Living in Tianjin and not knowing about this food is like living in America and not knowing about hamburgers, except that maybe there aren’t giant Chinese corporations more powerful than some national governments selling “oil sticks” and “tofu brains” next to KFC on every potentially profitable street corner on the globe. Still, you can find Tianjin’s local … delicacies … within walking distance of most neighbourhoods here. These local foods are a defining characteristic of the city, and you can feel the warmth and even a little pride from locals when you ask about them.

Breakfast is an especially big deal in Tianjin. Many people don’t like to cook breakfast themselves and the sidewalks are filled from early to late morning with folding tables, plastic stools, and crowds of people enjoying their very public meals.

Last week my sister came from Canada to see us, so I took her out before 6am one morning to sample both the local daily exercise scene and some breakfast. We took pictures, so here’s breakfast, Tianjiner-style, in no particular order. See the warning label at the bottom. Most dishes cost around two kuài ($0.30).

When Tianjiners travel overseas and get homesick, this is the stuff they miss.

1. 锅巴菜 gābacài

I like this stuff, though I wouldn’t have a clue what it’s made of just from eating it: maybe some sesame sauce, strips of something, some pink sauce, thick brown broth, and you can throw in some cilantro and crushed hot peppers in oil if you want. Apparently gābacài (锅巴菜) is a Tianjin original, and it’s seriously high-energy food; you feel like running a few miles afterward. According to this online recipe, it’s made with a mung bean-&-millet broth, strips of chopped, crepe-like jiānbǐng (煎饼), some of kind of gravy made with over ten kinds of seasonings, sesame paste, chilis in oil, pink fermented tofu sauce and cilantro. In standard Mandarin it should be guōbacài, but in Tianjin it’s gābacài — people often think it’s funny if the foreigner knows to use the local pronunciation.

2. 老豆腐 lǎodòufu

My students rave about “old tofu” (老豆腐) or “tofu brains” (豆腐脑) whenever I bring it up in class, but even they admit that it looks disgusting.

From what I can tell, it’s slimy lumps of tofu in an oil bath with some brown (sesame?) sauce thrown in. For me, the taste doesn’t come anywhere close to making up for its appearance. Of all the Tianjin breakfast foods, we liked this one the least. I think my sister stopped after the first or second spoonful.

3. 油条 yóutiáo

Two small strips of dough pinched together at the ends and deep fried, “oil sticks” are pretty much donuts without any sugar or flavouring. I honestly don’t see the point, unless you were trying to consume as much oil as possible without actually drinking it straight, though for some reason I still eat them occasionally. These things are everywhere at breakfast time, perhaps the most ubiquitous of all Tianjin’s breakfast offerings, maybe because they travel easily. 5 máo ($0.07) each.

The wider thing in the fry pot in the above photo is called a guǒbìngr (果饼儿) in Tianjin (薄脆 báocuì in Beijing). Guǒbìngr are thin and crispy rather than donut-y.

4. 面茶 miànchá

If you cooked it in less oil and traded the salt for brown sugar, you could slip bowls of miànchá (面茶) onto a Canadian family breakfast table and no one would notice (assuming that some Canadians actually still have family breakfasts). According to this online recipe and my Chinese-English dictionary, it’s made from millet, sesame paste, sesame oil, and sesame seeds. Unsweetened porridge, basically. I don’t know how to translate the name; the characters are the ones for “noodles” (面) and “tea” (茶), but I’m not seeing either in this dish [see comment #14]. Anyway, I’ll definitely be eating this again on a somewhat regular basis, though I can’t say the same or the “tofu brains” in the right half of the photo above.

5. 煎饼果子 jiānbing guǒzi

This is more or less the Chinese breakfast burrito, except that other than having a thin crepe-like wrapper, it’s (sadly) nothing at all like a burrito. The styles can vary and you can sometimes choose for yourself (see a list here), but a standard jiānbing guǒzi (煎饼果子) will be a green onion crepe lined with egg wrapped around a yóutiáo (油条 “oil stick”) or a crunchy guǒbìngr (果饼儿 — stacked overhead in the photo below), with some sauce and crushed red peppers in oil, and then folded twice. These transport well, and I often see them on the subway in the morning.

6. 豆浆 dòujiāng

“Bean broth” (豆浆) is better known in North America as soy milk, only the Tianjin variety is unsweetened and served really hot in a brimming bowl, scooped out of a big pot. Dòujiāng to-go comes in a bag with a straw. Sometimes they’ll add sugar to it if you ask. I like dipping the yóutiáo (油条 “oil stick”) in it, but I get funny looks from my Chinese friends when I do this.

This post doesn’t include every single kind of Tianjin breakfast food (there’d be no end; Tianjiners love them some breakfast!), but these are all the biggies. Hungry?

P.S. — Warning

Adventure eaters, be ye warned: This kind of local food is pretty much guaranteed to use the cheapest, poorest quality ingredients, and in China that means something different than it does back home. If, for example, you were deliberately trying to consume “gutter oil” (地沟油), which is discarded cooking oil that’s been skimmed off the sewer slop that was scooped out of manholes and resold in used containers back to restaurants and street vendors, you would eat things like yóutiáo (油条 “oil sticks”) or lǎodòufu (老豆腐 “old tofu”) at places like those pictured above, or you could go to an average local restaurant and order shuǐzhǔròu (水煮肉 “water boiled meat”), which is basically meat and vegetables in a serving bowl filled with oil. Most Chinese dishes use incredible amounts of oil, but the ones I’ve mentioned here use even more than usual and are therefore thought to be the most likely candidates for gutter oil.

I’ve seen people scooping slop out of manholes beside restaurants in Tianjin before, but I didn’t know they were doing it to skim off the waste oil and resell it back to the restaurants! If you’re not sick, you will be after reading the reports about 地沟油 linked below.

Translated from the Chinese internet: Restaurant head chef talks about drainage oil in China
From the China Daily: Old oil used in ’1 in 10 meals’

Pronounced: dì gōu yóu
Literally: drainage oil
Means: used cooking oil from restaurants that is typically dumped down the drain or directly into the manholes outside, then scooped out of said manholes by enterprising citizens and resold as cooking oil. I so wish I was kidding.

I’m not kidding; that’s exactly what these signs say:

Currently in the Chinese media, and now all over the English China blog world, is the news that China is considering passing a law that would make it illegal to eat dogs and cats. But even if it passes, I have my doubts that those hypocritical pork-eating bourgeois specie-ists will succeed in enforcing their shameless attack on cultural practices that go back thousands of years.

The image on the right is a bag of dog meat one of our Chinese teachers gave us as a gift.

Anyway, I just couldn’t pass up sharing a photo of a sign that says “Cats are friends, not food!” （猫是朋友，不是食物）。 Also visible in the photo:

• “Refuse to eat cats.” （拒绝吃猫）
• “Please show humanitarianism, set them free.” （请发扬人道主义 放过它们）
• “Cherish humanity’s good friends! Refuse to eat cat and dog meat.” （爱护人类好友！拒绝吃猫狗肉）
• “Refuse to eat cat and dog meat. Cherish humanity’s friends.” (拒食猫狗肉 爱护人类之友)
• 请口下留情 is a play on the phrase 手下留情 (“restrain your hand”), as in showing mercy or sparing someone’s feelings by not meting out more punishment than is needed, often in the context of criticizing. On the sign they switched “hand” (手) for “mouth” （口）, so it might mean something like, “Be merciful; please restrain your mouth”.

For our personal encounters with cats and dogs as food in China, including a downloadable translated menu from a local dog meat restaurant, see here:

• Dead puppies (don’t look, Grandma!) – menu included
• Obligatory cat eating post
• 龙虎斗

This is a dog meat restaurant near our old apartment:

The last time we ate dog, at a Korean restaurant with one of our teachers and her Korean fiancé:

Honestly, it tasted better at the dump-of-a-restaurant two photos up, but it wasn’t great at either place. Not like some of the donkey I’ve had.

We went out for hotpot last night and the restaurant sònged us two “cow frogs” (牛蛙):

One for the spicy side, one for the regular side! Nice of them to not throw out the skin.

Lots of restaurants in Tianjin have frogs in tanks near the front door so you can choose them fresh; it’s not anything all that extraordinary. This was the second time we’ve had frog, but the first time they were diced up and fried to unrecognizable smithereens.

Jessica made us move the frogs off the table after I took this photo because “they stunk.” And she wouldn’t let us put them in the pot until the end because she didn’t want to get the soup “all frogged up.” Pregnant ladies apparently have superior olfactory powers, and ought not to be argued with.

Stupid blog stuff
The blog’s been down a lot the last few days. So 烦得死去活来！ I don’t have time or know-how to fix it, but thankfully we have friends here who are smarter than me. Hopefully we’ll do all the upgrades and maintenance and stuff that I’ve successfully(?) avoided so far out of fear of messing everything up, and things will go back to normal — I guess this thing just couldn’t stay in 2003 forever. For now it’s limping along; if you get a blank page with a weird error message, that’s why.

Photos!
From today – of all the $0.50 fried noodles in Tianjin, her’s are my favourite:

From Sunday before last – a bit of colour in the morning commute:

Riding that close to all the cars is normal.

With the neighbours for the Mid-Autumn Festival. It’s the same family that had us over during Chinese New Year. “Grandpa Song,” a regular with the Old Boys’ Club, just had a quadruple bypass.

We had dinner at their apartment with their son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter, and then when for a walk in the park to look at the moon, since that’s what you do during the Mid-Autumn Festival. We brought apples, peaches, and bananas, as that’s supposedly a good gift for someone who’s just had a major surgery.

Monday night was the foreigner moon cake party. Everyone brought their left over moon cakes (most people don’t actually want to eat the moon cakes… they’re mostly for giving and receiving) and we played má jiàng (麻将).

Last year’s Moon Festival was also in Tianjin, and the year before that was at a rooftop barbecue in Taipei.

Our neighbours greeted each other with “zhōng qiū kuài lè” (中秋快乐 / Happy Mid-Autumn).

My first teacher three semesters ago warned me: you can buy produce at the local vegetable market, but avoid packaged food products from there or from little first-floor window shops, even if it’s the same label as what’s in the big supermarket. Chances are too high that it’s fake. Sometimes you can tell by the way the label is glued on crooked or has minute differences.

We’ve more or less followed her advice, but even in the supermarkets things can look dodgy – like a row of glass vinegar bottles that all have different amounts of vinegar in them with sloppily glued on labels.

Today I didn’t follow this advice, and stopped at a first-floor window to get a bottle of jiaozi vinegar on the way to eat lunch (fantastic Muslim beef sandwiches from a different first-floor window shop). I carried the vinegar bottle into the school since I was heading straight to class after eating, and a classmate joke, “You bringing beer to class?” Then I took a second look at the bottle, which you can see on the here.

Now, I’m all for recycling (it was routine for class pop bottles to be reused as pop bottles when we were in east Africa), but I’m not so sure I trust this one.

Sorry Xu Laoshi! Next time I’ll 听 your 说的话！

When Jessica was sick a while back, I went to the vegetable market and asked the lady who sells tea what Jessica should drink for her cough. She gave me this:

It’s more interesting than drinking water, and it looks cool, too. The little brown nut-looking thing turns into the big see-through brown blob in the cup. The top photo is one cup’s worth of stuff, and how much of each thing you should put together.

Here are a few photos from the last couple days. There’s a also a new photo gallery from our bike trip today to a run down family shrine and a long-disused church building.

Descriptions are under each photo. All are from today (Sunday March 9) unless it says otherwise.

[left] When I saw the crowds on the bridge and around the banks this morning, my first thought was “Oh no, not another body.” Turns out that the fish were all swimming at the surface of the canal, and people were just scooping them out with big nets. The water level dropped several feet overnight this week, and I suspect maybe the oxygen levels are depleted and the fish are trying to breathe the air, like when I wouldn’t change the water in the goldfish bowl soon enough. [right] Migrant workers are camping in our backyard again. Behind them you can see our neighbours doing their morning tai-qi. We suspect this crew is building fake roofs on all the buildings in our neighbourhood that can be seen from the road. These facades can be seen around the city. They make it look like the roofs are pointed with dormer windows instead of flat with satellite dishes.

Here you can see their food stash as of today – cabbage, flour, and potatoes.

[left] Two of our teachers came over Saturday afternoon to play games, eat strawberry shortcake, and watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding in Chinese. [right] One of them brought some snacks, which included this package of pre-cooked dog meat. You’re supposed to eat it chilled.

[left] This much colour early in the morning in the middle of a usually drab commute is like a kick in the head (the good kind). [right] Jessica buys dinner from a window shop on our way to an evening meeting this last Wednesday.

You could spend an entire day taking photos at this run-down former ancestral temple complex. Half of it is mostly empty (a few architecture students were sketching), but the other half is filled with junk and old men hanging out playing cards and chess.

[right] This is us riding a giant turtle or lion or luck-dragon or something. Click here for the temple complex & abandoned church photo gallery.