Congee, nai cha, and me
Posted on May 20th, 2010 – 12 CommentsAha! I finally figured out why the smell of frying food conjures up such strong feelings of summer. And it isn’t all funnel cakes either.
The whole synesthetic experience must’ve started when I was still doing my ex-pat thing overseas. It was on the tropical island of Taiwan where winter temperatures hardly dipped below 10 Celsius (50 Fahrenheit), and the summers we non-stop steam baths regularly hitting 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), that I first made the association. After a few years of that, the link between summer heat and fried food musta just burned into my brain, I guess.
The fried food part of the equation is my favourite Taiwanese breakfast, usually eaten in small roadside shops surrounded by greasy steam and greasier customers.
The three most common meals at such establishment are, as I recall, lobogau, diced fried daikon (giant white radish), congee, a cold soup consisting of rice, some kind of shredded meat, and a variety of veggie / nut toppings, and dan bing, which I’ll be discussing here and the only thing that I actually enjoyed in the mornings. (Fried radish — gross!)
The name dan bing comes from the Mandarin words “ji dan” (chicken eggs), and “bing” (platter or plate – or ice if mispronounced). It’s usually accompanied by “nai cha”, literally “milk tea”, but with whitener being used instead of real milk — for a variety of reasons. Incidentally, this is also the secret ingredient in Tea Shop 168’s milk teas, unsurprisingly since this is also a Taiwanese company. (With tapioca in the milk tea — buble milk tea — it’s called “jinju nai cha”.)
Dan bing is super easy to make:
... with pictures
... with sounds
... with videos
... with opinions
... that's shorter
... that's longer
