reviews of trashy Chinese snack foods
May. 28th, 2019 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
corviJust down the hill from the university building I work in, there is a Chinese convenience store that mostly seems to exist to sell small packages of assorted fried snack things things with chili oil and vinegar to students. It is an excellent place.
I have Many Opinions About Snack Foods, which is not the reason anyone logged onto dreamwidth this morning, but here they are anyway!
Xiangxiangzui tofu bean curd snack
This snack seems to have been invented by someone who made a bet that if a certain very likely event occurred, he'd eat his shoe, but was let down by the fickle forces of probability and thereafter regretted forever losing his chance to eat a shoe. It is a cunning vegan imitation of shoe leather, cut into strips about a centimetre wide and three centimetres long. Takes a lot of chewing, tastes of very little.
3/5
Wei long spicy asparagus lettuce
Qingsun is a breed of lettuce grown for its thick edible stem. It has a fresh, watery crispness, not unlike lettuce leaves but more robust and insistent. Flavoured with salt, vinegar and lots of hot peppers. Pleasantly baffling snack, aggressively refreshing somehow even as the hot peppers make your eyes water. Like eating a popsicle that is also on fire.
They make a kelp one as well, which I love for the same weird refreshing / burning experience. Like wading in a calm refreshing ocean that is also on fire.
4/5
Spicy Green Peas
They are somewhat spicy, but most of the experience is the wonderful crispy fried texture. Crunch crunch crunch. Crunch. They come in orange and purple Halloween packaging with pictures of monsters in autumn, like a shipment accidentally received from a dark parallel universe in which children go door to door on Halloween begging for peas. A universe much like ours, only everyone is ducks.
4/5
Wei long spicy flavour tofu skin
This is sheets of protein scum skimmed off the top of tofu-making vats, dried, cut into squares, and deep-fried. A dry toasty flavour. Oily. Crispy in places, chewy in places, sort of bacony texture. Cheap and deeply satisfying. Individual packages inevitably contain an evil spirit whose job is to attempt to stain everything you own with red chilli oil. My go-to snack and red wood varnish.
4/5
Caocainiao spicy oyster mushroom
Once upon a time, in October, the Chinese convenience store got a shipment of spicy dried bolete mushroom snack, and lo, that was a golden age when the sun walked gentle across the earth and the moon cast no shadow. The blackberries did not yet have thorns, and goats never found the most expensive plant in your yard and ate it. Everyone's handwriting was readable. Most wondrous, you could just buy dried spicy bolete snack at the convenience store and eat it whenever you wanted.
These spicy plerotus mushroom snack are quite good, with a slippery-solid mushroom texture, good mushroom flavour, and pleasant heat level, but they are not spicy dried boletes, and so they taste of melancholy, tinged with the echo of that long-vanished Age.
4.5/5
Weilong spicy lotus root with spicy
You might think that the word spicy is starting to lose some meaning if things are getting translated "Spicy X with spicy". You would be wrong. These are entirely too spicy with spicy spicy. An excellent use for them: add a single packet to ramen to make very spicy ramen with delicious crispy lotus root bits (similar texture to water chestnuts). A bad use for them and you will regret it: eat them straight.
3/5
Black pepper roasted vegan strips
This is a vegetarian version of pork floss. Pork floss is made by cooking meat until all the gelatin that holds individual muscle fibers together is dissolved, and then shredding it into individual muscle fibers and drying them; it's basically meat-flavoured cotton candy.
This vegetarian version also gives you the experience of trying to figure out how to eat a pile of dandelion fluff, but unlike regular cotton candy, the individual threads don't stick together with sugar. And they're mounded onto weird flat plastic trays inside the bag, so when you try to get any out the whole tray's worth slides out and then you're finding bright orange fake soy muscle fibers in unlikely places for weeks. They really put a lot of work into figuring out the messiest possible way to package their soy fluff.
Good, but not entirely satisfying. Eating it on top of rice would probably work very well.
3/5
Tofu Barbecue Flavour
I, uh, really should have puzzled through the Chinese text of the label on this one before opening the package at work. Or, perhaps, put more thought into the fact that inside this sealed package was another sealed package, and inside that sealed package was another sealed package, a level of caution normally reserved for spaceship airlocks, demon summoning, and jars of hing.
Inside the hermetically sealed third gate was stinky tofu. Oh dear god no. Traditionally stinky tofu is made by soaking tofu in a brine with decomposed vegetables and milk for a while. It smells like a dumpster but tastes much better, more like sweaty feet.
I sometimes enjoy stinky tofu breaded and deep fried, served on a stick and doused with pickled cabbage and hot sauce at the Night Market, but it's definitely Outdoor Food. I was not mentally prepared to be opening a thrice-sealed package of plain Dumpster Scented Tofu at lunchtime at work. Nope nope nope nope nope. Never have I been so glad we don't have an open office plan. All praise be to doors that shut and windows that open.
1/5
Wei long hand torn vegetarian meat
Apparently Wei Long can actually manufacture snack foods that merely hot, and not actively firing lasers at your tongue. These are made of a sheet of soy protein folded and twisted and rolled together to get a spongy texture that seems meatlike to someone who's been a vegetarian for nearly thirty years, but a meat eater probably wouldn't even realize it was trying to imitate meat. Chewy, garlicky, and quite chickeny. Actually supposed to be fake beef, I guess?
3/5
EDIT:juli found a website selling the Spicy Black Boletus Snack, the last remnant of a more delicious era! They called her to make sure she hadn't put it in the virtual shopping cart, checked out, and given them her payment information by mistake. "You meant to order this? You've eaten this before? You liked it? Are you sure?" Apparently it was the first time someone without a Chinese name had ever ordered anything from them. :D Hooray! Most Delicious Snack is on the way!
I have Many Opinions About Snack Foods, which is not the reason anyone logged onto dreamwidth this morning, but here they are anyway!
Xiangxiangzui tofu bean curd snack
This snack seems to have been invented by someone who made a bet that if a certain very likely event occurred, he'd eat his shoe, but was let down by the fickle forces of probability and thereafter regretted forever losing his chance to eat a shoe. It is a cunning vegan imitation of shoe leather, cut into strips about a centimetre wide and three centimetres long. Takes a lot of chewing, tastes of very little.
3/5
Wei long spicy asparagus lettuce
Qingsun is a breed of lettuce grown for its thick edible stem. It has a fresh, watery crispness, not unlike lettuce leaves but more robust and insistent. Flavoured with salt, vinegar and lots of hot peppers. Pleasantly baffling snack, aggressively refreshing somehow even as the hot peppers make your eyes water. Like eating a popsicle that is also on fire.
They make a kelp one as well, which I love for the same weird refreshing / burning experience. Like wading in a calm refreshing ocean that is also on fire.
4/5
Spicy Green Peas
They are somewhat spicy, but most of the experience is the wonderful crispy fried texture. Crunch crunch crunch. Crunch. They come in orange and purple Halloween packaging with pictures of monsters in autumn, like a shipment accidentally received from a dark parallel universe in which children go door to door on Halloween begging for peas. A universe much like ours, only everyone is ducks.
4/5
Wei long spicy flavour tofu skin
This is sheets of protein scum skimmed off the top of tofu-making vats, dried, cut into squares, and deep-fried. A dry toasty flavour. Oily. Crispy in places, chewy in places, sort of bacony texture. Cheap and deeply satisfying. Individual packages inevitably contain an evil spirit whose job is to attempt to stain everything you own with red chilli oil. My go-to snack and red wood varnish.
4/5
Caocainiao spicy oyster mushroom
Once upon a time, in October, the Chinese convenience store got a shipment of spicy dried bolete mushroom snack, and lo, that was a golden age when the sun walked gentle across the earth and the moon cast no shadow. The blackberries did not yet have thorns, and goats never found the most expensive plant in your yard and ate it. Everyone's handwriting was readable. Most wondrous, you could just buy dried spicy bolete snack at the convenience store and eat it whenever you wanted.
These spicy plerotus mushroom snack are quite good, with a slippery-solid mushroom texture, good mushroom flavour, and pleasant heat level, but they are not spicy dried boletes, and so they taste of melancholy, tinged with the echo of that long-vanished Age.
4.5/5
Weilong spicy lotus root with spicy
You might think that the word spicy is starting to lose some meaning if things are getting translated "Spicy X with spicy". You would be wrong. These are entirely too spicy with spicy spicy. An excellent use for them: add a single packet to ramen to make very spicy ramen with delicious crispy lotus root bits (similar texture to water chestnuts). A bad use for them and you will regret it: eat them straight.
3/5
Black pepper roasted vegan strips
This is a vegetarian version of pork floss. Pork floss is made by cooking meat until all the gelatin that holds individual muscle fibers together is dissolved, and then shredding it into individual muscle fibers and drying them; it's basically meat-flavoured cotton candy.
This vegetarian version also gives you the experience of trying to figure out how to eat a pile of dandelion fluff, but unlike regular cotton candy, the individual threads don't stick together with sugar. And they're mounded onto weird flat plastic trays inside the bag, so when you try to get any out the whole tray's worth slides out and then you're finding bright orange fake soy muscle fibers in unlikely places for weeks. They really put a lot of work into figuring out the messiest possible way to package their soy fluff.
Good, but not entirely satisfying. Eating it on top of rice would probably work very well.
3/5
Tofu Barbecue Flavour
I, uh, really should have puzzled through the Chinese text of the label on this one before opening the package at work. Or, perhaps, put more thought into the fact that inside this sealed package was another sealed package, and inside that sealed package was another sealed package, a level of caution normally reserved for spaceship airlocks, demon summoning, and jars of hing.
Inside the hermetically sealed third gate was stinky tofu. Oh dear god no. Traditionally stinky tofu is made by soaking tofu in a brine with decomposed vegetables and milk for a while. It smells like a dumpster but tastes much better, more like sweaty feet.
I sometimes enjoy stinky tofu breaded and deep fried, served on a stick and doused with pickled cabbage and hot sauce at the Night Market, but it's definitely Outdoor Food. I was not mentally prepared to be opening a thrice-sealed package of plain Dumpster Scented Tofu at lunchtime at work. Nope nope nope nope nope. Never have I been so glad we don't have an open office plan. All praise be to doors that shut and windows that open.
1/5
Wei long hand torn vegetarian meat
Apparently Wei Long can actually manufacture snack foods that merely hot, and not actively firing lasers at your tongue. These are made of a sheet of soy protein folded and twisted and rolled together to get a spongy texture that seems meatlike to someone who's been a vegetarian for nearly thirty years, but a meat eater probably wouldn't even realize it was trying to imitate meat. Chewy, garlicky, and quite chickeny. Actually supposed to be fake beef, I guess?
3/5
EDIT:
juli found a website selling the Spicy Black Boletus Snack, the last remnant of a more delicious era! They called her to make sure she hadn't put it in the virtual shopping cart, checked out, and given them her payment information by mistake. "You meant to order this? You've eaten this before? You liked it? Are you sure?" Apparently it was the first time someone without a Chinese name had ever ordered anything from them. :D Hooray! Most Delicious Snack is on the way!
no subject
Date: 2019-05-29 12:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-29 12:56 am (UTC)Maybe I'll try it in with nikujaga or something if I can find it around here!