Too Much Food in Beijing
http://toomuchfoodinla.blogspot.com/2009/03/old-beijing-snacks-4-nai-lao.html chinese snack
http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&newwindow=1&ei=-I_tSceuDYTi7APvtMzdAw&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=1&ct=result&cd=1&q=article+for+chinese+snack&spell=1 Century-old famous Chinese snack producer wants go believe for English trademark
Tianjin Goubuli Catering (Group) Corp., producer of famous Chinese steamed stuffed bun "goubuli", has applied for a trademark registration to use "go believe" as its English trademark.
Zhou Xueqian, head of general affairs of the company, said the new English trademark was picked from many suggestions since it began to solicit English names for goubuli recently.
"It was chosen because it has a similar pronunciation with goubuli and it is simple and easy to remember," said Zhou. "Foreign customers would like to go to an honest restaurant as implied by 'go believe'."
The goubuli brand first appeared in 1858. A poor village boy nicknamed "gouzhai (puppy)" went to Tianjin and apprenticed at a food shop at the age of 14. Years later he started his own business of steamed stuffed buns.
Each bun has 15 wrinkles and looks like a chrysanthemum. Soft and delicious, the bun soon attracted numerous customers.
Gouzhai became so busy at the shop and had no time to speak with customers, who complained "Gouzhai sells buns but does not speak to people". The saying was then shorten to goubuli, which means "gouzhai does not speak to people."
The application for an English trademark registration reflects the growing awareness of Tianjin Goubuli Catering (Group) Corp. in intellectual property rights, said Mi A'qian, brand consultant of the company.
The application is waiting the approval of the national trademark bureau.
Goubuli buns and 395 other cuisines around the country were awarded the title "Famous Chinese Snack" by the China Cuisine Association in 1997.
Chinese Street Snacks
Day or night, the time is always right for a few bites of food
Long before western nutritionists began telling people to eat smaller meals and more snacks, the Chinese were already doing it, feasting on a daily variety of small, tasty dishes.
Taiwan especially has an advanced snacking culture. Day or night, the time is always right for a few bites of food. The average salaryman might start the day with a fried bread twist, follow that with a mid-morning bowl of soup noodles, and then have an onion pancake or a couple of cubes of stinky tofu in the afternoon. The day’s grazing is often topped off with a late-night serving of grilled sausage after a round of drinking.
The snacking lifestyle is made possible by that ever-present icon, the Taipei street vendor. Wherever people gather - at movie theaters, in night markets, at temples, or on street corners - the vendors turn up, offering a selection of fresh-cooked food.
Simplicity and freshness are the hallmarks of Taiwanese street food. The food is fresh because the turnover is high, and the snacks are simple because each stand concentrates on a single dish. Most of the stalls are basic set-ups with a few stools, a generator, a tank of cooking gas, and some gear: a grill, a pot, or a steamer. At any given time, a half dozen people can be seen at any stand, slurping noodles, eating dumplings, reading newspapers, and gossiping.
The variety of street food is remarkable. A Taipei night market is a moveable feast of Chinese treats, ranging from fried rice, congee, and grilled beef dishes to unusual offerings like oyster omelette, wheat gluten, onion pancake and stinky tofu. Other stands offer barbecue squid and pork, candied cherry tomatoes, roast chestnuts, corn on the cob, fresh juice, dumplings, and table upon table piled high with tongues and innards and other ethnic indefinables.
Some of the street food comes from the far ends of the food chain: entrails, wings, knuckles, feet, tongues, eggs, and congealed blood are common. Sometimes the offerings look less like dinner, and more like a biology field trip.
But the real street classics of Taipei are easy to identify, even for visitors. These are the four barbecues: sausage, corn, squid, and pork. These items are sold in mobile carts all over town, making them the local equivalent of the New York hot dog.
My favourite is the grilled squid, which is cooked over a hot charcoal fire, accompanied by plenty of smoke and flame. The squid, brushed in sesame oil, painted with hoisin and chili sauce, and dusted in cayenne pepper, is delicious. The pork, wrapped around scallion, has a similar sauce and is almost as good.
The barbecue corn is another classic. Ears of corn are steamed, brushed with three kinds of spicy sauce, and barbecued. It’s hard to taste the corn under all the coatings, but the sauces deliver plenty of flavour. The corn is the slowest of the fast foods: the whole process takes about 10 minutes.
The humble barbecue sausage is the most common grilled snack in Taipei. Many a late-night drinker has emerged from a ‘Combat Zone’ pub and walked straight to one of the ubiquitous sausage vendors. The smoke and smell of the salty-sweet sausages are as much a feature of the Zone as the neon pub lights and the come-hither looks of the bargirls in the doorways.
The sausages are cooked over the hot coals until they sputter with melted fat. At this point, if you want, you can roll dice or play sidewalk pachinko. A winner gets two sausages. As usual, I give it a try, and as usual, I lose. The sausage is good anyway. Unlike the finely ground western sausages, the Taipei version has big chunks of solid meat and fat, and is served with a pungent clove of garlic.
Taipei street food is a bargain. A grilled sausage costs less than one U.S dollar, and a barbecue squid is just $1.50, although the corn, a relative delicacy, is $2.00. Other items are similarly cheap: five pieces of pork and scallion are just $1.20, a large spring roll is a buck, and five fried dumplings are yours for just 75 cents. The most incredible deal is the stinky tofu. A large, deep-fried square of this pungent snack sells for just 30 cents.
If the king of Taipei snacks is the sausage, the most versatile is the bowl of noodles. The variety is astonishing. Plain noodles and egg noodles, soup noodles and fried noodles, wheat, rice and bean noodles; thin and thick and hand-cut noodles; hot and cold noodles, green and white and orange noodles . . . all these and more are easily available.
The most common street-noodle dish is Tang Mien, or soup noodle, a tasty, warming snack that normally includes chicken broth, plus a little soy sauce, scallion, and pepper. Because they’re easier to make, boiled noodles are more popular among the vendors than fried noodles.
Dumplings are similarly versatile. The covers can be made of leavened or unleavened dough, or thin filmy wrappers, while the usual ground pork filling is sometimes replaced by vegetable, beef, or sea slug, or extended by adding cabbage to the meat. They can be steamed, boiled, or fried.
Because they’re simple, recognizable, and tasty, the dumplings and noodles are good choices for a newcomer to Taipei street food. But for adventurous eaters, or for seasoned snackers from places like Singapore and Malaysia, Taipei offers some unique dishes that are worth a try.
One of these is Lu Wei. These stands, which are wildly popular, have trays filled with pork, tofu, mushroom, vegetables, and meat. You choose the food, and they cook it. Selection is everything at a Lu Wei stand. Studiously avoiding anything not easily identified, I pick some mushrooms, green beans, cabbage, tofu, pork and taro root. The cook plunges it into the black, boiling Lu Wei broth, made from Chinese herbal medicine. He pulls it out and adds salted vegetable, soy, vinegar, and chili. It’s tasty, with a hint of tea, with one exception: the taro root was not taro root. I’m still not sure what it was.
Another common dish that stands out as uniquely Taiwanese is Oah Jien, or oyster omelette. The cook puts half a dozen oysters onto a very hot grill, and adds rice batter, then an egg. This gets flipped over and smothered in green vegetables, then turned again and cooked. It’s served with a spicy, sweet sauce.
The main dessert is candied tomato. These are made by skewering cherry tomatoes and glazing them in boiling red syrup, then letting them cool. If you have a sweet tooth, the tomatoes are sure to satisfy.
And finally, there’s the stinky tofu. Wafting down every alley and byway in Taipei is the unmistakable and often appalling odor of this unusual food. The grilled sausages and squid, with their smoke and flame, are the most visible street food in Taipei, but they are not the most aromatic.
The effect of stinky tofu on Westerners is a universal wrinkling of the nose, such as a Chinese person might feel after stumbling into a cheese factory. Summoning up some courage, I ate a piece of stinky tofu, albeit well-smothered in soy, vinegar, garlic and chili sauce. It has a sharp flavour, not at all similar to the smell. And how does it taste? You won’t know until you give it a try.
It takes a certain spirit of adventure to experience Taipei street food. Sometimes you have to point and gesture, and occasionally you have to take a chance. Look for stands with long line-ups and heavy turnover — and enjoy.