Beijing Street Eats
Parts 1 & 2 were posted on Tina's blog
Beijing Street Eats Part 1: Lamb on a Stick
Upon arriving in Beijing and venturing outside our hotel, we encountered two major themes of Beijing street food: Muslim cuisine, and food on a stick. Put the two together, and you've got kabobs. Kabobs are not what I would have expected to find on the streets of Beijing, but hey, what do I know?
It's ridiculously easy to find the kabob establishments: street stalls and hole-in-the-wall dives serving kabobs are everywhere, and at night they prominently display rope lights shaped to form the Chinese character for kabob (chuan4: δΈ²) which does indeed resemble meat on a skewer. In any case, the smoke billowing from the charcoal fires are a giveaway. We saw quite a few building with grill-sized alcoves built right into the exterior wall facing the sidewalk, optimally positioned to draw and service hungry pedestrians.
Beijing-style kabobs reminded me of satay: meat is threaded onto small bamboo skewers, then grilled to order over a narrow metal box filled with hot coals. Meat choices seemed to be lamb or chicken, though as we traveled more, it became clear that a taste for lamb is a prerequisite for eating in northern China. The lamb was highly spiced with cumin, salt, and pepper, smoky, and crispy around the edges. And at three skewers for 1 RMB (about $0.04/skewer), you can't beat the price.
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Beijing Street Eats Part 2: Little Critters on a Stick
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The Wangfujing area of Beijing hosts one of Beijing's most celebrated (and touristy) night markets, where a long line of stalls offer many snacks. In keeping with the Beijing food-on-a-stick theme, many of the stalls offers items on skewers, including high shock-value items like scorpions (still wriggling to protest their mishandling), quiescent grasshoppers, silkworm pupae, seahorses, and starfish. I got the impression that this zoo was trotted out purely to impress foreign bumpkins like me, because we didn't encounter squirmy things outside of Wangfujing and most of the Chinese patrons on the street stuck to good old "stinky tofu" on a stick.
Having just finished a bowl of noodles, I wasn't really in the mood for scorpion or grasshopper. However, I did try a starfish. I used to think that nobody in the world eats starfish--not even the Chinese!--so I was a little intrigued. After haggling with the young stall attendant (prices in Wangfujing are posted, but everybody has their price), the fellow selected a small starfish and tossed it in a wok of boiling oil.
After a few minutes, I got my starfish-on-a-stick. I took a crunchy bite: nothing but fishy chitin and salt. I thought to myself: it's a good thing I didn't pay full price. And then I chucked the whole thing in the trash.
So perhaps the Chinese do eat starfish, but I still maintain that nobody eats starfish for the taste!
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Beijing Street Eats Part 3: Breakfast
Our hotel in Beijing was located in one the old hutongs, a traditional Beijing neighborhood composed of small alleys opening into walled courtyards. After considering the hotel's breakfast ("Western" style: noodles and hotdogs?!), we ventured out into the hutong to find eats. We came across a sidewalk kitchen with brisk business. A woman shuttled between two burners, several steamers, and a wok full of oil. Several flimsy, kindergarten-sized tables with knee-high stools completed the picture. Customers hunched at the tables, gobbling down bowls of rice porridge, or stopped by on their bicycles to purchase a bag of fried "turnovers."
We found an open table and got ourselves the eight-treasure rice porridge (ba1 bao3 zhou1). I'm not exactly sure what all eight "treasures" were, but it definitely contained dried Chinese dates, wolf berries (like red raisins), sesame seeds, and red bean paste (which lent the porridge a distinctive color). The porridge was sweet but not too sweet, and the sesame really stood out. Rice porridge is standard fare in US dim sum restaurants, but I'd never seen the eight-treasure variety. What else are we missing out on?
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Most of the customers came for the "turnovers" (we never figured out the Chinese word for these, but it's probably "he2 zi"), which the woman fried in a large wok. We tried two types. Tracy's favorite, shaped like a hand-sized empanada, had a slightly chewy crust (not flaky or crispy) filled with a mixture of fried chives and bean sprouts. I preferred the other turnover, filled with sweet bean paste.
Before we left Beijing, we breakfasted on quite a few turnovers.
Beijing Street Eats Part 4: Haw on a Stick
The final Beijing street snack I will describe here is for sweet tooths: candied haw on a stick (bing tang hu lu). A haw is a sweet-sour fruit which resembles a miniature apple. It may be a type of crabapple--you'd have to ask a botanist to know for sure--but it is definitely the source of "haw flakes," that mysterious, misunderstood candy.
Bing tang hu lu is nothing more than fresh haw on a skewer, encased in a thin, brittle shell of sugar. So simple, yet so good! Actually, my favorite variant alternated haw and fresh orange segments; you bite into an orange segment, and when the sugar shell cracks, you get a mouthful of juicy orange and crispy sugar. My descriptive skills fail to do it justice. Bing tang hu lu is fantastic.
Bing tang hu lu is sold from stalls on the street, but there are also quite a few mobile vendors, who prominently display the skewers on the back of their bicycles.
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