TANTALISING TAIWAN
Eat your way around this East Asia State.
In a city that can easily overwhelm with its exotic edibles, a food tour with a local expert is an excellent way for your tastebuds to get their bearings, with both messy and sublime results.
In a small courtyard in south-western Taiwan, a woman by the name of Beautiful Cloud is gently seasoning oysters with salt, white pepper and the lightest dusting of chilli powder. Later, she’ll plunge them into a bubbling cauldron of hot oil, before serving the popular street food (known, variously, as salt and pepper oysters, popcorn oysters or, simply, fried oysters) in their shells.
Beautiful Cloud (“I picked the name because it’s so pretty,”) has been serving oysters this way for more years than she cares to remember. Her mother did it before her and her grandmother before her, she explains, the air around her a woven basket of smoke, spices and the briny scent of bivalves plucked from the nearby sea.
Arriving in Taiwan with few expectations we are met by some of the friendliest people on earth, most with an obsession with good food.
“Taiwan is all about food and temples,” says our guide Sophia during a Taipei Eats food walking tour of the capital. “We eat, we go to the temple to make offerings and then we eat again. Our culinary philosophy is to eat well and eat often.”
They’ve certainly got lots to choose from. Taiwan’s gastronomic culture has been shaped by numerous interlopers, from the Fujian and Hakka people of the Chinese mainland to 16th Century Portuguese sailors who took such a shine to the place they named it Formosa (beautiful island). The Dutch, Spanish and Japanese all subsequently ruled this island whose defiant independence has long been a thorn in China’s ideological side.
“Taiwanese food takes a little from China and a little from Japan,” explains Sophia. “They left us a taste for dumplings as well as raw seafood.”
One of the best ways to get a culinary handle on a new city is to put yourself in the hands of an expert. And Sophia, a part-time actress, full-time foodie and fluent English speaker, is just that.
On an unseasonably warm spring day we meet in Taipei’s shiny Xinyi District, just minutes from the capital’s tallest tower, Taipei 101. It’s mid-morning but Youngchun Market washed the sleep out if its eyes hours ago. We navigate around haphazard piles of seafood, butchered shark meat and bright pink dragon fruit. While we wander, Sophia offers us slices of milky guava, which we dip into bags of dried plum powder. There are black peanuts and love apples and items I can’t quite find names for.
The Taiwanese are pancake mad; nowhere else in Asia, apart from India, is there such a diversity of these delicious flatbreads. On offer are crêpe-like popiah, northern-style shao bing, omelette/pancake hybrids and flaky parathastyle bread deep-fried in oil. We opt for fat wedges of green onion bread, cooked on a large circular grill, which are the perfect balance of doughy and flaky. Flatbread is common around the clock in Taiwan, but is most popular at breakfast when the locals like to dunk it in warm, silken soy milk, sort of a Taiwainese take on churros.
We turn right outside the market and head for a postage stamp-sized cafe to try Gua Bao, Taiwanese burgers. These plump steamed buns bulge with slices of braised pork belly, pickled Chinese cabbage and powdered peanuts. We
The rest of the afternoon passes in a pleasant blur of sticky rice, noodles, Shanghai dumplings and the ubiquitous bubble tea, a Taiwanese invention and probably its best known culinary export.
take a big mouthful and enjoy the intermingling of sweet, salty and sour flavours.
At the neighbouring betel nut shop, a woman is painstakingly wrapping the fruit of the palm tree with betel nut leaves, chewed by users to give them a buzz on a par with drinking six cups of coffee. After nicotine, alcohol and coffee, betel nut is the world’s fourth-most populous psychoactive substance. I gingerly chew on a corner but spit it out almost immediately – it tastes a bit like the green stalk of a leek. But the bright red stains on the pavement, produced by users spitting out the juice, indicate that many locals don’t share my distaste.
By now, five minutes have passed without eating, so we detour to a bakery to sample the famed pineapple cake. It might not sound very Asian, but Sophia assures us it’s an iconic Taiwanese pastry. They’re like mini pies, filled with candied pineapple and chewable bits of bitter melon encased in a crumbly, buttery pastry; they’re surprisingly light but also dangerously addictive.
The rest of the afternoon passes in a pleasant blur of sticky rice, noodles, Shanghai dumplings and the ubiquitous bubble tea, a Taiwanese invention and probably its best known culinary export. This sweet concoction of cold tea, milk and balls of tapioca or boba, is sold on almost every corner. “Taiwanese love food with texture, whether that’s noodles, fish balls or tapioca,” says Sophia, by way of explanation.
What they also love is tea. Taiwan has been producing tea, especially the honey-coloured oolong tea suited to its subtropical climate and mountainous terrain, for more than 200 years so it should be good. And it is. Jason Wang from Wang Tea, which was established in 1890 and is possibly the oldest of Taipei’s 1,000-plus tea shops, shows us how the delicate roasting and fermenting process affects the beverage’s colour and taste.
Then he expertly douses a mound of charcoal-roasted oolong tea leaves with boiling water. Slurping from the tiny cups is allowed, encouraged even, and we’re instructed to hold the warm liquid in our mouths before slowly swallowing it, allowing it to caress our throats. “We believe tea improves the blood circulation, settles the stomach and helps you sleep,” says Jason, as I buy packets to take home.
Another eating-related thing Taiwan does well is night markets. These are the backbone of Taiwanese food culture and there’s one in almost every town.
On our last night, we head to Shilin Night Market, the largest and most famous in all of Taipei, for one last shot of gastronomic over-indulgence.
The market’s narrow alleyways are packed with stalls and everywhere we look food is being fried, barbecued, skewered or scooped into plastic bags. There are tables groaning with bowls of beef noodles, braised milkfish, roasted potato spirals and gelatinous mochi rice balls, topped with peanut and sesame shavings.
But the staple of every night market is stinky tofu. This infamous Taiwanese xaio chi (snack) begins life as regular tofu which is fermented in brine until it reaches a putrid ripeness, kind of like a cross between four-day-old socks and an open sewer! Cubes are then flash fried and draped with sweet and spicy sauce.
We hold our noses and nibble at this love-itor-hate-it delicacy. Surprisingly, it doesn’t taste too bad, even if the smell lingers on our clothes and in our memories longer than we’d liked.
Taiwan might be one of the most under-rated destinations on the planet, but if you’re looking for a holiday where lunch rolls seamlessly into dinner and where the food scene is, as they say, taking off, then tasty Taiwan is it. Sharon Stephenson was a guest of the Taiwan Tourism Board (taiwan/net.tw) and Taipei Eats (taipeieats.com)