The Republic of China, Taiwan or the Island of Formosa (meaning beautiful) lies about 100,000 miles south east of China and doesn’t just consist of one or two islands – there are more (eg. Kinmen and quite a few others). The largest island was called Tainan by the inhabitants until the time of the Ming Dynasty when it was christened Taiwan. Over a 1,000 years ago the indigenous people of Taiwan arrived from Indonesia, Malaysia and mainland China and settled on the islands – the latter arriving in Taiwan around 1,500 years BC.  Today this country is home to a

wonderful mixture of cultures from China there are the Hakka as well as Chinese from Shanghai, Beijing, Suzhou, Fujian and Guangzhou and in 1945 the Japanese people also contributed to the population when they returned the islands that had been ceded to them after the Treaty of Shinoeseki back to Chiang Kaishek. After the war a small number of Europeans settled as well and Portuguese, Dutch and Spaniards made this their home. As can been expected, it influenced the cuisine of Taiwan enormously and contributed richly to the already exciting, basically Fujianese culinary tradition. The Taiwanese are very proud of their food and always have been – quite rightly so. In the ancient times when the islands were inhabited by the first Hakka settlers, the Malaysians, the Polynesians and whoever chose to make the beautiful island home,  they began the culinary tradition upon which a truly great cuisine would be based. As proud as they are of their own history, they are of the history of China with whom they share a heritage and the food we discuss today is but an hors d’ouvre on the menu that is the food of Taiwan.

PORK CHOPS ON RICE

This is a typical Taiwanese meal with the common factor being the five-spice and the sweet potato flour, so if you cannot get hold of that, simply substitute corn flour.

Ingredients

• 4 pork  loin chops, trimmed and fat serrated
• 1 large lemon, grated zest only
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed and finely diced
• 4 tbsp rice wine (or dry sherry)
• 2 tsp Chinese five-spice powder
• 1 tbsp maize oil
• 125 ml sweet potato flour – if you can’t get hold of that, use corn flour (Maizena) instead
• 500 ml steamed rice, kept warm until needed

Method

• Combine the lemon zest, the rice wine, the five spice powder and the garlic in a bowl  until a smooth paste is formed and place inside a Ziploc  (or any other sturdy  plastic) bag, pop in the pork chops, close and shake well, ensuring that the all the chops are completely covered with the spice mixture.
• Allow to rest for 30 minutes, remove and discard any remaining paste.
• Dredge the chops in the corn flour (Maizena) or sweet potato flour, shaking of unnecessary flour.
• Heat the oil on medium heat until warm and fry each chop until crisp.
• Serve with warm steamed rice .

To begin,  staple foods are important to the Taiwanese and rice or sweet potatoes as well loved as the myriad of noodle dishes. The foods contains much less oil than in most other places in China and they’re a bit sweeter. Taiwan is modern and in Taipei coffee and tea shops plentiful– with the cake not forgotten.  The Taiwanese boba nai cha tea is very popular – it’s a known in English as bubble tea because one of the ingredients is tapioca which makes the milky drink look as if it contains thousands of little bubbles – it’s relatively unknown in most Western countries.  Alcohol and soft drinks are popular at mealtimes, unlike in old-world China but the love of soup, inherited from Fujian, is evident everywhere and banquets and formal meals usually offer a variety of different kinds varying from the clear to the thick but, under normal circumstances, soup can be eaten either as a meal or as a snack. Bamboo mushrooms (“rare and exotic tropical mushroom enclosed in a lacy white, netlike veil…(have) a crunchy texture and a unique musty, earthy flavour ….. usually reserved for banquets and fine vegetarian cuisine”) is popular as is fungus which is used as an ingredient in many dishes but can also be deep fried and at formal banquets –  the Taiwanese often use food to create breathtaking displays that are as mouth watering as they are beautiful.

TAIWANESE SPICY BEEF NOODLES

Ingredients

• 1.5 kg beef shin, cut into 2cm chunks
• 1kg ox tail, cut into 2.5-cm pieces
• 1 tablespoon Chinese vinegar
• 3 tbs light soy sauce
• 3 tbsp dark soy sauce
• 1-2 tbsp maize (or any vegetable) oil
• 10 cloves garlic, peeled
• 1 large onion, peeled and finely chopped
• 3 tbsp freshly grated knob ginger, naturally without the peel
• 15 large tomatoes, peeled and cut into quarters
• 6 – 8 red chillies, each one cut in half
• 20g spring onions, cut into 2.5-cm lengths
• 4 cinnamon sticks, each about 8cm
• 8 – 10 star anise
• 2 tsps freshly ground white pepper
• 6-8 small pieces rock sugar or to taste (use light brown sugar if you don’t have this available)
• 8 tbsp broad bean paste with chillies
• Water for cooking
• 2 kg la mian noodles or coarse rice vermicelli

Method

• Marinate beef shin and ox tail in the Chinese vinegar, the dark and the light soy sauce and ground white pepper, setting it aside for 2 hours – just make sure that all the meat is in contact with the marinade – if you can find a big enough plastic bag (without any holes) it works well because you can shake it up every now and again.
• Heat the oil, preferably in a rather large wok, over high heat and fry the garlic and the onion until fragrant and just translucent.
• Add beef shin and the ox tail and stir-fry until the meat is lightly golden in colour, add enough water to cover the meat well and add all the rest of the ingredients with the exception of the noodles.
• Bring to the boil, lower heat and cover and simmer until all the meat is cooked and tender (no less than an hour).
• Remove the cinnamon sticks and the star anise before serving, skimming off any oil that floats on the surface of the stock.
• Blanch the noodles, drain them and place a portion into each individual serving bowl, ladle the beef and stock over this and serve  hot with salted mustards.

STREETFOOD IN TAPEI

The Jelly Fig

This fruit is a native of Taiwan and Southeast Asia and grows in the mountains of the Chiaya Province – jelly is made from the gel on the seeds of this fig, Ficus pumila var. awkeotsang – the  fruit are the size of small mangos that are harvested just before they ripen to a dark purple. They are then halved and turned inside out (as per the image above) to dry – over the course of several days. The dried fruit can then be sold as is or dried so that the aiyu seeds can be pulled off the outside skin and sold separately. To make the jelly, the seeds are placed in a cotton cloth bag and submerged in cold water and rubbed. A slimy yellowish tea coloured gel will be extracted from the bag of aiyu seeds as it is squeezed and massaged. The bag is discarded and the extracted gel is allowed to set into a jelly either in a cool location or in the fridge. As with many Chinese foods, there is a tale attached to it and this fig is no different – in the 1800’s the plant and the jelly were named after the daughter of a Taiwanese tea businessman who discovered the jelling property of the seeds when he drank from a river in Chiayi.  He found a clear yellowish jelly in the water he was drinking and was refreshed upon trying it. Looking above the river he noticed fruits on hanging vines. The fruits contained seeds that exuded a sticky gel when rubbed. Upon this discovery, he gathered some of the fruit and served them at home with honeyed lemon juice. Finding the jelly-containing beverage delicious and thirst-quenching, the enterprising businessman delegated the task of selling it to his beautiful 15-year-old daughter, Aiyu. The snack was very well-received and became highly popular. So, the businessman eventually named the jelly and the vines after his daughter. The aerial roots of this fruit actually climb up tree trunks and over rocks and one plant on a large tree can yield about 3,000 jelly-figs with a myriad of seeds, each seed containing achenes that gelatinise water.

SESAME OIL CHICKEN

This is a really quick recipe for two – should you require bigger portions, simply double up and double up again.

Ingredients

• 4 free range chicken legs, cut into pieces
• 12 ginger slices – peel the ginger first
• Seasonings
• 8 tbsp black sesame oil
• 400 ml cooking wine
• 250 ml water

Method

• Stir-fry the ginger with black sesame oil until fragrant and almost burnt, add the chicken and wine, stirring  briskly and then pour in the water, reducing the heat to a gentle simmer and cook for 20 minutes until the chicken is quite tender.
• Remove from the heat and serve hot with liquid.
• If you stir fry the ginger of a low heat, it will become bitter so the secret here is to add the chicken as soon as the ginger is slightly charred and curled up – if you don’t char it until it is dark enough, the ginger taste will be too strong and it will spoil the taste of the chicken.

Below is a very short list of the most popular street food available on the streets of Taiwan.

• Dragon beard candy is popular amongst children and adults alike and is made on the streets to attract attention and create business for the vendors.  It’s made “by boiling partially solidified sugar or a plain saturated and maltose solution until it just reaches the stage and then leaving it to chill. The resulting solid, which is elastic, is formed into a torus and then repeatedly pulling and folded over, tripling the number of strands after each repetition. While the candy is being folded it is kept covered in toasted glutinous flour, in order to keep the strands from sticking together.” The finished beard is cut up into small pieces and usually then wrapped around crushed peanuts and eaten immediately after it’s made.

• Barbecued food can be found all over Taiwan and not just on the streets – the Taiwanese penchant for it legendary! Barbecued pork wrapped around spring onions, minced beef stuffed into yao tai crullers (they look like large spongy fried donuts), chilli spiced squid, sausages and even corn is common fare on the streets, making one realise that street meals are nothing like junk food but a far superior food culture.

• Dumplings and soup with noodles are more common than burgers in Taiwan and often eaten with spring rolls, shrimp cakes, congee with sweet potatoes or deepfried salted duck by the tourists with the locals more daring or more different, depending how you look at it.
• Naturally, there is also the strange food and chicken feet, snakes, entrails and many other strange foods are available for those so inclined and provide interesting tastes and textures to try – chicken feet, for example, can be really tasty!!

• Seafood is consumed in large quantities and the fisherman catch hundreds of thousands of tons of salt and fresh-water fish and other sea creatures –  crustaceans, molluscs and eels form part of the diet and restaurants serve fish live because it is vital, to the Taiwanese, that the fish is fresh. Hot peppery soya soaked clams in rice wine and oyster omelettes are common fair and as far a poultry goes chicken, goose and duck are commonly eaten spiced with Ginseng – Lopokao, made with steamed shrimps, radishes and rice is also well loved.
• Taiwanese meatball (image above the spicy beef noodles) - is a popular streetfood made with a sticky rice pastry on the outsided and stuffed with minced pork mixed with bamboo shoots, chilli, garlic and sticky soya sauce is essential – sometimes fried and sometimes steamed.

Always bear in mind that in Taiwan food is available for 24 hours a day and there’s absolutely no restaurant that closes over lunch and if there is, by chance, a single one – the streets more than make up for it with their continuous supply of food, like the wheeled carts that provide everything from tea to grilled meat in any form shape or size and prepared by an extremely talented people who live their culinary tradition and embrace the modern with as much glee as they depend on their ancient culinary history to create a cuisine fit for angels.  Shopping for food whets the appetite and specialist shops are everywhere – shark fins specialists, preserved fruit specialists, noodle specialists and sweet specialists are but a few and their prices range from high to low – much as in the rest of the world except that their lows are really, really low.

BEAN PASTE BEEF NOODLES

Ingredients

• 150g minced beef
• 1 packet Chinese basic flat fine noodles
• Chopped spring onions to taste
• 1 tbsp rice wine
• 1 tbsp sweet bean paste
• 2 tbsp ordinary bean paste
• 1 tbsp dark soy sauce
• 1 tbsp light soy sauce
• ½ tsp sugar
• 5 tablespoons water
• Freshly ground black pepper as needed
• Maize, peanut or any vegetable oil for cooking

Method

• In a good sized wok, heat some of the oil and stir-fry the minced beef over high heat,  drizzling with cooking wine to taste – when just cooked, remove from wok.
• Heat a little more cooking oil to stir-fry all the well-mixed seasoning ingredients until it becomes fragrant (because the pastes go through a fermentation period, frying it in oil improves the taste of the dish because it get’s rid of a possible sour taste).
• Return the minced beef to the hot wok and stir to mix with everything and then remove it from heat.
• Bring a pot of water to a boil to cook the noodles until just done, transfer to a bowl and drizzle with meat and bean mixture.
• Sprinkle with a few chopped spring onions and serve.
• You can double up this recipe and you can keep the bean and meat mixture in the fridge for, at least, a week.

FESTIVALS

Festivals are important and the Dragon Boat Festival, Moon Festival, Tomb Sweeping Day, Double Nines and New Year are celebrated with foods specifically created for these days – rice dumplings filled with bamboo leaves, sweet dumplings stuffed with sugary black sesame seeds and Grave cakes are but a few of the specialities enjoyed when the Taiwanese celebrate. When the celebrations are over, they simply go back to eating normally and ‘normally’ means dinging on  crab shells stuffed with egg whites, tea flavoured prawns, jellyfish and smoked goose, white fungus with rock sugar or fried oysters with soybeans – the list is endless and one could continue all day but this should give you an idea of the vibrant food that the Taiwanese call ‘home-cooking’.

THE BANQUET

A typical large banquet can include as much as 15 hors’douevres, glutinous rice dumplings, fish dishes like steamed scallops balls, Chinese braised meat, baby calamari soup, shrimp stuffed loquats, deep fried cuttle fish cakes, herrings cooked with peanuts and then typical Chinese old favourites like Buddha Jumps the Wall, Shark fins soup, abalone, chestnuts, taro, yam and so on and ended with a variety of desserts often including ornately carved fruit or sugar dishes. Tables are ladedn with Taiwanese specialities like Stewed Shark’s Fins, Frogs and Shredded Ginger, Braised Eel, Abalone and Pork Maw, Stewed Turtle, Pineapple Jelly, Green Bean Congee, Sweet Egg Cake, Fried Spring Rols, and Salty Congee, Noodles with Shrimp and Meatballs, Phoenix-eye Cake, Sweet Potatoes Steeped in Syrup, Hsinchu Rice Noodles, and Meatballs and Meat Pies. Hakka Style Sauteed Green Bean Noodles and espcially their Seafood with Black Bean Sauce, their and the Clams with Basil – surely influenced by the Portuguese!

SESAME PRAWNS

Ingredients

• 12 huge (jumbo) prawns, heads removed, deveined and butterflied
• 1 pkt  bean thread noodles
• 1 litres oil for frying
• 6 tbsp  lightly toasted white sesame seeds
• Coating
• 125 ml corn flour flour (Maizena)
• 125 ml flour
• Sauce
• 125 ml homemade  chicken stock
• 1 ½ tbsp tomato ketchup – buy a sugar free, good quality ketchup here
• 3  tsp sugar
• 3 tsp white vinegar
• A little salt to taste
• Marinade
• ⅓ egg white
• 1 tbsp Maizena corn flour
• 1 tsp rice wine (the Taiwanese use rice wine as cooking wine.)
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• ½ tsp sugar
• 1 tsp grated lemon zest
• Salt to taste
• Freshly ground white pepper to taste

Method

• Marinate the prawns for about an hour in the marinade and then coat the prawns with coating ingredients.
• Heat oil to medium heat and fry bean threads until they are puffy and expanded, drain and place on a serving platter.
• Place bean threads on serving platter.
• Deep fry prawns until they are done and then drain.
• Put the ingredients for the sauce in a wok and bring to a boil, simmer for a minute or two and pour this onto the prawns.
• Serve the prawns and the sauce on the bean threads and sprinkle with sesame seeds.

*Stephan Facciola’s Cornucopia II 1998