This week, I’m turning the spotlight on Guizhou, one of China’s least-famous provinces. Read my introduction to Guizhou and then subscribe to my RSS feed to automatically receive the rest of the posts in the series!
Guizhou has all the staples of Chinese cuisine — noodles, hotpot — but puts its own distinctive hot-and-sour spin on them. Like Hunan and Sichuan, the province is known for its fondness for spicy food — an old joke claims, “No degree of hotness will affright the people of Guizhou.” Generally speaking, we found the heat to be a little less intense than the other two provinces, but it was usually coupled with a bit of sourness from pickles or a lemongrass-like herb.
The source of spice: Dried chilies for sale at the Shidong market.
The staple of our Guizhou diet was the local varation on noodle soup, for which I don’t even have a name. The exact ingredients varied, but the method was always the same. Starting with an empty bowl, the noodle-maker would throw in pinches of salt, sugar, dried chilies, and I suspect, MSG. In would go a handful of fresh rice noodles and a ladleful of broth, and the mix would be topped with a spoonful each of cooked ground meat, vegetable pickles, scallions and a final dollop of hot sauce. Most days, this was breakfast:
We discovered our second Guizhou specialty courtesy of our Couchsurfing host, who took us to eat suantang on our first night in Kaili. Suantang is a variation on hotpot where the broth is a slightly spicy and tomato-based. We ate it at a casual courtyard restaurant, where we sat on low stools, hunched over our Sterno-fueled hot pot. Vvegetables and meat came on skewers for 7 cents each, allowing us to sample as many different foods as we wanted.
We cooked a few skewers at a time, unthreading them first to submerge the food fully in the broth. Lettuce, chives and eggplant cooked quickly, while slices of potato and lotus root required more time in the soup. Fresh out of the pot, they were only mildly spicy, but a quick dunk in hot sauce (a mix of dried peppers and herbs with a dash of suantang-broth to bring it all together) made them quite spicy indeed. At the end of the meal, we drank the spicy tomato-ey broth like a soup. It was a warming meal, perfect for a winter night but pleasant even in summer, with a cold beer or soda to wash it down.
This post is part of Wanderfood Wednesday over at the Wanderfood blog. Head over there to check out other great, mouthwatering posts.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
My mouth feels like burning just seeing the color of the soup.
“No degree of hotness will affright the people” — that is priceless, and something to aspire to! Spicy dishes can be just the thing in warmer weather.
Makes me long for the days I spent in China twenty years ago! And nice to know eating out is still so affordable. Back then, we’d gorge ourselves for something like 20 cents a person!
since i am a “no flames” kind of girl, i sort of cringe at all this red. my husband, though, would make up for my deficiencies – he LOVES hot food! gorgeous photos!