Typical Chinese/Taiwanese Breakfast Foods
breakfast, chinese
1 info file
Congee ("jook" in Cantonesese and "zhou" in Mandarin) is not only a breakfast food. It's poached rice made into a thick soup, sometimes cooked with small pieces of vegetable or sausage. It can be made in a rice cooker, but is just as easy to cook on the stovetop. Purists say perfect congee demands hours of slow cooking, but I have tasted fine stuff that has cooked for no more than an hour. A lot of people pour soy sauce over it when served. There is also "zi mi zhou" or purple-rice congee on the mainland in Sichuan, eaten at any time, especially at "xiao chi" (fast-food) joints.
In Hong Kong, bread sticks (C. "yao tiu" or M. "you tiao," oil sticks) are virtually identical to Mexican churros -- lengths of bread dough, slightly twisted, and deep-fried. They are frequently served with congee, along with steamed flat rice noodles (C. "cheung fun" or M. "chang fen," broad noodles), which are sometimes filled with sausage or shrimp and atop which soy sauce usually goes.
In Hong Kong and parts of Guangdong, "yam cha" ("drink tea") is the classic weekend breakfast for families to meet and eat, analogous to Sunday brunch or a pancake breakfast. It's usually just dim sam in a dim sam house. In the north, breakfast is often just congee or even cold rice, with perhaps some sausage on the side or a thousand-year-old egg, and possibly other small tidbits of preserved fruit and vegetable. In other parts of the country, noodle soups, dumplings, and steamed buns are natural breakfasts. For everyday meals, there is not always so much difference between breakfast, lunch, and dinner in China as we see in the West, though dinner out or dinner parties are usually richer in meat and hot dishes.
Peter Zelchenko
Yield: 1 servings