[Beijing] Street Markets

After finishing breakfast, we walked further down. It turns out to be one long market street. There are all manner of fresh produce, fresh seafood, meats, vegetables, and more food stands. This single street contains more variety than your local Super Wal-mart, and then some more.

I think it's simply excellent because all things of produce varieties there are brought in fresh every morning, probably no more than hours since picking time. Every thing has such color and freshness to it that you can't find in the fast-food, flash-frozen supermarkets in the States that have been slowly dying in large produce trucks for days before they get to your local Wal-mart.

Speaking of which, you can look forward to a post covering a Wal-mart in Beijing later.

[Beijing] More Breakfast Curiosities

Other foods served at this breakfast stand include tofu soup (fondly referred to as "tofu brains" for its consistency)


-- and Tea Leaf Eggs, which are hard-boiled eggs named as such because tea leaves are a major ingredient in the brew in which they're steeped and marinated. Other spices that are also used include cinnamon sticks, star anise, cloves and orange peel, along with a little soy sauce and some salt. Mum says the recipe is also frequently known as "Five Spice Tea Leaf Eggs". But I only listed four of the spices because I don't know the English term for the fifth spice...


(My mother makes them at home, too. They are wonderfully tasty.)

It was a restaurant of small but not uncommon size. There were about 4-6 small tables inside and one table outside, all of which seat four people each. If you're not getting your food on the go, your food will be brought to your table once you order at the front. In small or private restaurants like this, what food goes to what table is usually just memorized by those who take the orders. And if course, if all else fails and they forget, a loud call of, "Four grease rods and a tofu brain!" is all that's needed. Sometimes I think yelling is the main form of verbal communication in China anyway.

We ordered a bowl of tofu brains each and a tray (that is likely never washed) of three grease rods. My father walked over to the bao zi maker next door and also bought some of those, some with meat and some with vegetables. Then they hand you some hot sauce in a tiny saucer (that's usually shared communally) and a stack of thin napkin squares, and you have at it.

"Tofu brain" is mainly just a thick, brothy sort of soup with one big slab of fragile soft tofu that you stir up into little chunks when you get it. The tofu is so soft and the soup is so thick that they usually taste like a similar consistency. Most kinds of tofu themselves don't actually have a taste at all. Tofu is a food that is used more for its texture, and the taste of it depends heavily on the other stuff in which it's cooked. This tofu brain soup had all sorts of seasoning and some garnish cilantro in it. Thick but definitely slurpable (of which most people take advantage with no shame). I suppose it's similar to "hot and sour soup" you might find in a Chinese restaurant in America, but with less of the sour, and more towards a salty flavor. A small scoop or two or three of spicy sauce, depending on personal preference, goes excellently with it.

As I've mentioned them before, a bao zi is just a stuffed bun. Both the bao zi and the western dinner roll are made of mostly the same stuff, but the difference is that dinner rolls are baked, whereas bao zi are steamed. Bao zi are springy but much less spongy than dinner rolls. The dough is also a consistent white throughout, unlike the dinner roll that has a brown outer shell. A bao zi with no filling is called a Man Tou (mahn tow), which means, "full/filled head." So it's even more like a dinner roll. They're a little easier to make since they require no additional recipe for a filling, but bao zi are still usually much more popular.

[Beijing] Deep Fried

The second stand sold primarily fried foods.


Not exactly fries and burgers. (Above) The two trays at the bottom are stuffed pastries. They're usually filled with some kind of ground meat and/or vegetable mix. Sitting in the strainer next to the giant wok at the back of the picture are things called You Tiao (yo tyaw).

Literally translated, this means "grease rod". Note this as a prime example of things that sound much more appetizing in native Chinese than in the corresponding English translation.

One of the cooks is frying a you tiao in the wok itself. She's turning it on all sides with a pair of chopsticks in her right hand that are made especially long for deep frying uses. Her left hand is sitting on a dirty shoe box with leaf-piles of money in it -- the cash register.

The you tiao is nothing but two wads of dough that are rolled out into two long, flimsy rods. They're lightly twisted and stuck together, then put straight into the boiling vegetable oil in the giant wok. Several of these are slid in at the same time, so the cook performs a sort of assembly line and puts more in as the earlier ones get done. They're rolled around until the entire you tiao becomes a medium golden-brown, which probably only takes around a minute. The grease strained off from the batches is collected and invariably reused. It's easily recyclable for cooking, and most people actually like the stronger flavor when they're cooked in oil that has been used before.

Taste? Once it's fried, the you tiao can be big but is rather hollow inside. Essentially, it's just another kind of bread, and it tastes like a dinner roll, only.... it's long, somewhat chewier, definitely greasier and definitely more moist. It fills me up more quickly than dinner rolls do, at least. In a nutshell, it's just a deep-fried wad of dough, stretched out a little. Sounds incredibly unhealthy. But in fact, much like bao zi, everyone in China knows what a you tiao is, and they are definitely not an uncommon food on the streets.

(So the question is, how can they all have foods like this in their cuisine and still be tiny??)

[Beijing] Breakfast of Ch... inamen

We moved onward down the street until we came to an alley-like marketplace nearby. In addition to exploring around, we were also looking for breakfast. But of course, finding breakfast in a big city in China can hardly be considered a problem.

We walked down this street nearly every day that we were in Beijing, since it extends for several blocks of solely produce and cooked food. Many vendors have their stands completely set up and ready with tiers of produce on the sidewalk by about 6:00 AM. Some are family-owned, and you can see little kids running around, crying, or playing in their parents' shop fronts. Some stands sell produce only, some sell cooked foods only, but many provide both services. On streets like this, cooked food is more or less always made for you hot. Food stands are usually run by anywhere from two to six people (depending on the size of the business) who are all kneading dough/baking/frying/serving/boiling at a constant rate, with one or two of them in charge who also participate in the cooking but take care of the currency exchange up front.

There were two little stands next to each other not too far down this road. The first one sold... bao zi (see? They are everywhere). It had two big steamers on a cart out in front and a tiny little kitchen area in the building right behind it. The cart had two steamer wells. In case you don't know how Chinese steamers work, here are the basics. It's really quite clever. You have a large reservoir of boiling water at the bottom (in this case, in the cart's large wells). On top of it, you stack circular racks that are traditionally made of woven bamboo. When the racks are stacked and you put the woven-bamboo lid on your "tower", it traps in the heat like a big vertical oven and cooks your bao zi. However, the bamboo inside the racks is woven loosely enough that enough steam will escape to prevent your bao zi from just quickly becoming soggy wads. Also, the entire steamer is round in order to ensure evenness and consistency when it's cooking.

This is all a very clever idea because the steam will always travel upward, efficiently making use of just one stovetop to cook many, many servings of food. Steamers with very large circumferences sometimes have at least 3 or 4 layers stacked. For smaller steamers that have the circumference of a medium-sized round dinner plate, I've seen stacks about 10-15 racks high. Restaurants will also often use two steamers, not always just because you can cook more at the same time, but because you can swap racks at the top with less heat down to the bottom with those that are closer to the heat source. Having two steamers lets you move top racks immediately to a hotter steamer with losing only minimal heat if you keep one steamer less burdened than the other.

[Beijing] Just For Kicks... Feathery Ones

Having arrived only the day before, and consequently feeling relatively fresh (which did not last long comparatively to the rest of the trip), we woke up early and went on a grand little adventure to explore the nearby streets and neighborhoods around our hotel. We were also taking advantage of the early time to beat most of the swarming morning rush. The rush, that is, that swarms continuously (relentlessly, mercilessly) all day long and doesn't stop until much in the evening.

Just a block or two down, we passed an old man playing with a Chinese hackey sack, known as the Jianzi (JYEN dzeh). Rather, he was doing it for exercise, as he told us he did every morning as part of his daily routine. My mother had explained them to me when I was much younger, but they are very hard to explain if you've never seen one... (hence the link above). I was instantly fascinated with it, especially since at first glance if there's one sitting there, it usually doesn't look... "hackey-sack-able"... at all.

Here's the breakdown of a Chinese hackey-sack. To put it in a nutshell, it's basically just:

1) A weighted base (though merely a few ounces)
2) Feathers attached to stabilize aforementioned base

The base is made of a piece of rubber that's flat on the bottom and has another small, hollow tube of rubber sticking out of its middle. To get an idea of that shape, think of a quarter with a cut-off cigarette butt glued on its end to the center of the coin. So far so good? Great. Around this hollow tube part are several washers made of metal -- for weight. (Personally, I like them best because they cause the hackey-sack to make a nice "chink" noise every time you kick it, like barely tossing up a small stack of coins and catching it again). The rest after that is just sticking and fastening feathers of whatever size, shape, or color are preferred into the tube part.

So now you get to see some photos of this guy in action. And note, if you will... this man is at least in his 60's.








We found some of these big ones in a market in Beijing. I got three of them and precariously carried them by hand in a bag so the feathers wouldn't get crushed. They're sturdy, but the feathers are brittle enough to be bent or snapped at the shafts. I brought them ever so carefully all the way to Shanghai!... only to lose them in the taxi from the airport when we left. Unfortunate. But then again, we made up for it when we bought 11 ones of the smaller variety in the Shanghai markets. (As a side note, the big 4-feathered ones could only be found in Beijing. In Shanghai they only make the smaller tufted ones, which is why I had been disappointed when I lost the big ones).