PREP
Stories, observations, and places we’ve discovered while eating and cooking in Beijing
Sometimes, you just get the urge to shred something. Particularly as it (almost) feels like spring, and the markets around Beijing are finally filling back up with a loads of fresh vegetables, a sight for sore eyes after a winter of buying limp, overpriced turnips and making seemingly endless pots of stew. Inspired by the crack carrot salad at Yellow River noodles, when we spotted this orange toy set of mandolins and veggie carving tools, we had to have it. Easy choice, as this swanky set of plastic fun cost us a mere 7 kuai (1 buck).… READ MORE | 4 Comments
Tags: carrot, COOK, PREP, shredder, yellow river
If you haven’t been to the Dongjiao Market, and you are a kitchenware junkie, then you must go now: for the sheer quantity and variety of items available, as well as the lower than low prices. There’s a hotel/restaurant equipment supply shop with two floors of supplies, packed to the brim with ceramic, glass, tin, steel. Lining the walls are uniforms, mostly related to the hospitality industry, which suggest endless Halloween outfit possibilities. There is also a seemingly endless row of vendors devoted to things as useful as toilet paper, ceramic bowls, rope, meat grinders, and stools, should you want to open your own food cart and need to provide seating for your customers.
Many people have that longing for a piece of… READ MORE | 1 Comment
Tags: beijing, cooking gear, dongjiao, market, PREP, shopping
It’s a northern custom to make and eat dumplings on the first day of the New Year (chuyi 初一), and we were determined to do it right, with several kinds of fillings. We went out to Sanyuanli Market (三元里市场) to source goods for dumpling-making in celebration of Chinese New Year. It was packed to the brim with fresh goods, and hopping with people picking up their hot pot meat and auspicious fishes, but all the vendors were calm and patient.… READ MORE | 4 Comments
Tags: beijing, COOK, dumplings, market, PREP, recipe
Although I reluctantly admit to being a snob about convenience foods in the states, in Beijing I love to try random premixed items found at the grocery store, including this little packet of chicken wing seasoning. This fragrant-spicy spice mix, made by McCormick, is designed to be mixed with water, slathered over wings, marinated for a few minutes, and nuked in a microwave. It’s a combination of salt, chili, sugar, milk powder, desiccated garlic, onion, cumin seed, orange peel, tomato powder, sichuan pepper, pepper, and yeast extract. No mess, no fuss! How easy for the harried mother! How perfectly delicious at 2 am when you’ve had a little two much erguotou 二锅头 (in Beijing… READ MORE | 2 Comments
Tags: chicken, fast food, market, spices
For the chowhound, food souvenirs might be one of the most pleasurable aspects of travel. I used to pore obsessively over Japanese guidebooks for their painstakingly detailed guidance on the representative specialties of each prefecture and the oldest purveyors still practicing the most ancient, time-tested methods. Under globalization, it’s charming, and ever so slightly delusional, to believe that there still are local goods that can only be found in their place of production. And even if they can be bought millions of miles away, few things feel as authentic to a transient as participating in the local economy by buying something as simple, common, and necessary as food.
Tags: afternoon, COOK, jujubes, longyan, milk tea, recipe, red dates
Tianjin is the birthplace of jianbing, but here in Beijing there is no shortage of this street food. In researching how to make our own version of this street snack, we are shamelessly eating jianbing as we see fit (which is often).
This stand outside the Wukesong Photographic Equipment Center appealed because 1) this Beijing variation was fragrant with toasted black sesame seeds sprinkled on top, and 2) they were enormous. For 2.3RMB (40 cents) we got this one-pounder, two-egg jianbing monster that pretty much served as breakfast, lunch, and at least half of dinner.
Here is the step-by-step birthing of a jianbing.
1. A crepe-like batter is spread over a… READ MORE | 13 Comments
Tags: beijing, crepe, egg, food, jianbing, PREP, street food, wukesong
Most people do not think of Tianjin as a tourist destination, but I went recently and loved it. First, you get to be harmonized (hexie‘d 和谐) on the express train, and the female attendants wear luxurious red wool pillbox hats decorated with the party emblem. Secondly, Tianjin is the birthplace of the egg crepe/pancake (jianbing 煎饼), known as jianbing guozi 煎饼果子 there.
Imagine if Jean-Georges Vongerichten, in this passage from a New York Times travel piece by R.W. Apple and requoted in Evan Osnos’s New Yorker blog, had eaten his jianbing in Tianjin instead of Shanghai (which indubitably is NOT the birthplace of jianbing).
Tags: crepe, egg, jianbing, street food, tianjin
To a displaced American with southern Chinese-Taiwanese roots, where rice rules supreme, northern Chinese noodle and bread culture (mianshi 面食) is completely bewildering.
But the pleasures of biangbiang noodles are many.
Jen introduced me to biangbiang noodles, which I loved immediately. Biangbiang noodles are a specialty of Shaanxi 陕西 province, most often found in Xi’an 西安 as a street food. The character is infamously difficult, so there are several versions of a mnemonic poem that are used to invoke its 57 (52, or 56… depending on which version you subscribe to) strokes. It can also be found on menus as biaobiao mian 彪彪面, bangbang mian 邦邦面 or 棒棒面, and youpo chemian 油泼扯面. Or you… READ MORE | 6 Comments
Tags: biangbiang mian, history, noodles, shaanxi
Biangbiang noodles are a damn tasty treat that I became addicted to at first bite. Despite all the variations, it consists of a relatively simple formula. Chewy noodles, a few blanched vegetables, and an oily spicy/salty sauce. Sure, a bowl will only set you back about RMB 12 (a little less than 2 dollars), but there is something to be said for actual home cooking so we wanted to figure out how to make a killer version of biangbiang mian.
With that in mind, we found two Shaanxi noodle shops and ate four bowls of noodles one afternoon to suss out the exact ingredients we should throw into our noodles. The first pick was obvious – the… READ MORE | 5 Comments
Tags: beijing, biangbiang mian, cooking, gulou, kitchen, noodles, shaanxi, yellow river, youpo chemian
San Yuan Li is a wet market in Beijing that caters to foreigners and foreign restaurants that buy in bulk. You can get ricotta cheese, avocados, turkeys, and nutella, as well as sage rosemary and thyme. It’s the best.
This haul of vegetables cost RMB 98. The dairy (cream, cheese, sour cream) totaled RMB 67. That is a total of about 25 US bucks.
It fed 13 people… READ MORE | 3 Comments
Tags: cheese, dairy, food, market, sanyuanli market, vegetables
