Are you a huge Chinese food fan? Ready for a challenge?
After taking the now famous Omnivore's 100 quiz, I realized 1) my score's pretty good, and 2) it's because the author ran the gamut of Eastern and Western cuisines, high and low end, like a true omnivore. I decided to create my own 100 list of Chinese foods and drinks that, in keeping with the spirit of this blog, focuses on a broad definition of Chinese food.
I've avoided a few well-known delicacies (like bird's nest and shark's fin) that I personally think are either overrated or too scarce to put on any such list. Some foods here are also present in other Asian countries, but I included them because they're so entrenched in Chinese cuisine. In addition to traditional Chinese dishes and ingredients, there are also some international interpretations of Chinese food and foods in Hong Kong and Macau that have developed in the past hundred or so years. In short, a modern take on Chinese food.
So copy and paste the list, highlight the ones you've tried, and let me know how you score. Which ones do you absolutely love and which ones would you not eat even on a dare?
Read MoreI was on a sugar high during my stay in Hong Kong. I blame the milk tea.
Hong Kong-style milk tea is in a class of its own, different from other forms of milk tea you're likely to encounter. Also called pantyhose milk tea or silk stocking milk tea, it gets the signature intense, smooth flavor from the being strained back and forth through a long cloth sieve that resembles women's stockings. In this episode of an HK food show on Youtube (in Cantonese only), the proprietor of one cafe explains how he uses a blend of six types of tea leaves and boils and strains the tea eight times. At the end, evaporated milk and a heaping spoonful of sugar is mixed in to create the final cup of pure caffeinated bliss.
Granted, pantyhose milk tea, known as "si mut naai cha" in Cantonese, can get a bit heavy at times. But for me, it's about as addictive as Vietnamese coffee and Thai iced tea. Since I can't get milk tea this good in Beijing, I spent my trip in Hong Kong indulging in this thick, sweet concoction in almost every shape and form.
For the summer time, of course, there's iced milk tea, best drunken on a lazy afternoon in a cha chaan teng with a newspaper and pineapple bun. But some cha chaan tengs (Cantonese cafe/diner), acknowledging that melted ice can dilute the tea too much, have devised some quirky ways to keep the drink cold without flavor loss. One spot I visited serves their milk tea in plastic cups nestled in bowls of ice. In the aforementioned Youtube video, the shop makes its ice cubes out of the same hand-pulled milk tea.
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