Shanghai Street Food #26 Sesame Breakfast Pastries: Dà Bǐng 大饼, Shāo Bing 烧饼

Da bing breakfast pastry

The overwhelming choice of breakfast street foods in China means a morning smorgasbord of flavours every day. The most difficult thing is choosing what you want to eat. Should it be savoury or sweet today? Crispy or soft? Bready or cake-y? With or without soy milk?

It's pretty hard to go wrong with bing, a kind of all encompassing term which means any food which is flattish, roundish and like a bread or pancake. The bing family of breakfast foods includes the perenially popular folded pancake jiān bing 煎饼, and my personal love, the scallion oil pancake cong you bing 葱油饼 made by the vendor on Nanchang Lu. 

Most little breakfast shops also sell dà bǐng 大饼 (big bing) or shāo bing  烧饼 (baked bing), both names referring to small (not big) sesame sprinkled breakfast pastries. Crispy, warm and flaky, they lie somewhere between a flatbread and a pastry and are very inexpensive - usually 1 yuan each. 


The vendor may ask if you want sweet or savory bing (tián de háishì xián de 甜的还是咸的) - I like the salty ones, finding the sweet ones a little plain. 


It's great to watch them being cooked - the bread dough is sprinkled with either a little sugar, or salt and scallions, before being shaped and then pasted, Indian naan style, onto the inside wall of a 44 gallon drum 'oven' to get nice and crispy, then rested on the circular oven shelf to keep warm.

The Shanghai Street Food Series

Now in its third year!

Number 1   Roast Sweet Potatoes

Number 2   Snack-on-a-stick 

Number 3   Liangpi - a spicy cold noodle dish

Number 4   Langzhou Lamian - hand-pulled noodles

Number 5   Cong You Bing - fried shallot pancakes

Number 6   Baozi - steamed buns, Shanghai style

Number 7   Jian Bing - the famous egg pancake

Number 8   Dan Gao - street cakes

Number 9   Shao mai - sticky rice treats

Number 10  Summer on a Stick - fresh fruits

Number 11  You Tiao - deep-fried breadsticks

Number 12  Dan Juan - egg rolls

Number 13  Shao Kao - street barbecue

Number 14  Bao Mi Hua - exploding rice flowers

Number 15  Chou Doufu - stinky tofu

Number 16  Bing Tang Shan Zha - crystal sugar hawthorns

Number 17  Mutton Polo

Number 18  Yumi Bang - puffed corn sticks

Number 19  Mian Hua Tang - cotton candy

Number 20  You Dunzi - fried radish cakes

Number 21  Suzhou Shi Yue Bing - homestyle mooncakes 

Number 22  Gui Hua Lian'ou - honeyed lotus root stuffed with sticky rice

Number 23  Cong You Ban Mian - scallion oil noodles

Number 24  Guotie - potsticker dumplings

Number 25  Nuomi Cai Tou - fried clover pancakes

The Five Wonders of Wuxi

Wuxi residents may be upset to hear me say this, but I had kind of low expectations of the town for my first visit last Friday. I just didn't want to get my hopes up about a place that's home to China's third largest lake and ninth largest Buddha statue, in case I found it all a bit underwhelming and was left wondering whether I shouldn't actually be visiting the eighth largest Buddha statue instead. Wherever that is.

But as it turns out, Wuxi is quite wonderful in an understated sort of way, in the way only a city that doesn't rely on tourism can be, just by being itself. I didn't even see the lake (third biggest in China) or the fairly big Buddha, but I still had a great time thanks to Wuxi-ren Unbravegirl who took time off from her frantic Bloggie-winning schedule (Best Asian Blog, by the way) to show me around the place in her new role as the Wuxi Tourism Board's Ambassador and incoming President of the Wuxi Visitor Hosting Programme. 

I hope they're paying her a lot because she is really a very good host. And here are four things I didn't expect to find in Wuxi:

1. Excellent blue sky

Wuxi really outdid itself with the weather on Friday, turning on a very nice blue sky dotted with clouds and a day so warm I could have left my coat at home. I finally felt a breath of hope that spring might come this year after all. 

(Note to Shanghai: I haven't seen a blue sky for thirty-two days. Grey drizzle is not attractive for thirty-two days in a row so you need to pick up your game because if Wuxi can do it, so can you.)

2. A very pretty temple

Wuxi's Nanchang Temple has everything - monks in saffron robes, a multi-story pagoda you can climb, flags, lanterns, and a lot of incense. And because it's called Nanchang Temple I really had to visit, although it felt awkward to point out to my Wuxi Ambassador that Nanchang Lu's Nanchang (南昌) is different from the Nanchang Temple's Nanchang（南长), so I didn't. And it was still very lovely.

3. Canals

I'm not going to call Wuxi 'The Venice of the East', in fact I'm not even going to call it 'The Venice of Wuxi', but there is no denying that a few well-placed canals lined with whitewashed houses hung with lanterns add enormously to the atmosphere of a place. The factory spewing smoke in the background probably needs to go, but add in a curved stone bridge or two, and you're done.  

4. Street foods I've never seen before

I've now seen and eaten a lot of Chinese street foods. A lot. But Wuxi had a whole variety of specialised Chinese street sweets I'd never seen before, in quite unique colours. I've grown quite wary of Chinese sweets with their occasionally jarring flavour combinations (pork floss doughnuts come to mind) and these were no exception, a timely reminder that taro and custard should never go together.

The small pretty buns with the spiral pattern were small and pretty, but best left untouched. The strange purple filling was like stale bread mixed with food colouring. 

I did quite enjoy the honeycomb texture of the Chinese canoli, a fried perforated potato slice wrapped around a filling of sweetened pale purple taro paste. I would eat these again if I was close to starving, but not under any other circumstances.

5. Unexpectedly great noodles

Hurrying to catch lunch before the departure of my afternoon train, and having failed to fill up enough on Wuxi's sweets, my Wuxi Ambassador and I picked a small noodle restaurant at random based on the fact that it was open and looked like it could serve a meal in quick time. For reasons of haste there was no photograph taken to record what was a stupendous steaming bowl of noodles. 

The scorching hot earthenware bowl was filled to the brim with spiced broth, fine wheat noodles, sour pickles, a tiny wobbling poached quail's egg, lettuce (delicious and silky soft when cooked), and salty smoked slices of bacon. It was amazing.

All I can remember, aside from the blockbuster taste, was the restaurant's orange formica stools and tables. If you need the address for your next trip to Wuxi (the one you're now planning) you can contact your Wuxi Visitor Host for details. 

Where is Wuxi?

It's halfway between Shanghai and Nanjing, about 45 minutes by super-fast G train from either Hongqiao Station or Shanghai Station. Trains run every half hour.

Taming the Kitchen Dragon: Farm-Style Home Cooking in China

It's half an hour past midday, late by Chinese lunch standards. A whole hour late actually - lunch generally beginning at the barely-finished-breakfast time of eleven thirty - so everyone in the smoke-filled kitchen is starving and beginning to steal bits of food from the bowls covering the square wooden tea table, dressed with a piece of pale blue floral sheet. They're all hoping the cook won't notice.

The cook meanwhile, has a huge fire-breathing machine to control, a square squat black and white patterned dragon in the corner of the room puffing smoke and steam and full of fire, and he's trying to tame it enough to get the lunch finished so we can all sit down and eat.

I'm in the farmhouse kitchen of the Xu family, along with eight neighbours, relatives and friends who have stopped by to see what's for lunch, and the dragon is the wok stove that takes pride of place in every eastern Chinese farm kitchen, a rather lovely hand-painted beast of a thing. After a morning visiting the local market and farms of Farmer Feng and her neighbours, I'm having a home-cooked farm-style lunch and spending the afternon seeing the farms of the extended Xu family and their neighbours. 

I'm very taken by these big Chinese farmhouse stoves though, and the skill needed to cook with them. This one (in Farmer Feng's kitchen) is typical, with it's simple painted designs and chimney recessed to hold sauces and condiments. Made from rammed earth then tiled and painted, the stoves are so enormous that farmhouse kitchens tend to be enormous too, just to fit them in. I've come across some really beautifully decorated and painted ones, like the stove at a peach farm I visited, but others are very simple and functional.

The stove usually has three deep indentations set into its broad top, for two large woks and one small one. The woks, seasoned to a deep bronze-black patina, are divided up according to their purpose - one for stir-frying, and the others for boiling water or steaming.

The stove backs onto a small alcove behind the chimney and has two long narrow fireplaces about the thickness and length of a man's arm, each fireplace leading to the spot directly underneath one of the two large woks. The fireplaces are fed with a stash of dried bamboo and straw standing in the chimney corner.

Cooking on a wood-fired wok stove is way more complicated than just turning the gas up or down, and it requires a lot more skill, but here's how it works. Cooking is a two man affair, with the cook standing in front of the stove tossing ingredients into one of the two woks at great speed, and calling out to the second 'cook' the necessary instructions - 'more heat!' 'less heat!' 'fast heat!!' and so on.

The second cook sits facing the fireplaces, feeding in bamboo at the required speed for the level of heat. When a really high heat is needed, she works a small electric bellows which draws air through a side vent, magnifying the fire massively (I guess in other farms manual bellows might still exist, although I've never seen them used).

Meanwhile, the kitchen is dense with smoke, steam and heat, and the dishes are coming out to the table at a great rate of knots. Every single thing we're eating today has been pulled out of the earth this morning. 

The pale blue duck eggs, collected today and given to me earlier by Farmer Feng, are going in the soup. The eight different vegetable dishes have come from vegetables picked less than thirty metres from the kitchen - baby celery, fresh scallions and garlic, spinach, bok choy. Many I've never seen before including a claw-shaped, multiheaded vegetable called wa-wa cai or baby vegetable, shown below.

It's quite some spread! White-poached chicken with a soy dipping sauce, and hong shao ji  (red-cooked chicken) in a sweet, sticky soy reduction are both on the table (the chickens freshly dispatched an hour prior) along with crisp fried local fish, and a parade of fabulous vegetable dishes, each one simply cooked to show off the wonderful fresh-out-of-the-ground flavours. Duck egg soup with tomatoes and slices of radish, Stir-fried spinach with finely shredded tofu and a little pork, and the baby vegetable, boiled first to soften it, then gently stir-fried in the wok with a pinch of salt and a touch of oil. It has a forgettable mushy appearance but the flavour I like - a cross between a really fresh brussel sprout and cabbage. That may not be the most attractive description, on reflection, but I did enjoy it!

As did all the assembled neighbours - Wang Ayi (Auntie Wang) in the centre, her cheeks marked from years of winter work outdoors, spent the entire meal negotiating with me to find her single 29 year old son a wife. The foreigner the better, she thought, seeing as he'd so far failed to find a Chinese wife and produce any grandchildren. Twenty nine! she exclaimed.

And heartfelt thanks for a memorable meal to our wonderful two cooks - Xu Ayi, who controlled that fire so well, and Cook Wang who tamed the dragon in the kitchen and sent forth dish after dish of fresh, simple, delicious food. Don't you wish you could eat like this everyday?

Yours Truly, Finalist in Food Photographer of the Year!

Well, this last week has been certifiably nuts. I had four different magazine deadlines, all on vastly different topics, such that my brain had switched itself permanently to 'BING!' even in the middle of the night, which was tiring and inconvenient. 

I would wake up with a brilliant idea about 'A Weekend in Suzhou' only to remember that I submitted that particular article the day before, and it would be really super helpful if my brain could now put that to rest and instead, come up with ideas for a funny column about living in Shanghai.

I spent a whole day wet, cold and very muddy photographing the lovely farmers I met in the last post. 

Then on Friday morning, unthinkably, I got an email informing me that I had been seleced as a finalist in an international food photography competition, The Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year. What?? Are they truly really serious?? Only ten minutes before the email arrived I tripped on the stair going into the kitchen while holding an armful of half-full cereal bowls, which all smashed to smithereens and left me bruised and covered in milk and bits of muesli. It was shaping up to be a bad day. And I still didn't have any funny ideas for a column due in four hours' time.

But apparently those Pink Lady people were very serious, choosing not one but three of my photos. (Clearly the competition was open to amateurs - me, as well as seasoned professionals, but we all competed together). I'll say it again - What??! The final awards, and here's the part where I just about dead dropped over, are in London. England. End of next month. 

Firstly, for those of you who have already heard this news via Twitter and Facebook, I want to say thanks a million trillion for your congratulations, messages of support, and good wishes. You're all fabulous!

(PS  I'm not permitted to show the images that were chosen until after the finals.)

Farmer Boy, Farmer Girl: Allotment Farming in China

Meet the delightfully friendly Farmer Xi Hu Li, who at nearly seventy years of age has two things to show for a life of hard work - a neat little half-acre farm on the outskirts of Shanghai, and a pair of very fancy silver teeth.

He's a quietly spoken man, well shy of five feet tall with a soft weathered face and a ready smile, but completely mystified as to why a foreign woman, myself, would suddenly show up in one of his greenhouses. He is far too polite to make a fuss about it though.

I'll have to go back a few steps to explain how I came to be in his greenhouse. Every time I travel by road or train out of Shanghai I see hundreds of tiny farms, often with rows of arched plastic-covered greenhouses crammed like sardines on the city's outskirts. I wanted and meet some of these small plot farmers and see what their life is like, how they farm, and where they sell the food they grow. 

The constant scaremongering in China about food safety gets a bit tiring, and everyone seems to live and eat in a state of perpetual alarm-readiness. What's on the blacklist today? Yesterday someone told me that strawberries sold in Shanghai are injected with sugar solution to make them sweeter and heavier. What? Where does the truth lie? I wanted to see farming in action for myself but until recently I had no idea how to even meet any farmers, let alone wangle an invite back to their farms.

Then I had a lucky break - when I went to Mr Xu's metal workshop recently I noticed it was smack bang in the middle of a village of small farms, and after taking his portrait he agreed to lend me one of his staff, Little Chen, to meet the local farmers of San Tuan village this week.

The chosen day dawned grey and dismal - pouring with rain, feezing cold and windy, with bouts of sleet. A sunny day would have been lovelier but this is the reality of farming - you have to go to work in any weather. 

Little Chen thought we should go to the local market first to find the farmers, who would be there selling their wares, and we could hopefully coerce one or two into showing us their farms.

The first farmer I met was Dong Ai Xian, selling baby celery so fresh there was still earth clinging to the roots. The seventy year old mother of four children goes to market at four in the morning three days a week, earning 50 yuan a day ($8) selling the vegetables she grows herself. It's very little money, and the days are long but she says every bit helps.

On the other side of the market I met a row of women selling vegetables, all local farmers, and among them the very shy Feng Wu Bao, who for reasons still unknown to me agreed to take Little Chen and I back to her farm for the morning and meet her husband Xi Hu Li who was mending their greenhouse. I wish you could have seen the hastily suppressed look of surprise on his face when we turned up!

Feng Wu Bao and Xi Hu Li have a traditional zi liu di farm - a small allotment assigned to individual families at the close of the Cultural Revolution, derived from the breakdown of large communal farms. All the farms in this area are run on the same basis and are small, no more than an acre each. The farms can be handed down from generation to generation but can't be bought or sold.

Farmers Feng and Xi, like all their neighbours, grow vegetables and raise ducks and chickens for their own use, and for their children and grandchildren too, with any surplus taken to market to sell. Because their family are all eating the food they grow their foremost concern is that the food be safe, and for this reason they don't use any pesticides or herbicides, and the only fertilizer utilized is the manure and straw mulch from their duck pen. 

They've farmed this way for over forty years, growing only what's in season, with the only nod to modernity being the construction of an arched plastic-covered greenhouse in which there is a healthy crop of tomatoes thriving. Greenhouse farming helps them conserve water and prevents crop loss due to birds and pests.

Although they might not be familiar with the term 'organic' these farmers have, in fact, been using organic farming principles for a very long time.

Back at their house, I poke around the chicken pen, the duck pen, the storage shed and the tool shed. Not a skerrick of chemicals anywhere. By now, Feng's best friend and neighour has popped around to see what's going on. There are smiles and giggles all round as these sixty-somethings share a private joke and have their photo taken.

To be honest, I feel quite elated myself - despite the sleet, the mud, and the miserable grey skies I feel very optimistic that there are many, many farms like this one all over China, not organic, no, but clean, well-cared for and chemical free. It's nice to know the next time I go to my wet market I can ask: 

你自己种得吗？Nǐ zìjǐ zhòng de ma? Did you grow this yourself?

As I leave Feng presses a bowl of the palest blue duck eggs into my hands, for my family. They're practically the loveliest things I've ever seen.

The China Road Trip: A Progress Report

From motorhomestoday.com

Just in case you all thought I might have let the whole campervanning around China thing fall off my radar, because it was too difficult, costly and just too nuts, here's the first of a series of updates to whet your appetite for the almost-certain disasters, embarrassing language mess-ups and map confusion to come.

After deciding that the second half of this year would be as good a time as any to pack up the Shanghai house, the family, and the dictionary and set off for a six month road trip around China's less-travelled roads, we soon realised that this was going to be a logistic nightmare needing to be broken down into more do-able monthly tasks.

The two tasks assigned for February (because it's a short month and we didn't want to set ourselves up for failure) were:

1. Get our Chinese driving licence

2. Find a campervan, motorhome or minivan

I'm sad to report I have already FAILED on both these counts, China not being the easiest country in which to organize anything in a short time-frame (except having a suit made, which can happen overnight, or demolishing a historic building, also possible overnight).

Let me explain these miserable failures to you.


The Chinese Drivers Licence Failure

In theory, it should be a piece of cake getting a Chinese Driving Licence because all you need is:

1. An existing international driver's licence (check)
2. Healthy body and mind (check)
3. The ability to get 90% on a multichoice exam on Chinese road rules (not impossible)
4. 90 days or more remaining on your Chinese residency visa. Really??

Apparently I only have 68 days remaining on my residency visa, because I only have 68 days remainng on my ten-year old passport. It's kind of coming back to me now that they informed me of this when I last applied for a new visa, but it may have conveniently slipped my mind.

So before I can apply, I need a new passport, and a new visa. And a lot of luck with those multichoice questions. The only positive thing to come out of this whole circuitous paperwork drama is my new passport photo, in which I have failed to age at all over the last ten years thanks to Wally at the photo shop who did a bit of photoshop on me.

Maybe not so easy as I thought then. This may explain the fact that I've only seen two foreigners driving cars in three years in China. That's called a clue, but I choose to ignore it. Next month, with my new passport and visa, I will be reporting Chinese Drivers Licence SUCCESS.


The Chinese Campervan Failure

The vehicle, on the other hand, is going to be much more tricky. I think I may have explained in my last post that a culture of camping, caravans and motorhomes doesn't really exist in China. I can't just pop down to the local motorhome display yard to take a look at the latest models, or check the second-hand pages of the China Daily for a bargain minibus. Unlike London and Byron Bay, Shanghai is not littered with the carcasses of fouth-hand campervans left behind by backpackers.

So I started my research on campervans at the place where every Chinese person researches a new purchase - Taobao, the Chinese website/temple to capitalism where you can buy absolutely anything from popcorn to a ten metre neon sign customized with your name. My search for 'campervan' however, yielded exactly one match, shown below.

T-shirt 39 yuan, from Kumao Co

Even broadening the search field to 'motorhome' yielded only 4 results, and 'camping' a measly 820, most of which were children's books in English (Curious George Goes Camping, Bailey Goes Camping, Amelia Bedelia Goes Camping, Tiny Goes Camping, Maisy Goes Camping etc etc. They have all of them gone camping, just apparently not in China).

I decided to go further afield, this time to Alibaba, an Aladdin's cave of large hardwear, machinery and stuff you make big stuff out of, like pipes and panels and so on.

My first search for a campervan turned out to be pure gold!

This snappy modern vehicle was made by the Shenzhen Speed Sources Technology company, which sounded extremely professional, reliable and high-tech. 

Then I saw the specs: Length: 17cm. The lifelike photo had me completely fooled. This was nothing but a cheap Chinese homebrand Barbie Camper. Bugger.

Next I discovered the Yiwu Chufeng Commodity Firm were selling 'Foam Antistress Campervan Shaped Stress Balls', suggested under the category of 'Corporate Gifts' What mid-level executive wouldn't benefit from squeezing the hell out of a foam campervan? I thought. But if squeezing one doesn't sufficiently relieve your stress the same firm also make electric cigarette maker and tobacco rolling machines for times when only nicotine will do.

Unfortunately, their minimum order is 3000 pieces. That's a lot of stress relief right there. I bet you could use 3000 of these to make a giant executuve sress relief campervan pit that you could dive right in to, like those plastic ball pits in the kids' playroom at Ikea.

Personally, I was most taken by the 'Hotselling Wooden Motorhome' from the Hangzhou Hklong Arts and Crafts Co Ltd. A small Swiss chalet on wheels wasn't exactly what I had in mind for six months on China's backroads, but it would certainly be a conversation piece whenever we stopped and laid out the white picket fence with the letterbox, birdbath and swing set each night.

At last I found something that appeared to be a real, actual campervan/motorhome/RV large enough for real people and not likely to burn down when I used the gas cooker. This full-sized, non-combustible, non-squeezable campervan from the Qingdao Fe Dora Co Ltd also had a very detailed description of its interior fittings.

Inside, it apparently contains a lot of Luxury Items: 

*Luxury Bathroom *Luxury Lamp *Luxury Furniture

and also a lot of Advanced Items:

*Advanced Sink  *Advanced Sofa  *Advanced Toilet  *Advanced Sound System

then a whole pile of stuff I really don't understand:

*Warm Wind  *Big Shoe Tank *Protector for Charging and Discharging

and a bedding arrangement that speaks for itself:

*Double Men Bed *Two Double Deck Single Man Bed

Clearly, this is not a family camper.

Also, it's $30,000 for the basic model. Sigh. The search for the perfect (extremely cheap) camper continues. More next month....