Food in Xi'an and Beijing

Hello everyone! I have been back from my trip for a while, though I haven't made any updates to my blog, because of a sudden visit by my in-laws and grandparents. These kinds of visits only happen at the spur of the moment, so there isn't usually much time to prepare. Anyhow, I'm sorry I didn't get finished with the post about Empress Wu. I really tried to get it finished on the morning we left, but I ended up just staring at my computer dumbstruck. I really don't know what the problem was. Unfortunately, I will have to put that post on hold, but I'll definitely get back to it! For now, I'm going to give you a food blog that gets a five star rating (the food, not the blog) from your's truly.         

 There is a Chinese phrase 民以食为天, which basically means "food is the god of the people." If you have spent any amount of time in China, you will know that, for it's people, this is so true! In other places, we make small talk about the weather, but in China people make small talk about what they have eaten. Food is one of the most important things for people near me, and people are so generous with it. I often joke with my friends that before I came to China, I used to say "no thank you," but now I say "please no," because of all the snacks my friends offer me.
             China is already famous for it's great food, and I have had some really excellent culinary experiences here, but I have to say my experience in Xi'an was like a food epiphany. I think it might have changed my dietary habits, but that has yet to be seen as my in-laws just went back home and they've successfully fattened me up with their cooking. Hui and I have already begun actively seeking out some of these foods in Hangzhou, but so far we are not satisfied. We may have to return to Xi'an soon!
             To tell you a bit of background about the food of Xi'an, the city is home to many of China's Hui minority people, and you will find them all over the more touristy eating spots. Hui people are Muslims, and I read on Wikipedia that there more than 50,000 Muslims in Xi'an. This means that if you were planning on finding a place to get something alcoholic, you might find it a little difficult. I know on our first night Hui and I wanted to go out drinking, and we were surprised. In China, the Muslims are famous for their delicious food. When we asked the taxi drivers for their recommendations, they just said go to where the Muslim food is, because everything there is equally delicious, and the place to go for tourists is Hui Street (回民街). You will find this maze of  endless food stalls from heaven placed conveniently tucked right next to the Xi'an drum tower. We were lucky enough to be staying at a hotel next door, so we ate their for most of our meals.
               On our first night in Xi'an we had the city's most famous dish, lamb paomo 羊肉泡馍. The word paomo roughly means drenched bread, but if you try to translate it, you will get paomo, because the word refers specifically to this dish. The mo in the name is a kind of bread which you are usually given to tear apart yourself and put into a noodle soup, hence the name I have given it "drenched bread." This dish was so delicious that we ate it more than once during our two day visit. Second, we had lamb kebabs, and I cannot stress enough, I have had many a lamb kebab in China, as they are very popular, but this is the best one I have ever had. Some of them are sold on big wooden sticks, and those are the ones you want. The wood gives them a special taste, and it is just sooooooo good (just don't read this if you haven't eaten. Sorry, I forgot to warn you)! Next to the kebabs there is a thing called roujiamo 肉夹馍, which is kind of like a pulled pork sandwich but with lamb, and it tastes like ten times better and it is just 98ibfeu8brfg87ore8a8ibufiubfd. I am getting emotional over this food, and I really don't even have a proper adjective for how it tastes. That wasn't a typo. I've actually got a friend who used to eat roujiamo every day when our company used to be next to a Muslim noodle place. They made it a little too oily for my taste, so I never tried it. I'll just say I'm very glad I tried it this time.

On that night we also had a very special kind of baozi. This famous Chinese bun is usually steamed, but these are baked, and so they are called baked baozi. I believe the inside of the ones we tried was glass noodle with beef or lamb. I'm sure they have different flavors, but, of course, no pork!
       







             After dinner it was time to explore the street! We bought some snacks to bring back to our friends, and we scouted out places to eat in the future. One thing we found in our search was pomegranate juice. There are lots of pomegranates in Xi'an, and they are very cheap. We overheard someone saying that they sell there for one yuan per pomegranate. That's why you see so many places selling fresh pomegranate juice. Some are sweet, and some are sour, but they are mostly all fresh and delicious. Hui and I drank pomegranate juice I would say at least six times in the two days we were in Xi'an. We are making plans to buy the machines we saw in Hui Street, get pomegranates wholesale from Xi'an online, and start making our own.
           

the biggest dates I have ever seen!

the character for biang

               We woke up super early the next morning (as we did on every single day of the trip), so we didn't have much time for breakfast. Hui was thrilled by the lack of people at the terracotta army, and so he was extra enthusiastic for the whole morning. The terracotta army is actually out of the city in the countryside, so I was expecting to see nothing else, but to my surprise their were literally hundreds of food vendors outside the historic landmark. Going back a few months, one of my friends had just taken some time off to go and visit Xi'an. She had brought back tales of a wonderful noodle dish. The dish is called biang biang noodles, and they are wide, thick noodles which are usually spicy, but the ones we ate had vegetables. This goes without saying that they were equally as delicious as the food of the previous night. These noodles are famous for their unusual name, written with a character so complicated that it isn't even programmed into the Chinese keyboards on phones and computers. Biang is a character that has 57 or 58 strokes depending on who you ask, and which has a questionable origin. Some say it's the sound that you make when you eat it, some say it's the sound it makes when it's being made, some even say the character was made up by a person trying to get out of paying their bill. Wherever it came from, it makes the dish all the more memorable for me, and I'd love to try it again.

        Xi'an is also known for it's dumplings, and the dumplings we had were excellent. They were really spicy, but not too spicy, with peppercorns, which is my favorite kind of spicy. During our exploration of the food of Xi'an we also found a kind of dessert snack called osmanthus cake 桂花糕. During the fall, there is a flower blooming all over China called the osmanthus, or gui flower. I have three osmanthus trees right outside the living room of my home. This flower makes the air smell sweet, which I have to guess is the inspiration behind this treat. In the fall, you should be able to find this snack not just in Xi'an, but all over China. That's just like the ice cream puppies that have been so popular this year, but Hui wouldn't let me eat one, because he said they weren't special.

osmanthus cakes

There is one final dish from Shanxi province I would like to talk about here. This dish is called 胡辣汤, or in English spicy soup. If I was on a mission to try biang biang noodles, it was Hui's mission to try this spicy soup. Since it is usually eaten for breakfast, and since Hui and I woke up early to take a taxi the first day, it was not so easy for us to find. Finally, on the second day we found it before going to Shanxi Museum, which I might regret showing up late to if this dish were a little less delicious. If you don't like spicy food, this is not the dish for you. It definitely cleared out my sinuses! I might describe it as a kind of spicy congee with no rice that isn't really congee at all. That's exactly how it tasted to me. I'd like to maybe try it again at a somewhat nicer restaurant to see how they compare.

The food of Beijing

Peking Duck 四季民福

Question: I can order a roast duck in any city in China. What is the difference between what I usually order and the one in Beijing? 

              Hui and I definitely had a very special and interesting experience on our adventure to try Peking duck. We decided to try it at a restaurant called 四季民福 which in English means something like "four seasons of blessings?", and when we arrived we were told it was a three hour wait. I have to say, it was my first time to wait three hours to eat anything. Of course, we didn't just sit in the restaurant for three hours, because when it comes to vacationing, the two of us stick to an insane, filled to the brim schedule. We decided to go over to Tiananmen to take some pictures, ended up getting sucked into the forbidden city with the other thousands of tourists, and in the end had to walk for more than thirty minutes to find a place where we could get a taxi back to the restaurant. In the end, we only had to sit and wait in the restaurant for about twenty minutes.

             The restaurant was lovely, and the service was wonderful. Before they cut the duck they bring it out to show you, and then they take it to a spot nearby to cut it. You can also watch the ducks roasting in the ovens while you are waiting to be seated. As for the taste, it really is different than other roast ducks you might have experienced. The skin is crispy and sweet, and it melts in your mouth. They give you a recommended sauce for each part of the duck. The skin goes in white sugar, and the meat goes in minced garlic. There's also a barbecue sauce and spring onions for putting the bigger pieces of meat in a pancake. After they finished cutting the bird, they brought it back to the kitchen to make a soup from the pieces that were left. 

Here is a video of the cutting of our duck if you are interested.

by the way that is the biggest spoon I have ever seen

          While we were waiting on our food, as I mentioned, we went to Tiananmen, but Hui also tried a popular Beijing dish called 卤煮, translated as soy sauce stew??? Yeah, I don't know either. Being that we needed to wait three hours for our food, we had to eat snacks to tide us over. I'm not a super big fan of foods that have been cooked in this way, or of intestines, which is exactly what this dish is and Hui said that it was average. Here's a nice photo anyway.

               Isn't that a great picture of Hui! He used to live in Beijing, and he ate these snail flavored noodles all the time. They were one of his favorites. They aren't Beijing cuisine, but we went way out of our way to eat them. I was sorely disappointed to find that this dish had no snails in it. I told him I thought it was a ripoff! Though, sadly, this isn't a rare occurrence. Short rib soups filled with meatless bones, 鱼香肉丝, which means meat that smells like fish (which it doesn't. It has literally nothing to do with fish), to name a few. I loved how excited he was, but I prefer the one that I had back home in Hangzhou. This one used that spicy sauce that is just spicy and has no flavor. I'll probably take him to have it again though.

         One Beijing dish that I used to have at least once a week is called 炸酱面 or zhajiang noodles. I had this dish of zhajiang noodles at a small breakfast place across the road from the Temple of Heaven. The important part of this dish is the sauce, which is made with small pieces of meat and soybean paste. The sauce is sweet and very salty. I love it!

          There is a restaurant that Hui used to eat at often with his roommates and that is also famous in Beijing. It's name is Hutusi Street food 护图寺小吃. You can try many different kinds of Beijing street food there, and how amazing it was! I have begun to notice that a lot of the foods you find in a foreign Chinese restaurants are originally from Beijing. A lot of the foods Hui chose were ones I had eaten before in America. Let me introduce a few new dishes. One is called halal tripe, but I don't like that name, so let's give it the direct translation of exploding belly 爆肚. It's the black and white dish on the right photo. This dish has a strange smell that I can only describe as smelling like it had just been straight up boiled and put on the plate, but it tastes great, so plug your nose and try it. Speaking of smelly dishes, see that bowl of something way back in the back of the left photo? It's the one behind the brown drink. That's mung bean milk or 豆汁douzhr in the Beijing dialect (oh how I love the Beijing dialect). This dish is famous for having a bad smell like eggs, and I thought there was no flavor to it. Hui thought it tasted good if you added the pickled vegetables to it. Another dish I want to point out that was just so strange to me is that yellow square object there in the left hand picture. That's called 豌豆黄, or pea cake. I was fooled by the fact that they look like green tea cakes, which I love, but my goodness they are nothing alike, and so I had that confusing milk for soda kind of feeling when I tasted it, and I think I literally gagged. It's really not so bad, but I just really don't like peas, which is what it tastes like. If you like peas, you will love this, but it's not for me. 

             Here's something fun. Have a look at the picture below these two. There's a steamed twisted roll called a 画卷 huajuan, which is usually steamed with green onions, but this one is made with sesame paste. I love twisted steam buns, and I love sesame paste even more, so I really loved that one. 

        After we climbed the Great Wall, Hui and I visited some famous shopping and eating areas that are popular with tourists and young people. One is called 后海 Houhai, meaning rear lake. In Houhai, you can visit the historic Prince Gong's Mansion 恭王府, which I was planning to make a blog about, but I didn't have time to visit. We had a much more important appointment which I will reveal at another time. Along the lake, we could see many restaurants and bars, though most were closed as it was early afternoon. At this location we tried two different snacks. One was very non-Chinese churro ice cream. Another was something I have wanted to try pretty much since I first came to China, donkey meat. It was good, but again, I hope next time I can find a nicer restaurant to try it at. I didn't take too many pictures here. As it was national holiday the number of people was ridiculous, and I wanted to be safe.
         Another place in Beijing that is famous for shopping and eating is called Nanluogu Alley 南锣鼓巷. The area is lively and filled with tourists. It is in one of Beijing's famous hutong residential streets, and it first got it's name during the Qing dynasty.As we wandered around, we found some gifts for family members, a popcorn store with lots of colorful popcorn, and a famous shop that sells milk products. Hui had researched this beforehand, because they sold one of his favorite snacks, double skin milk 双皮奶. Don't ask me why it's called double skin. I don't know, but I could probably find out. He bought two kinds of milk products, the other was 奶酪, which is a Beijing style yogurt (though the same to characters also mean cheese).

          There is a special type of hot pot in Beijing called 涮肉 or instant boiled meat. I like the Chinese name better, because I don't know why, but the words boiled meat just don't sound very appetizing. This dish, however, was delicious. We ate it just before heading off to the airport to go back to Hangzhou. We had just come back from the Palace Museum, and the ridiculous wind from Tiananmen Square gave both of us the chills. This was the perfect thing to eat. I felt so relaxed.We ordered lamb and beef (there was no pork, 2% of Beijing's population are also Hui people, and keep in mind how massive Beijing is compared to Xi'an). I highly recommend going to try this out. It is the perfect thing on a chilly afternoon. The only thing that I can say negative about it is that it's a little dangerous. The whole pot it hot, so you really have to be careful that you don't burn your hands.

        Now you have come to the end of our journey into Beijing and Xi'an foods. I hope you learned a lot and added some entries to your food bucket list, and I hope you weren't too hungry when you started reading. I know my stomach is rumbling right now. I do apologize again for the amount of time it's been since I've uploaded something. Since I've come back it's really just been one thing after the other. Now I'll start to slowly uploading everything from my trip with maybe some little bits in between to tide you all over. I've also got part two of my Gansu Hexi Corridor series sitting in my dashboard nearly finished, so that will be coming eventually as well (when I am divinely compelled to write). Until then, I will end. See you next time with probably a blog about the terracotta warriors. Sorry for a few formatting mistakes. My computer has made it extremely difficult to fix them.