Food Tube

Scorpions

2008-04-02T15:16:48Z

Food - Deep-fried scorpions

Location - Wangfujing night market, Beijing

I've just spent six months in Beijing and trying the weird food at the night market seems to be the done thing, for tourists at least. Locals and resident foreigners avoid the place, as it's fair to say that it's an inauthentic, overexpensive tourist trap. Still, as a fan of unusual food you can't help but like the place. Whatever government official set the place up knew what he was doing. About thirty identical stalls stretch down one side of the road toward the forbidden city, each with it's own selection of snacks. Many are variations on the fried noodles and roujiamo themes, but a fair few also have the kind of thing I'm more interested in.
One stall in particular had a nice selection of not-usually-considered-edible wildlife on skewers, some of it still alive.

There were a few that didn't seem particularly special, and a few things I'd tried before, but the scorpions looked interesting.

This friendly chap made a good performnce out of skewering and deep-frying poisonous insects. I wonder how you get a job like that.Do you have to have some kind of certificate? Is there a training course?

After the frying it looked much the same - that is, not something you'd be particularly keen on puttng in your mouth. Scorpions are poisonous aren't they? And I'm afraid of them aren't I?
Ah well, I've put worse in there.

First impressions were not bad at all. A bit like fried chicken, with a thin, insect-y skin. Might as well finish it off.

It didn't even have a bad aftertaste. The tail didn't look like it was supposed to be eaten, so I left that out.
All-in-all fried scorpion is just a fairly pleasant oily street snack, if a bit of a expensive one. I'm assured that Chinese people don't really eat scorpions, they're just for tourists, but I don't see why not. If you can stomach the silkworms then why not these?

Finally today we have a first for foodtube, a youtube video.

As you can see, nothing wrong with eating scorpions.
I'm off to Vietnam this month, so expect a few more unusual eats to come.

Foodtube Christmas dinner (sort of) - Bamboo Rat

2007-12-18T18:05:49Z

Colourful Chinese name: Bamboo rat

What it really is: Stir-fried dried rat bits with vegetables

Location: Yangshuo, Guangxi, China

Ok, so I've been away for quite a while. My summer was mainly in the UK, a country that for all its charms has fairly squeamish health and safety laws in regards to restaurants. Then in September I moved back to China, but have been too lazy to update this for the last three months or so. It doesn't help that Livejournal has been blocked by the government while I've been away, making updating this a bit of a hassle. In addition to this a little research has led me to the inescapable fact that I'm not the first person with this idea or even the tenth. I caught a few episodes of something called "Cooking in the Danger Zone" too, a programme that does this all better than I realistically could, and was considering letting it quietly die.
Then last week I found a few photos from when I was travelling around China in the spring and thought you people would 'enjoy' them.
I was in Yangshuo, one of the most beautiful places in the world. If you don't believe me then go and look it up, it really is. I wasn't appreciating it too much though. A few days earlier in the neighbouring city of Guilin I'd made the mistake of going into a suspiciously cheap and customer-free restaurant, followed by the greater mistake of eating the luke-warm bowl of food they brought me a minute after I arrived. For the next three days (which included a 6-hour boat journey) I was as sick as I can ever remember being, to the point that I imagined I had caught hepatitis. The cure was a packet of antibiotics I bought from a stall in the street. Shouldn't really have done that, but desperate times and all that.
To make things even worse I'd decided, mainly through bloody-minded ginger pride, to grow a ridiculous goatee.

Anyway, to cut a long story a little shorter, I had soon recovered enough to order the dish called "Bamboo Rat" from the hostel restaurant menu. Call it a test of my digestive system.

As usual with dishes like this it had been cut up into chunks and stir fried with garlic leaves, something that makes almost anything palatable. I love those garlic leaves. Why can't we get around to eating those in Chinese restaurant at home instead of those nasty flavourless water chestnuts?
I went ahead and took a bite.

The first impression was mainly that it simply wasn't very nice. The rat meat had been dried, and this just boosted the intensity of the flavour. For some meats this is a fine idea, but not for rat. Not in any way. The dryness also meant there was more rat-meat on the plate than anticipated, and each piece would take a bit of chewing - chewing that brought out that weird, pungent, fermented flavour.
Oh, and what's that..?

Can you guess what it is yet?
Yes, nothing's been wasted from these vermin (at least, not yet)

As I've said before, there's not much meat on a foot. The only reason for their inclusion in a dish (aside from the obvious one of fucking with the tourists) would be to give your customers something to play with, chew on and spit out. Crunching on bones is a bit much for human teeth.
Still, I couldn't resist having this photo taken.

Jesus, what an utter twat I look.
Still, better to look a twat than have to munch through that whole plateful. Nicely presented and all, but ultimately inedible. Aside from ten or so bites (and the ever-tasty garlic leaves) the dish was left for the dog, who should probably have eaten it in the first place.

Snake Soup

2007-02-18T15:46:26Z

What it is: Snake Soup

Location: Backstreet restaurant, Gongbei

I haven't posted a review for a while, and snake seemed to be the obvious last thing to try before I leave this city next week. A friend told me there was a restaurant specializing in Snakes in the Macau-bordering city area of Gongbei. I went there on Chinese New Year's Eve, to find most of the shops and restaurants boarded up or shuttered down. It took a good half hour of wandering before I found one that was open. Fortunately it turned out to be the one I was looking for.

Outside there were cages full of snakes.

These are bred in snake farms in the next province and shipped down in boxes. I asked how much it was for a big snake. It was 750 yuen, which works out at about 50 of our British pounds, way out of my price range. Smaller snakes were available for as little as 300 yuen, still too much for me. A little bargaining later he agreed to make a little snake soup for 25.
It came in a couple of minutes.

It looked like a normal Cantonese-style soup, only perhaps a little thicker than usual. The cloudy colour you can see is, I think, glutinous rice. I took a sip.

It din't really taste of much at all - just a plain vegetable stock broth, but as thick as a "western" soup and with a very slight spicy heat.
The solid contents were shredded onions, carrots, red cabbage and snake.

The bits of snake were fairly small, but recognisable as reptilian as the skin remained intact on each piece.

I didn't know snake skin was edible, but it does seem to make sense. It smelled perfectly normal. I felt no hesitation in tucking in.

The bits of snake were fairly long, and some required sucking in, like a thick piece of pasta.

I hate to be finally saying this, but it really did taste like chicken. The texture was fairly similar too, though perhaps a little more chewy and gristly. Not like a particularly tasty chicken either. The skin was even like a roast chicken's. There was a little chewing involved, but otherwise there was no difficulty in finishing off the bowl.

Apparently snake is the most healthy meat of all, containing only omega-3 oils. This fact is perhaps some consolation for paying 25 yuen for a small bowl of not particularly interesting soup.
At this point the tables were being packed up and we were being bothered by a prostitute, so we paid up, made our excuses and left.

Living fungus milk

2006-12-21T15:20:33Z

Product name - Living Fungus Milk

Real contents - Unknown

Found at - Supermarket

I was shopping at an upmarket Japanese supermarket called "Jusco" when I found this carton. It was fairly expensive, but I had to investigate it. The picture seemed to indicate that "living fungus milk" is a traditional English foxhunting drink. Having lived in England for 22 years or so I didn't recall ever having heard of it, but then again I've never been to a hunt and who knows what crazy stuff goes on there?
I still had my doubts that there really was such a thing as "living fungus milk" but the label was very clear on this point:

I opened the carton and poured the contents into a plastic receptacle. On first glance it looked like... well... milk. Just ordinary milk. Maybe quite thickly textured milk, but still milk.

Drinking it didn't seem like much of a challenge. It smelled like watery yoghurt, utterly inoffensive and not particularly interesting.

It tasted exactly like an unflavoured yoghurt drink and not like any kind of fungus. There were no bits of mushroom in it and nothing unusual to report at all.
The back of the carton provided an explanation. Evidently a translation expert somewhere doesn't understand the difference between fungus and bacteria.

Tasty Crispy Silkworm

2006-11-30T13:53:08Z

Appealing Chinese name - "tasty crispy silkworm"

What it really is - deep fried silkworm pupae

Location - posh Beijing restaurant.

This week I went to one of the best restaurants in town to try one of the most visually appealing things on the menu.
This "Northern" Chinese restaurant is near a friend's house and seems ridiculously opulent. There are a trained team of about ten girls in traditional dresses whose job it is to say hello to you as you walk in the entrance and toward the stairs. If you're lucky you can arrive while they are doing their warm-up chants and feel like an emperor in a film. Here it is;

The food here is generally excellent, but there's one menu item that's always interested me more than the others - "tasty crispy silkworm". The picture in the menu looked genuinely appealing, if a little on the large side, portion-wise.
Before I came to China I was unaware that silkworms were edible, let alone served at fancy restaurants like this one, but here they are.

Before I start the review perhaps I'd better remind everyone that silkworms are not actually worms but the pupae of moths. If somebody wanted to make a shirt out of the things they would boil the pupae in water for five minutes and wind out the strands of fibre. For some reason somebody thought it would be better to deep fry them instead and serve them up as food.

I don't have any problem with eating pupae, probably because they look a great deal more like a plant than an animal. If I was being presented with the caterpillars or the moths I might think twice about putting them into my mouth, but when they arrived these looked not particularly insect-like, but more like some delicious golden-brown vegetable.

On the side there was a small saucer of sesame seeds and salt, presumably for dipping.
The first thing I noticed was the smell. It wasn't good. Something like burned hair, which, in a sense, it was. The smell was pervasive and lingering. I didn't like it at all.

Still, better dig in. The first chopstick contact with the pupae was surprising in its lack of crispyness. While the outer shell itself was quite hard the object as a whole bent quite easily.

The obvious thing to do was to dip it into the sesame salt. Sesame and salt both taste good, no risk there surely?

It stuck to the outer shell very well. The dish had at least been designed by somebody who understood textures.

This boded well for the first bite. I raised it to my lips and bit away a third of the thing.

It wasn't bad. As expected the taste was mainly sesame salt, but the shell was nicely chewy and the inside part was textured in quite a pleasant way - a little like fibery bean-curd. There actually wasn't that much to see inside, just a few wispy fibres.

The shell required a fair bit of chewing, but did eventually dissolve away. Altogether the first taste wasn't bad, though I could still smell burnt hair.

A second bite took me down to the base of the thing, where there was a harder, larger bit of shell. I'd like to call it a head, but I don't think it really is one.

This bite was much the same as the first one, but slightly better as there was less shell to chew. There really wasn't anything particularly bad about either the taste or the texture, but nothing particularly satisfying either.
Inside looked a bit strange this time, though.

As you can see there was a black bit in the centre. I'm not sure what this is and brief research yields no answers. I suppose this must be the moth that could have been.
There was only the end-piece with the "head shell" left. I popped this into my mouth and began to chew.

But this bit wasn't quite the same. After about thirty seconds it became clear that there were chewy bits that would never become swallowable. As much as I chewed they pieces refused to break-up. Whether this was the "head shell" or the black bit inside wasn't really clear.

Finally I managed to swallow it. Overall I managed to eat four of the things before the smell started to overpower me. It seemed a bit of a waste, but eventually we had to have the dish taken away from the table as it became impossible to eat anything else. Then for the remainder of the day I could still somehow smell it, and it just kept getting less and less pleasant.
These are some of the reasons I won't be eating silkworms again.

Picture hosting and questions.

2006-11-20T08:21:27Z

No entry this week as I'm a bit busy. Back in business next week. In the meantime a couple of things if anyone can be bothered answering.

First I'd like to ask if anyone has any questions for me about this project in general, as I'm making my user-info page a bit better and am not sure what to write about. I'll credit questions I put up, if they're good.

Secondly I'm getting a bit concerned about my picture hosting - the last entry got a lot more hits than I ever expected and all I have is a free photobucket account. I'm not sure what the maximum amount of times a picture can be linked before it gets replaced by a marker is but I may well be about to hit it. Anyone have any advice on this? Bear in mind I have operate from an internet cafe and have no money on my British debit card.

Good Doggy

2006-11-06T15:50:25Z

Unusually straightforward Chinese name - "dog meat hotpot"

What it really is - a dog meat hotpot

Location - Backstreet restaurant

Everyone knows how English people are sentimental about dogs. Given the choice to either contribute to a charity for the homeless or to one for homeless dogs, a significant majority of the public opted for the latter. The idea of eating them seems to actually offend people who never think twice about eating other meat. During the 2002 world cup people actually went over to Seoul to protest about it.
I don't see anyone protesting about the eating of bacon, though pigs seem to be in every way more intelligent than dogs. Besides that I've never been attacked, threatened or snapped at by a pig.
So when I met up with my ex-girlfriend last week and she mentioned a place that served dog meat I insisted that she take me there so I could try it. The restaurant was tiny and down a series of backstreets. Here it is, and here she is:

As you can see, it wasn't anywhere near as classy as the previous restaurant. When I first came to China I'd have probably even been scared of eating here, but now I've come to love these places. The prices are cheaper, the staff friendlier and the food often just as good or even better.
By the time the food had come we were joined by various acquaintances of my ex. They ordered a very expensive, very bland fish. Then the dog hotpot arrived. As with the duck parts there was an oil-lamp fire underneath, and a covered container on top.

After a couple of minutes the top was taken off to reveal the meaty hotpot goodness. Besides the meat itself there were big chunks of ginger and nothing else, no vegetables, no rice. When you're eating a carnivore you might as well dispense with garnish.

There was a side-dish, though - a very small saucer which contained some fermented tofu. Fermented tofu is the Chinese equivalent of blue cheese - it smells even stronger and more sock-like than a ripe gorgonzola. The taste is also surprisingly similar. Most people have trouble getting past the smell. I mashed it up, took a bit of dog meat, and dipped.

I put a little into my mouth and chewed. The first flavour was the fermented tofu, sour, pungent, cheesy and delicious.

The meat itself was pretty good. The texture was like beef, but not quite as tough, and quickly softening. The flavour, under the tofu, was surprisingly mild. I'd been told to expect a strong, bitter taste, but it just wasn't there. It was just like eating a nice piece of beef, but leaner and more tender, and with more small bones.

There was even a segment of tail in the pot. It had been skinned and cooked for a while, but I just wasn't really up for trying that yet, so the ex ate it instead.

She was loving it.

The more I ate the dog hotpot the better it got. The ginger in the sauce complimented the meat perfectly. I've never really been a fan of really red meat - it's always seemed to me to be too chewy and gristly to be really enjoyable. The dog meat was just generally nicer. The meat came right off the bone and tasted very good - mild, sweet and delicious. The ex and I polished it off in no time.

Because there were so many smaller bones in the pot, the leftovers ended up filling up a bowl. The fermented tofu had to be rationed - don't know how I ever thought twice about eating it. There was a stray dog wandering about - I asked the ex whether she thought it would eat the bones if we gave it some. She thought it would know, somehow. I thought she had some very strange ideas. Don't worry, we didn't give it any.

So, all in all, dog hotpot is the heavily recommended. Don't listen to people who say it is poisonous - that's just the liver. Don't listen to the people who say it tastes foul, they are evidently just eating the wrong dog. Don't listen to people who make jokes about unidentified meat in low-priced restaurants being dog, either. It's one of the more expensive meats and if you serve it you'd want to advertise the fact.

Update: 10/1/2007

Since I wrote this a couple of months ago there have been more comments than I can deal with. Since I haven't the time or the inclination to reply to all of them here are some further points:

Vegetarians vs vegetarian-haters - I choose to eat meat, some people choose not to. This is all fair and good. Any further arguments are unneccecary, surely?

People don't really normally eat dog - Around here they certainly do. I see dogs hanging up in butchers' windows pretty much every day.

Dogs are treated cruelly - This is a tricky one, and a lot more complex than at first sight. The main problem here is getting independent information. There are a fair few sites on the internet with grisly details but these seem to all start with the premise that 'eating dog is wrong' and work from there. Aside from this they are all based on the Korean dog trade - I'm a long way from Korea and Cantonese food is as different as, to take an example, Italian food is from Scandinavian. This doesn't mean they are treated well, of course, just that it is near impossible to say. Local friends have re-assured me that many of the horror stories don't apply down here, but until I know more I won't be eating dog again.

Personal insults - If you have something to say I'd be a lot more willing to listen to it if you stay calm and don't resort to name-calling.

foodtube @ 2006-10-27T17:30:00

2006-10-27T10:05:35Z

Slightly misleading Chinese name - "three duck parts"

What it really is - duck tongues, feet and shoulders in hot sauce

Location - Hunan restaurant

Keeping up to the unusualness levels of last week's snack seemed unfeasible, so this week I made a decision to eat something a little more palatable. This Hunan restaurant looked like a fairly safe bet:

Inside, the restaurant was immaculate and utterly deserted. Chinese people just don't eat at 4.30pm. The standout item on the menu was "three duck parts." After eating the embryonic version there would surely be no problem eating the less palatable parts of the adult bird, right?
The food arrived in the usual quick time - first a base with an oil lamp inside, then the dish itself.

As you can see, there were three parts inside - tongue, webbed foot and shoulder. All were cooked in the Hunan style - that means lots of spices and a little oily but doesn't make your tongue numb. There were also some hot peppers, but I've made the mistake of biting into them before and I'm not about to repeat it.
First I thought I'd go for a tongue.

The only way to hold it seemed to be at the base. To be perfectly frank I was previously unaware that ducks even had tongues. I'm fairly sure I'd never even thought about it. But they do, and they are thin and for some reason triangular. The two other parts seemed to be entirely cartilage, so they might have been some sort of tongue support. Ah well, here goes.

It wasn't very nice. The outside part, under the hot sauce coating, was unpleasantly soft and slimy, the texture of boiled mucus. At the centre was a harder, rubbery bit made from very thin cartilage. It was not in any way edible. Finishing off one, I managed to get myself to eat a second. It was, if possible, worse.

The sauce was genuinely very hot. I'm used to a high level of spiciness, but this was serious enough to make me have to wash my lips.
Leaving aside the "shoulder" which didn't appear to feature any meat whatsoever, I picked out a foot. It looked something like this:

The important difference between chicken feet and duck feet is that ducks have to swim and so therefore have webbing. This is what a webbed bird foot looks like when it's been boiled in hot sauce for twenty minutes:

On one hand not particularly pleasant looking, on the other at least presenteing a good bitesworth of flesh with no small bones or gristle in the way. It was almost appetising.

The taste was much the same - not unpleasantly textured like the tongue but nevertheless not presenting what I could describe either as a "meal" or a "delicacy" but instead the kind of thing you may be forced to eat in a famine when you've finished off all the meat and vegetables. Bird feet aren't really a problem any more, but I just don't really see the attraction. The only thing that made it actually unpleasant was the sauce, now making my eyes water and forcing me to wash my lips - I suppose my tolerance of chilli is not as high as I'd thought.
Overall, the feet were mediocre, the shoulder not containing anything edible, the tongue near revolting, and the sauce unbearably spicy (in Indian terms a vindaloo or a phall.)
This meal is not recommended.

Balut

2006-10-17T10:36:32Z

Name - "balut"

What it really is - boiled duck foetus

Location - Samantha's house, Manila, Philippines

On a trip to Manila in May this year I was invited to try something called "Balut". I'd seen it advertised on home-made signs at the side of the road and in shopping centres. Samantha, who took these pictures, told me what it was - a boiled fertilised duck egg, almost ready to hatch.

There's an explanation and better photos at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balut.

I had to try it.
A few eggs were fetched from the nearest stall along with a small bag of rock salt and instructions to "eat them while they're hot"

They looked fairly innocuous on the outside, of course. The first task was to get the egg open, which was done in the usual boiled-egg-with-soldiers manner. Instead of a boiled egg there was a reservoir of dark brown liquid

...which I had to suck out...

It tasted fairly strange - a little like chicken stock, but not really definitively edible. I would have made more notes on this part, but I was thinking too much about what was to come.
The shell was very thick, like a shell. I cracked it open with the spoon and with moderate difficulty. After a good peeling I was left with this -

It looked a bit like a brain - a yellow, eggy, duck brain, with smaller brown bits. It's a shame the picture here isn't clear enough to make out the features clearly, but it had a little head with a little yellow beak poking out.
I thought I'd start with the other, non-beaky, side.

I had expected it to taste a bit like scrambled egg, but it didn't. Even with a bit of salt it was deeply strange. The development of the duck had changed the chemical composition of the yolk somehow. It was around a second after it went into my mouth that I realised that I could feel something strangely textured against my tongue. Feather. For a second I gagged, then I swallowed quickly. It wasn't that bad.

Looking down I realised I'd accidentally eaten a good amount of the duck itself and not even noticed. The body had been so soft that I'd munched through a fair amount of feather and bone without realising.
I let myself get the retching out of the way, took a deep breath and went for the head.

It was a bit more chewy and feathery. I was more relieved than disappointed to find that I couldn't distinguish beak from yolk in the mix.

And then it was all gone, and much the same. Under the fleshy part there was a large hard, rubbery part that I was told not to bother eating, so I didn't. I passed on the second egg - sometimes you can have just too much of a good thing. All in all it wasn't nearly as revolting as I'd been warned, just a little strange-tasting and surprisingly textured - somewhere between dry and sticky. I'd been told that the smell was revolting too, but it didn't offend me.
Next time I try it I'll take off all the yolk so I can just pop the duck foetus into my mouth. Should be fun.

Field Chicken

2006-10-07T10:25:00Z

Misleading Chinese name - "field chicken"

What they really are - frogs. Lots of frogs.

Location - Cheers restaurant

I often go to this semi-outdoor barbecue restaurant to eat more normal food, drink cheap beer and the like.

To order food here you generally go up to the entrance and pick out what you want. Generally this means various meat and vegetables on skewers, tofu, corn-on-the-cob, chicken feet, etc. One day, though, I looked down and saw this-

The bottom section contains snakes, which I may come back to at some later date. In the top section you can see a few big miserable-looking frogs. A brief inquiry revealed that these weren't intended to be put on the barbecue but instead to be prepared in the kitchen in some way. Sounded good.
About twenty minutes later the cooked version arrived.

It didn't look bad at all, and the smell was promising. There did seem to be substantially more frog there than I had expected - at least six of the creatures, maybe even more.
Still, bon apetit.

It tasted, as expected, a bit like chicken. It didn't exactly have the stringy texture of chicken meat, though - more rubbery, like biting into a mushroom.

The sauce was actually pretty nice, a subtle ginger, red-vinegar and soy concoction that suited the meat and the vegetables. In fact, the whole thing was generally a normal-tasting decent stir-fry. It didn't seem off-putting at all that I was sucking bits of frog-meat off frog-bones.

Soon I'd started to just generally enjoy it, and polished it off fairly quicky. I left the cucumber on the side. Now that is disgusting.

Apart from the cucumber there was a decent platesworth of frog remains - bones, gristle and the like. It didn't look very nice, really.

Still, it was a good meal which I'd be happy to eat again any time.
Nothing wrong with field chickens.

Phoenix Claws

2006-09-26T09:01:14Z

Misleading Chinese name - "phoenix claws"

What they really are - chicken feet boiled in vinegar

Location - Sichuan restaurant

Phoenix claws are not a delicacy because Chinese people eat them all the time. They eat so many that shiploads are imported from Canada to meet the demand.
As a start they seemed fairly unthreatening. It was mid-day, and I had just woken up with a particularly bad hangover after a few hours sleep. Probably not the best time.

Getting a hold of the things with my chopsticks proved a little hard. The water and the vinegar had given them a slippery, almost slimy texture. Using my fingers seemed to be easier.

The main edible portion was the pad at the base of the foot. Biting that off seemed to be the way to go. Once it was in my mouth things didn't improve. It was just a very thick bit of lightly boiled chicken skin, but very rubbery indeed and in no way interesting to eat. The flavour, if there was one, was diluted vinegar.

Once I'd finished the pad I started on the toes, which were almost entirely bone and gristle, with a thin coating of very marginally better boiled skin. It took me a few minutes to finish that off.

All in all a bit boring and not particularly nice. There were a few more left in the bowl but I didn't really feel like finishing them.
Candy and Amanda stuck to noodles, I don't blame them-