Local food.

 Welcome back to our blog.

I don’t get a lot of free time at the moment because I have a busy teaching schedule.

This month, I thought I would write something about the local food that I enjoy here in Weifang.

Di Gua

The first one is sweet potato, Di Gua. Known to the kiwis as kumara, the humble sweet potato is a winter food here. The sweet potato starts to appear in the streets during autumn, having been harvested (dug up) towards the end of summer in September/October.

The local ones are the yellow variety, are very soft, moist and very sweet, as anyone who has tasted them will agree.

The truly unique thing is the way you buy them here. Local farmers bring them into town on their three wheel bikes which have a special charcoal oven mounted on the back. There are a couple of variations but mainly it is basically the old 44 gallon drum with a fire in the base and a series of rotating wire shelves mounted above. The potatoes are placed on the shelves and slowly baked in the oven. You can smell them cooking about ten metres away.

Some photos of venders.

Another variety of the oven is a square box with a series of round sliding draws in the front which hold one or two potatoes.

The experienced chef knows by feel when they are ready and either puts them into a polyurethane box or on top of the oven under a heavy blanket to keep warm. As I said before, they are very soft, very moist and very sweet. As they are baked, they hold all of their nutrition and the skin becomes lightly crisp and nutty. On the cold winter days, you will see people everywhere munching on these tasty, warming and filling delights. It is actually sad when winter ends and the supplies run out.

Oh Yum!  Anji often buys one for breakfast on her way to the bus stop in the morning. I’m a rolled oat porridge man and she doesn’t like to cook just for herself at breakfast.

Huo shao.

Often described as Weifang Hamburgers, it is more accurately described by Australians as a Weifang Meat Pie. A small, round pastry filled with meat or various vegetables.

Again, the way it is cooked makes the difference in the taste.

The traditional way and, I believe still the best, is again a small coal fired oven. Any real fire source such as wood, charcoal or even gas would probably work as well. The electric ovens don't give the same texture or taste. They are too efficient and consistent in heat.

The traditional procedure is to make a dough of ordinary flour, very moist with oil and prepare the different ingredients. The prepared Hua Shao is placed on the top hot plate to be seared on the outside.

Once seared, the Huo shao is placed inside and moved around from the back to front as it is cooked.

I mentioned the difference between the solid fuel and the electric ovens. The traditional ones have a crisp outer crust and very moist contents. The electric ovens, being more even in heat, tend to make the pastry a little cakey and the contents can be dry. The whole atmosphere is also different.

This is a common breakfast food and you will often see a dozen or more people sitting on little folding stools, munching these hot delights before they head off to work.

Dou Fu Nao

Along with the Huo Shao, the other common breakfast food is Dou Fu Nao, a type of soup with fresh Tofu (Dou Fu) as the main ingredient served in a soup bowl and a spicy soup poured over it and some finely chopped vegetables such as coriander sprinkled over the top. It is eaten with a spoon and the best ones are home made. You sometimes can be unlucky because it can sell out quickly. It is something to be eaten fresh because it loses its flavour and the vegetables their freshness if reheated.

You will usually find someone selling Dou Fu Nao sharing the same location with a Huo Shao shop and both venders work in partnership because most people like to have Huo Shao and Dou Fu Nao together. Making Huo Shao is a continuous job because they sell so fast so the Dou Fu Nao lady will look after the tables and plates. The Dou Fu Nao is prepared the night before.

Two Huo Shao and a bowl of Dou Fu Nao will keep you going until lunch.

You Tiao

Another breakfast favourite, equally as popular as Huo Shao, is You Tiao and Soya bean milk. You Tiao is commonly called Chinese doughnuts by foreigners because of the way it is cooked.

A flour dough mixture is dropped into hot oil. The dough expands and rises to the top like a doughnut and is turned to ensure it is cooked on all sides. The difference is the shape. While a doughnut is round with a hole in the middle, you Tiao are long and straight and about the size of a hotdog bun or a bit longer. The are a golden brown, and when cooked in clean hot oil, they are delightfully light and crisp.

Like Huo Shao and Dou Fu Fao, You Tiao are best when eaten with some fresh Soya bean milk.

You could call it bean juice but it looks like yellow milk as the commercial Soya milk does in the west. In fact, it is exactly the same thing but it is produced freshly from the raw Soya beans and is usually drunk hot. Because there is nothing else added, it can sometimes be a little bitter to the western pallet so I like to add a little sugar. In the street, it is served in a plastic bag with a straw and you will see many bags swinging from bike handle bars of people on their way to work.

There is a famous chain of restaurants in Weifang with a little fat boy with a Koolie Hat as their brand mark. This was where I had my first breakfast in Weifang six years ago. Early in the morning after having just got off a train at 5.30 am on a winters morning in February, I was taken to one of these restaurants and served a hot milky substance that I found delightful. It was bean juice.

In fact, Anji and I had breakfast in one of these restaurants last Sunday morning. Hot, sweet  bean juice and freshly cooked You Tiao. A set order in the restaurant is two per person but in the street, you buy them by weight. A couple of yuan will buy you a bag full of around ten.

As the day goes on and lunch approaches, perhaps you are starting to forget breakfast and feel hungry again. The lunch and dinner choices would be classified the same but I am going to separate them by saying that I usually only certain foods at lunch and eat others for dinner. So I will give them to you as if you were with me and Anji for lunch and then dinner.

Huo Le

One of my favourite lunch time foods (and often at dinner too) is noodles. “What?” I hear you say? “The common old noodles?” Ah yes! But hardly common. As in Japan, noodles come in many shapes and sizes here. There is the common, everyday noodle, about the size of spaghetti. Then there is the very thin noodle known as Lamen (Ramen) in Japan. And then there is my favourite, the local, thick noodle or Huo Le (Huo Luo in Weifang dialect), known as Udon in Japan. There are a few traditional noodle restaurants around Weifang. So traditional is this that there is a statue in one of the parks depicting a boy making the noodles by sitting on the seat of the noodle press. I have seen this done in the restaurant near my home where they still make it the traditional way. The noodles are made fresh as required and not bought or stored.

Imagine a large cooking pot at least one metre in diameter and, above this pot is another container with many holes in the bottom like a giant strainer. This second one is the dough pot. Above this container is a large arm perhaps mounted on the wall and reaching over the top of the container, ending with a seat that can come down the outside of the cooking pot. In the middle is a large press the same diameter as the dough pot.

A large ball of the fresh noodle dough is placed into the dough pot and the press placed on top of it. The cook then climbs into the chair and their weight squeezes the dough through the holes and into the cooking pot. Viola! Fresh, thick noodles.

This is served in a soup bowl with sliced meat balls, Sweet pickled garlic and some other chopped vegetables.

Outside the Huo Le Restaurant.

A warning here. If you feel hungry, don’t order the large bowl. It is the size of a small hand basin. I love these noodles but I couldn’t finish the large bowl. Order a medium (zhong). My son can eat pretty well. But when he was visiting Weifang, we had these noodles for lunch. He finished his medium, just. But his wife gave up. Servings in the smaller restaurants don’t reflect the shop’s size. Servings are VERY generous.

And now for dinner. Of course there is the usual collection of typical Chinese food with a list too long to mention and not unlike the Chinese food you get where you live.

But I would like to mention two that I have never seen out side of China and a third, which is a variation on something that you may be familiar with.

The first is possibly my favourite food, especially in winter, Chao tian guo. The closest thing I can think of would be a Kebab but with a local feel to it, especially the way it is served. The whole experience is based on a tradition and has two major parts. The first is the soup which is free and as much as you can eat (or drink, which ever way you look at soup).

The traditional restaurant is built around a huge soup pot which is situated in a corner near an outside wall. This is to allow the chimney to get to the outside more easily. The soup pot is, again, usually coal or gas fired and is kept simmering all day. It is about half a 44 gallon drum length ways in size and in it all the different meats and animal bits are cooked slowly. You can sit around this simmering stove, if you are by yourself, or at a normal table.

You order your desired meat, vegetable or egg, which is wrapped in a thin wheat flour wrapper exactly like a kebab wrapper or Indian Rotty bread. You can have pork (Zhu rou), beef (niu rou), Donkey (Yes Donkey. Liu Rou) and meat ball. 

The other local favourites would be Hot Pot and Barbeque. Hot Pot is where you each have a small pot on its own little stove and the sauce is kept simmering by a burning gell in the base. Into this you throw varying types of meat and vegetables, cook them for a few minutes and eat them. At the end of the night, I like to let the sauce simmer down and then drink it.

Barbeque here is different to an Ozzie Barbeque. You can enjoy it all year round but it is more popular in summer because you can sit outside on little tables set up on the wide footpaths. The food is cooked over glowing charcoals and it gets a slightly smoky flavour. As the food is cooked, the Chef will sprinkle on spices such as cumin and chilly.

All the foods are cooked and served on long stainless steel skewers in the manner that we would call ----- and are dropped onto a tray at your table. You can have beef, lamb, fish, pork, chicken wings and even sparrow if you are inclined. You can also have toasted, salty and spicy bread and roasted garlic cloves. Most of the bigger restaurants also serve keg beer in large glasses  and it is very tasty and refreshingly cool.

The cookers are long, square containers of steel on a stand and the coals are kept burning. The smoke wafts across the diners giving a lovely aroma and great atmosphere. It’s a very noisy and busy place with many diners sitting, chatting, drinking and eating for hours.

At the end of the night, your table is littered with empty skewers, bones and maybe the skins of steamed Soya beans which have a nutty flavour and go wonderfully with beer (Edomami in Japan).

Grandkids.

I have two Grandsons and another (as yet unknown) due in March.

I teach Kindergarten once a week which I may have mentioned before. The youngest of these kids in about two and a half and the oldest perhaps six. Yes, that's correct. I am teaching them English.

It occurred to me the other day that most of these kids call me Grandfather and therefore I guessthat, in some way, I was around a thousand Grandkids here in China. Here are some of them.

The two little girls in the middle in red pants are twins.

There are a lot of sets of twins here in Weifang.

Fashions.

A last topic I would like to comment on is ladies fashions. Back in the 1960s and 70s, the young women of China were expected to wear the PROGRESS SUIT, the one we in the west call the Mao suit with the four pockets on the jacket. They were expected to grow their hair and two have it in two pigtails. Hair cut or styled would be considered showy and counter revolutionary.

Things have changed. The young women of today have their hair styled and coloured in as many styles as western women do. And the fashions styles, although maybe a little different from the west are just as varied and attractive.

The autumn style this year was very nice knee length shorts worn over black stockings. And often short skirts or T-SKIRTS worn over tights. As the weather got colder, the stockings have been replaced with heavy weight tights and boots.

So the days of bland looking styles are long gone and the young women all look very attractive in very modern styles of clothing.

Our friend Miao Miao showing the latest fashion and sharing a moment with Ben .

Young Lady waiting for a bus and looking pretty. 

That’s all for the time being. I hope to have another blog written before the end of the year if I can find time from my busy schedule.

Cheers from Ian and Anji.