11 shoes.)
A crackly outer skin, like seared paper, narrowed to impossibly thin widths at times, making it impossible to believe it held so much meat and so many vegetables together. They leave their shrimps' skins on, so it gets even more crunchy when you ensnare shrimp in your lettuce scoop. That's fine, because the pillowy pork fat leaves your teeth something rich to sink into afterwards.
Lots of people tell me they find bánh xèo too greasy, and I always wonder if they're eating it wrapped in, and stuffed with, vegetables and herbs, like you're supposed to. Most Vietnamese herb 'accompaniment' places are bigger than my head, and Vietnamese people will finish them, right down to the last leaf. If a dish isn't completely veg-i-fied with each and every bite, you're not doing it right.
I now proudly note that not one green speck of lettuce, mint, fish-mint, or basil remained on that plate after I was done cracking bites off this giant's-foot-sized pancake.
And not more than ten drops of nước mắm remained in the sauce bowl, either.
As we were leaving, I saw the kitchen. It was like a mass bánh xèo production assembly line run by one sweating woman. Stacks and stacks of these pancakes were balanced on a few aluminum platters, ready to be run out to the rapidly filling restaurant, while she flipped and filled at least 6 more in the three frying pans that surrounded her. While the menu technically has about 20 items, nobody really looks at it. It's a safe assumption that everyone will order the bánh xèo.
Monday, July 15, 2013
The mysteries of octopus brains
A skewered baby octopus from a street stall - whole, soy-browned, and roasted just past tenderness - presented me with a few questions I'd never contemplated asking, let alone having answered:
1. Do cooked octopus brains taste, feel, and look exactly like hardboiled quail egg yolk?
I used to eat baby octopus salad all the time as a kid; my mom would bring a small container of it home from the seafood market as a special treat for me to eat for lunch. But I never noticed that its brains tasted like egg yolk, so:
2. Alternatively, is it possible to somehow replace the brains of a seemingly intact baby octopus with the hardboiled yolk of a quail egg, fashioning the yolk as the brains and the white as the skull casing? And if this is possible, would the Japanese actually do such a thing?
I think we can all agree that the answer to part 2 of question 2 is 'yes', but the practicalities involved in part 1 boggle the mind and would involve magical syringes at the very least.
But people build collapsible models of ships they slide into bottles and proceed to maneuver their sails up with string, so I'll accept the magical syringes.
Regardless, while trying to find my foodie footing in a country seemingly starved of street food (at least compared with its neighbors) it was refreshing to be able to exchange a skewer of something for a few coins and go along my merry market-wandering way with something mysterious in my mouth.
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