Taiwan food post: lunches
I was considering different ways of compiling the food posts for my Youbike trip through Taiwan - for instance splitting snacks/小吃 and "full" meals - but one of the reasons why i do these posts is so that i can remember the arc of my journey. To that end, there is something satisfying about taking chronological slices that feature at least one dish per day.
This isn't exactly a lunch post, because several days i either skipped lunch or had a late snack only a few hours before dinner, but it's a good snapshot of the kind of food i ate while actively on the road - places that i stumbled upon by accident or ended up at in desperation while i was in the process of going somewhere else.
Now, where i should open this post is with the 葱抓餅 spring onion pancake that i got in Taoyuan, just after i had spent an hour hiding from the torrential rain and then wrestled the bike up the hill into a suburb with a few shops and hotels. However the photo didn't come out very well, and i've posted many of them before so eh. I will say, though, this small street vendor was the only place i went to in the whole trip where they rocked hard with the 九層塔 "nine layer pagoda" aka Thai basil.
When i was in Taiwan 5 years ago i remember being surprised that this "nine layer pagoda" (isn't it a delightful name?) was used so much in the local cuisine, because i had never really associated basil with "Chinese" food. After visiting China i realized that in China it's hardly used at all. But now i have been back in Taiwan for a year i can say it isn't really ubiquitous here either. It seems to feature mostly in fried snacks, among which 葱油餅 crispy/oily spring onion pancake and 葱抓餅 stretchy/less-oily spring onion pancake. The one from the vendor in Taoyuan came folded over like a taco packed with basil and chili sauce and it was divine. The vendor was nice too, offering me a stool next to her daughter in the cooking tent after seeing how bedraggled i was.
Above is the first surprise lunch i found on the road, heading south from Taoyuan and into Hsinchu county. I can't remember exactly where i got it, but i do remember it was just before i turned off to head to the coast. I was on the edge of a small town, and instead of heading through the center, i took a shortcut through the paddies that led to a shabby diner that i probably wouldn't even have noticed was there if i hadn't seen a restaurant icon on Google Maps. The joint was my usual kind of place - faded sign, 3 or 4 tables, open to the outside, nothing over 150NTD (~US$5). The 老闆 lǎo bǎn (boss) was relaxing on a chair in the back listening to the radio, and the kitchen/prep area at the front was looking fairly bare.
I knew there wasn't going to be any more food for a while, so i asked what she had. 飯買完了 "rice sold out", she said. I saw some stuff on the menu printed on the wall, but it seemed more like a list of the sorts of things in the general genre of cookery (solidly Taiwanese), and not so much a list of what was actually available. So i just asked for a bowl of whatever noodle. What i got was a big bowl of soup with yellow noodles and cleavered-up hunks of bone-in chicken. Don't like meat, definitely don't like bone-in, but i have to admit it was a pretty good soup. Reminded me of the kind of stuff i ate in Laos. Simple, but flavorful.
Next shot is from the next day, as i continued down the coastal greenways. I got to one village on the Miaoli coast which seemed like a minor tourist destination, probably due to the nearby 媽祖 Mazu temple.
Let's talk about Taiwanese folk religion. Taiwanese folk religion is very much like Chinese folk religion, and probably many other folk religions from around the world going back to antiquity. People worship their ancestors, both direct ancestors like their great-grandparents and cultural ancestors that include various legendary figures of the past. There are countless gods and spirits and various divine entities, some of which are more popular than others, but none of them are really in conflict with each other. People believe in whichever ones they want to believe in. And then they burn stuff. Not just joss sticks but also joss paper aka spirit money. They toss the paper into one of the little braziers that sprout from sidewalks all over Taiwan, and their offering burns away, sending it to the land of the gods and the ghosts.
I have say that it comes across as eminently reasonable, much more so than mainstream organized religions. Of course you should venerate your ancestors - they are where you came from, after all. Of course you should be able to believe in any god you like - why try to control where other people get their comfort? And when you bring gifts to these invisible entities that you believe in, of course you should burn those gifts, so that they disappear and become invisible too. It feels weirdly consistent.
The neat thing about folk religions in East Asia is that they never got crushed by Christianity or Islam. When Daoism came along, when Buddhism came along, those religions were polytheistic too, so people could keep on believing what they already did before and sprinkle some of the new belief on top. Mix and match, it's all good. Taiwan today is what modern day Italy or Greece or Egypt or Iraq might have looked like if Jesus hadn't come along to fuck it all up.
One of the most popular gods in Taiwan is a lady called 媽祖 Mazu ("ancestral mother") or 天上聖母 ("holy mother in heaven"). She was a woman who lived in coastal Fujian over 1000 years ago. She became a shaman who performed miracles like calming the seas, bringing rain when it was needed, healing the sick and so on. She never married, died young, and is now something like a patron saint not just for fishermen and sailors but many people with Hoklo ancestry, which means about 70% of modern Taiwan. Some of the biggest and most elaborate non-Daoist and non-Buddhist temples in Taiwan are for Mazu. There are huge statues of her that always make me happy to see because it's rare that women get to be the stars of the show in religion.
Anyway, it was behind a Mazu temple where i stopped for some vegetarian food. Temples in Taiwan usually have a bunch of street vendors or small restaurants around them, and guaranteed one of them will always be vegetarian. The dish i got was actually a dish from northern China called 炸醬麵 zhajiangmian, which in its original form is ground pork cooked in soy sauce on dry noodle, the end. The vegetarian version just switch the pork out with tofu. It's a bland dish to start with, which makes the Taiwanese vegetarian version (no garlic!) not significantly blander than it already was. This particular version also had 地瓜葉 sweet potato greens but was still fundamentally bland. And salty. Not great. But it filled my stomach.
The better thing on the table was the blocks of 千葉豆腐 thousand "leaf" (layer) tofu, which is a springy and spongy and fun-to-eat version of tofu, which the laoban had served with "nine layer pagoda" basil and a sweet and sour sauce, which she then urged me to splash a bunch of her homemade chili sauce on top of too. It was really fantastic.
Alright let's move things along. I also stopped somewhere along the way to get a 剉冰 which is yet another one of these infuriating words they use in Taiwan that does not match the expected pronunciation. 剉冰 should be pronounced cuò bīng in Mandarin, but actually you pronounce it something like "tsua bing", which is the Hokkien pronunciation. What it means in Hokkien is (i presume) shaved ice. (In Chinese Mandarin shaved ice is 刨冰 bào bīng.) And you guys, when you are sunburnt to hell and have spent hours cycling in 35+ degree temperatures, thick humidity and no shade, a shaved ice is the greatest thing in the world. You don't even get to see all of it here. Because underneath that huge mountain of passionfruit-drizzled, snow-like ice flakes, there is a bowl of 仙草 grass jelly with some peanuts on it. So good.
I wasn't going to post this picture, because any of you who have lived in a part of the world where it snows will recognize this as looking exactly like the black slush that appears in the gutters when the melt comes. But i need to get you primed for the ugly-but-delicious pictures to come. This one was another shaved iced that i got the next day, also with grass jelly (hence the color), but instead of the light, fluffy consistency of the day before, this was a sandier consistency more like what is called a snowcone in the US and Canada. If you ever meet a snob who complains that snowcones back home aren't as good as the raspaos they had in Panama or Colombia, i think this explains the difference. Flaked ice off a giant block versus crushed ice coming out of a magical nozzle. I'm not sure one is objectively better than the other, but i have to admit i prefer the flaky one because the crunchy one hurt my teeth to eat. Too cold.
Here is an amazing treat. When i was cycling through the back roads of Changhua county, one of those puttering trikes stopped just in front of me, and an old lady rushed out of her house to buy whatever the dude was selling. I didn't even know what it was, i just saw the sign 碗糕 "bowl cake" and decided i needed to have one too. It was only like 20 kuai or something. He popped it out of the bowl into a plastic bag, squirted some sauce and twisted the bag closed.
I cycled through the paddies until i found a small, covered shrine where i sat down to find out what it was. Turned out it was a savory "cake". The brown sauce you see here is actually gravy with a bit of ground pork. The cake is probably better described as a glutinous rice dumpling. It had that quivering, wobbling texture of a blancmange but was thick enough you could use the popsicle stick to make little cake slices to nom on. Then - surprise! - inside the middle of the cake was a dainty meatball. This thing was such a delight to discover randomly on the road, and so fun to eat, i think i will try it again in the future. I often say that any food that isn't spicy is automatically trash. You really need to do a lot to impress me if you aren't going to put any chili. But sometimes just getting the packaging right can make up for the lack of chili.
The ugliness continues! Check out this 肉圓, a famous food of Changhua that i ate a bit further south in Douliu (Yunlin County). 肉圓 means "meat circle" and in China it can be used to describe any kind of meatball. But the Taiwan 肉圓 ròu yuán (pronounced "ba wan" in Hokkien) is different, because it's not just a meatball, it's a meatball wrapped in some weird, sticky gloop that's like nothing i ever ate before. The dish is so sticky that they don't serve it with chopsticks, they give you a fork. And even with a fork it's almost impossible to eat.
The wrapping is stretchy, like elastic, and very hard to cut through. When you get a morsel into your mouth it's chewy, like a Haribo gummy bear. According to wiki the wrapper is made from sweet potato starch - far from the soft, pudding-like texture of the 碗糕 bowl cake's glutinous rice. Unexpectedly, once you fight your way through the wrapper, the "meat" ball doesn't have much meat in it at all. It has a smidgen of ground pork, but also mushroom and bamboo shoots and (i think) tofu too. You know what? It was fucking great! I think i am a sucker for hiding some food inside another food, especially when the outside food is starchy.
Here is another picture i didn't really want to post because it's not interesting, but it is important to contextualize all the rest. In Chiayi i was just about to leave the main part of town to cycle out round the reservoirs, so i stopped in at my usual kind of noodle place on the side of the road for a bit of energy. These places can be hit-or-miss, and this one unfortunately was a miss.
I got a 麻醬麵 sesame sauce noodle, which is exactly what it says in the name. In China same thing was available at the Fujian-themed franchise 沙縣小吃 (sometimes hilariously translated as "Shaxian Delicacies") and called 拌麵 - mixed noodle. Some places in Taiwan do a decent one for what it is (and what it is is capital-B bland), but a lot of places tend to over-salt it or make it too wet. Like this place. It was a bad noodle. I also got 地瓜葉 sweet potato greens and 豆腐皮 tofu skin as 小菜 side dish. The worst part is that on all three of these dishes they heaped a big scoop of ground pork. I am used to most places in Taiwan sprinkling ground pork for flavoring, and i normally don't mind eating a bit to get my B12 in, but this was the point where i was just like "fuck this shit". A bunch of food after this was explicitly vegetarian.
Starting with this lunch from a typical Taiwanese vegetarian buffet in Tainan. Tofu skin. Bamboo shoots. Bitter melon. Wood ear mushroom. Sesame "chicken". Fried "fish". Green beans. Sprouts. This fern-like green which i have seen fairly frequently in Taiwan but i still don't know what it's called. I didn't even care that that was no garlic, no onion, no chili. I felt like a goddamned buddha eating this while listening to the holy chants and other religious music that tends to be playing in these joints.
This is it. One of my faves from my visit to Taiwan 5 years ago, and i found it back again on my trip out to the Caoshan Moon World in Tainan area. It's almond tofu. I think it's just called tofu because it is the consistency of tofu, not because it's actually made from soy beans. I think it's made from almond milk. In any case, it has an excellent jelly-like texture and the smoother, sweeter taste of almond, which is a nice change from the beaniness of regular tofu pudding. This was served on top of a small hill of shaved ice, and topped with red bean. As delicious as i remember, and something i will have to try hunt down in Taipei too.
Ah, this meal tells a story too. I had made it to Cijin island in Kaohsiung. Surf, sand, palm trees, the works. And, as usual at any seaside tourist destination in Taiwan, there is a street full of vendors selling all manner of seafood. But i don't like seafood. Well i don't like any seafood except for one: fish and chips. And i was on the beach. And The Guardian had just posted their excellent long read on the death of fish and chips in the UK (https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/jul/20/a-funeral-for-fish-and-chips-east-neuk-fife-anstruther-scotland). I was craving fish and chips. Of course there was no hope of getting it from any of the local food stands. But this was a tourist beach!
And lo, there was a beach shack where they sold booze you can drink out of a coconut and Google Maps suggested they might have 炸魚薯條 (fish and chips) too. So i rode around to the entrance and took a look at the menu and... FOUR HUNDRED FUCKING DOLLARS. Are you kidding me? 400NTD is about £10, which is not an unreasonable price for fish and chips in the UK these days, although over twice the price of any meal i have ever bought in Taiwan. But then, at the bottom of the menu, "10% service charge will be added to all orders", the fuck!? What kind of asshole has the nerve to add even more to the price of an already outrageously expensive dish, as a so-called "service charge", in a country where tipping does not exist at all. If this is what Rich Taiwan is like, i'm glad i spend my whole life outside of the office in Poor Taiwan because i cannot deal with this nonsense.
Thus i was simultaneously pissed off at the audacity of these clowns charging so much for what should be the cheapest meal that there is, while also craving European comfort food that was unattainable without me compromising my ideals, while also being thrilled to finally be on the beach... And so i just decided to get the closest thing i could get to fish and chips from the local vendors. I went to the same 烤地瓜 roast sweet potato guy i had visited 5 years before and picked out a nice potato. Then i went to a local noodle place that offered 小菜 side dishes and got two large triangles of 油豆腐 "oil tofu", which is similar to thousand layer tofu but braised in 滷味 stock, which in this case was rich and meaty and gave those slabs an almost steak-like texture. And then i went and sat on the beach and ate my Taiwanese version of fish and chips and it was great. Cost me something like 90 kuai all up.
Back in town i got these dumples. I don't often get dumplings in Taiwan because, much like steamed buns, there isn't much choice. A lot of small dumpling places just sell "dumplings", period. No choice of filling, which means the filling is always going to be meat. But i was in a dumple mood, and this place offered two different sauces - satay and Sichuan. The only time i remember eating 水餃 boiled dumplings with spicy sauces like that was at a Chinese Indonesian restaurant in Australia, so i thought this could be a similar thing. As luck would have it, it was! The dumplings were the usual meat and greens type thing, probably pork and chives. Served on a bed of greens and bean sprouts (not visible) and smothered with chili sauce that was actually fairly spicy. It reminded me of my favorite street vendor in the urban village i lived in Shenzhen who made 煎餃 fried (vege) dumplings with properly spicy sauce - something i try to replicate at home but never quite get tasting as good. Needless to say, this put a big, dumply smile on my face.
Fast forward on to (almost) the last day of my journey, when i cycled out in the direction of Pingtung. I don't think i wrote about that day yet on LiveJournal. I decided to leave Kaohsiung and head to the last city with a Youbike dock - Pingtung. But the edge of the typhoon was already creeping along the south coast and the rain came in this frustratingly patchy rhythm where one moment it'd be sunny and a few minutes later it would be pelting cats and dogs. It annoyed me so much, and especially given i had already biked from Kaohsiung to Pingtung county during the 228 holiday, i gave up. I parked the bike at a rural train station and trained the rest of the way.
As it turned out, Pingtung City is boring as hell. It seems like it should be exactly the kind of small town i love to hang out in, but for whatever reason, nothing was open, nobody was outside. Even though there were a bunch of shops, it felt like a ghost town. I kept wandering and wandering, but there was truly nothing happening, and the rain kept randomly dumping on my head, so eventually i resolved to just get a snack and then train it back to Kaohsiung.
The first snack i got was a thing that looks like a donut, but it's not a donut. I'm not sure what exactly it was, but i got it from one of those vendors with Korean and Japanese on their sign, so i am sure it was something very pan-Asian and trendy that all the young people would know what it is. It was more light and fluffy than a donut, more like a ring-shaped pancake. It was reminiscent of imagawayaki, which are called 車輪餅 "wheel cake" here in Taiwan, and are popular treats amongst my office crowd at work. Not bad.
My other street vendor nibble from Pingtung was a 飯糰 rice roll which is a bit like gimbap or onigiri. It's a sheet of seaweed with rice and various fillings inside. I know you all know what it is, it's another one of these trendy pan-Asian snacks you can get anywhere. I think that's what was so disappointing about Pingtung. It seemed like it should be full of small-town vibes, but instead it felt like a generic suburb with the same snacks you can get at any shopping mall foodcourt. It's not bad food, it's just not very interesting food. This rice roll was a vegan version - dry tofu, vege floss, pickle and so on. It was fine.
Back in Taipei, i decided to have one last holiday meal after taking the 高鐵 bullet train home. I went to one of the vendors in the low end food court near my house and ordered a fried rice. I asked to 加辣 "add spicy", which is usually not worth a shit in Taiwan, but laoban actually put some fresh chopped chili for me that really hit the spot. Nothing fancy, nothing exotic, just a plain and simple fried rice same as you can get anywhere in the world. Cozy and comforting, a nice ending to my journey.
And now it's way after midnight. Gosh, being back at work again is so draining. There's never enough time. My happy-go-lucky life, interrupted. Having to work sucks so much.
Tomorrow the next typhoon of the season is going to blow past Taipei. Should be pretty far out to sea, but i'll probably get rained on again. Already been rained on all week. It's much less fun getting rained on and then having to plip, plop and squelch into the office instead of taking refuge in a temple drinking green tea and nattering with a retired local.
Retirement cannot come soon enough.
This isn't exactly a lunch post, because several days i either skipped lunch or had a late snack only a few hours before dinner, but it's a good snapshot of the kind of food i ate while actively on the road - places that i stumbled upon by accident or ended up at in desperation while i was in the process of going somewhere else.
Now, where i should open this post is with the 葱抓餅 spring onion pancake that i got in Taoyuan, just after i had spent an hour hiding from the torrential rain and then wrestled the bike up the hill into a suburb with a few shops and hotels. However the photo didn't come out very well, and i've posted many of them before so eh. I will say, though, this small street vendor was the only place i went to in the whole trip where they rocked hard with the 九層塔 "nine layer pagoda" aka Thai basil.
When i was in Taiwan 5 years ago i remember being surprised that this "nine layer pagoda" (isn't it a delightful name?) was used so much in the local cuisine, because i had never really associated basil with "Chinese" food. After visiting China i realized that in China it's hardly used at all. But now i have been back in Taiwan for a year i can say it isn't really ubiquitous here either. It seems to feature mostly in fried snacks, among which 葱油餅 crispy/oily spring onion pancake and 葱抓餅 stretchy/less-oily spring onion pancake. The one from the vendor in Taoyuan came folded over like a taco packed with basil and chili sauce and it was divine. The vendor was nice too, offering me a stool next to her daughter in the cooking tent after seeing how bedraggled i was.
Above is the first surprise lunch i found on the road, heading south from Taoyuan and into Hsinchu county. I can't remember exactly where i got it, but i do remember it was just before i turned off to head to the coast. I was on the edge of a small town, and instead of heading through the center, i took a shortcut through the paddies that led to a shabby diner that i probably wouldn't even have noticed was there if i hadn't seen a restaurant icon on Google Maps. The joint was my usual kind of place - faded sign, 3 or 4 tables, open to the outside, nothing over 150NTD (~US$5). The 老闆 lǎo bǎn (boss) was relaxing on a chair in the back listening to the radio, and the kitchen/prep area at the front was looking fairly bare.
I knew there wasn't going to be any more food for a while, so i asked what she had. 飯買完了 "rice sold out", she said. I saw some stuff on the menu printed on the wall, but it seemed more like a list of the sorts of things in the general genre of cookery (solidly Taiwanese), and not so much a list of what was actually available. So i just asked for a bowl of whatever noodle. What i got was a big bowl of soup with yellow noodles and cleavered-up hunks of bone-in chicken. Don't like meat, definitely don't like bone-in, but i have to admit it was a pretty good soup. Reminded me of the kind of stuff i ate in Laos. Simple, but flavorful.
Next shot is from the next day, as i continued down the coastal greenways. I got to one village on the Miaoli coast which seemed like a minor tourist destination, probably due to the nearby 媽祖 Mazu temple.
Let's talk about Taiwanese folk religion. Taiwanese folk religion is very much like Chinese folk religion, and probably many other folk religions from around the world going back to antiquity. People worship their ancestors, both direct ancestors like their great-grandparents and cultural ancestors that include various legendary figures of the past. There are countless gods and spirits and various divine entities, some of which are more popular than others, but none of them are really in conflict with each other. People believe in whichever ones they want to believe in. And then they burn stuff. Not just joss sticks but also joss paper aka spirit money. They toss the paper into one of the little braziers that sprout from sidewalks all over Taiwan, and their offering burns away, sending it to the land of the gods and the ghosts.
I have say that it comes across as eminently reasonable, much more so than mainstream organized religions. Of course you should venerate your ancestors - they are where you came from, after all. Of course you should be able to believe in any god you like - why try to control where other people get their comfort? And when you bring gifts to these invisible entities that you believe in, of course you should burn those gifts, so that they disappear and become invisible too. It feels weirdly consistent.
The neat thing about folk religions in East Asia is that they never got crushed by Christianity or Islam. When Daoism came along, when Buddhism came along, those religions were polytheistic too, so people could keep on believing what they already did before and sprinkle some of the new belief on top. Mix and match, it's all good. Taiwan today is what modern day Italy or Greece or Egypt or Iraq might have looked like if Jesus hadn't come along to fuck it all up.
One of the most popular gods in Taiwan is a lady called 媽祖 Mazu ("ancestral mother") or 天上聖母 ("holy mother in heaven"). She was a woman who lived in coastal Fujian over 1000 years ago. She became a shaman who performed miracles like calming the seas, bringing rain when it was needed, healing the sick and so on. She never married, died young, and is now something like a patron saint not just for fishermen and sailors but many people with Hoklo ancestry, which means about 70% of modern Taiwan. Some of the biggest and most elaborate non-Daoist and non-Buddhist temples in Taiwan are for Mazu. There are huge statues of her that always make me happy to see because it's rare that women get to be the stars of the show in religion.
Anyway, it was behind a Mazu temple where i stopped for some vegetarian food. Temples in Taiwan usually have a bunch of street vendors or small restaurants around them, and guaranteed one of them will always be vegetarian. The dish i got was actually a dish from northern China called 炸醬麵 zhajiangmian, which in its original form is ground pork cooked in soy sauce on dry noodle, the end. The vegetarian version just switch the pork out with tofu. It's a bland dish to start with, which makes the Taiwanese vegetarian version (no garlic!) not significantly blander than it already was. This particular version also had 地瓜葉 sweet potato greens but was still fundamentally bland. And salty. Not great. But it filled my stomach.
The better thing on the table was the blocks of 千葉豆腐 thousand "leaf" (layer) tofu, which is a springy and spongy and fun-to-eat version of tofu, which the laoban had served with "nine layer pagoda" basil and a sweet and sour sauce, which she then urged me to splash a bunch of her homemade chili sauce on top of too. It was really fantastic.
Alright let's move things along. I also stopped somewhere along the way to get a 剉冰 which is yet another one of these infuriating words they use in Taiwan that does not match the expected pronunciation. 剉冰 should be pronounced cuò bīng in Mandarin, but actually you pronounce it something like "tsua bing", which is the Hokkien pronunciation. What it means in Hokkien is (i presume) shaved ice. (In Chinese Mandarin shaved ice is 刨冰 bào bīng.) And you guys, when you are sunburnt to hell and have spent hours cycling in 35+ degree temperatures, thick humidity and no shade, a shaved ice is the greatest thing in the world. You don't even get to see all of it here. Because underneath that huge mountain of passionfruit-drizzled, snow-like ice flakes, there is a bowl of 仙草 grass jelly with some peanuts on it. So good.
I wasn't going to post this picture, because any of you who have lived in a part of the world where it snows will recognize this as looking exactly like the black slush that appears in the gutters when the melt comes. But i need to get you primed for the ugly-but-delicious pictures to come. This one was another shaved iced that i got the next day, also with grass jelly (hence the color), but instead of the light, fluffy consistency of the day before, this was a sandier consistency more like what is called a snowcone in the US and Canada. If you ever meet a snob who complains that snowcones back home aren't as good as the raspaos they had in Panama or Colombia, i think this explains the difference. Flaked ice off a giant block versus crushed ice coming out of a magical nozzle. I'm not sure one is objectively better than the other, but i have to admit i prefer the flaky one because the crunchy one hurt my teeth to eat. Too cold.
Here is an amazing treat. When i was cycling through the back roads of Changhua county, one of those puttering trikes stopped just in front of me, and an old lady rushed out of her house to buy whatever the dude was selling. I didn't even know what it was, i just saw the sign 碗糕 "bowl cake" and decided i needed to have one too. It was only like 20 kuai or something. He popped it out of the bowl into a plastic bag, squirted some sauce and twisted the bag closed.
I cycled through the paddies until i found a small, covered shrine where i sat down to find out what it was. Turned out it was a savory "cake". The brown sauce you see here is actually gravy with a bit of ground pork. The cake is probably better described as a glutinous rice dumpling. It had that quivering, wobbling texture of a blancmange but was thick enough you could use the popsicle stick to make little cake slices to nom on. Then - surprise! - inside the middle of the cake was a dainty meatball. This thing was such a delight to discover randomly on the road, and so fun to eat, i think i will try it again in the future. I often say that any food that isn't spicy is automatically trash. You really need to do a lot to impress me if you aren't going to put any chili. But sometimes just getting the packaging right can make up for the lack of chili.
The ugliness continues! Check out this 肉圓, a famous food of Changhua that i ate a bit further south in Douliu (Yunlin County). 肉圓 means "meat circle" and in China it can be used to describe any kind of meatball. But the Taiwan 肉圓 ròu yuán (pronounced "ba wan" in Hokkien) is different, because it's not just a meatball, it's a meatball wrapped in some weird, sticky gloop that's like nothing i ever ate before. The dish is so sticky that they don't serve it with chopsticks, they give you a fork. And even with a fork it's almost impossible to eat.
The wrapping is stretchy, like elastic, and very hard to cut through. When you get a morsel into your mouth it's chewy, like a Haribo gummy bear. According to wiki the wrapper is made from sweet potato starch - far from the soft, pudding-like texture of the 碗糕 bowl cake's glutinous rice. Unexpectedly, once you fight your way through the wrapper, the "meat" ball doesn't have much meat in it at all. It has a smidgen of ground pork, but also mushroom and bamboo shoots and (i think) tofu too. You know what? It was fucking great! I think i am a sucker for hiding some food inside another food, especially when the outside food is starchy.
Here is another picture i didn't really want to post because it's not interesting, but it is important to contextualize all the rest. In Chiayi i was just about to leave the main part of town to cycle out round the reservoirs, so i stopped in at my usual kind of noodle place on the side of the road for a bit of energy. These places can be hit-or-miss, and this one unfortunately was a miss.
I got a 麻醬麵 sesame sauce noodle, which is exactly what it says in the name. In China same thing was available at the Fujian-themed franchise 沙縣小吃 (sometimes hilariously translated as "Shaxian Delicacies") and called 拌麵 - mixed noodle. Some places in Taiwan do a decent one for what it is (and what it is is capital-B bland), but a lot of places tend to over-salt it or make it too wet. Like this place. It was a bad noodle. I also got 地瓜葉 sweet potato greens and 豆腐皮 tofu skin as 小菜 side dish. The worst part is that on all three of these dishes they heaped a big scoop of ground pork. I am used to most places in Taiwan sprinkling ground pork for flavoring, and i normally don't mind eating a bit to get my B12 in, but this was the point where i was just like "fuck this shit". A bunch of food after this was explicitly vegetarian.
Starting with this lunch from a typical Taiwanese vegetarian buffet in Tainan. Tofu skin. Bamboo shoots. Bitter melon. Wood ear mushroom. Sesame "chicken". Fried "fish". Green beans. Sprouts. This fern-like green which i have seen fairly frequently in Taiwan but i still don't know what it's called. I didn't even care that that was no garlic, no onion, no chili. I felt like a goddamned buddha eating this while listening to the holy chants and other religious music that tends to be playing in these joints.
This is it. One of my faves from my visit to Taiwan 5 years ago, and i found it back again on my trip out to the Caoshan Moon World in Tainan area. It's almond tofu. I think it's just called tofu because it is the consistency of tofu, not because it's actually made from soy beans. I think it's made from almond milk. In any case, it has an excellent jelly-like texture and the smoother, sweeter taste of almond, which is a nice change from the beaniness of regular tofu pudding. This was served on top of a small hill of shaved ice, and topped with red bean. As delicious as i remember, and something i will have to try hunt down in Taipei too.
Ah, this meal tells a story too. I had made it to Cijin island in Kaohsiung. Surf, sand, palm trees, the works. And, as usual at any seaside tourist destination in Taiwan, there is a street full of vendors selling all manner of seafood. But i don't like seafood. Well i don't like any seafood except for one: fish and chips. And i was on the beach. And The Guardian had just posted their excellent long read on the death of fish and chips in the UK (https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/jul/20/a-funeral-for-fish-and-chips-east-neuk-fife-anstruther-scotland). I was craving fish and chips. Of course there was no hope of getting it from any of the local food stands. But this was a tourist beach!
And lo, there was a beach shack where they sold booze you can drink out of a coconut and Google Maps suggested they might have 炸魚薯條 (fish and chips) too. So i rode around to the entrance and took a look at the menu and... FOUR HUNDRED FUCKING DOLLARS. Are you kidding me? 400NTD is about £10, which is not an unreasonable price for fish and chips in the UK these days, although over twice the price of any meal i have ever bought in Taiwan. But then, at the bottom of the menu, "10% service charge will be added to all orders", the fuck!? What kind of asshole has the nerve to add even more to the price of an already outrageously expensive dish, as a so-called "service charge", in a country where tipping does not exist at all. If this is what Rich Taiwan is like, i'm glad i spend my whole life outside of the office in Poor Taiwan because i cannot deal with this nonsense.
Thus i was simultaneously pissed off at the audacity of these clowns charging so much for what should be the cheapest meal that there is, while also craving European comfort food that was unattainable without me compromising my ideals, while also being thrilled to finally be on the beach... And so i just decided to get the closest thing i could get to fish and chips from the local vendors. I went to the same 烤地瓜 roast sweet potato guy i had visited 5 years before and picked out a nice potato. Then i went to a local noodle place that offered 小菜 side dishes and got two large triangles of 油豆腐 "oil tofu", which is similar to thousand layer tofu but braised in 滷味 stock, which in this case was rich and meaty and gave those slabs an almost steak-like texture. And then i went and sat on the beach and ate my Taiwanese version of fish and chips and it was great. Cost me something like 90 kuai all up.
Back in town i got these dumples. I don't often get dumplings in Taiwan because, much like steamed buns, there isn't much choice. A lot of small dumpling places just sell "dumplings", period. No choice of filling, which means the filling is always going to be meat. But i was in a dumple mood, and this place offered two different sauces - satay and Sichuan. The only time i remember eating 水餃 boiled dumplings with spicy sauces like that was at a Chinese Indonesian restaurant in Australia, so i thought this could be a similar thing. As luck would have it, it was! The dumplings were the usual meat and greens type thing, probably pork and chives. Served on a bed of greens and bean sprouts (not visible) and smothered with chili sauce that was actually fairly spicy. It reminded me of my favorite street vendor in the urban village i lived in Shenzhen who made 煎餃 fried (vege) dumplings with properly spicy sauce - something i try to replicate at home but never quite get tasting as good. Needless to say, this put a big, dumply smile on my face.
Fast forward on to (almost) the last day of my journey, when i cycled out in the direction of Pingtung. I don't think i wrote about that day yet on LiveJournal. I decided to leave Kaohsiung and head to the last city with a Youbike dock - Pingtung. But the edge of the typhoon was already creeping along the south coast and the rain came in this frustratingly patchy rhythm where one moment it'd be sunny and a few minutes later it would be pelting cats and dogs. It annoyed me so much, and especially given i had already biked from Kaohsiung to Pingtung county during the 228 holiday, i gave up. I parked the bike at a rural train station and trained the rest of the way.
As it turned out, Pingtung City is boring as hell. It seems like it should be exactly the kind of small town i love to hang out in, but for whatever reason, nothing was open, nobody was outside. Even though there were a bunch of shops, it felt like a ghost town. I kept wandering and wandering, but there was truly nothing happening, and the rain kept randomly dumping on my head, so eventually i resolved to just get a snack and then train it back to Kaohsiung.
The first snack i got was a thing that looks like a donut, but it's not a donut. I'm not sure what exactly it was, but i got it from one of those vendors with Korean and Japanese on their sign, so i am sure it was something very pan-Asian and trendy that all the young people would know what it is. It was more light and fluffy than a donut, more like a ring-shaped pancake. It was reminiscent of imagawayaki, which are called 車輪餅 "wheel cake" here in Taiwan, and are popular treats amongst my office crowd at work. Not bad.
My other street vendor nibble from Pingtung was a 飯糰 rice roll which is a bit like gimbap or onigiri. It's a sheet of seaweed with rice and various fillings inside. I know you all know what it is, it's another one of these trendy pan-Asian snacks you can get anywhere. I think that's what was so disappointing about Pingtung. It seemed like it should be full of small-town vibes, but instead it felt like a generic suburb with the same snacks you can get at any shopping mall foodcourt. It's not bad food, it's just not very interesting food. This rice roll was a vegan version - dry tofu, vege floss, pickle and so on. It was fine.
Back in Taipei, i decided to have one last holiday meal after taking the 高鐵 bullet train home. I went to one of the vendors in the low end food court near my house and ordered a fried rice. I asked to 加辣 "add spicy", which is usually not worth a shit in Taiwan, but laoban actually put some fresh chopped chili for me that really hit the spot. Nothing fancy, nothing exotic, just a plain and simple fried rice same as you can get anywhere in the world. Cozy and comforting, a nice ending to my journey.
And now it's way after midnight. Gosh, being back at work again is so draining. There's never enough time. My happy-go-lucky life, interrupted. Having to work sucks so much.
Tomorrow the next typhoon of the season is going to blow past Taipei. Should be pretty far out to sea, but i'll probably get rained on again. Already been rained on all week. It's much less fun getting rained on and then having to plip, plop and squelch into the office instead of taking refuge in a temple drinking green tea and nattering with a retired local.
Retirement cannot come soon enough.