Experts note Taiwan's lack of porridge

In international news, the TBS and CTS news networks are reporting on the grits-eating competition held in Bossier City, Louisiana last month. Reports translated "grits" as 麥片粥 and 麥片糊, which both mean "oatmeal", despite the fact that grits is made from corn. This translation is not surprising, given the non-availability of grits and other hot porridges in Taiwan.

Grits eating competition

Even at Jason's Market Place, where most foreign foods can be found, I have not found grits, corn meal, Cream of Wheat or Cream of Rice. Taiwanese experts respond by noting that congee, a rice porridge, is the preferred porridge of Chinese peoples. However, foreign experts question whether Taiwanese-style congee is really a porridge or just watery rice (稀飯) and point to reports showing a 60% probability that "congee" is a fake word. In an effort to avoid looking like a food chauvinist, foreign experts also concede that millet porridge, which is a bona fide porridge found in Taiwan, is pretty good.

Millet porridge from flicker user strwang.

Baked raw oysters

Raw oysters

The most common oyster in Taiwan is the little 蚵仔. (蚵 is written as ô in Taiwanese, and first-tone ke in Mandarin, according to the pinyin input method. The Unihan database, however, lists it as ke2 and he4.) I have not seen any Taiwanese dishes where they are eaten raw. The only oysters that are served raw are the large, foreign-imported oysters. These have a completely different name. They are called shenghao (生蠔). The first character means "raw", as in "raw ginger" (生薑) or "raw fish slices" (生魚片). The second character means oyster, as in "oyster sauce" (蠔油). So, the word "shenghao" seem like a adjective followed by a noun. I checked about ten dictionaries (all at once), and they listed the characters individually, but none of them had shenghao listed as a word, so this would seem to support the categorization of shenghao as adjective-noun. However, I recently noticed that shenghao is used as a single noun.

The first example of this is from a television program where they were talking about harvesting oysters . Shenghao was used to describe them. It's obvious that the oysters are alive when they are caught, so it seems superfluous to use an adjective to describe them as "raw".

The second, better example is from a restaurant menu. Baked oysters were listed as kao shenghao (烤生蠔), which seems to literally mean "baked raw oysters". An internet search confirms this usage is standard. On Google, there are 54,300 results for the search string "烤生蠔" while there are only 7,660 search results for "烤蠔" (with the "raw" character omitted).

So, we have verified that shenghao is used to refer to foreign oysters, even when they are not raw. But what if we want to say "raw oyster"? If a shenghao is not necessarily raw, then don't we need to add a word to make it explicit that we are talking about raw oysters? If we add the word "raw" (shengshenghao), I find only 223 hits; compare that to 805,00 results for shenghao. So, it only accounts for .03% of all usage of the word "oyster", while in English search results, "raw oysters" accounts for (239,00/6,670,000) 3.6% of all usage of "oysters". This seems to indicate the shengshenghao is not a standard usage.

The unsatisfying conclusion: shenghao means "raw oyster" and it also means "oyster". You have to determine its meaning based on context.

And it gets more complex. Foreign oysters are also referred to as muli (牡蠣). When should you use the word "muli"? Perhaps, "muli" is a general term for oysters, which includes shenghao and others? To get started, let's do a search for the different ways of expressing "catch oysters" in Chinese:
"捕牡蠣" 194 results
"捕蠔" 438 results
"捕生蠔" 87 results
"捕蚵" 318 results

At this point, it is getting tedious distinguishing these words, so I leave it as an exercise for the reader. :)

Taiwanese oyster

Cartilage kebab at KFC

KFC in Taiwan has just introduced a new product. Judging from picture, it appears to be a chicken kebab with some fruit, perhaps starfruit, between the pieces of chicken. But closer examination shows that it is actually cartilage. The idea is that people will be attracted by this cartilage, causing them to want to purchase it. The consumer will then consume the cartilage, chewing it and savoring the subtle taste of cartilage.


Apparently, this is a food found in Japanese izakaya, which are places for drinking alcohol and eating.

In the above picture, two pieces of cartilage can be seen flying through the air in the vicinity of the kebab. It is most likely that they are flying because they are extremely tasty, not because they were discarded.

Singaporean restaurant

This restaurant, 168 Singaporean Cuisine, is one of only two Singaporean restaurants in Hsinchu that I know of. (The other one is The Curry Garden, which used to be located near Chenghuang Temple, but is now across from National Tsing Hua University in the Three Great Circles area.) For the past few years, it has been a tiny food stall in the Huayuan (花園) night market with barely enough room inside for the owners, an elderly and very hardworking couple. In the last couple of months, they have expanded their operation to a bigger area, still in the same night market, and there are now about five other people working.


The main thing of interest on their menu is the curry. They have curry with chicken, pork, goat, or beef over rice. There is also curry chicken over noodles. The dishes are only about $60 or $70 a plate, so the chicken is mostly bones and the other meat is not of the greatest quality. Despite the small amount of meat, the chicken dishes are good, but the best option is to order a curry and rice plate with an omelette on top. There is a seafood omelette on the menu that is made from squid and shrimp, but I like to get it with just shrimp. The omelette is huge.

The curry omelette is not actually on the menu. The menu lists a Korean omelette over rice, but does not list any omelette dishes with curry. There are other dishes not on the menu. I got one dish with curry and peanuts and dried fish, but I can't remember the name of the dish.

They have always done a very brisk business. I'm not sure if it is because of the location or the cuisine, but there are usually a number of Indonesians who are eating here. There are usually people lined up in front of the stall waiting for their orders, so be prepared for a little wait.


You can see some red sauce on the shrimp in the above picture. That is the hot sauce, which is more flavorful but less spicy than the normal hot sauce.

Italian-Indian Restaurant

This restaurant (which seems to be called Bistro, judging from the sign) is one of the remarkably few Italian-Indian Taiwanese restaurants. You might be disappointed to find that there are no dishes on the menu that mix Italian and Indian, but both the Italian dishes and the Indian dishes are prepared well enough that you can forgive that omission.

The restaurant is in Hsinchu across from National Tsing-Hua University in the Three Great Circles area. A good number of the customers are foreigners. I suspect that the Indian food is not the most authentic, but it gets the approval of some Indian customers (as well as myself). There are often some young South American people eating here. I assume they work at the university. So this little restaurant clearly has international appeal. There is an English menu, and the proprietor, shown in the picture as a speck of orange shirt, speaks English.


Above is the chicken curry, which goes for NT$70.

This is the lamb curry, which is the only item on the menu for NT$80. I recently read some tips for photographing food. One of the tips was that it is not a good idea to photograph foods with brown sauce. While the above photograph may resemble vomit or worse, I assure you that it looks better in person. I've eaten there at least ten times and the only complaint I have is that the last time I went, the curry was a little spicy. The dishes are cooked to order, so they are always hot. The other curry choices are shrimp and fish.

This is the pesto spaghetti with ground chicken, which is NT$60. There are other spaghetti dishes on the Italian side of the menu, but the one shown above is by far the best, in my opinion. The picture doesn't do it justice. It would be great if there were some other items on the menu besides curry and spaghetti, but at under NT$100, these dishes are a steal. In fact, I constantly worry that this restaurant will go out of business, so give it a try.

Eastern-Style Western Food

An article in the New York Times from a couple of weeks ago describes Japanese-style Western food in Japan, called yoshoku. The article is relevant to Taiwan because much of Taiwan's idea of Western food comes via Japan. Not all yoshoku dishes are common in Taiwan, but the dish that is arguably Taiwan's most popular "western" food, jukao (焗烤) is probably a Japanese import. (Jukao is rice or noodle casserole with cheese on top.)

Link:
Spaghetti Stir-Fry and Hambagoo: Japan Looks West

Taiwanese Restaurant - Song Shi Shougong Bu

At most of my favorite little restaurants in Taiwan, there are one or two dishes that the restaurant does quite well, while the rest of the menu items are average. But at this little restaurant, Song Shi Shougong Bu, not only do they have a good amount of variety on the menu, most of the things on the menu are really good. Below is the storefront, found on 31 Changchun (長春) Road in Hsinchu.


Below are the steamed rouyuan. If you want to eat rouyuan in Hsinchu, most natives would recommend that you go to Chenghuang temple, where they serve the deep-fried Hsinchu-style rouyuan with large pieces of pork and bamboo shoots inside. However, I much prefer the steamed rouyuan, with the soft skin and the filling made with more finely ground pork, as served at this restaurant. In addition to the sauce, which is just as important as the filling, there are two other sauces on top of the sauce, as well as cilantro. Two of the small dumplings go for NT$30.


Next is migao, a glutinous rice dish served with a generous amount of sweet-hot sauce. Also NT$30.


Here is a plate of black stinky tofu with pickled cabbage on the side. The heap of white on top of each piece of tofu is pureed garlic. There is also some sliced red pepper to go with the tofu. The spiciness from the red peppers and the freshly deep-fried tofu go together well with the cold and slightly sweet pickled cabbage. The skin of the black stinky tofu might be a little thicker than normal stinky tofu, but I could not detect any difference in taste. Cost is NT$40.

Next is a bowl of noodles with cilantro and pureed garlic on top. Also NT$40.


All of these items are very common, but I can't think of any other restaurant that has all of these items on the menu. There are other restaurants where you can find slightly better versions of some these dishes, but the combination of variety and tastiness of this restaurant makes it a great place to eat.

Fish maw

The most expensive meal I've had in the last few years was at Japanese restaurant in Taipei. One of the dishes that I did not recognize was a long white thing that tasted like neither meat nor vegetable. It looked like a mushroom more than anything else. It's taste was not strong--the texture is clearly what is unique about it. It was soft like soggy tofu. Clearly a delicacy. It wasn't bad, but I didn't hear anyone exclaiming how good it was.

My coworkers told me that it is biao ( 鰾, which is fourth tone according to the dictionary, but was pronounced as first tone by my coworker), a bladder that a fish fills with air to rise or sink in water.

I didn't think I was likely to see this dish again, but then I saw it again a couple of weeks ago, this time at a Chinese banquet. So, I decided to learn a little more about it. In English, it's called a fish maw or a swim bladder. A fish fills it with oxygen from the gills to increase its buoyancy, and lets out air to decrease buoyancy. Not all fish have one.

Next time someone asks me how to describe this fish organ in English, I will be able to give them the following unsatisfying answer: it's called a fish maw, a swim bladder, or a gas bladder; but there's a good chance that an English speaker won't know what you're talking about even if you manage to remember all of those terms.

Links:

Wikipedia entry: gas bladder

How stuff works explanation