Life on Nanchang Lu

Shanghai Street Food #25 Fried Clover Pancakes: Nuòmǐ Căo Tóu 糯米草头

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:31:00 +0000

It's pretty much been a back-to-back street food extravaganza here. In fact, did I cook anything over Chinese New Year? Perhaps not, but if I had actually done some cooking the recollection might have been knocked out of me by daily bouts of early morning firecrackers. Like this morning's, literally, literally outside my door.

I can only say thanks to my kind neighbours, and go back to bed safe in the knowledge that they have inadvertently shown the Money God the door to my house and frightened all the bad spirits away. So thanks, really.

I definitely ate more than my fair share of street food over the Spring Festival break, both here in Shanghai and in Nanjing. And a couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of showing hardcore street foodie Frank Kassell around Shanghai for a day of full-on street food consumption starting with deep-fried bread sticks (you tiao) and ending with Shanghai style fried rice via xiaolongbao and crispy scallion pancakes (cong you bing).

Frank is writing a street food guide to China, and while he's on the road researching you can check out his progress at A Field Guide to Chinese Street Food.

But on to the actual street food, which I know is what you're all here for. These crispy herbed fried cakes (nuòmǐ căo tóu 糯米草头) are a specialty of Nanxiang, home of xiaolongbao, but I'm including them here because Nanxiang is now a suburb of Shanghai (although in the olden days before elevated highways were invented it was a town in its own right).

Nuomi cao tou are made with glutinous rice flour (糯米) and very finely chopped cooked green vegetable (草头), flattened into small rounds and shallow-fried on a griddle until browned and crisp. They are justifiably famous in Nanxiang because they taste wonderful - crisp and salty on the outside, gooey and soft in the centre with a strong herb taste. And only 2 yuan (30 cents) each!

I'm a little stuck on what to call these in English, but after consulting dozens of websites and two reliable Shanghai foodie friends, I have settled on 'fried clover pancakes' because cao tou (literally grass head) is, according to them and google, actually a type of clover. Any further assistance from Chinese readers out there would be greatly appreciated.

The nuomi cao tou sellers cluster around the old street in Nanxiang, on both sides of a lovely canal, and also sell fried pumpkin patties and stinky tofu. After my last experience with stinky tofu I'm continuing to avoid it on the grounds that it might nauseate me. But the canal is lovely, with an old stone bridge and white-washed houses, and it's only a hop, skip and jump from downtown Shanghai.

The Shanghai Street Food Series

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

Seven Must-Dos at Nanjing's Lantern Fair

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 10:43:00 +0000

If you're looking for buzz, excitement and a festival atmosphere, come to Nanjing! For the last few days I've been having a ball at the famed Nanjing Lantern Fair, where it seems everyone is celebrating Spring Festival (the first fifteen days of the Chinese New Year) in noisy and colourful style.

We ended up in Nanjing largely by default, perhaps because it was the only destination we could get tickets to without sleeping overnight at Shanghai Railway Station. Please don't feel unloved, Nanjing, because we had a great time! Spring Festival is the worst possible time to go anywhere in China you can't get to by bicycle, with tickets at an absolute premium as everyone travels home to be with their families.

At Spring Festival time Shanghai can feel a little like a ghost town - there's a mass exodus of at least a third of its population, and everything is closed. Although the quietness makes for a nice change, it's not how people imagine Chinese New Year to be - loud, exciting and buzzing with people. Nanjing, on the other hand, has atmosphere to spare with the Nanjing Lantern Fair bringing people from all over to the streets around the Confucius Temple. Here are seven reasons to get yourself there before the Lantern Fair ends on February 6.

1. See Some Lanterns

Nanjing's Lantern Fair is a riot of colour and craziness, with all kinds of things you could never imagine fashioned into a lanterns. Cheerful bees. Drumming dragons. Giant candlesticks. It's all here, and runs every night until the fifteenth day of Chinese New Year, February 6, the day also known as the official Lantern Festival.

You can find the action in and around the Confucius Temple area, along with a worrying number of fire trucks and firefighters in bright orange jumpsuits, pump packs strapped to their backs and surrounded by extinguishers. I guess 'be prepared' is a good motto when you're surrounded by thousands of metres of temporary wiring.

For a really great view, take one of the pleasure boats from the dock opposite the temple and cruise the canals decked with amazing lantern arches.

2. Try Your Luck on the Money Tree

Well, actually this tree standing outside the entrance of the Confucius Temple is correctly called the 'Tree of Health and Wellbeing', but we all know that what everyone wants more than anything else is to be wealthy. Why else are the leaves painted gold?

The aim of the game is to stand underneath the tree and throw a red-ribboned 'wish' up into its gilded leaves so that it sticks there. Ribbons can be purchased nearby (everyone knows you have to spend money to make money, right?)

3. Buy a Battery-Operated Musical Dragon

Or a dragon balloon, or a dragon lantern. But you gotta have a dragon to carry around through the crowds in this, the Year of the Dragon, and the larger and more unwieldy it is the better. These fellas play a cheerfully unrecognizable tinny tune and light up fiercely when you flick the switch, and they last about as long as a toy from inside a cereal packet, but hey, would it be a carnival novelty if the novelty didn't wear off? Or wear out? Or give you a small electric shock?

4. Eat Something Sweet'n'Sticky on a Stick

Bing Tang Hu Lu 冰糖葫芦, these irresistable shiny red treats, are Chinese toffee apples made with red hawthorns covered in a crisp layer of red toffee. The hawthorns, or haws (山楂 shānzhā) look like apples, but taste quite sour and are a perfect match for the crispy toffee which shatters into sticky shards when you bite into it. You'll probably still be picking pieces off your coat the following day but these are seriously good. Plus, they have small seeds you can spit on the pavement and feel really authentically Chinese as you do so.

Or have some regular old cotton candy (miánhuā táng, known to me as fairy floss) or an amazingingly intricate toffee version of your Chinese zodiac animal made on the spot by a toffee artist.

5. Visit the Confucius Temple

If you're looking for a a quiet and spiritual experience away from the press of the crowds, don't go into the Confucius Temple grounds during Lantern Fair because it's a riotous continuation of what's happening outside with the additional attraction of puppet shows, musical performances, and a whole lot more lanterns depicting famous scholars and pals of Confucius.

6. Buy Yourself a Lantern

The Lantern Fair is where all of Nanjing's lantern makers show off their wares, and from 10 yuan you can have your own handmade lotus, rabbit or dragon lantern in every possible colour. I've still got the ones I bought two years ago. Put a tealight inside for night-time use.

7. Make a Balloon Seller's Day

It's compulsory to purchase a balloon at the Lantern Fair, judging by the sheer number and variety of novelty balloon items for sale. So make a balloon seller's day and buy a whole flotilla of them - there aren't many opportunities in the year for balloon sellers to make a lot of money, and the Lantern Fair is the pinnacle of their balloon-selling bell curve .

Balloon bunch of grapes? Balloon backpack? Balloon Sponge Bob? Go on, you know you want one, and if it hadn't been for a bright blue Angry Birds balloon I might still be searching for my two children in the crowd.

Nanjing Lantern Fair

Every day and night until February 6 (incl)

Confucius Temple Area

Nanjing

G trains run every hour from Shanghai Railway Station, 90 minutes.

220 yuan adults, 110 yuan children.

Shanghai Tang Cafe: Refined Dim Sum

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:34:00 +0000

Would it come as a delightful surprise that Shanghai Tang, the Chinese luxury brand founded in Hong Kong, have a cafe in Shanghai where every weekend, you can eat a deliciously sophisticated all-you-can-eat dim sum brunch for less than twenty dollars a head? Shanghai Tang Cafe is sleek and gorgeous, with an interior like a black enamel jewel box and tables set with plates and glassware from Shanghai Tang's own vibrant homewares range, but expensive it isn't. Shanghai is full of great food secrets once you know where to find them.

Walk past the giant pink rabbits flanking the door (replaced yesterday, I am told, with pink dragons), take your place at a lacquered table by the window, and your waiter will bring you a dim sum menu. Sorry, menu? Philistine that I am, and accustomed to years of cheap and cheerful Cantonese style yum cha in Australia, the concept of ordering dim sum from a menu comes as something of a culture shock.

Used to feasting with the eyes as the trolleys trundle past, I realised I might need some help with Shanghai Tang Cafe's choice of no less than thirty-six different dim sum dishes. Our waiter helped us decide on a substantial number of them to share between four, adding a level of complexity and balance to the meal I wouldn't have managed by kidnapping whatever looks the most appealing from a trolley.

Over the next hour the dishes appeared at a leisurely eating pace, meandering from simple Shanghai staples like scallion oil noodles（cōng yóu bàn miàn 葱油拌面）and the famous xiăo lóng bāo (小笼包）to traditional favourites like old-fashioned Shanghai smoked fish (lăo Shànghăi xūn yú 老上海熏鱼）I love this smoked fish - pieces of smoked river fish crisply fried then smothered in a thick, sweet dark soy syrup. Superb with the tangy vinegared cucumber pieces served alongside.

The menu has been designed by chef Jereme Leung, and it shows in the presentation of dishes like these spectacular chryanthemum spring rolls (jú huā zhá chūn juăn 菊花炸春卷), with dozens of fragile crisp petals radiating out from a traditional spring roll filling in the flower's stem. Just brilliant.

We continued with ridiculously delicious crispy garlic shrimp, siu mai dumplings topped with Yunnan ham, steamed pork ribs with a delicate clear plum sauce, savoury crispy fried long beans, and braised duck breast. They even served my own favourite guilty pleasure - home-style fried radish cake with a salty chili sauce（fēng wèi luóbo gāo 风味萝卜糕）here served in small cubes with gently stir-fried leeks and beansprouts. Classy street food.

Although by now we were all fit to burst, I had saved a tiny, tiny corner for a desert that caught my eye on the menu. Black sesame dumplings in ginger soup (jiāng chá hēi zhī tāngyuán 姜茶黑芝汤圆）tasted as perfect as they looked - sweet soft sticky rice dumplings filled with smooth nutty black sesame paste and served in a hot ginger broth. Even if you manage to eat your way through every dim sum dish on the menu, make sure to save room for this perfect last dish.

Shanghai Tang Cafe

Levels 2 and 3, 333 Huangpi Nan Lu

Shanghai

Open 7 days for lunch and dinner

黄陂南路333号

靠近太仓路

Ph +86 21 6377 3333

Dim Sum Brunch every Saturday and Sunday from 11am

118 yuan ($20) per person, all you can eat.

The Year of the Dragon. In Red.

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 04:28:00 +0000

Best wishes for health and prosperity for everyone in the Year of the Dragon! As I walked through Yu Gardens this week watching the frenzied preparations to hang thousands of lanterns for the coming Lunar New Year tomorrow night, everywhere I looked was the same strong, vibrant Chinese red.

Red symbolizes happiness in Chinese culture and is always the colour of joy and celebrations. It inspired me to find all my favourite red images from the last year, from all corners of China (I really covered some ground!) and put them together for you. Enjoy!

L: washing seats, Shanghai stadium

R: Drum Tower, Xi'an

Sliding sled seats sit on a frozen lake, Beijing

L: A small boy sits outside his mother's hairdressing shop, Miao village

R: Lucky red underwear for New Year, Tongli

Cheap wigs, Qibao

L: Opera singer, Tongli

R: Night chicken feet and giblet vendor, Qian Dao Hu

Toffee strawberries, hawthorns and other fruits for sale, Nanjing

L: Peek into a Chinese home, Tongli

R: lanterns for sale at Shanghai's Commodities Market

Bicycles, Shanghai. 'Standard Integration, Transparent Operation'

L: Elderly worshipper, Longhua Temple Shanghai

R: Elderly early adopter with mobile phone and mountain bike, Beijing

L: Travelling home for Chinese New Year, Shanghai Railway Station

R: Transport for a family of four Kyrgyz, Lake Karakul

Dancing Miao women, Langde

L: Temple deity, Tiger Leaping Gorge, Yunnan

R: Young Kyrgyz girl near Tashkurgan

Hundreds of single votives hung together to create the character shou 寿 ‘long life’, Tongli temple

L: Scented handmade decorations for Dragon Boat Festival, Shanghai

R: Sweet peanut cake, Xian

Temple, Nanjing

L: Carefully painted fire hydrant, Shanghai

R: Gate to the old city, Lijiang

Pair of ancestor paintings, Tongli

L: Tiny carved wooden deity, Qibao

R: meat for sale at the wet market, Shanghai

Firecracker Seller, Nanchang Lu, Shanghai

L: A tour group of workers from a costume factory in Northern China dress up in cabaret costumes whilst visiting a small Miao ethnic village. No, I have no idea why.

R: Prayers at the Confucius Temple, Shanghai

Unbridled joy on a battery-operated wheelie horse, main square, Kaili

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

恭喜发财

Happy New Year! Congratulations, and be prosperous!

Charcuterie Ducks, Eels, and Kidneys: Chinese New Year is Coming!

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 03:00:00 +0000

Well, if there are rows of flayed ducks lining the streets, then it must be Chinese New Year. The whole city has been transformed into an enormous outdoor charcuterie - every footpath is lined with makeshift wooden frames covered with the oddly attractive looking bodies of drying ducks, head and feet intact, tiny ribcages on display. The ducks are tagged around the neck or one webbed foot with the name of the purchaser so that when they're ready (five or six days, in cold dry weather) they can be collected.

Look up as you walk and instead of ducks you'll see doorstop-sized hunks of pork, soaked in brine and drying in the cold winter air, pierced with bent wire coathangers and hung alongside the week's washing.

There is a terrific do-it-yourself aspect to all of this - just the same way my mother still makes her own Christmas puddings every year, many families in Shanghai follow in an age-old tradition and make their own dried goods for Chinese New Year.

Back in Shanghai watching the Chinese New Year preparations hot up, I can tell you there is a world of dried meat involved. I've been trawling the internet for hours trying to get to the bottom of the whole dried fish, dried duck, dried pork, dried sausage and dried chicken thing, but needless to say there will be thousands of years of tradition and a deep degree of symbolism behind it, much more than I could ever understand. I guess it tastes pretty good too.

The fish I can understand, because the word for fish (鱼 yú) sounds just the same as the word for prosperity or surplus (余 yú). So you should eat some fish, not all of it mind, and you'll be sure to have a surplus of wealth in the new year. The favoured fish around town is an alarming looking giant eel, split neatly down the middle, flattened like a skateboard and strung up on a clothes rail in the street to dry, like an enormous sharply toothed silver sail.

My neighbours, previouly unknown to me as charcuterie experts, have been drying ham and stuffing their own strings of Chinese sausage for weeks now, draped over their balcony rails or hung neatly under their air-conditioning unit for protection. I'm unsure what kind of protection the exhaust vent from an airconditioner box offers, exactly, but it is a neat place to hang stuff.

The sausage is pleasingly attractive, all knobbly with hunks of meat and large pieces of fat. The butcher shops have taken to hanging theirs in festive red and white garlands strung between telephone poles or conveniently placed trees outside their shops, where the passing traffic can see their wares and the sausage can catch a few fumes for extra flavour.

What I really love though, are the ducks. The first time you walk outdoors and see the weirdly flattened shovel shape of a drying duck it is rather confronting to those of us accustomed to having our smallgoods prepared out of sight and away from inclement weather.

Why outdoors? Well, I suppose it's partly a question of space, and finding somehwere with good airflow - the charcuterie experts among you will know about that. If there was plenty of space to be had in a city of twenty million people, why would you decide to hang your ducks under a high-voltage transformer to dry, for instance? One short-circuit and.....boom! Charcoal.

Next to the ducks hang funny little strings of baubles, but on closer inspection they turn out to be drying hearts, kidneys and livers, out of reach of the neighbourhood cats. Not a thing is wasted, everything can be rendered tasty.

My Chinese friends tell me that seeing ducks and eels out to dry is the seasonal equivalent, for them, of seeing Christmas trees appear in the shops for us. It means a time of delicious food and togetherness is coming and you can feel the goodwill and excitement building out on the streets. In less than a week, families will come together, cook wonderful meals and share the news of the last year with each other. And some dried eel.

What's The Most Exciting Meal You've Eaten in the Last Year?

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:30:00 +0000

For me, it has to be this one, from extraordinary wine bar and restaurant Garagistes in Hobart. I've eaten hundreds of lip-smacking meals this past year, but this one was by far the most exciting. Why? Well, for a start, other than the egg yolk (duck, free-range) how many of the other ingredients on the plate do you even recognize? There were grilled spring onions topped with shaved kohlrabi ribbons, nettle sauce, lovage and toasted quinoa. A sensation of tastes and textures.

Chef Luke Burgess (ex Tetsuya's, Sydney and Noma, Copenhagen) and partners Katrina Birchmeier and Kirk Richardson 'celebrate produce sourced from many local growers, fishermen and farmers', including wild and native Australian ingredients sourced very locally and cooked in combinations of flavour and texture that will have you applauding their harmony.

I read about Garagistes some months ago and mentally filed it away for future reference, not thinking for a second I would get there from Shanghai. Then a Christmas invitation to Bruny Island turned up and a flight scheduling glitch just before New Year meant we had a whole free evening to ourselves in Hobart - clearly, it was a meal that was meant to be!

Arriving at the airy converted garage space, we took the last seats at one of four long communal heavy wooden tables and waited to see what had been prepared for the night - the menu varies according to what's good, local, fresh and tasty.

The meal began with an exquisite flower-scattered potato crostini with braised onion, smoked potato mousse, and herbs and flowers - shiso leaves, and a tiny spray of fennel leaves. The aniseed flavour of the fennel with the smoky potato, combined with the fragile crunch of the crisp potato crostini was a delightful start to the meal.

At Garagistes they do all their own curing and smoking, like the slivers of eel in this dish of quivering quail eggs, onion fondue, crispbread and potato, with oxalis leaves. I had no idea the oxalis leaves, something growing in every Australian backyard, had the most intense lemon flavour, a great contrast to the rich smoky oiliness of the eel.

All the dishes are designed to be part of a shared meal, communal style, so you can choose five or six dishes (or seven or eight!) and enjoy a taste, a glass, a carafe or bottle of wine from the exhaustive list of natural and organic wines from Tasmania and beyond. Not a wine drinker? There's a whole lot of interesting sake to choose from. The only small disappointment of the night was the lack of non-alcoholic drinks for the non-drinkers and younger diners.

The next dish, a salad of raw bonito, salted courgettes, sea urchin and pinenut emulsion with plump sweet currants, had a deep briney flavour lent by the sea-urchin emulsion.

And this plate. It fills me with vegetable delight! A forest of baby heirloom carrots with fresh young almonds, wild olives, saffron, and caramelised yoghurt. Have you ever seen anything so beautiful? The caramelised yoghurt was sensational, rich and creamy, with a slick of olive oil and the soft crunch of the sweet white almonds.

At the recommendation of our waiter we also tried the daily special, a dish of the most spankingly fresh grilled flathead tails served simply with pesto. Salty, sweet, with crunchy grilled skin, it was so fresh it must have presented itself straight from the ocean to the door of Garagiste's kitchen. There's no photograph because the fish was already gone before the plate hit the table.

Desert can sometimes be a disappointment when the menu runs to only two choices, but at Garagistes we had already had so much spectacular food we trusted the deserts would be equally good. We ordered both. The first to arrive was a melange of kunzea (an Australian native plant) ice cream, strawberries, raspberries, pepper meringue, and lemon basil cream. It sounds like a mash-up but there was a beatiful symphony between the lemon basil ice-cream and the slight peppery, minty flavour of the kunzea.

The last dish to arrive was the absolute standout of the night. Burnt cream, buttery shortcake, citrus meringue, rhubarb granita and gooseberry jelly with tiny leaves and flowers. The sharp shards of the rhubarb granita melted instantly in the mouth with a burst of rhubarb acidity, along with the soft, sweet and sour gooseberry jelly. It was wonderful. I have an intense taste memory of this dish and I hope to get the chance to eat it again someday. To me, it tasted of Tasmania's summer.

In short, Garagistes was everything an exciting meal should be. The service, relaxed and attentive, meant all your senses could focus on the food, with its sublime combinations, innovative wild ingredients and contrasting textures. It's worth a trip to Tasmania to eat there.

Where did you eat your most exciting meal of the last year? Details!

Garagistes

103 Murray Street

Hobart

Tasmania

Phone +61 3 6231 0558

Beachcombing, Rockhopping, Freewheeling

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 05:03:00 +0000

Sea urchins are an amazing piece of natural architecture, arent they? These beautiful photos were taken while beach-combing on Bruny Island, jumping from rock to rock and discovering tiny hidden worlds within a single rock pool. I'd planned a lovely post to go with them about going slow and taking time to get lost in the small, beautiful things in life.....but instead I'm cramming like crazy for my last Chinese exam tomorrow morning. I'll let you know how I go. In the meanwhile, the sentiment is here in pictures......

Bruny Legends

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 12:34:00 +0000

I may be back in Shanghai but I haven't quite finished with Tasmania yet - I have a couple more fantastic posts to bring to you from this gorgeous place in Australia bursting with good food! Today, let me introduce Bruny Island's most interesting couple, John and Penny Smith.

Sometimes life throws you an amazing coincidence and you just need to make of it what you will. A few weeks back I received an email from a reader, Penny, who had recently travelled through China and asked if she could use some photographs from my Xian Street Food posts for her own blog, BrunyFirePower. That's a coincidence, I thought, we're off to Bruny in a few weeks - I wonder whether her website has anything to do with Australia's Bruny Island?

A few clicks later and it became clear this was one and the same Bruny Island. A few emails later and it emerged there were only three degrees of separation between us, with many friends and colleagues in common in the world of public art my husband inhabits. I don't inhabit that world, being rather poorly equipped on the art side of things, but it transpired Penny was also a passionate foodie(of course!) and environmentalist.

Being the lovely person she is, Penny invited us to visit her Bruny Island home when we were there last week for a cup of tea and some fruit mince pies. Yes please!

Blogging, as fellow bloggers will know, can be quite a solitary process, and it's always exciting to meet someone in person you have connected with through your blog. I know all my readers are hugely interesting people (you are!) with a deep passion for food and wide-ranging interests in the world at large, and it's great to meet someone who embodies all of that. Penny is an incredibly talented ceramic artist, with works in major galleries and private collections around Australia, and was previously head of the Ceramics Studio and the Ceramic Research Unit at the University of Tasmania, but she also has fosters a passion for clay cooking techniques and cooking vessels from around the world.

She and her husband John live in an idyllic corner of Bruny Island, right on the water and surrounded by towering gumtrees. Their incredible dome house, designed and built entirely themselves, resembles a lunar module resting gently on the earth, but in fact this dome dwelling is in perfect tune with its surroundings. Fully 'off-grid', it has solar power, rainwater tanks to supply their own needs and extra for fighting bushfires, and has a completely self-contained waste system.

The inside of the house is as compact as a ship with every single feature beautifully designed and handcrafted, from the clever roll-away ladder to the loft, to the compact upstairs kitchen under the dome. Shelves are laden with clay cooking vessels from all over the world - Thaoland, South America, China and beyond.

John, a talented craftsman and accomplished furniture designer (he was previously Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for Furniture Design at the University of Tasmania), has shown his skill in every clever detail. Outside is a deck with an amazing view over the bay, and a garden dotted with artworks like the View Finder, above, created for Sculpture by the Sea.

The thing I'm most jealous of though, is the outdoor kitchen, where roasts, wood-fired pizzas and more come out of the oven, and the nearby fire pit where Penny indulges her passion for cooking with clay. Penny explains that she has always been besotted with clay and with cooking.

"Cooking with clay came together gradually. Cooking food and cooking clay are both magical processes, whereby the alchemical changes that occur in both, render, in the case of food - the often poisonous to the palatable and in the case of clay from the porous to the permanent. "

On her recent travels through China Penny found "several regions....that have very distinctive clay pot making and cooking traditions that reflect the region through its pots and its food. One of these days, I intend to return and visit them....."

In the meantime, Penny recently tackled Hangzhou' famous but difficult Beggar's Chicken, a whole chicken stuffed with herbs and ham, wrapped in a lotus leaf then in a layer of clay and slow-cooked in its hardening clay 'pot' until it falls apart, all the delicious juices remaining trapped inside. When you read Penny's Bruny version of making this dish, you begin to realize the depth of her interest in cooking with clay. For starters, she digs the clay herself from the ground and tends the fire for hours until the chicken is cooked just so!

I found over the course of a long sunny afternoon, tea and fruit mince pies followed by local Tasmanian beer and cheese from the Bruny Island Cheese Company, that Penny and I share many of the same views about the joys of regional and seasonal food.

She says "what is really inspirational is that cooking with clay and cooking food both reflect the seasons - making pots (particularly in the traditional vlllages that still make clay pots to cook in on an open fire) require the right weather conditions and the foods that are cooked in them reflect what is available at the time." It's what we're all thinking - food is always best when it's in season, and cooked close to the source.

Catch Penny's further adventures in cooking with fire and clay at BrunyFirePower

See John Smith's exquisite furniture at john-smith-design.com

And to my Penny and all my other readers - I look forward to sharing tea and dumplings with you anytime you're passing through Shanghai!

2012. My Year of Maximum China.

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 10:36:00 +0000

Firstly, a big smiling Happy New Year to every single one of you! My hope is that 2012 will bring all of us a year of good friends, good food, and a lot of laughter!

2012 will likely be my last year in China, a situation I have very mixed feelings about - I miss home and family, I miss the breathable quality of overseas air, and the Australian wilderness, but I have an extraordinarily interesting and colourful life here in China that will be hard to let go. Not to mention the noodles.

There's no escaping it though - our older daughter begins high school in Australia at the start of 2013, and we promised we would return home before that date, although we never imagined we would be living in China right up until then!

As a way of fending off any imagined future regrets, I plan to pack as much of China - its food, its countryside, its people - into the coming twelve months as possible. The major manifestation of this plan is a crazy scheme that first gripped me some six months ago and I haven't been able to shake it off since. You know it's a good idea when it gives you a sick, terrifying feeling in the guts every time you think about it.

So here it is. We will take a Chinese truck, or a minibus, or some kind of campervan-like vehicle, and transform it into a fully-equipped home on wheels, replete with sleeping, cooking and coffee-making facilities, then spend the last six months of 2012 roaming around the remoter backroads of China. What do you think?

Personally, I think it's a bloody crazy idea but you can't deny it has enormous appeal. Even crazier, the rest of the family has come on board with it, after some initial misgivings about whether there would be Western-style breakfast cereal and the capability of recharging electronic devices on the road.

It will be a hugely HUGE undertaking, mostly because we are breaking relatively new ground - recreational vehicles don't really exist in China, necessitating making a sort of custom-built home-made frankencampervan of our own, complete with comfortable bedding and privacy curtains.

Camping of any kind is pretty much unheard of, and the last time I saw anyone in a tent in China, it had been erected by the staff of a three star hotel on the adjacent concrete basketball court, with use of hotel facilities included in the tent price. There are no camping grounds, no trailer parks, and no laybys with nearby toilet facilities.

So I'm calling 2012 our year of Maximum China, a fully immersive experience of seeing and eating our way through as much of China as possible, with our own twist. As 2012 looms excitingly ahead, instead of looking back on the year in review as I've done before, I'm looking to the year ahead and what it might hold, both in the short term and the long term, in travel planning terms.

Here's what I predict for the coming year of Maximum China:

1. I will pass my Chinese exams next week, motivated by the desire to avoid being the first student over forty to fail and the need to speak enough Chinese to cover vehicle breakdowns and other minor emergencies. Although I wish the teachers had given me a lot more warning about the 100 word written essay at the end of the Chinese test, because my essay will consist of twenty characters I can write from memory, and a lot of blank spaces. (But - I have a cunning plan to copy any vocabulary that might be useful from the rest of the exam paper and paste it into my essay, although this may not work out so well:

On my holidays, my family and I visited the...bank to make a credit card application. At the...bank...was a lot of...lovely scenery...and we...completed the application form...while...climbing a mountain. That day the...weather report predicted rain...but we...waited for the application to be approved. The End.)

2. The ratio of Chinese:Western meals my family is willing to eat will decrease from 1:3 to 1:10 by year's end, decreasing exponentially with time spent on the road away from supermarkets full of Western food in Shanghai. I will be forced to resort to making them congee for breakfast when we run out of cereal. They will hate this.

3. I will pass my Chinese driver's license test without having to bribe any officials, or have a Chinese stand-in named 'Fay-ah-na' sit the test on my behalf, for a pre-arranged fee.

4. We will finaly get to visit Tibet, provided there are no more monk self-immolations in 2012.

5. My iphone app, the Shanghai Xiaolongbao Tour for Crimson Bamboo, despite being extremely niche, will go totally viral on release causing the entire Chinese internet to collapse and making me an overnight app millionaire. (The first part of this prediction is entirely true - I've been working on this exciting project with Crimson Bamboo, authors of cool travel apps for history lovers, for the launch of a new range of travel apps for food lovers. It's released in two weeks, and I'll tell you more closer to the time. The latter part of the prediction? Well, dreaming's OK, isn't it?)

6. The hare-brained travelling campervan scheme will take more money, wits, patience and cunning than I currently possess, but because I'm not a quitter I will make everyone's life hell as I try to source solar-powered portable water heating and a compostible travelling toilet in a country that hasn't yet heard of camping.

7. Eighteen will be the number of times my husband will tell me we can just hire a car and sleep in hotels with actual beds instead of campervanning our way around the country.

8. Eighteen will be the number of times I reply something along the lines of 'bugger off' to his very sensible suggestion. Although sometimes I will really, really want to give in.

9. China will finally get high-speed internet just as I leave the country, and I'll be really pissed off because I never got to experience the thrill of uploading a photo in under ten minutes.

10. After six months of travelling rough crammed into a home-made campervan my children will probably hate me, but when they're forty-five they'll tell their kids it was the best holiday they ever had. I hope.

There you have it, my 2012 Maximum China predictions. Let's see how many come true........

Bruny Island Providores: Four of the Best

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 02:01:00 +0000

Bruny Island, pristine and unspoilt, has been an incredible wild haven for the last week, but you might be surprised to find that it's home to foodie treasures too, with an increasing number of great food destinations dotted around the island. Here are four of the best - I hope you have a chance to enjoy their produce as much as I have!

Get Shucked Oysters

The roadside sign pointing to Bruny Island's Get Shucked Oyster Shack points you down a dirt road to a humble caravan sitting under the shade of a towering eucalypt. Just opposite the sparkling waters of Great Bay, where the oysters are grown and presumably live a happy life reaching plump loveliness in preparation for being eaten, the caravan sells shucked or un-shucked oysters ($12/dozen) and they don't come any fresher than this.

You can sit under the eucalypt and eat them straight from the shell, or take them home and arrange them on a plate before eating them straight from the shell. Either way, make no mistake, these oysters make for very, very good eating and need no acconpaniment other than fresh air and a hearty appetite. Thanks little oysters. I love you, I really do.

Bruny Island Cheese Company

What a find the Bruny Island Cheese Company turned out to be! I really didn't expect to come all the way from Shanghai to find artisanal cheeses in a pristine wilderness, but those are exactly the sort of pleasant surprises Tasmania has the habit of dealing you every day.

Cheesemaker Nick Haddow makes seven types of cheese, all from Tasmanian cows' milk. Tasmania has incredibly luscious, rich milk (as an aside, in the 1930s the Cadbury Chocolate Company decided on Tasmania, from the entirety of Australia, for their factory because of the superior quality of the milk) and the resulting cheeses are all excellent.

The cheese house has a light-filled indoor area (for cold days) and a broad verandah (for warmer days) where you can sit with a bottle of good Tasmanian wine, and a sampling of cheeses with bread from the wood-fired oven, or even a wood-fired pizza. It's a lovely way to spend a sunny afternoon.

I really enjoyed their 'saint' cheese, a soft surface-ripened brie style with creamy full flavour, and the 'tom' (seen ripening in the cheese room above), a five months ripened hard cheese. But they're all good, including the soft and light-flavoured o.d.o. (one day old) cheese, a baby steeped in olive oil to keep it soft and perfect with crusty bread, herbs, and prosciutto.

Bruny Island Berry Farm

Pick-your-own? Yes please, and berries are always a favourite. Sadly, the day we visited the Bruny Island Berry Farm it was absolutely clean out of berries because everyone else holidaying on the island had the same idea. Instead, I had to make do with a creamy raspberry and strawberry ice-cream from Tasmania's Valhalla icecreams followed by an excellent piece of berry cake. Small consolation.

The farm sits in an indescribably beautiful location opposite a tiny cove of Adventure Bay with aquamarine waters and silver sands, and serves coffees, pancakes, and home-made cakes as well as jams and berry sauces.

They grow a number of interesting berry varieties including Tasmanian pepperberries, blackberries, and raspberries, all in full season right now, so I returned today to try a few more ice-cream flavours (in the interests of quality research I'm happy to report they are all, including the sorbets, superb) and buy some plump ripe sweet raspberries ($10 for 500g) for dessert. A rare treat.

Bruny Island Smoke House

I have occasional dreams of setting up my own smokehouse, rows of oily fish hanging deliciously from the smokehouse roof ready for eating. Until I get round to that highly unlikely pipedream I can visit the Bruny Island Smokehouse, who smoke their own Tasmanian salmon, ocean trout, rainbow trout, sardines and meats, including wallaby from Bruny Island Game Meats.

The smoked ocean trout from nearby McQuarry Harbour is soft, luscious and lightly smokes, and pairs well with a glass of reisling sitting overlooking Sykes Bay. The wallaby, sliced finely, was less game-flavoured than I expected, and was delicious with crusty bread and pickles. I could imagine using tossing it through fresh orrechiete with mushrooms, herbs and olive oil.

The Smokehouse's prizewinning produce extends to smoked Pomegranate quail, Leatherwood duck, home-made pomegranate syrup (I'm taking a bottle of that rarity back to China) and spiced preserves and pickles, and they deliver anywhere in Australia.

The Details:

Get Shucked Oysters

Bruny Island Main Road, Great Bay

Bruny Island

www.getshucked.com.au

Bruny Island Cheese Company

1807 Main Road, Great Bay

Bruny Island

www.brunyislandcheese.com.au

Bruny Island Berry Farm

Two Tree Point, Adventure Bay

South Bruny

www.brunyislandberryfarm.com.au

Bruny Island Smokehouse

Lennon Road

North Bruny

www.brunyislandsmokehouse.com.au

My True Love Gave to Me: Oysters Straight From the Rocks....

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 01:21:00 +0000

My husband, badly jet-lagged, searches his hand luggage for a small knife, or screwdriver, or some kind of tool, but there's nothing even remotely suitable for the task of levering rock oysters from their beds in a bag of stuff brought from Shanghai. Frantic at the site of hundreds of oyster-covered rocks before him he opts for the only tool available - the edge of a flat rock picked from the shore.

The oyster cleaves messily from the rock, fractured bits of shell flying everywhere. He cracks it open with more care, revealing a plump creamy oyster inside, and rinses it gently in the cold, clear indigo water before handing it to me to eat. Unbelievably delicious. There are hundreds more on every rock around us as we wait for the ferry to Bruny Island, off the coast of Tasmania.

Bruny sits off Tasmania's south-east coast (Tasmania being that very large and beautiful isand off Australia's southern tip), and from China it's an almost twenty-four hour trip - two flights, a longish drive, a ferry ride, and yet another drive - to get to the house we've rented for Christmas. It's a pretty traditional Australian way to spend Christmas - pack the entire extended family, in-laws included, off to a waterside destination for Christmas complete with decorations, ham, and plenty of beer in the back of the car.

It's a little out of the way unless you already live in Tasmania, but that is exactly the point - it has few people but is literally heaving with animal life, in the water, in the air, and on the land. Mother Nature's abundance is never more obvious than here. Within the first twenty four hours of arriving, I've caught eight wrasse (threw seven back - no-one can eat that many!) and a flathead from the seat of a kayak by literally tossing a line over the side, and watched my talented brother-in-law snorkel for fresh abalone which he removes from the rocks with a dessert spoon. Shanghai couldn't be further away. Different season, different hemisphere, different eco-system.

Our first afternoon is spent at Adventure Bay climbing amongst the rockpools. There are enormous swathes of kelp and tendrils of seaweed fringing the pools, and as I look down I shout to everyone to 'look!' at the orange starfish I see. A starfish! We sit and stare for a moment in rapt wonder before one of the children yells 'Here's another one! and another!'

There are around thirty fat, healthy starfish n every single rockpool. Even here in Australia, a place kind of overflowing with wildlife, I've never seen anything like it. Bloody marvellous!

As for the abalone, Tasmania is one of the places where they grow wild. As long as you're happy to brave the cold waters and the sharks, they are just sitting on the rocks ready to be scooped off with a spoon. Or a butter knife.

My marine biologist brother-in-law tells me that they can be too easily damaged with a sharp knife, and the key to collecting them is surprise - the sligtest touch or advance warning of your intentions and their thick muscular foot will clamp down tightly onto the surface of the rock below it, making them completely un-removable. So the best thing is to use something blunt, and slide it quickly under the shell before the abalone knows what's coming. Oh - and wear rubber gloves to protect your hands from the sharp edges of the shell.

I wish all of you near and far a very happy Christmas, and thanks for following my adventures on Life on Nanchang Lu over the last year. It's been another fantastic year of food and travels, from Dragon's Backbone rice terraces near Guilin, to ancient Miao village festivals, distant Kashgar and everywhere in between, and along the way I've met some of you in person and got to know others online, always a joy and one of the greatest rewards of blogging!

I hope your day is filled with family and friends and of course, good food! What Christmas would be complete without it? As for me, I'm having champagne and abalone. What a combination!

I'll bring you some more of the beauty of Bruny Island soon.

Shanghai Street Food #24 Fried Dumplings Guōtiē 锅贴

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 08:05:00 +0000

Love dumplings? How about crispy, juicy fried dumplings? Could there actually be any better antidote for a major dose of Shanghai winter blues?

Guōtiē ( 鍋貼 literally pot-stick) are pork dumplings with a crispy fried base, made in much the same way as regular jiaozi cooked in water, but with a thicker and tougher skin to withstand frying. The filling is an unctuous mixture of pork seasoned with ginger, shaoxing wine, a little garlic, sesame oil and salt, wrapped in a circular skin and the edges crimped together to form the typical flat-bottomed double-horned shape.

Cooking happens in three continous stages, first a gentle frying, then some steaming, then a final fry to crisp up the bottoms of the guotie. The guotie are placed in a broad shallow circular iron skillet over a gas flame, row upon row, around a hundred in every skillet. Depending on demand, the skillet may be filled half and half with guotie and shengjianbao, because the cooking method for both dumplings is identical.

While the crowds line up to purchase the freshly-cooked guotie, the cook ladles in oil and turns up the heat to begin the cooking. He lets the bottoms fry a little first, then using a pair of pliers to get a good grip on the scalding hot rim of the skillet, he grasps it and gives it an almighty spin with all his strength, preventing the pot stickers from sticking to the pot.

The next step requires steam, so a few ladles of water go into the the skillet and a heavy wooden lid goes in, but the arduous spinning continues.

Lastly the final frying - the lid comes off with great billows of steam, and a couple more ladles of oil are added to really get the bottoms of the guotie satisfylingly browned and crisp.

Guotie are usually eaten standing on the street, using tiny chopsticks to grapple the oily, slippery dumplings from a rectangular styrofoam tray into your mouth. The first bite sends hot oil pouring down your chin - guotie are seriously oily!

The smooth and chewy top is a wonderful contrast in texture to the crunchy bottom, with the salty savoury pork filling in between. Guotie are rich, but you can dip them in a little dark vinegar to cut through the oil if you desire. But after a tray of these oily, salty dumplings your winter chills will be banished for the day.

The Shanghai Street Food Series

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

The Apocalypse, Now. Constructing the New China

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 01:24:00 +0000

It's a scene from the end of the world - a pallid sun struggles to push through a thick polluted haze to the ground below, where an endless miasma of cold grey mud covers the ground as far as the eye can see, pitted with pools of stinking green water. Men, such men as can live and work amongst the mud, move slowly and laboriously through the landscape, mud sucking at their every step. They work side by side with rusting hulks of dirty machines digging at the mud and belching smoke and nearby mud-covered pipes spew liquid mud endlessly from one filthy pool to another. Mud moves from one place to the next, covering everything, colouring everything.

The sky is pierced by towers of steel rigging, soon to be cranes, and in every direction for as far as the eye can see are the hazy silhouettes of cranes on other building sites littering the horizon like so many giant skeletal weathervanes, pointing the way to some dystopian future. Flagpoles planted to stake a claim in the earth.

This is a construction site in the 'New Town' of Ningbo, next door to the Ningbo International Finance Centre where I spent a day last week photographing their public art at on my first real 'professional' photography gig. Ningbo, I suspect, is a city built largely on mud, sitting on the coastal cusp of the Yangtze delta. Mud barons have spent gazillions to create glittering towers from displaced mud, where before were only flatlands and barren wetlands.

While I searched for a vantage point to photograph a particular artwork at the Finance Centre I realized I had a birdseye view over the foundation groundworks nearby, normally hidden completely by twelve feet of impenetrable hoarding around the site perimeter. Within that perimeter hundreds of men (and women labourers too) live and work, surrounded every day by all that mud.

Of course, this hideous mud-covered scene is particular to part of the east coast of China where sediment from as far away as Tibet washes out to the sea, advancing the coast of China by an inch a day. Extraordinary to think all that sediment will make China one mile wider in about a hundred and seventy years. But this kind of building isn't confined to Ningbo's new financial district, it's going on all over the country.

China, every last inch of it, is in the grip of a building boom so vast, with a scope so broad, so deep, and so tall it beggars belief. If I hadn't crossed the country top to bottom and east to west and seen it for myself I couldn't even begin to imagine the extent of it. Millions of metres of new roads, thousands of new skyscrapers, hundreds of bridges and tunnels.

I watched this man in intervals over the course of the entire day as he shovelled mud, by hand, from the left side of the roadway to the right. Mud continued to ooze from some unseen source, undoing all his work and he would begin clearing the same section of road all over again. It seemed rather futile in the grand scheme of building a skyscraper from scratch, but the more I watched him and thought about it, the more it brought home to me that every skyscraper is the work of thousands and thousands of hands, shovelling, hammering, welding and grinding. And moving mud.

Twelve Steps to Making Traditional Fermented Soy Sauce at Qian Wan Long

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 23:52:00 +0000

As Master Zhang lifted the black conical bamboo hat from the top of the vast earthenware pot, the intense and deeply yeasty aroma of soy sauce filled the air. So this is how real soy sauce smells, I thought. I peered over the rim of the waist-high jar and saw the sky reflected in the inky blackness inside.

Master Zhang turned to the bespectacled soy sauce master Dàshī Wang, and a small smile moved imperceptably across his face, as if to say "this year's brew is very good." Wang Dashi remained implacable, without a flicker of emotion in return. In his thirty years of making naturally fermented soy sauce he's seen everything, and seemed to be saying "We'll see."

Dashi Wang listens as Master Zhang explains

I had come to see the inner workings of one of the few remaining traditional soy sauce makers in China, Qian Wan Long. Master Zhang immediately set the scene by telling us that modern manufacturing processes enable a bottle of soy sauce to be made in only twenty days. Qian Wan Long's soy sauce, on the other hand, takes a minimum of one and a half years to develop its complex flavours the natural way before they will even consider putting it in a bottle. These people were serious about their soy sauce.

Qian Wan Long set up shop in 1880, in the village that was once Zhangjiang but is now part of modern day Pudong in Shanghai. In those days, owing to the need for large amounts of salt in the production of soy sauce, it was necessary to have an Imperial permit or seal to produce it, essentially a royal decree. Incredibly Qian Wan Long is still in possession of theirs, a heavy wooden tablet made from gingko wood and inscribed with their name in faded gold characters.

The seal survived the Cultural Revolution (and the destruction of all things imperial) when a carpenter working for the factory hid it in his home, but only because he thought it was a fine piece of wood. It's the only such soy suace maker's Imperial seal left in China.

We began the day with a tasting and Master Zhang surprised me by opening a cupboard full of competitor's sauces. All the big names were there - Lee Kum Kee, Kikkoman, and an organic Japanese brand I often buy. We tasted them against Qian Wan Long's two year aged soy sauce, and they all fell short. Very short.

The other sauces tasted 'thin' and very salty with a metallic aftertaste and hints of something not quite right, compared with the full-bodied, intense umami and salt flavour of Qian Wan Long's sauce. I guess it's not often you taste soy sauce before it goes in your food, but next time you cook I suggest you give it a try.

Soy sauce can be made using either the traditional fermented or brewed method (slow), or the modern chemical hydrolysis method (fast, but requires additives - often MSG and artificial colours - to enhance both taste and appearance).

Here's a factual description of how soy sauce is made using the non-brewed, or chemical hydrolysis method (source: madehow.com):

Soybeans are boiled in hydrochloric acid for 15-20 hours to remove the amino acids. When the maximum amount has been removed, the mixture is cooled to stop the hydrolytic reaction.

The amino acid liquid is neutralized with sodium carbonate, pressed through a filter, mixed with active carbon, and purified through filtration. This solution is known as hydrolyzed vegetable protein.

Caramel color, corn syrup, and salt are added to this protein mixture to obtain the appropriate color and flavor. The mixture is then refined and packaged.

Master Zhang, with occasional nods and tacit agreements from Dashi Wang, then explained their traditional twelve step process. 'It's not a secret recipe' he said, 'everyone here in this factory - and most of them have worked here for two or three generations - knows what goes in the sauce, as you will see. But the difference is that Dashi Wang has the most experience dealing with the small problems, with the weather, and with the different processes, so he can make adjustments.'

Twelve Steps to Making Traditional Fermented Soy Sauce

1.Choose your soybeans.

You have to start with the best soybeans, of course and theirs come from Heilongjiang (Black Dragon River) province, a part of far northern China where the air is clean and the soil is good. Equally importantly, these beans have a stable level of protein, and the breakdown of proteins in the fermenting process is what give the sauce its complexity.

2. Wash and soak the beans

The beans are washed and soaked overnight, then steamed in an enormous tin pressure cooker, the only modern bit of machinery in the whole place.

3. Add wheat and rice flour

The next step is the most crucial - the beans are mixed with a little wheat and rice flour. Over the next year, the fermentation of these wheat and rice starches will help develop the deep colour of the soy sauce and add sweetness to the flavour.

4. Grow some mold

Without mold, there is no soy sauce, and if this step is incorrect or incomplete, the finished product will be inferior. Nearly two years of work down the drain. The bean and flour mixture is spread on broad, flat woven bamboo trays and stacked on shelves in a humid room to develop the soft downy white mold necessary for the beans to ferment and develop flavour.

In the crucial 48 hours needed for the mold to grow, the vagaries of the weather can interfere enormously, so to make sure all goes well, Dashi Wang often sleeps by the baskets, adjusting the humidity or temperature of the room by minute degrees. His long exerience means he knows exactly how to control for any unforseen difficulties.

5. Add brine

Salt is an essential component of soy sauce - it assists in the fermentation and importantly, inhibits bacterial growth and acts as a preservative.

6. Age in earthenware jars

The courtyard of Qian Wan Long is filled with around a hundred heavy earthenware jars, each with a number painted on its side. The soybean mash is placed in the jars covered with a gauze net to keep out insects, and topped with a double-layered bamboo lid.

7. Leave for a year

Outside in the weather, the beans undergo a slow fermentation, stirred from time to time. The bamboo lid keeps out the rain but sun and warmth are essential to the process.

8. Press the beans

After a year the beans are dark brown and smell like soy sauce. They're removed from the earthenware jars and pushed into cloth bags for pressing using this aged wooden press. The clear dark brown liquid is separated from the pulp, which is used as animal feed.

9. Add more brine

More salt water is added to the first-pressed soy sauce to bring the salt up to the requisite level (eventaully about 16% for light soy sauce, and 20% for dark soy sauce).

10. Pour into jars

The soy sauce is not yet ready and needs to be returned to the earthenware jars in the open air for aging.

11. Age a second time

The soy sauce is now aged for six months to two years and reduces in volume. It spends the entire aging process, like the fermentation process, in the outdoors protected by a bamboo lid. As one of Qian Wan Long's staff, Janni, says "It dries under the sun, it sits under the moon and gathers dew. It's like a meditation."

12. Bottle

After all this time, 18 months to three years in total, it's ready to be bottled.

At Qian Wan Long Master Zhang said that the last 131 years of making traditional soy sauce has been filled with ups and downs, not least of which is the difficulty of competing with big manufacturers who can make soy sauce cheaply and quickly, and the challenges of getting young people interested in the skill of making soy sauce. Currently, everyone who works there is over fifty years of age.

Suddenly, in 2008, Qian Wan Long's fortunes changed. There was finally recognition that the traditional method they employ to make their artisanal soy sauce is valuable, and they were named an 'Intangible Cultural Heritage' by the Chinese Government. Now, all of their soy sauce is sold before it is bottled, and they have been able to open a restaurant featuring traditional soy-based dishes in Zhangjiang district.

Things are definitely looking up and Master Zhang says 2011 has been "a very auspicious year". Last month, food writer and activist Michael Pollan visited to research fermented food methods.

Master Zhang feels confident that the renewed interest in traditional methods will mean they can find a new generation of soy sauce masters who are as passionate about the craft as they are. At last, people are beginning to understand that this is knowledge worth keeping.

Qian Wan Long

Unfortuately Qian Wan Long is not open to the public (many thanks to SEA for arranging the visit), however everyone can visit their restaurant and enjoy traditional Shanghainese food cooked with their famed soy sauce.

Qian Wan Long Restaurant (Qian Wan Long Da Jiu Dian)
778 Guanglan Lu near Zuchongzhi Lu
Zhangjiang district, Pudong
Open 7 days for lunch and dinner

Ph ＋86 21 58552088

上海广兰路778号 (靠近祖冲之路)

Stop the Presses! Slow Food Comes to Shanghai!

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 11:48:00 +0000

Shanghai is a city on speed, and everything about it, including the food, is fast. People talk fast, drive fast, walk fast and live fast but I would argue that if ever there was a city ready for the Slow Food movement to take a gentle hold, Shanghai is it.

Shanghai seems always poised on the brink of something exciting - new technology, economic advances, five million kilometres of new subway lines, fifty new KFC outlets - then it catapults forward and on to the next achievement. There's no time to stop, pause and reflect. And yet the Shanghainese love food, and more than that, they love really good food. They're excited by traditional and artisanal foods and they're interested in where their food comes from and how it is grown. More and more, they're appalled and alarmed by breaches in food safety and poor food standards in China.

Enter Slow Food, the global grassroots movement founded in Italy in 1986, promoting the principles of food that is good, clean and fair. It goes deeper than that - it's about bringing back the joy of food into our lives, supporting the farmers and food producers who bring us those foods, and protecting the heritage and importance of our food. In the words of Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini, 'Slow Food unites the pleasure of food with responsibility, sustainability, and harmony with nature.'

So for a city moving fast, more than three hundred of us enjoyed Slow Food Shanghai's inaugural event yesterday, held to coincide with Terra Madre (Mother Earth) Day, the International Slow Food day of celebration.

It was a hugely successful and overwhelmingly optimistic event, as founders Mark Laabs, Kimberley Ashton and Rene van Camp arranged a wonderful group of organic farmers, artisanal producers (including a traditional soy sauce maker I'm visiting this week) and restaurants supporting the concepts of Slow Food. Here are just a very few of the farmers, restaurants and suppliers who attended:

Chongming Island, outside Shanghai, is home to an entire network of organic farms and farmers producing seasonal pesticide-free vegetables and fruits. Many of the farms, like Yi Mu Tian (left) offer farm visits to see how everything is grown, and will home-deliver their spanking-fresh produce.

A mouth-watering discovery - artisanal cheese producers Sololatte (right) make fresh mozarella daily, and even better, fresh stracciatella cheese - smooth, light and creamy, it goes perfectly with slow-roasted tomatoes and fresh basil.

A highlight - a dainty teacup of Jerusalem Artichoke soup (left) poured from a piping hot teapot, from chef Lex Hauser of The Purple Onion. Five years ago he began asking farmers if they'd be interested in growing the small tubers, and this year finally has a reliable supply of what the Chinese call 'ginger potatoes' because of their appearance. His perseverance has paid off with a creamy, earthy soup full of nutty flavour, topped with crispy Jerusalem artichoke slivers.

Kush vegetarian restaurant brought along wraps and spring roll tasters (right).

I was really impressed that the organizers had done an extraordinary amount of legwork to bring together as many organic Chinese farmers and food-producers as possible, from organic hot-pot restaurants to egg suppliers, to grain and sprout growers.

The most illuminating discussion of the day was given by Wang Jing of Greenpeace China. She opened my eyes to the enormous amount of work already underway in China to promote awareness of food safety and farming sustainability. I was surprised to learn that GM foods are already big news amongst Chinese consumers, with around 70% of consumers refusing to choose GM rice. She explained the principles of Greenpeace's food campaign as being "to test and investigate products and fresh foods, commission research, and hold big food companies accountable and responsible." She added "we will produce a non-GE food Guide and supermarket ranking to help consumers choose more healthy, safe food, and to encourage companies to take positive action."

As co-founder of Slow Food Shanghai, René van Camp said, "there are already lots of farms here with great practices. The challenge is to connect these people, create awareness, and get people in touch with one another."

Within the next few years, co-founders van Camp and Mark Laabs hope that "no-one in Shanghai is unable to access good, clean, fair food because of a lack of information or awareness. There's more out there than people realise!"

Interested in Slow Food? Join the Convivium!

Slow Food Shanghai

Slow Food Hong Kong

The Camera-less Blogger

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:01:00 +0000

The last photo taken with my Canon, Xietu Lu 2.30pm

It's been one hell of a week and already Wednesday, without a single word to show for myself. Chinese classes, sick children, overseas visitors, and to top it all off, camera troubles. I'm between cameras, you see, saddled with one that keeps breaking down but not committed to buying a new one. It's an unpleasant state similar to realising your current boyfriend is gonna have to go, but you haven't yet found a replacement for him.

The trusty Canon and I have travelled some 100,000 km together in the last three years, across China several times, to Australia, France, Scotland and the Netherlands and back, and up and down just about every street and lane in Shanghai.

A hard-working camera like that definitely deserves better treatment than I've dished out. I dropped it hard, twice, once on the Great Wall and once on Nanchang Lu, both falls resulting in a short stay at the Shanghai Canon hospital's high dependency unit. Touch and go on the auto-focus. It's never even had its own camera bag, it just rumbles around in my handbag along with a hundred pens, a few half-eaten biscuits and leaking bottles of water. I can see the real photographers cringing when I say that.

And then it started to play up with little lapses of attention and weird lens behaviour. It couldn't seem to capture Chinese reds (lanterns, firecrackers, lucky underwear, and so on) as well as I wanted. When I called my photographer sister last week and asked her advice, she went through all the possibilities and finally said "You know what the problem is? You've outgrown your camera. Your technical skill is now beyond what the camera can offer you."

What? My technical skills??! My technical skills have never outgrown anything, not the DVD remote control, not the self-assembly instructions from IKEA, nothing. Certainly not a highly complicated bit of kit like a digital SLR, surely?

I was gutted. I loved that Canon and could use it with my eyes closed. Or half-closed and kind-of-screwed-up. A new camera would just be a whole lot of hassle and I'd have to learn the buttons all over again, and I hate purchasing technical stuff. Really, really hate it.

Which leads to an embarrassing disclosure - my husband and I both hate purchasing whitegoods and electronic items so much, we outsource the purchase decisions to family members who seem to get some kind of perverse pleasure from drawing up spreadsheets with the pros and cons of various washing machines or DVD players. Based on their research and calculations, they tell us what we need and we go and buy it.

And if there aren't any available gadget-loving relatives around, we walk into the shop and get the shop guy to do the thinking for us.

"So, what are you looking for today?"

"A computer"

"Any idea what kind?"

"No"

"Which brand?"

"Don't know"

"Screen size?"

"No idea"

"Memory capacity?"

"No. No idea. I haven't done any research and I don't have any preferences. How about I just tell you what I need it for and you tell me which one I should buy?"

"Can I interest you in a discussion about pentium processors?"

"No"

We're dream customers. The guys in the electronic shops know our type, and basically just hand us a iBag filled with iGoods, take our credit card, and hand us an iReceipt and an extended iWarranty. They're happy, and we're happy because we haven't spent hours and days wondering if we should have bought the iGizmo v 2.0 instead. We didn't even know it existed.

So you can see why buying a new camera was, for me, an iNightmare. When I asked photography-loving friends what I should buy, they asked all sorts of tricky questions and then came up with four completely different solutions. When I asked Mr Google what I should buy, he came up with "It depends."

There was nothing for it. I spent the last two wet rainy days researching sites like dpreview's great side-by-side camera comparison. I asked Mr Google a lot more questions, got sidetracked as various photographers biffed it out in online forums (photography buffs apparently love to fight over technical stuff like lenses and something called 'bokeh', not a Middle Eastern food).

I went to the Shanghai Photography Market today and on the way in, took a few last photos with my Canon. The autofocus gave up for good soon after, probably dying of a broken heart. I put it away in my handbag, where it had always lived, and walked out an hour later with a brand new Nikon (purchased entirely in Chinese! Chinese classes are paying off after all) in a padded, waterproof, sturdy-as-hell bag of its very own.

I believe it does all sorts of cool things the Canon couldn't, although I can't be sure because the instruction manual, as it turns out, is also entirely in Chinese. Mr Google and I are going to be having a very late night.

What camera do you use, and what would you buy if money was no object?

First photo taken with my Nikon D700, Huating Lu 5pm.

The Shanghai Photography Market

Cnr Luban Lu and Xietu Lu

上海鲁班路(靠近斜土路)

Open daily 9am-6pm

Making Soy Milk, the Old-Fashioned Way

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 10:32:00 +0000

Winter has taken grip outside, but inside the cottage spinning the wooden handle of the old stone grinding wheel, I'm starting to build up quite a sweat. A trickle of creamy soy milk is dripping from the heavy grinding stone into the basin below, drop by drop, and it already smells good.

The mysteries of soy milk (dòujiăng 豆浆) and how it is created from soy beans have puzzled me for some time, although never for long enough to actually do some reading or research about it (shame on me). Doubtless for any of this blog's Chinese readers it will be no mystery whatever, but I didn't grow up drinking sweetened or savoury soy milk for breakfast everyday and I didn't even know that making soy milk is the first step in making tofu (more shame on me!). When the opportunity came to actually make soy milk myself this weekend I jumped at the chance to see how it was done and learn more, and I could hardly have asked for a better teacher.

This is Ah Ping, who lives in the loveliest little white-washed stone cottage on the shores of Yangcheng Lake, where she entertains guests of the nearby hotel by showing them how to make soy milk the traditional way, using organic dried soybeans grown on the hotel's own impressively large organic farm. Ah Ping is also the apiarist who takes care of the nearby beehives, producing a delicious dark local honey, and a great farm-style cook.

Yangcheng Lake is home to the world's best hairy crab thanks to its clean, deep waters, and because of the fairly strict (for China) management of the lake's valuable natural resources it has become an area of increasing interest to Chinese foodies for its nearby organic farms and food producers. More and more Chinese people are developing an interest in where food comes from and how it is grown, an interest in no small part fuelled by frequent food scandals and disasters.

I walk into Ah Ping's neat three-roomed cottage. The sun is streaming through the open lattice windows onto a small settle by the window where the heavy stone grinder sits. It has a circular top with a stout wooden handle to one side, and a small hole for placing the soy beans and water. This top stone rotates over the lower grinding stone as you turn the handle, and the resulting soy milk trickles between the two stones into a circular stone trough, and over the lip of the trough into a basin placed below it. It must weigh a tonne and I ask Ah Ping whether anyone still keeps such a heavy piece of equipment in their home. 'Nearly everyone who makes their own soy milk now uses a small electric machine' she tells me, 'but in the countryside some people still use these grinding stones.'

Ah Ping brings me two bowls of soybeans, before and after soaking. Before soaking the soybeans are small, hard and yellow, but after an overnight soaking in water they have quadrupled in size and softened.

She places a spoonful of soy beans into the hole on top of the grinder, using the blunt end of a chopstick to push them down and begins to grind, adding a little water now and then when the liquid soy milk looks too thick. When the hole is empty she adds another spoonful of beans and some more water. The thick soy milk oozes between the two grinding stones and runs down into the trough, and after ten minutes of grinding we have a litre of cream-coloured milk. As for the optimal grinding speed? 'Not too fast, not too slow' she says, with a smile.

After grinding, the creamy milk is poured through a muslin cloth into a clean wok, and the muslin twisted and squeezed to get every last bit of the milk. The remaining bean grindings can be used to cook other dishes including a type of cake, Ah Ping tells me. Once strained, the milk is heated to simmer point for a few minutes, and the inedible froth skimmed from the surface and discarded. In this process the unhelpful protease inhibitor enzymes in the soy milk are inactivated and removed.

The result? Like milk of any kind it tastes better and stronger when it's fresh. Served hot, plain or sweetened, it has a creamy texture and a light nutty taste with grassy overtones. I've taken the glass outside to sit in the winter sunshine, warming my hands as I sip. Ah Ping pokes her head out of the window. 'Tastes different to the soy mik in Shanghai, doesn't it?' she asks. 'You have to make it fresh to get the best taste.' I agree with her, and decide I'm going to invest in a soy milk machine in the next week or two, because I have a grandiose plan to try making my own tofu. Now that would be an achievement.

Yangcheng Lake can be reached by taking the fast train from Hongqiao Station, Shanghai to Kunshan South Station (17 minutes at 300km/h, trains run several times every hour). Ah Ping's house is part of the organic farm owned and run by the Fairmont Hotel, Yangcheng Lake. You can visit for a lesson in soy milk making (50 yuan, including 500ml of organic soy milk) or to taste and buy honey. By arrangement, Ah Ping also hosts cooking classes and lunches using the farm's own organic vegetables.

Master of Noodles

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:46:00 +0000

Meet master noodle maker Ma Dai Cai. He's the boss at my favourite noodle joint on Fangbang Lu in the Old City. We've been going to his hand-pulled noodle restaurant for nearly three years now and he always greets us like old friends, shuffling everyone around so the four of us can sit and eat together.

My life is full of noodles right now - I'm writing a magazine article about Chinese noodles, and I thought it would be an ideal opportunity to formally interview Ma Dai Cai for the piece and have a bowl of his great niu rou la mian (beef hand pulled noodle soup) at the same time. His story is probably familiar to noodle makers seeking their fortune in every big city in China.

His restaurant - all of two metres wide - sits right opposite the temple shop on Fangbang Lu, wedged in a row between two other small food joints. What sets Ma Dai Cai's restaurant apart is the steaming cauldron of bubbling soup sitting just outside the entrance, steaming away day and night. Walk through the plastic strip curtains and you'll find yourself in a very small room lit by a pair of fluorescent lights, a total of six tables and sixteen small orange stools crowding the floor, and at the rear a tiny kitchen where all the wok cooking takes place. Ma proudly showed me his most recent acquisition - a pink electric chopstick sterilizer and dispenser, about the size and shape of a rice cooker.

On one wall of the restaurant is a huge pictorial menu, and on the opposite wall a map of China and a giant blue written menu. (I believe these menus are absolutely identical in every la mian restaurant in China. I have a theory that there is a national la mian menu centre where all the food photography is carefully standardized and they print cloned blue, white and green menu posters.)

The table closest to the noodle-making work bench is a hazardous place to sit because of the swinging arms of the noodle makers, and you can't sit at the table closest to the kitchen because that's where a step ladder leads through a hole cut in the ceiling to the cramped living and sleeping quarters above. Ma and his family - his wife, wearing traditional Muslim dress, his teenage daughter and his three year-old son all live together with the apprentice noodle-maker in the tiny space.

Ma came to Shanghai eight years ago from Xining in Gansu Province. He had been working in noodle restaurants since in his early twenties, initially apprenticing then working his way up to full noodle-making. He soon realized he needed to own and run his own restaurant to get ahead, so he came to Shanghai and pulled noodles in other people's restaurants until he could afford to open his own place three years ago. The work is tiring, particularly because the restaurant never ever closes. Keen to capture every last shred of business, you can knock on the door at 3am and Ma will get up and fix you a steaming bowl of freshly-pulled noodles. He never takes a day off and weekends are meaningless to him.

It took Ma two or three months to learn how to master all the different noodle varieties - hand-pulled noodles thick and thin, hand-cut noodles, and torn noodle pieces. I asked if it perished his shoulders after so many years but he said they he never had any problems. Even so, Ma always has an apprentice now with much younger arms to do most of the noodle-pulling, and Ma is in charge of cooking and serving the noodles and handling the cash. His wife takes care of all the stir-fry dishes, and his fourteen year-old daughter serves and cleans up. The three year old? Mostly he causes trouble and keeps the customers entertained with some lively antics.

For those of you not familiar with the theatre of hand-pulled noodles, here's how it works (thanks to Ma's apprentice noodle-maker) :

A length of wheat flour and water dough is taken and twisted, stretched, twisted again, then doubled back on itself. This pulling and twisting action is repeated over and over again until dozens of fine long strands have been stretched into shape. The noodles receive a quick cooking in the cauldron of lightly spiced beef stock, then are served in a bowl along with a ladle of stock and a handful of coriander and beef slices. You can add chili paste or vinegar to taste. Here's how they look:

Ma's noodles are really tasty and his restaurant is almost always full, all sixteen seats. It's tiring, back-breaking work but he has high hopes for his family and their future here - I can only hope Shanghai delivers on its promise.

Hand-pulled Noodles

638 Fangbang Lu near Luxiangyuan Lu

Open 24 hours, 7 days

方浜中路638弄(靠近露香园街)

Shanghai Street Food #23 Scallion Oil Noodles: Cōng Yóu Bàn Miàn 葱油拌面

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 03:20:00 +0000

Scallion oil noodles (cōng yóu bàn miàn 葱油拌面, literally scallion oil tossed noodles) are a deceptively simple street food packing a powerful flavour punch. I dare you to try eating only half a bowl, even when you're already full! This morning I ate breakfast at home, then went straight out to shoot some noodle photos and I only planned to have a few mouthfuls....but there you go, three minutes later I could see the bottom of the bowl.

Scallion oil noodles are one street food you could reproduce quite easily at home (I like this recipe from Cecilia Chiang, minus the shrimp). The finest hand-pulled noodles are quickly blanched for a minute in boiling stock or water then rinsed, cooling them to room temperature. Earlier, a simple sauce has been made by frying julienned scallions until they are dark and crisped, removing them, then adding salt and soy sauce to the hot oil. A bowl is prepared by being filled with a couple of spoonfuls of the scallion oil/soy sauce mixture, on top of which goes a tangle of noodles then a small handful of crispy fried green scallions. As you mix the noodles they become coated with the oil and soy, giving each strand a slippery tasty covering of sauce - a lovely contrast to the sweetness and crispness of the fried scallions. Add black vinegar to taste as you eat for extra flavour.

This classic Shanghai home-style dish is often the cheapest bowl in any street-side noodle restaurant at around 5 yuan (80 cents) but is also served in upmarket Shanghainese restaurants towards the end of a meal. When sharing, the waitress will bring a large bowl of cong you ban mian and tosses the noodles tableside, serving everyone with individual smaller bowls.

In my local noodle shop, the cong you ban mian are one of seventeen different noodle dishes you can order from the vast wall menu, which runs to a total of eighty-seven dishes. I can't vouch for the other eight-six dishes because I'm usually just there for the noodles, but all of them are produced in a kitchen the size of a closet. A-stounding.

The Shanghai Street Food Series

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

Criticizing Lin Piao and Confucius - Greetings from 1975

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 02:10:00 +0000

Take a step back to a happier age - what were you doing in 1975? In 1975 I was six years old, and had just learned to rollerskate using old-fashoned tie-on rollerskates. I had permanently skinned knees.

On the other hand, things weren't so free In China in 1975 - Mao was still alive and the Cultural Revolution wasn't to end for another year. These six year olds, pictured on the front of a 1975 calendar card I picked up in an antique market last week, were studiously 'criticizing' those old communist humbugs Lin Piao and Confucius. Confucius I'm sure you all know, the lucky ancient is now riding a new wave of popularity in China (again), having taken a dip during the 60s and 70s. Poor old Lin Piao (usually known as Lin Biao) was a communist military leader who died in a plane crash in Mongolia allegedly following a failed attempted coup and assassination attempt on Mao in 1971. Sadly his lost popularity hasn't been successfully regained.

I found this tiny little piece of history at a wonderful early morning antique market. Calendar cards, smaller than a playing card, were given away in the New Year by companies, businesses and government departments (the names of which are often priceless, like the Zhejiang Province Epidemic Prevention Branch). The earliest I've found date to 1974, and they continued to be popular for ten years or so. Often printed with happy politically correct scenes (for the time), they came in sets like these from the Shanghai Ocean Shiping Voyage-Repair Dockyard, with a picture on the front and a miniature calendar on the reverse.

I have amassed quite a collection of these little calendar cards, but my favourites by far are from the Gangu County Printing Ink Factory, 1975. They are delightfully retro but with a dark and slightly disturbing edge, like the 'Criticizing Lin Piao and Confucius' card at top.

'Sentry on the East Sea'

'Voice from Peking' once again shows children in ethnic minority dress listening with rapt attention to the national radio broadcast.

'Study Hard'

'Red Flowers Facing the Sun'

'Let's Share the Toys' I found this card the most bizarre, with a child holding a very western-looking round-eyed doll while children frolic in the background in what could well be a housing estate in England.

'Friendship First'

Untitled. Loving the green full body cable-knit sweater.

Lingshi Lu Antique Market

The antique market is fabulous, but is not easy to find hidden away behind a regular bird and flower market. It operates mainly on Friday mornings when people start arriving at 4am, (closing at 6pm) but is also open at weekends, although fewer vendors show up. On Fridays vendors set up in the building's forecourt too. It's the place to find old books, maps, coins, toys, porcelain and jade (last time I went I picked up five old recipe books for 10-15 yuan each). The calendar cards are plentiful and sell for 4-5 yuan each.

Lingshi Lu Antique Market

behind Lanling Bird and Flower Market

1539 Lingshi Lu, near Xincun Lu

Shanghai

上海岚灵花鸟市场

灵石路1539号靠近新村路

Fridays from 4am

Weekends from 10am

To get there by metro:

Line 7 Xincun Station （metro map here)

Take Exit 1 - walk north along Lingshi Lu, where the Bird and Flower Market is at number 1539. Walk all the way through the market to the pink coloured building at the rear and go up to the second and third floors to find the antique market.

Eight Shanghai Hairy Crabs, One Ethical Dilemma.

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 00:20:00 +0000

Today is the day I am going to tackle two things I've never done before.

1. I'm planning to cook my own Shanghai hairy crab for lunch, because reader Adeline suggested it and she is a woman full of good ideas.

2. I will tackle my slight phobia about cooking live crustaceans. For good.

This should be interesting.

8.10am. I cycle to the wet market to choose my hairy crabs. We're in the second half of the annual three month long hairy crab-eating festival here in Shanghai - a magical time of late autumn when the click-clack of little claws can be heard on every pavement as the crabs try to make their unsuccessful escapes from tubs and buckets, having made the pilgrimage to Shanghai from nearby shallow lakes to fulfill every foodie's dream - a feast of hairy crab.

Last week I dropped by the old-fashioned wet market on the corner of Taiyuan Lu and Jianguo Lu to check out their hairy crabs and ask a few questions ahead of today's purchase. The crabs certainly looked the business - lovely olive green shells, shiny bright eyes on stalks, nice little furry mittens on their claws, very lively. Having totally given up on the idea of buying the famed Yancheng Lake hairy crabs because there are so many fakes and imposters around, I have opted instead for regular old unmarked, unbranded, un-microchipped hairy crabs, four boys and four girls.

The crab lady helps me choose by easing up the breast plate of each crab to show that the females are full of yolky orange roe, and the males are full of....something. Crab sperm? I nod sagely as she shows me the pale white underbelly.

Once chosen the eight crabs get a thorough going over with a rough scrubbing brush, an action that has the effect of subduing them sufficiently so they can be concertina folded into a small tight bundle and wrapped with twine, a feat the crab lady achieves by holding one end of the twine between her teeth for tension.

8.56am. I cycle back to the wet market to take photographs of the crabs being tied up. Can't believe I forgot my camera the first time.

Girls on the left, boys on the right

9.20am. Once back home I put the crabs in the coldest part of the refrigerator to help them have a nice little sleep and go back out buy a winter coat for myself. Today the temperature has suddenly plunged and I know if I don't get one today they'll all be gone and I'll end up with a hideous shiny purple puffa coat. I've calculated that by the time I get home in two hours all eight crabs will be snoring away in a sort of crustacean suspended animation, making their subsequent cooking as painless as possible.

12.40pm. Arrive home, ravenous. Coat purchasing took a lot longer than expected because every other person in Shanghai has had the same idea. Buggers. The thought of ten minutes' wait for the crabs to cook seems so long! I put the water for the steamer on to boil and pull the crabs, hopefully blissfully unconscious, out of the refrigerator. As I open the bag they make small busy noises and eight pairs of bright little crab eyes open up and poke out at me. They're wide awake and if they weren't neatly tied up they would probably have made themselves a cosy home on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator using the butter dish as a sofa. I'm battling life-threatening hunger but I decide this should be done humanely, so I take the pot off the heat, put the crabs into the freezer, and eat a yoghurt.

1.12pm. I google 'kind and fast ways to kill crabs'

1.13pm. Google replies with thousands of sites about unwanted lice and how to get rid of some garden weed called crabgrass that can apparently invade your lawn. Useless, google! Further down, I see something on the RSPCA website. Surely the RSPCA will know a thing or two about killing crabs kindly!

It turns out they do, to the tune of a six page document titled 'Humane electrical stun/killing of crustacea'. It makes for horrific reading and I feel guilty just skimming over it, with its underlying judgmental tones. In fact, I'm probably right now on some international register of crustacea-vores just for downloading the PDF. I bet they're all vegetarians.

If you must kill a crustacean, the RSPCA suggests using a Crustastun™ humane shellfish electro-stun/kill machine. That's its real name too. It looks a little like a sandwich toaster or a panini press, with a lot more voltage. I go to their website but can't figure out how much one costs, or whether they deliver to China.

Not having immediate and ready access to a Crustastun™ I read pages four, five and six of the RSPCA document. For those unfortunate enough not to have a Crustastun™in the cupboard next to the sausage machine and the olive pitter, they suggest the 'mechanical destruction technique', involving the use of a long sharp knife and a detailed anatomical diagram identifying the crab's two main nerve centres. They also mention having 'dedicated trained competent operatives' perform this task. I decide I am only slightly dedicated and definitely untrained and incompetent, so not up to the task.

I read on. Lunch is looking further and further away every minute. The RSPCA throws me a small tattered lifeline. As a third, very poor option, the crabs can be rendered 'insensible' by freezing them for two hours 'gradually' to 'avoid osmotic shock.'

1.22pm. I put the crabs in the freezer.

2.17pm. I'm very, very hungry and the rest of the family is taunting me with fresh crusty bread and cheese. I resist. I take the crabs back out of the freezer to check for signs of insensibility. They poke their eyes out brightly as if to say 'godDAMM it's cold in there! No! Don't put us back! No!'

I put them back in the freezer.

3pm. I've just finished a banana with a TimTam chocolate biscuit chaser. I'm feeling a bit less light-headed and have resolved some of my inner ethical dilemmas so I go to work on the dipping sauce mandatory with hairy crab. I check the crabs again. Only two of the eight fulfil the RSPCAs criteria for 'insensible', meaning that when I tap on the shell they don't move or open their eyes. Bloody Chinese freezers. Bloody RSPCA. Back they go.

3.46pm. Desperation. I try the crabs one last time. By now they're probably frozen solid. Certainly all the meat I've had to remove from the freezer to make way for the hairy crabs has completely defrosted, so at least I'll have a back-up plan if the crabs don't work out.

They look asleep. I tap the shells and one of the eight drowsily pokes his eyes out. Bugger. Back he goes in the freezer, and I crank up the heat on the steamer and put the other seven in the steamer basket, on their backs as advised, on a comfortable bed of ginger slices and scallion leaves, also as advised. I clamp the lid on and worry slightly about their insensible nerve centres as I race to the next room for ten minutes' respectful silence. Also, the rest of the family have left the house so there's no-one to talk to.

3.56pm I tentatively lift the lid. The crabs come out of the steamer a deep orange. Wafts of ginger and sweet crab smell. No discernible movement.

I cut the strings off and apart from a small terrifying moment where one claw springs out at me and my inner 10 year old girl screams, while my inner 42 year old says 'for gawd's sake it's DEAD' they look and smell perfectly cooked. I retrieve the silver hairy crab tools purchased specially for this occasion - a pair of pliers and cutters in one, and an elegant double ended tool for retrieving the tiniest bits of meat.

4.06pm. Lunch. I tie a tea towel around my neck. On my left, a plate with seven hairy crab, four girls, three boys. In front, a dish of sweet vinegar and ginger dipping sauce. I crack open the first crab, revealing the sweet shards of white flesh and the golden, oily, buttery roe. I remove the feathery gills then eat the meat bit by bit. Unbelievably good. The clean fresh crab taste is so perfect I hardly use the dipping sauce at all.

4.41pm. On my left, a pile of detritus. In front, a pile of detritus and a very dirty camera. On my right, a pile of crablegs and claws too small to get anything out of. I can barely move and there are smears of crab roe all over my hands, clothes, and face. I didn't actually intend to eat all seven hairy crabs but they are really truly quite small. And I only do it once a year.....

Wonder which cupboard I could squeeze that Crustastun™ into??

Tips for cooking hairy crab

Unless you want an Annie Hall moment, keep them tied up until after they're cooked
Lay them on their backs during cooking to keep the delcious juices in
Steam for ten to thirteen minutes in a bamboo steamer depending on weight
Cut the strings and serve while still hot, with a side dish of ginger vinegar dipping sauce and a finger bowl
Consider serving the traditional accompaniment to hairy crab - warmed Shaoxing wine

Dipping Sauce for Hairy Crab

Ingredients

50 ml Zhenjiang vinegar
100ml water
4 tsp sugar
pinch salt
2 tablespoons very finely shredded ginger

Method

Gently heat ingredients until sugar is dissolved
Cool before serving

Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:43:00 +0000

Fuchsia Dunlop , a woman with a wonderfully exciting depth of knowledge about Chinese food, is now officially my favourite food writer (apologies, Jeffrey Steingarten and the two Elizabeths, David and Romer). Dunlop knows her subject inside out and brings her love and passion for the food of China, and of Sichuan in particular, to a wider audience with her third book, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper.

The book chronicles Dunlop's evolving love affair with Sichuan food, peppered with recipes and woven through with her observations on food history, language and culture. Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper won the Guild of Food Writers Kate Whiteman Award for Food and Travel and the IACP Jane Grigson Award in 2009.

Dunlop arrived in Chengdu on a British Council scholarship in 1994 (purportedly to study Chinese policy on ethnic minorities) but became entranced, captivated and totally distracted by the food of Sichuan somewhere along the way, eventually studying Sichuan cuisine at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine and mastering the intricacies of flavour combinations, cutting skills, and the mystical 'huo hou', the sense of heat when cooking in a wok. She went on to write what many consider the book of Sichuan cuisine, Sichuan Cookery, and a second book on the food of Hunan, the Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, written during the terrifying SARS epidemic of 2003.

Her personal stories of culinary discovery are flavoured with the challenges of being foreign in a part of China that saw few foreigners at the time, and of coming to grips with an alien language and culture.

"To learn the language of cookery in China was, in part, to learn the language of life. And as I went deeper into my culinary studies, I found that I was not only cooking, but also in some ways thinking, like a Chinese person."

The book opens with a description of Dunlop's first taste of proper Chinese food, and in stark contrast to her later lavish descriptions of Sichaun dishes, it leaves us reeling with visceral disgust -

"The preserved duck eggs were served as an hors d'oeuvre in a fashionable Hong Kong restaurant, sliced in half, with a ginger-and-vinegar dip. It was my first trip to Asia, and I had rarely seen anything so revolting on a dinner table. They leered up at me like the eyeballs of some nightmarish monster, dark and threatening. Their albumens were a filthy, translucent brown, their yolks an oozy black, ringed with a layer of greenish, mouldy grey. About them hung a faintly sulphurous haze. I tried one, just to be polite, but ts noxious aroma made me feel nauseous and I found it hard to swallow. Afterwards, a slick of toxic black slime from the yolk clung to my chopsticks, threatening to pollute everything else I ate. Surreptitiouly I tried to wipe them on the tablecloth."

Fortunately, her taste for Chinese food rapidly improves, as she describes one of Sichuan's most famous street dishes, dan dan mian - dan dan noodles.

"They looked quite plain, a small bowlful of noodles topped with a spoonful of dark, crisp minced beef. But as soon as you stirred them with your chopsticks, you awakened the flavours in the slick of spicy seasonings at the base of the bowl, and coated each strand of pasta in a mix of soy sauce, chilli oil, sesame paste and Sichuan pepper. The effect was electrifying. Within seconds, your mouth was on fire, your lips quivering under the onslaught of the pepper, and your whole body radiant with heat."

Dunlop takes us on a lip-smacking ride through Sichuan food, food history, Chinese culture and travel. My favourite chapter by far is one on which she returns to Sichuan to hunt down the best Sichuan pepper, that lip-numbing spice so intricately associated with Sichuan food. Part homage, part travelogue, she travels eight hours by long-distance bus to the remote township of Qingxi, the home of the world's best Sichuan pepper. Dunlop doesn't disappoint with her description of the first taste of the tiny peppercorns.

"And then I put some pepper between my lips. In its green astringent newness, it puckers my tongue immediately, and then, a few seconds later, the tingling hits. That incomparable tongue-numbing sensation of Sichuan pepper, a fizzing that starts stealthily and rises to a mouth-streaming breathtaking crescendo that can last for twenty minutes before it slowly, gradually, dies away. It's stronger even than I expected, and I laugh in surprise. For years I have dreamt of tasting Sichuan pepper on the tree, and here I am, in Qingxi itself, my lips singing."

In the haphazard world of English language books in Shanghai, it took quite some time to track down a copy of Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper. In a way, though, it was important for me to find Dunlop's book now, rather than two years ago, because it is so much more meaningful after having seen more of the country and experienced more of its food.

Although I read and enjoyed Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper because of its food focus (and certainly the descriptions of Sichuan foods make your mouth fairly water), for me Dunlop became something of a cultural guiding light as she explained so many aspects of Chinese food culture I found intriguing and at times repulsive, like the apparently barbaric treatment of animals used for food. I recall watching with growing horror as a Shanghai market vendor plucked a young chicken while it was still alive, its eyes bulging with fear and pain as it struggled desperately to get away and blood dripped onto the woman's jeans. All the while, she chatted with her neighbouring vendor while her toddler played with an empty plastic drink bottle nearby. Dunlop explains this seeming callousness thus -

"I'd been to many Chinese markets before that outing with Feng Rui, and had at first been amazed - and appalled- by the cruelty I witnessed. It was the sheer nonchalance of it, the way people scaled fish as though they were simply peeling potatoes, skinned live rabbits while smoking a cigarette, joked with a friend as the blood drained from the throat of a bewildered duck. They didn't kill animals before they cooked and ate them. They simply went about the process of preparing a creature for the pot and table, and at some random point it died. But there, perhaps, is the crux of the matter, embedded almost invisibly in those last two sentences. In English...the words for the living things we eat are mostly derived from the the Latin anima, which means air, breath, life. 'Creature' from the latin word for 'created',seems to connect animals with us as human beings in some divinely fashioned univere. We too are creatures, animated. In Chinese, the word for animal is dong wu, meaning 'moving thing'. Is it cruel to hurt something that you simply see as a 'moving thing', scarcely even alive?"

Dunlop also goes on to explain, among other things, the Chinese fascination with gristly and rubbery food textures, and the attraction of eating wild and endangered animals. For a foreigner like myself trying desperately to come to grips with China, the country, through Chinese food, this is a tremendously enjoyable read. I often felt Dunlop had been surreptitiously reading my thoughts, she seemed to describe my life so accurately, except that of course, she'd done it all many years before me.

"I took a few private Chinese lessons and spent the rest of my time hanging around markets and restaurants, or sitting in teahouses, poring over dictionaries and photocopies of local restaurant menus."

Hmm. I know someone who may or may not do exactly that.

Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper

by Fuchsia Dunlop

First published 2009

Paperback edition published 2011 by Ebury Press

Reviews of other books on Chinese food and travel you might enjoy:

Serve the People by Jen Lin-Liu

The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones

My China by Kylie Kwong

naked Retreats naked Stables

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:06:00 +0000

Disclaimer: We paid for this weekend ourselves, and it was bloody expensive. But it was so worth it.

The people behind Moganshan's naked Retreats have just opened a new eco-resort development nestled in a bamboo and fir tree valley between Moganshan and Anji. It's a spectacularly beautiful piece of unspoiled nature and more importantly, feels a thousand miles from the hideous gritty gray pall of smog that passes as weather we've had for the last week in Shanghai.

naked Retreats began as a weekend getaway in a small village at the base of Moganshan mountain, with several village houses converted into rustic retreats complete with roast chicken dinners, fireplaces, and nature walks. A month ago, the same group opened naked Stables, a lavish spread of some 120 'earth huts and treetop villas' settled between the trees of a valley that forms part of a large private nature reserve.

And for those readers outside Shanghai, when I say 'nature reserve' it's not a euphemism for 'nudist colony', and the name naked Retreats is designed to indicate a return to nature, not a shedding of clothes. Just so you know.

To get to the new naked Stables from Shanghai you'll need private transport, or you can take the fast train to Hangzhou (45 minutes) and have them collect you at the station for the 90 minute trip to the resort. Having just finished telling you it's not a nudist resort, I did get a good laugh from the text message sent by the young lady arranging our pick-up from Hangzhou Train Station. It read "Ok. I will wait you at exit. And with shuttle bus come naked." In the crowds at Hangzhou station we might well have slipped through naked relatively unnoticed, but we opted to wear clothes to avoid any difficulties.

Once you leave Hangzhou's equally choking smog behind you drive towards the mountains, past rows of terraced tea bushes, through small towns piled to the sky with stacks of green bamboo drying in the sun, and past tiny fields of golden rice, head-heavy and ready for harvest.

In amongst all of this is naked Stables. Soon after our arrival on Friday afternoon our 'host' Tornado (his real name, although he confusingly pronounces it 'Toledo') took us in a motorised golf buggy to our villa, Crane 1, perched on a ridge overlooking the valley. It's all incredibly lovely - timber floors, stone walls, floor to ceiling windows looking out on to a broad deck. There are bedrooms with fluffy white quilts, bathrooms lined in slate, and a huge and comfortable living room with a full-sized kitchen, should you feel like self-catering.

The kitchen comes equipped with local 'white' tea, a variety of green tea, and freshly-ground coffee. I personally think a bottle of wine would have hit the spot really well on a Friday afternoon, but there was none in the mini-bar. Tea will have to do for now.

When you're done relaxing in your villa, you can call Tornado and he will take you to relax somewhere else. Deep, sustained relaxation is the key to getting the most out of this place, I figure. There are daily activities like mountain hikes, horse riding, pilates and mountain-biking, but why put yourself to all that trouble and perspiration when there is a perfectly good lounge to recline on down at the Clubhouse in the early winter sunshine, and snacks and drinks to be had?

When summer arrives the pools (there are three altogether) will be a great drawcard. In the meantime I try a Moganshan Spring beer and 'Moganshan farmer's snacks' - dried sweetened bamboo shoots, chewy and sinewy, dried smoked green soybeans, terrifically delicious and never-before tried, and boiled peanuts (20 yuan/$3). The Clubhouse has a casual bistro decorated with terracotta lamps and carved wooden chairs where you can eat lunch and dinner. The very reasonably priced menu runs to shrimp and pomelo salad (50 yuan/$8), chicken and mushroom pot pie (75 yuan/$12), prosciutto and mozarella sandwich (50 yuan/$8), or shrimp and water chestnut pot-stickers with a garlic-lemongrass dipping sauce (45 yuan/$7).

For breakfast and more formal evening dining, you can eat lakeside at Kikaboni Restaurant at the opposite end of the resort. In the morning sunlight streams through the restaurant windows, reflecting off the small lake. It's a lovely space and the food reflects their philosophy of simple food, locally sourced and made.

Two full days of it round-the-clock relaxation (there's a spa opening soon) and good food and you're just about ready to move to naked Stables for good. The only problem will be how to explain the overdraft to your bank manager. Guess it will have to be an occasional guilty indulgence.

naked Stables

Currently in soft opening from now until Feb 2012

Earth huts from 2600 yuan/night, second night free until Feb 29

Villas (2-4 bedrooms) from 5800 yuan/night, second night free until Feb 29

Breakfast and Hangzhou transfers included.

Jia Jia Tang Bao - A Shanghai Xiaolongbao Classic

noreply@blogger.com (Fiona Reilly) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 09:55:00 +0000

Xiaolongbao, Shanghai's incredible soup-filled dumplings, don't come any more classic than those at Jia Jia Tang Bao, eaten at the original restaurant in the back streets north of People's Square. If you go there right now in the middle of hairy crab season, you'll find the best hairy crab xiaolongbao you ever tasted at prices so low you'll think they left an extra digit off the bill. Really.

Xiaolongbao come in two main varieties - pork, and pork mixed with hairy crab meat and/or crab roe. Right now, October to December, is hairy crab season, and the little dark green crustaceans with hairy black pompoms on the end of their claws have arrived in Shanghai from nearby Yangcheng Lake and surrounds. Restaurant fliers featuring eight course hairy crab feasts come through the letterbox every day. Tubs and tanks full of hairy crabs are on every street in the city, the crabs sitting mutely with their ridiculous pompom claws tied folded close to their bodies.

A month ago my favorite dry goods shop on Wulumuqi Lu had every item temporarily removed to make way for a dozen or so glass-topped barrels full of hairy crabs. The nuts and dried fruits will make a comeback in December when crab season is over, but for now there is only one item for sale - hairy crab. Last week I walked past as a delivery of crabs was sitting in a plastic crate on the pavement. Clambering over those underneath a few brave crab souls made their escape, falling ungracefully onto the pavement before righting themselves and making off towards the traffic.....they were snatched from the jaws of certain death under the wheels of a motorcycle and plonked back in a barrel, temporarily delayed from a tasty end in someone's kitchen.

Jia Jia doesn't look like much from the street but is a huge favorite of Shanghainese locals and travelling foodies alike, and in hairy crab season its popularity goes through the roof. After tasting their crab xiaolongbao you'll know why. You'll need to queue for a table no matter what the time of day, frequently being required to defend your queue position against stealth attacks from sneaky Chinese tourists who try and inveigle a position ahead of you. Don't worry, the front desk inside the door is manned by an eagle-eyed woman who will yell at them and send them back to the end of the line, shame-faced.

While you wait, choose from either the outside menu or the inside menu hanging on the wall behind the counter, and when you finally make it to the front of the line order and pay before being shown to a seat with your docket. In many places - Jia Jia included - xiaolongbao are also known as tāng bāo (汤包 soup dumplings). Choose from 'pure delicious fresh meat soup dumplings' at 10.5 yuan ($1.50) for a dozen, shrimp, chicken, or even the luxurious 'pure crab meat soup dumplings at 99 yuan ($16.00). I highly recommend foregoing all others for the signature dish - xièfĕn xiānròu tāngbāo (蟹粉鲜肉汤包 hairy crab and pork xiaolongbao), at 25.5 yuan ($4.00) for a dozen.

Once seated at one of only ten or so tiny formica tables, you can people-watch while you wait for your number to be called. Old Shanghainese couples sharing a steamer basket of xiaolongbao for breakfast. Trendy kids from Taiwan, with angular haircuts, outsize glasses, and harem pants with hi-tops taking iPhone photographs of one another. Somewhat disconcertingly, the hungry diners lined up outside tend to frequently press their faces to the window to check on your progress. Ignore them.

At last! Your dozen crab meat and pork xiaolongbao arrive. The lid comes off the basket to reveal twelve fine specimens resting on a woven grass basket lining, the yellow crab roe clearly visible through the dumpling skins. There are two choices of dipping sauce - black vinegar, or golden rice vinegar with shreds of ginger. The latter goes perfectly with the more subtle flavor of the crab meat, and is the same accompaniment to steamed whole hairy crab (see this post on eating hairy crab at quirky Yong Xing Restaurant).

The xiaolongbao are perfect - strong fine translucent skins, an explosion of delicate crab meat and yolky rich crab roe, a touch of smooth pork, and a mouthful of hot broth filled with oily gold droplets of melted roe. Incredible. Before you know it all twelve dumplings are sitting happily in your stomach. Worth every minute of the half hour wait.

While you eat and enjoy you can also watch the frenetic activity in the open kitchen as a team of women work in unison to make each basket of xiaolongbao to order. Tiny nubbins of dough are rolled individually into paper thin skins, then stuffed with filling, pleated closed and placed carefully in a steamer basket. Basket after basket, all day long, from kitchen to steamer to grateful mouths. Take a big appetite when you go.

Jia Jia Tang Bao 佳家汤包

90 Huanghe Lu, near Fengyang Lu

黄河路90号, 近凤阳路

Ph +86 21 6327 6878

Open 7 days, 6.30am - 10pm or until sold out