A Vegan Called Bacon

Thanks to the excellent Beijingveg.com website, during our five weeks in Beijing we were able to amass enough mock meats to satisfy any gluten glutton.

Pure Lotus is supposed by most listings magazines to be the best vegetarian restaurant in Beijing. We found the food quite good, but the way it was served was distracting. The menus are the size of small tombstones and as easy to hold. The dishes have names like “grand swallow nose treasure hot hot cold cold.¨ (I made that up but they honestly were that silly). And the serving dishes were enormous splats of porcelain with design features like big holes in the side through which scalding hot liquids could pour.

The vegetable dishes were disappointing, but the mock meats were pretty good. This was where we had the most delicious mock fish we’ve tasted: a soft, flakey ‘meat’, with a thick ’skin’ of pleasantly chewy seaweed, served steaming hot, in a delicious sweet, dark, bubbling sauce. The mock ribs were decent, but I wasn´t sure about the ´bones´. Having a bit of wood in my mouth just felt wierd. (Elsewhere we´ve had versions with edible ‘bones’ such as celery or lotus root. Much better.)

So, Pure Lotus, while it had some excellent dishes, was overrated, over priced, and silly. Having said that, I do agree with my friend Diana that the dry ice fruit at the end was good silly. And the teacups were cool.

My personal eating highlight in Beijing has been eating with the Vegan Social Club of Beijing at Still Thoughts. The food is reasonably priced, and there’s a good selection of dishes. I ‘m not sure it’s the best vegan food in Beijing; but eating in a group of 10 - 20 other veggies means you get to try pretty much everything on the menu. Highlights included a ‘crispy duck’ of fried tofu skin wrapped around dark, meaty mushrooms; large, soft, slightly spicy green peppers in a black bean sauce (something like a Chinese pimientos del padron); and long, thin aubergine, sliced crossways, with garlic and seitan stuffed between the slices. The green vegetables here were fresh and crunchy.

If that was my favourite eating experience, the restaurant that worked best without needing a big, fun crowd of fellow veggies was Bodhi Sake. It was in a beautiful setting: the courtyards and rooms of a Buddhist temple hung with lanterns and art. The menu had a good selection of vegetables and mock meats. The food was presented beautifully. We had the most memorable mock meat we’ve had yet: pork belly. It was served in an earthenware vessel on top of a bed of salty greens. The ‘belly’ was a type of gluten with a slightly smokey flavour; the ‘fat’ was konjac (or possibly rice-based) and melted in your mouth. We also had a delicious dish of long, dark, string shaped mushrooms, fried until nearly crispy.

As for my favourite individual dishes, the best greens we had were at Lotus in Moonlight. They also did a fantastic dish of tiny cubes of soft tofu, fried to a salty crisp on the outside, while keeping the inside silken.

My favourite mock duck was the duck at Beihe. It had a good savoury taste, a pleasant texture, and was served with celery instead of cucmber, which worked very well. I suspect the real reason I liked it so much was that it came in a comedy “duck” shape.

The best spicy dish was fish at the restaurant by the Big Bell temple. It blew my head off. I liked it so much I went back again on another visit to Beijing. It had a nice atmosphere (maybe a bit too dark though) and that dish was amazing. Also good was the little chunks of ‘lamb’. The place was hard to find, but fantastic value and really tasty.

An honourable mention goes to Cat restaurant, which to my knowledge is the only organic vegetarian restaurant in Beijing. They spoke great English, were incredibly friendly, and served the freshest vegetables I had.

A finally, a dishonourable mention to Gong De Lin. It is often mentioned in guidebooks as thir token vegetarian restaurant, but I have no iidea why. It was without doubt the worst meal we’ve had in a Chinese vegetarian restaurant - for example, a mock fish which was a lump of mashed potato with a gluey coating, in a pool of watered down tomato ketchup. Don’t go!

I´m missing Beijing. It´s an interesting city, and a great place to be vegan.

In June, we spent abut 10 days in Xinjiang, the wild west of China. The indigenous population here is Uighur. They speak Uighur, are Muslim, and have facial hair on their upper lips (the men, at least).  Nothing here is what an outsider would identify as Chinese (unless you count the roads, buildings, shops and food brought into the cities by the Chinese immigration policy).

Food-wise, we were quite worried. We had heard that it’s meat meat meat in Xinjiang. First impressions confirmed this. The most popular snack is chuan’r: spicy mutton kebabs cooked in the street.

But in the end, we did pretty well. To start with, we located the nan bread for which the region is fairly famous. Street bakers dot the Uighur neighbourhoods in two-person teams, one kneading and rolling out pizza-shaped dough, the other shaping it on a convex surface with a thick crust, impressing a pattern of rings with a spikey tool, dabbing the surface into a mixture of minced onion and cumin seeds, and then sticking it to the wall of a tandoor-style oven to bake.

They sell huge piles of these in the mornings. When it’s fresh and warm, the bread is absolutely delicious. it quickly goes hard (and keeps for days). When it’s crispy, it’s less nice on its own, but goes well with juicy fillings like flavoured tofu (from Chinese stores). Some stalls also sold vegan corn breads. It was so nice to have “proper” bread again (i.e. not the sweet, dry, cakelike stuff you get in Chinese bakeries).

Other dry street goods stood out as vegan. Xinjiang is famous for its fruit, and Uighur areas are covered in dried fruit stands, selling about 8 varieties of amazing raisins like nothing you get at home, plus strange but delicious dried tomatoes, figs, plums, apricots, almonds, walnuts…. more than I got to try. Similarly, roasted pulses are common. A bus we were on stopped on a highway for a toilet stop right next to a stand selling at least 15 varieties of roasted pulses: all of which I had never seen before.

In Kashgar, we had one of our favourite meals in a long, long time. Kahsgar is on the Karakoram Highway to Pakistan, and we found a Pakistani street restaurant which cooked us a simple, homestyle meal of channa dahl and a green leafy vegetable. It was amazing.

We also did really well in Urumqi, where there was a fantastic vegan Chinese restaurant called Yuanqi, which did fantastic jiaozi and chuan’r.

However, it seemed a shame not to be able to sample proper Uighur food. So we found a tourist office and got them to write down what we do and don’t eat in Uighur, and we started using it at restaurants and street stands.

In the end we were able to eat three types of authentically Uighur food: pancakes, konjac noodles, and laghman noodles.

Laghman noodles are hand-pulled, doughy noodles, much like you get in other parts of China, but with a rich, tomato and vegetable sauce. I assume the standard version has some meat slipped in, but we succeeded in getting a veggie option. It tasted really quite Italian to me. Pictured is a version we got with small, square noodles, which made it seem even more Italian. It came with delicious rose tea.

The Konjac noodles are also very common. You see vendors in street markets slicing thick noodles off a large, jelly-like block with a big knife. They are served cold, with a range of magic sauces (vinegar, soy, broth, etc) poured on top, and a topping of raw garlic and lots of chilli. A very strong flavour which I loved but which does your breath no favours. I was a little dubious about some of the magic sauces but I took a long time explaining my food choices and they assured me it was OK. (I had a photo that I lost… going to dig it out later, I hope. But they look something like this).

The highlight for me, though, was the pancakes. I first saw them in the Wusi Night Market, an amazing weekend spectacle of lights and fire and smoke and smells in Urumqi. There were two types: one fried in a lot of oil, and one cold. The fried one contained egg, but the other one (xian4 bing3 xiao3 cai4 &em; pancake with pickle stuffing) was OK. What really excited me, though, was the fillings. About 15 different bowls of salads and pickles. Strips of marinaded tofu. Pickled cabbage. Lightly fried, finely chopped mushroom. Beansprouts with garlic and nuts. You point at what you want and they roll them all into a delicious little package for you. I found variations elsewhere, often with meat, but usually with the option to have no meat. Another delicious one contained a green leafy vegetable, strips of tofu, and some spicey flavourings, squeezed between two thin pancakes, sealed at the edges with water, and then dry fried, rolled, and sliced. Like a Xinjiang pop tart, or something. Serve with icy, dirt-cheap beer.

As our time in China is coming to an end, I thought it was time to list some of tasty or bizarre varieties of mock meat we’ve encountered. I’ve been following the Mocking of Meat at Hezbollah Tofu and can’t wait till I get a chance to do some serious seitanising like this wicked-looking roulade.

´Ribs´, when done well, are delicious. They need to be marinated properly in a really savoury sauce. We preferred ones with edible ´bones´ to those with bones made of wood.  Why do I want a mouthful or thick toothpicks?

One of our favourite dishes was ´beef in XO sauce´. No picture, annoyingly. It was strips of seitan deep fried to a crispy/chewy texture, in a delicious sweet/savoury sauce. We had this, and the ribs pictured above, at Pure Lotus in Yangshuo (check out the photos of their food on their website).

An old favourite, and the only one to be found with any regularity in the UK, is mock duck. What´s entertaining here, though, is that sometimes it´s been molded so that it supposedly actually looks like a duck. This one´s from Beihe Restaurant in Beijing. I got the parson’s nose.  (Which I just found out is properly called a pygostyle. Mock Pygostyle!  Yeah!)

Beijingers are obsessed with ´meat-on-a-stick´, or chuan´r. Tiny chunks of lamb (or stranger meats like a pig´s pizzle) are pierced with a stick, painted with a cumin-chilli mix, and roasted over what appears to be actual lumps of coal. For ages I couldn´t work out what the signs were that looked like this: 串. Then I realised they were pictures of meat-on-a-stick. It took me a couple more weeks to find out that the actual Chinese character for chuan´r is 串.

Anyway, we´ve had it a couple of times, including tofu-in-a-stick or broccoli-on-a-stick variants, but the best meaty one was in a Vegan Yuanqi Restaurant in Urumqi:

Another favourite dish, which also scores high on the ´wierd´ front, was Bodhi-Sake´s pork belly (and I propose to try emulating some real pork belly dishes back at home):

Surprisingly common, yet not-particularly-pleasant, is mock whelk:

We´ve had two much better ´seafood´ dishes: mock fish, and mock cuttlefish. This mock fish was from Pure Lotus in Beijing, and was one of our favourites:

The mock cuttlefish pictured next was from Hong Kong.  Mock cuttlefish?  I absolutely lack the experience to just its mock accuracy (mockuracy?), but it was pleasantly chewy strips something rice-based, somehow made to go curly, and fried with a crisy, salty coating.

The single most bizarre fishy discovery was mock sea cucumber in Bodhi-Sake, Beijing.  A vegetable which is made in the form of a fish which is named after a vegetable.  And, what’s more, a fish which looks like a knobbly poo.  It didn´t taste of much (maybe like the real thing? I have no idea). But it looked pretty cool.

I think my least favourite mock meat is mock prawns. We´ve had them a couple of times. They are made of some kind of very firm material, molded into prawn shapes, and flavoured like prawns. Most mock meats taste interesting and natural, and stand in their own right as interesting ingredients. These prawns tasted completely artificial, a mockery of mock meat. They are the pink things in the hotpot platter below:

Update: No, James: sadly, on this trip, we are yet to find a decent mock ortolan.

Update 2: Since I wrote this we went back to Beijing one last time, where I witnessed perhaps the wierdest ersatz buchery yet: mock pidgeon

When we were in Yangshuo we used to hang out at this guy’s shop, eating tasty greasy fried noodles for nearly no money. I never really thought of fried noodles as a meal before we started scoffing the lot here.

The basic ingredients are garlic, ginger, chilli paste, fried in a bit of oil. Then add the secret ingredient: chopped Sichuan Pickled Greens (su cai) or a similar pickled packet vegetable. They sell them in Chinese supermarkets at home. Sichuan Greens are nice in any vegetable dish. Here’s two types of pickeld veggies - the first are some kind of green bean, the second are classic Sichuan greens.

Actually, he had some other secret ingredients, which I think were MSG and sugar, but my version tastes OK without.

Just soak flat rice noodles for the appropriate amount of time. Then heat up a little oil in a wok. Throw in chopped dried chillies or chilli/garlic paste, chopped ginger, and garlic. Sizzle. Add chopped pickled greens and chopped real greens (e.g. yellow flowering broccoli, finely chopped), and any other finely chopped veggies you fancy. Chuck in the noodles. Fry. Add a glug of light soy sauce and a small splash of sesame oil.

The end. It’s very nice. This one also included some fried, pressed tofu, and some coriander:

Another good outcome of my tofu binge: I discovered I like Chinese five spice seasoning.  Normally I think it makes everything taste of cinnamon.  I think this stems from a bad spice experience as a kid.  My mum had a mysterious and exotic-looking spice collection which came out occasionally, like when she was baking a Christmas cake.  I found out that a spoonful of cinnamon tastes like shit.  I think this has tainted all cinnamon experiences since then, in the same way that drinking a whole bottle of Ouzo as a teenager causes the smell of aniseed to make you feel sick for the rest of your life.

But this was dead easy and I really liked it as a snack.  The type of tofu was bai yu, firm-white tofu.  It looked like this:

All I did was cut it into triangles, and ‘marinade’ it in a bowl of powder consisting of 1 part Five spice, 1 part salt, 2 parts sugar, some garlic, and some white pepper.  I rubbed the powder all over the pieces and left it for an hour or so.  Then I deep(ish) fried it in an inch of very hot oil, turning it over until it looked lovely and brown and crispy.

It tasted super-savoury, which is my thing.  The outside was crisp, the inside satisfyingly firm.  And the five spice wasn’t much like cinnamon at all.  Probably because I’d nuked it by frying it to death.

One of the types of tofu I bought was tofu rolls. I wasn´t sure what to do with them. Turns out I did something completely inappropriate with them.

For lunch one day in a restaurant, I had a nice, spicy dish of thin strips of tofu (which I later learned was called doufu si, and is a very common salad-type dish), but all I could remember about it was that it was spicy. So, I thought I´d make a Gonbao Tofu dish by slicing the rolls lengthwise and stir frying them in a gonbao sauce.

I was wrong in a few ways, it seems. First, the rolls are meant to be eaten as rolls. Slicing them thinly in strips and then laboriously unpeeling the resulting thin spirals into strips is a complete waste of time, because it turns out you can buy ready-made strips. Second, they are really meant to be eaten cold, as a salad. If you stir-fry them, they go far too crispy, very quickly (I did manage to get them just a little crispy, and it was OK). Third, the traditional flavouring for doufu si isn´t gonbao, but a light dressing of ground sichuan pepper, a sprinking of chilli, some fresh coriander, and some fennel seeds.

Still, it tasted OK, and gave me a chance to learn how to make a better gonbao sauce. Gonbao is a vinegar-and-sugar based sauce, stirred in at the end with peanuts. The first time round I wasn´t bold enough with really laying on the flavouring. So the second time round, I used a firmer, chunkier tofu, and a really decent amount of gonbao sauce. It worked much better.

Gonbao sauce should consist of two big glugs of black Chinese vinegar; one-and-a-bit glugs of a mixture of light and dark soy sauce; a couple of teaspoons of sugar (a quantity enough to match the vinegar); a dribble of sesame oil; and a small amout of water (or stock). You then stir in maybe a teaspoon of corn or potato starch to thicken it up a bit, remembering to stir it again just before you pour it into the stir fry. The peanuts should be the roasted, unsalted, still-in-their-red-shells variety.

The stir-fry should start with chillis and Sichuan peppers, continue with plenty of garlic and ginger, and then include your ´meat´ substitute, and some very finely diced or small vegetables such as carrot and/or peas. Don´t forget some spring onions (scallions) towards the end, again finely chopped.

The tofu I ended up using wasn´t something I got the name of, but it was a marinated/five-spice flavoured type, which appeared to have been both deep fried and compressed. It had a great texture for this kind of recipe.

So, a good excursion into two more types of tofu, though I felt a bit silly unwinding perfectly good rolls into strings.