Hitting the Ground Running

I made it! It was a long journey (almost exactly 24 hours from my house in Washington to my place in Shanghai), but here I am in China. I may write more about the travelling later. For now, though, it's finally time to get into the meat and potatoes of this blog--writing about Chinese street food!

Yesterday, I had the extreme good fortune to have a personal tour guide to the best street food in Shanghai. Fiona Reilly, who blogs at www.lifeonnanchanglu.com about food and life in Shanghai (be sure to check it out), was kind enough to lend me her husband's bicycle and show me around the city for five hours on Friday. It had been years since I bicycled in China; it was every bit as exhilarating as I remembered. The traffic laws on Chinese roads generally feel more like traffic suggestions. In general, the idea is to do what you like, just don't hit anybody or get hit. This means a lot of weaving in and out of traffic, turning left in front of oncoming traffic, moving into oncoming traffic to pass the car in front of you (and forcing the cars going the other direction to wait until you're done), and similar strategies. Biking in China makes me feel like I am part of some big, hulking organism. Like an individual red blood cell, chaotically coursing through an enormous body.

Anyway, Fiona generously took me to some of her favorite street food spots. Our first stop was for You Tiao (油条), which is somewhat similar to a cruller. It's composed of two attached-at-the-hip tubes of dough, about a foot long. The dough is light and flaky, sort of like a croissant, but much greasier. The process for making You Tiao is kind of neat. First, you roll out the dough into a long ribbon, about the width and length of a sash. After it's rolled out to your liking, you fold it over in two (top to bottom) and then slice it width-wise into strips about the size of a harmonica. The only thing left is to throw it into the oil and let it soak in those fatty juices for a while, and then you have your You Tiao. You Tiao is often eaten with a bowl of Dou Jiang (豆漿), or soy milk, mixed with ingredients such as pickled vegetables (for a more savory version), sugar (for a sweeter version), or small bits of You Tiao. You Tiao is a pretty common breakfast in Shanghai, so if you want to try it out, make sure you look for it (all around the city) before 10:00 or 11:00.

You Tiao with Dou Jiang

After the You Tiao, we tried several other local dishes including Ci Fan Gao (粢饭糕) (fried rice patties), Cong You Ban Mian (葱油拌面) (scallion oil mixed noodles), Xiao Long Bao (小笼包) (soup dumplings), and Cong You Bing (葱油饼) (scallion pancakes). The standouts for me were the Xiao Long Bao and the Cong You Bing. Xiao Long Bao are basically steamed dumplings filled with pork and a bit of soup. Generally you dip them in vinegar before you eat them. Each time you bite into one, the soup bursts out of the dumpling into your mouth, coating your tongue with the juices. It's really fabulous. 

So much flavor in such a small package.

Much of the appeal for me of the Cong You Bing was the character of the particular shop where we bought it. Fiona tells me that it's the best place for Cong You Bing in the city, and the line outside certainly backed up that claim. The guy running the shop is an older gentleman who was apparently born with a hunchback and--due to the prevailing cultural atmosphere at the time--was sent to live with his uncle. He has run this shop by himself for many years. He moves a little bit slowly, but he makes excellent food. Cong You Bing is made of dough (with some lard in it) that is stuffed with scallions and a little bit of pork. The dough patties are fried on a grill, flattened with an iron, crisped by a fire, and then served. The owner of the shop has a complex one-man-assembly line going; at any given moment there are probably a few of the Cong You Bing in each stage of the process.

That griddle where the Cong You Bing are frying slides out (towards the camera) on those rails so that he can access the fire in the steel drum below. Around the rim of the steel drum are some other Cong You Bing being crisped by the fire.

The final product is delicious. It's greasy, flaky, and savory. One bite tells you that it's great for your taste buds, but not so much for your heart. Nonetheless, it's so good that several people in line told us they eat them every day.

The finished product.

So that's about that for Shanghai. I'll be returning to this enormous city later on my trip (I'm flying back out of Shanghai), so there may be more to come. In the meantime, I'm in Suzhou enjoying the street food here. Hopefully I'll be posting more soon. Until then, be well and eat well.

And I'm Off!

The time has come! In just a few short minutes, I will be on my way to the DC Metro, to DCA, to JFK, and finally to Shanghai. Am I ready? I don't know. Time will tell, I suppose. In any case, check back in the next week or so for updates! See you soon, friends.

Visa Issues Resolved

Five days before Christmas, I walked into the Chinese visa office in DC feeling good, ready to pick up my visa.  An hour later, I walked out in a fog of frustration and confusion, with a thousand whirling dervishes of thought coursing through my skull. To make a long story short, I had been granted a visa, but not the one I had requested. When I applied, I requested a multiple-entry visa with 60 days per entry. Instead, I received a single-entry visa good for 60 days. There are two main troubles here. First and foremost, if you go from mainland China to Hong Kong or Macau and then try to get back on the mainland, that counts as an additional entry. With a single-entry visa, then, you would have to apply for a whole new visa while in Hong Kong or Macau, which is both costly and time-consuming. The second issue is that my trip, as a whole, is 90 days. So, with my single-entry 60-day visa, I was left with three obvious options: 1) Leave Hong Kong and Macau out of my journey and book entirely and apply for a visa extension while in China; 2) Include Hong Kong and Macau and have to apply and pay for a new visa each time I returned to the mainland; or 3) Reapply here in the states and hope to get a multiple-entry visa this time around (at the risk of paying for a new visa and ending up right where I started). Though all of the options were pretty unappealing, Option 3 seemed the least offensive of the bunch. I contacted the China Visa Service Center, and they were able to help me reapply for a visa. I just received it yesterday, and all is well--I now have a multiple-entry visa good for 60 days per entry, just like I wanted. Whew! Just in the nick of time. Now I just need to pack before Wednesday...

The Life of a Street Food Vendor

Tricia Wang, a self-described "ethnographer, sociologist, and researcher" currently living, working, and studying in China, spent three days this past summer living and working with a migrant family in Wuhan as they pursued a street food vending opportunity. The results of her visit, engagingly written up on her website, were eye-opening. Tourists passing through a city eating the street food don't often have the opportunity to learn about the lives of the vendors they frequent. In this case, the vendors were unlicensed and new to the city. Their main customers were the workers at a construction site. All in all, this means their situation is likely to be different from the established vendors that you're more likely to come across as a tourist. Nonetheless, their experiences are worth knowing. They work a grueling schedule, make barely enough to live on (if they even make that much), live in squalid conditions, and work in constant fear of the police. Because they don't have a lot of seed money, they make do with broken-down equipment (see the picture below of the author pushing the battery-powered bicycle that didn't always work) and a non-ideal system of transporting the food to the selling site, which causes much of the food to be spilled or ruined before they even get to the construction site.

The author pushing one of the family's two electric bicycles

It's sobering to be reminded of the living and working conditions of the people who serve the food we enjoy so much (as well as the sanitary conditions of the food preparation itself). As I said above, this is not the story of all street food vendors, but the migrant culture is absolutely a part of modern China, for better or worse. The more we know about their stories, the better chance there is to improve their situations. I'd encourage anybody interested in modern China, in street food, or just in humanity in general to read Ms. Wang's account of her experiences with this family.

Asian Food vs. Western Food

Though it presents all sorts of ancillary problems, sometimes it's useful to deal in huge, sweeping generalizations. A study recently published in Nature found good use for these sorts of generalizations when it explored why Western food and Asian food taste so different (see Gizmodo for a summary of the study in less technical language). Of course "Western food" and "Asian food" are extremely loose terms that gloss over the incredibly rich diversity within these hemispheric regions, but for the purposes of this study it's a fair enough distinction--these regions' foods do tend to taste fundamentally different.

Now, I was a philosophy major--I haven't read a lot of scientific studies--but as I understand it, it appears that the main difference between the culinary styles is that Western food tends to pair ingredients that share flavor compounds (the ingredients of the ingredients), whereas Asian foods typically avoid matching ingredients with overlapping flavor compounds. For the visual learners out there interested in knowing more about how these flavor compounds connect, here's an entertainingly dense chart showing how different foods relate:

Who knew that Jamaican Rum and Parmesan Cheese shared flavor compounds?

This research apparently flies in the face of some of the recent ideas about chemistry-informed cooking that suggest using seemingly unpairable ingredients (e.g. chocolate and blue cheese) because they share flavor compounds. Obviously--as several millennia of Asian cuisine can attest--this approach is not the only way to develop interesting dishes. 

Anyway, I was glad to come across this study (thanks, Rachel!). It's a great reminder that there is no one way to make good food. The world is full of different ways to please our tongues and bellies, and for that I am grateful.

Street Food Documentary

Here's a neat documentary created and published by CET Academic Programs about street food in Beijing:

The video starts with some man-on-the-street interviews asking folks some questions about street food in China, including questions about the health and provenance of the food. Unsurprisingly, most people enjoy the food but are skeptical about the quality of the ingredients. The video creators took it upon themselves to talk to some vendors about where they got their supplies, and then they went to the market to talk to the suppliers. I was pleased (as I'm sure you will be) to hear their conclusion (around 8:37 in the video):

"We thought that visiting Xing Fa Di would unearth some underworld of street food mayhem. We thought the market would be a mess of chemically treated vegetables and rotting meat, but it wasn't. Contrary to popular belief the vegetables were clean and the meat was fresh.  It's true, not every street vendor is as picky about buying ingredients as the vendors we talked with.  But, Beijing street food is more or less clean." (Emphasis mine.)

As regular readers will know, this has been my experience, too. There's no doubt that unscrupulous vendors are out there deceiving people about the quality of ingredients, lying about what they are feeding customers, using gutter oil, or otherwise harming consumers, but these nefarious nogoodniks are the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, if you use common sense you will be fine.

This documentary is an interesting look at a side of Chinese street food that we don't often see; it is definitely worth a watch. Great thanks to CET Academic Studies (and CET China Studies in particular) for creating this video and for their permission to share it here. Keep up the good work, CET!

Street Food on The Bitten Word

Earlier this evening I came across a great food blog. The couple who write it live in DC (like me!) and primarily focus their energies on the foods they prepare themselves. I'm not much of a cook myself, but I like to eat good food and some of their sample pictures had me champing at the bit. What really caught my eye, though, were their two posts about their recent trip to China, particularly the one entitled "The Wackiest Foods We Encountered in China." In it, they recap some of the more adventurous items they came across, whether or not they actually tried them. Naturally, many of these "wacky" foods were street foods. Their pictures are lovely and do a terrific job of conveying the rich variety of street foods (and foods in general) in China. With their permission, here are some highlights:

Insects

(Credit: www.thebittenword.com) 

 Whole Pigeons

(Credit: www.thebittenword.com) 

 Sheep Penis

(Credit: www.thebittenword.com) 

 Stinky Tofu

(Credit: www.thebittenword.com) 

Visit their blog for more great shots of great food.