A Vegan Called Bacon

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.

In my quest for chewy, I have found a couple of interesting textures.  Pork belly, and calamari.  We reckon they’re made from rice.  So I bought some “rice cakes” and experimented.  Here’s a quick writeup of the experiment, for the record.

We start with the raw ingredients: hard, waxy squares.  Pretty unappetising.

We continue by cooking them in the three ways outlined on the back of the packet.  First, just boil them.  Second, stir fry them, then steam them in a little water in the wok.  Third, boil them in a little water, let it boil away, then fry them.  Here’s what all three look like in the end:

The ones at the back were boiled-then-fried.  They were OK I suppose.  Basically tasted like fat, which is all right in my book.  More or less large, flat, crunchy croutons.  They had a nice colour, though.

The ones in the middle were fried-then-steamed.  They came out kind of grey.  They were chewy in a cardboardy kind of way.  No thanks.

The white ones were the ones that were simply boiled.  They tasted of nothing much.  A little like rice, not surprisingly.  The texture, however, was kind of interesting, as it was pleasantly chewy.

To conclude the experiment: largely, a pointless ingredient.  But I think I might try using the boiled version in a dish that calls for chewy seafood. 

I decided the other day I’d be avoiding fetid tofu for the time being. In the mean time I’ve been trying to find ways to use furu.

I’ve asked around. Someone has suggested sticking it in cheesecake. It’s a bit like stilton, so I’m thinking about putting it in Broccoli soup. In Chinese cooking, it’s most commonly used as a flavouring in green vegetable dishes… just stir in a cube (or half a cube) into some stir fried beans, along with the usual flavourings.

I’ve also tried putting a cube on the side of my plate and nibbling bits with the rest of the food, like a pickle. It was pretty good.

I’m told people spread it thinly on bread. I tried it with Marmite but I think this was a bad choice with a hangover. The crazy salty sharp cheesiness made my headache twice as bad.  I’ll try that again some time, in the afternoon, not for breakfast.

Someone I met from Hong Kong told me they used to eat deep fried furu from street vendors for breakfast on the way to school. I searched the web for clues about this dish but couldn’t find any. So, I tried deep frying chunks which were dipped in vegan tempura batter. Mmmm, greasy.

It was frankly a bit too intensely flavoured for me. But I might try it again some time. I can tell this is one of those things which goes from not-particularly-pleasant to addictive following repeated exposure, like olives or beer.

The batter worked great though. I’ve used the same batter before to coat banana slices, and then served them with whipped coconut cream and melted chocoate as a desert.

It’s basically twice as much corn flour as plain white flour, a decent pinch of baking soda, and some ice cold beer. The trick is not to add too much beer. It’s easily done and the batter doesn’t stick to the food you’re frying.

Incidentally, this was with the spicy furu in hemp oil.  The really red stuff (”da kuai doufu“) which tasted lie miso is a nice all-purpose flavouring.  I think it will work really well in a soup.

My tofu eating marathon continues with an intrepid expedition into the world of Fermented Tofu. This is tofu which has been injected with bacteria and left to fester, just like cheese. Apparently it is very good for you… anti-mutagenic, in fact, which maybe means it acts as a shield against death rays.

Generally, people call it “stinky tofu”. I’ve seen it called “Chinese Cheese”, and there is definitely something cheesey about it. Most of the stuff is called furu in Mandarin, which appears literally to mean something like “spoiled milk”, and is generally translated as “fermented tofu”.

Here’s the ones I bought, with samples laid in front:

The jars, from left to right, are “Spicy Furu in Hemp Oil”, “Fetid Tofu”, “Big Chunks of Furu“, and “White Furu in Hemp Oil”. Read the chunks left-to-right, top-to-bottom.

I tried them with some trepidation. The results:

Conclusion: I’ll use furu again. The ones in hemp oil were very cheesey.

I think I will never touch the fetid stuff ever again, anti-mutagenic or not. Here’s a close up.

Mapo Doufu (Pockmarked Old Woman’s Tofu) is one of the most popular tofu dishes in China. Its traditional flavours are tofu, fried ground pork, mala, and doubanjiang (Sichaun Bean Paste).

You basically fry the ground pork so it’s a bit crispy, and set it aside; fry the bean paste in oil for 30 seconds, along with some extra chillies and sichuan pepper; then add some stock and boil chunks of soft tofu in that, with some scallions or leeks. Add the pork back in, and finish by thickening it with some potato or corn starch.

I encountered several challenges in preparing this. I didn’t have any vegetable stock, which doesn’t appear to exist in China (only pork, chicken and beef stocks), so I used Marmite (which travels with me everywhere, of course). I couldn’t find doubanjiang, so I used a red bean chilli garlic paste, which you can find everywhere.

Talking with a meaty person, they said the pork is a pretty important part of the dish. They told me it adds a slightly crunchy, chewy texture, and a slightly smoky flavour. I got  excited in a tofu geek kind of way when I realised I could try substituting ground smoked tofu (doufu xun yu, “firm smoked tofu”) for ground pork. It meant I could use two types of tofu in one dish and make a good start to my tofu marathon.

The soft tofu was yellowish and smelled of egg. I took a nibble and it tasted of egg too. I looked up the Chinese characters on the label. Egg tofu. Shit. I ran to the market next door and found an old guy selling tons of fresh tofu products. It seems that tofu made that very morning is a delicious thing. It wobbled enticingly on the plate and smelled very delicate and moreish. I need to find a fresh tofu seller when I get home. And it cost 10p.

All mapo doufu recipes I’ve seen call for you to boil the tofu chunks in salted water before continuing. I tried this and kept some other chunks aside for comparison. I have no idea what boiling is meant to do, but the flavour and texture of the boiled and unboiled versions was the same. If anything, the unboiled one tasted better.

Next up, making the “pork”. I chopped the smoked tofu into tiny cubes and then mashed them with the back of a fork. I gues you could use a blender or a big pestle and mortar to do the same thing. It looked like this (that’s Beijing in the background):

Then I fried it in very hot peanut oil for a few minutes until browned and a bit crispy, while still being chewy.

Finally, I just followed the recipe… frying the spicy stuff and the paste, boiling the tofu with “stock” and some onion-type things, stirring in the “pork” and some thickener at the end. You have to stir it very carefully or the tofu gets mushed up.

End result: a pretty tasty dish. I needed to adjust the flavours at the end by adding a bit of Chinese “sherry”, because it wasn’t rich enough. I think if I’d used a decent stock it would have been fine without. I also need to find a better chilli paste, preferably proper doubanjiang. The one I used was quite salty so I held back on it, meaning the dish wasn’t as spicy as I’d have liked. I also used ground Sichuan Pepper which doesn’t have so much flavour, so my mouth hardly got numb at all. But I think for most people who just like “normal” spicy, it would have been just right.

Plus, I think the “pork” worked a treat. My first point on the texture scoreboard.

I keep being told by proud Chinese people that China has 2000 types of tofu. I don’t know about that, in fact I don’t believe a word of it. But, embolded by my decision to investigate vegan textures, and by the fact I’m hanging around in Beijing with nothing much to do, I thought I’d see how many types I could buy in the fairly shit local supermarket.

The answer: about 25, though I “only” bought 16:

Problem is, some of it’s going to start going off pretty quickly, so I’ve got to start to cook it right away. The race is on.

Highlights of the above haul include the bizarrely rubbery “worn out building tofu” (in the green bag at the front) and the “complex mixture tofu” (one of the unappetising brown ones nearer the back); but most exciting of all, the jars, which include the excitingly named “foul bean curd”, “pockmarked spicy rotten milk in oil”, and “big chunks of rotten milk”. Bring it on!