So Many Things to Try!

Overall, I found the food in China to be hearty and comforting compared to the light, bright flavors of Vietnam. It was also considerably colder in Fuzhou (usually in the 40s or 50s), so I craved warm comfort food a lot.

The first meal I had on campus, which I ended up having nearly once a day, was a bowl of soup from the cafeteria’s made-to-order soup station. It was so awesome.

It worked like this: first, you pick up an orange basket and choose your soup ingredients from the refrigerators. There were tons of options: cauliflower, taro, seaweed, lots of mushrooms, fungus, eggs (hard boiled or fresh), tofu, bean sprouts, greens, tomato, fish balls, crab, sausages and much more. There were a few different noodle options too.

Next, you give your basket to the cook in the window, who places all your ingredients in one of the individual boiling baskets in a huge pot of broth to cook. It takes 5 or 10 minutes, but it is so worth it. Outside the window are bowls of garlic paste, chili sauce (I’m officially addicted), scallions, ground pepper and vinegar to mix in.

Eating it is kind of a process, and it takes a while. By now I’ve become pretty good with chopsticks I’m proud to say, and I actually prefer them for noodle soup. Chopstick natives eat soup with two hands by scooping up a little broth with a flat ceramic spoon in their left hand and plopping a few noodles on top using their chopsticks in the right hand. The perfect bite. Eventually I figured it out, but it was awkward for a while.

Almost all the food at the cafeteria was made-to-order. One station even offered fresh, hand-pulled noodles, and you could watch them being pulled all day long. I don’t think anyone was quite as excited about that as I was. The Hwa Nan cafeteria wasn’t unique either. Hardly any ingredients are actually packaged or processed in China no matter where you get a meal, except probably the flour, sauces and spices. Otherwise it’s all fresh. And it’s incredibly cheap, at least by my standards. A bowl of soup at the soup station was between 6 and 9 Yuan, which is about $1.00-$1.50. But Sophie told me she didn’t like eating at the cafeteria because it was so expensive. It’s all relative.

Apart from noodle soup, most of what I ate was some sort of vegetable stir-fry with white rice. The vegetables in China were awesome. So many mushrooms! Bean sprouts, bok choy, kale, cabbage, tomatoes, eggplant, and so much more. Tofu is really common too.

In fact, my greatest food-related discoveries in China often weren’t actual dishes, but just individual ingredients. Here are some of the best:

Taro

Some of my Asian classmates were familiar with taro prior to our trip, but I had never seen it before. Oh my god, it changed my life. Taro is a root vegetable similar to a potato in texture, but not in flavor. It is much sweeter and more smooth, but not quite like a sweet potato. They have a slight lavender color to them too. I’ve now had it fried, baked, boiled, freeze-dried and frozen in ice cream. But by far my favorite incarnation was when I had mashed taro with sesame seeds at Sophie’s house.

It was amazing: creamy, starchy and unctuous (not exactly sure what ‘unctuous’ means, but I heard Padma Lakshmi say it once, so hopefully I’m in the clear). I hope to god I can find it at home. I don’t know if I can live without it anymore.

Dried Sweet Potato

Speaking of potatoes, one of the literally THOUSANDS of weird packaged Chinese snacks was dried sweet potato. Dried fruit has become my staple snack on the trip, so I was down to try it. It took some getting used to though. I still don’t quite understand how such a naturally dry food can become chewy as it is dehydrated, but apparently it can.

It is very mild tasting and not very sweet. And it’s bright orange. I actually mistook it for mango at first because most Chinese packaging doesn’t have English translations.

It wasn’t anything mind-blowing, but I decided to throw it in because I ate it so often in China.

Chestnuts

Though a bit tough to peel, chestnuts became one of my favorite snacks in China. You can find them steamed and roasted at little shops and restaurants all over the place. Chestnuts are sweet and nutty tasting, but much more starchy than a regular nut. They are kind of like a cross between a walnut and a potato in flavor. They are delicious little surprises in stir-fry dishes, but they must be a huge bummer to prepare. Their shells are pretty tough, and you can’t really peel them without a knife.

Pamelo

These guys are a lot like giant grapefruits, but with a much milder flavor. You peel the skin and eat them in slices like an orange, but they are like four times the size. Our school convenience store sold them and peeled them for free! They are SUPER filling though, and it is hard to stop eating them once you’ve started.

I only had the yellow pomelos, but the insides look pretty much the same to matter the color. They are surprisingly easy to peel. Once the outer rind is gone, you just have to work around the pith. Also kind of labor intensive, but very rewarding.

This is not my cat.

Fungus

Similar to mushrooms but with a much different texture, fungus like this was everywhere in China. They feel kind of like a human ear when you touch them (sorry if that’s gross) and they have a little bit of a rubbery crunch. They are awesome in soup and in egg stir-fry.

I know they don't look like much, but just wait until you've tried them. The texture is really unique.

Chili sauce

There are SO many different kinds, but by the end of my visit, I poured some type of spicy sauce on to practically everything I ate. The most common was the dried chili oil that I put in my soup everyday. A word to the wise: the oil is much spicier than the actual chili pieces.

My absolute favorite was a smooth, vinegar-y sauce that I ate with these incredible mushroom dumplings on my last day in Fuzhou. It wasn’t sweet at all, and it wasn’t too spicy to be used as a dipping sauce. That was probably my second favorite meal in China, right behind the homemade lunch at Sophie’s house.

Food in Fuzhou was much different than any Chinese food I’ve had in America, probably because of the huge selection of ingredients. But I have to say, it was just as oily if not oilier than American Chinese food. A few of my friends had to stop eating at the cafeteria because the oil made them sick. It was pretty heavy, but I like to think the vegetables cancelled out the greasiness a little bit J.

But wait! I can’t go without a word on the weirdo Chinese street food snacks. They were definitely out-of-this-world, and not necessarily yummy. I think pictures are the only way to go here:

The Chinese love kitschy little treats in small packages, and I swear, 90% of them had some kind of stuffing or filling. They were very colorful and creative, and I certainly won't find them anywhere else in the world.