From Bubble Tea to Egg Tarts
The great Hainanese chicken rice debate, Hong Kong egg tarts and their medieval English origins to soup dumplings making their way to the West, and the rise in popularity of Taiwanese bubble tea.
South China Morning Post’s Eat Drink Asia is a podcast that will tempt your taste buds and give you some great conversation starters at the dinner table.
From contemporary to traditional cuisine, Asian food has a fascinating history. Image: Cottonbro Studios.
Warning: This podcast may cause salivation.
Eat Drink Asia is accessible, well researched and highly-produced. SCMP doesn’t have a lot in its podcast library, but this is one that will appeal to anyone interested in history and food. And while they haven’t added anything new to the season since early last year, the series is timeless, which you’ll soon discover as you make your way down the list, getting insights into your favourite Asian cuisines.
A mix of interviews with history experts and chefs, vox pops, and narrated presentation is interspersed with the sounds of sizzling, rolling, chopping, and the buzz of busy kitchens, which all set the tone perfectly for the podcast.
An array of Asian classics are explored in the series: Chinese Hainanese chicken rice, tofu, soup dumplings, ram-don noodles, Japanese Okonomiyaki (Japanese pancake), butter chicken, Banh mi, chickens feet, bubble tea and more.
If you’re a fan of Dim Sum or Yum Cha and you have a sweet tooth, chances are you’ll find it hard to resist the light, flaky pastry of an egg tart or ‘Dan Tat’ as they are called in Cantonese. And yes, SCMP have an episode on these too!
Introduced to Hong Kong during the 1940s and 50s through an influx of immigrants from Mainland China, the silky tarts have become a mainstay in Hong Kong cuisine.
Popular as an afternoon treat the tarts also have origins in England and Portugal. The episode investigates the origin of the sweet tart and takes listeners into a chef’s kitchen to find out how they’re made and the ingredients that make the pastry so flaky and delicious.
A Mash up of Cultures
Another episode explores the popularity of bubble tea and its rise in popularity in the West.
One customer in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay is queuing up for a drink: “I’m prepared to wait for one hour”, he tells the podcast host.
Bubble tea is essentially a drink you can eat. The jelly-like consistency is what truly makes these drinks so special and sets them apart from anything else.
Image: Kim Cruz.
In this episode we meet the daughter of Liu Han Chieh who invented the first bubble tea in Taiwan during the 1980s. She says her Dad was inspired by cold iced coffee drinks in the West.
“People thought we were crazy…it was popular with young people,” she says.
The milk tea was soon to ignite a craze, with customers lining the streets outside stores, especially when new flavours were released.
And today, the bubble tea trend has made its way into mainstream culture in the West.
The rise of bubble tea exploded in North America around 2015, and due to its aesthetic nature and pastel bright colours, its presence has also made its way onto Instagram.
The drink is popular throughout Asia both in cafes and hole-in-the-wall outlets. On a busy day, passersby will queue up at their favourite shop to get their caffeinated bubble tea hit.
“A taste for coldness has been a very Western thing for the last 100 years,” says Krishnendu Rayhe, Professor of Food studies at NYU who adds that the rise in this drink is a sign of cultural transformation.
“It is a flow from East to West, textural contrast, people not used to chewing things in liquids.” Bubble tea has come from a professional class structure according to Rayhe. Where Asian food was once seen in the past as ‘cheap food’ there is now a reversal where cuisines from the East have prestige, are also experiencing the same in the West.
Eat Drink Asia is timeless podcast, sure to tempt you to dine out on an array of contemporary and traditional Asian cuisines.
Listen to the two episodes above to find out more or head to Eat Drink Asia.
