What Are Those Cubes?

"This is a wish that's really more of a velleity, but I wish I didn't like ketchup." (Is this not the strangest desire ever expressed on a blog?) Matthew Yglesias chimes in on the "I wish I didn't like so many foods" tip. Obviously, living in power-hungry D.C. has affected his mind, since his desire to not like some foods is just instrumental: he wants the power to veto his friends' restaurant decisions. As one commenter pointed out, lie about it! Any goods which accrue to the ketchup hater can also go to the false-ketchup-hater! MY does hate some weird Asian desserts, though (we'll get back to that). Poor Kevin Drum, on the other hand, doesn't like any vegetables, which is tragic. He is in grave danger of dying from scurvy, and he is missing out on some of life's great pleasures. This whole wanting not to like foods thing is silly. The tastiness and convenience of liking everything far outweighs any meta-utility to be derived from having dislikes to foist on others. In this spirit, I am offering Belle's taxonomy of weird Asian dessert foods. Because some of them are actually good! No, really! Let's break it down:

The Obvious, Fruits:
No sense in listing them all. In my personal roster, mangosteen, litchee, mango, pineapple are at the top, and jackfruit is at the bottom. It's rubbery and not so tasty. I may be the only person in the world to feel ambivalent about durian. I've started to think the smell is good, and I don't think it tastes bad, but it's so creamy, sort of like crab fat, that I don't love it either. I used to hate it, so I think I must be moving towards loving it. I'm convinced that when I do, beaming old Chinese guys will gather around me in the hawker center, bringing me slivers of XO durian and clapping me on the back, and everyone will be my friend.
Special Mention:
Thai Mango with Glutinous Rice and Coconut Milk: this is the greatest. Creamy mango, slightly salty coconut sauce and sweet sticky rice. Even if you think you don't like weird desserts, you'll like this one.
Banana Fritters: Again, who doesn't like these? Whether wrapped in egg-roll wrappers like cigars, fried plain, or chopped in batter, it's all good. Honey from nothern Thailand makes a tasty sauce.

Ice Cream:
Green Tea: everyone's favorite! Especially when it's deep-fried.
Coconut: less available than it should be. If you live in the Bay Area you should go to Mitchell's Ice Cream right now and get a double cone of young coconut (macapuno) and mexican chocolate. Don't thank me. Oh, hell, thank me. I'm talking to you, Brad DeLong.
Yam: whatevs. Nothing glaringly wrong with it. The purple color is interesting.
Red Bean: see Yam.
Durian: well, not so good.
Corn: big mistake.

Nuts to Soup:
Hot Almond Cream: mmmm, so good, creamy and pandan-flavored. Sometimes they serve it in a hollowed out young coconut and you get to eat the jelly-like flesh afterwards. This is a real winner.
Hot Peanut Cream: ditto.
Pulot Hitam: black glutinous rice cooked with sugar and pandan, served with coconut cream. Yum-ola. A similar Thai dish is less soupy, more sticky, but also very good.
Cheng Tng: Either hot or cold, fragrant syrupy soup with stuff in it, like candied persimmons or lotus seeds. Can be strangely tasty.
Either Almond or Peanut Cream, jellied: texture problems. See: the evils of agar-agar.

Category Errors:
Avocoado Eis: cubes of avocado, shaved ice, condensed milk, sugar. Um, no.
Ice Kacang: Shaved ice with sweet corn, red beans, peanuts, cubes of jelly, and rose syrup. I really don't have any excuses to make for Malay people here. I don't know what they were thinking, either. On the up-side, the ice is fine.
Bubble Tea: It's a drink--it's a food--it's a drood! Tasty tea, plus big pearls of tapioca=nasty stuff. You feel like you're sucking eyeballs through that special big straw.
Chendol: this can be either good or bad, depending on what you pick to put in it, but mostly it's dubious. Basically, shaved ice, bits of stuff (those green things? Green pea flour strips, apprently), coconut milk, fruit puree. Durian is popular for this.
Grass Jelly: It's sort of black, and they cut it into strips. Is it really made of grass? I'm not finding out. It often comes with litchee, so you could just pick those off and eat them, then throw away the grass jelly.

Better Than You Think:
Shaved Ice with Sea Coconut: they have this in Singapore, but I don't know if it's served elsewhere. It's some sort of seaweed product cooked in gula melaka (sugar) and then served with shaved ice and syrup. Actually very tasty. Sort of like a sweet tea sno-cone, with bits in it. But not gross bits.
Ruby Water Chestnut with Ice and Coconut Milk: I don't know if this is normal water chestnut that they dyed, or what. It has a different texture from ordinary water chestnut, a slightly gelatinous outer layer and a crunching interior. Little ruby cubes are served up with shaved ice and tasty coconut. This is really very good, despite its family resemblance to ice kacang.

The Evils of Agar-Agar:
Agar-agar is the Asian substitute for gelatin which, because it's NOT made of hooves, can be eaten by Muslims, vegetarians, and generally, everyone who likes to eat things that are really gross. By the power of Grayskull, agar-agar has the power to jell things into total, bouncy submission. You can mold it, cut it into cubes. Boy, can you cut it into cubes. Anything jelled in this manner will be highly resisitant to the bite, with an outer skin, and rather than eventually melting away in your mouth (like Jello), will simply reduce into smaller and smaller gristly bits which must be swallowed. No, thanks.

Kueh, Dumplings:
Kueh: Here in Singapore, kueh is (are) a category of Chinese dumpling-like cakes, some of which are formed by hand, and some in a wooden mold. The "pastry" is translucent and made of rice flour. In general, these are very nice, although the yam ones tend to be sliding off the sweet axis and onto the savory. Better: black sesame, peanut, lotus seed. Durian: well, this all depends on how you feel about durian. More palatable to the durian-hater than the fruit itself, I'll say that much.
Glutinous Rice Dumplings: wrapped in banana leaf and steamed. One of those mystery Asian "desserts" that comes in sweet and savory variations, with not much difference between them. I prefer the sweet-ish pork to the nominally sweet ones.
Moon Cakes: I've never had a good one. They're not sweet enough, the outer pastry is dry, and double yolk just isn't doing it for me. Lotus paste is the least offensive of the traditional, and white ones filled with green-tea-flavored paste are OK, but sort of like eating library paste. Expensive hotels sell fancy packages of these at the festival time which I imagine people are just handing off to one another repeatedly like the proverbial fruitcake.
Crystal Dumplings: a place near me sells these but, because it is a popular and highly rated hawker stall, it is almost never open. (Hawker stall uncles are not big on customer service, and seem to have a set amount of money in mind to make any given week. Once they get there, they close up shop. Odd.) Transparent, tender coating, with red bean paste inside, served in sugar syrup. Awesome. Naturally, there are savory ones too, that are too sweet to be savory but not sweet enough to be sweet. Steer clear.
Sweet Bao: those steamed fluffy white buns which most famously have tasty pork inside can also have lotus paste or red bean. As with the glutinous rice dumplings, you are better off going for the (strangely sweet) pork filling than the (not sweet enough) allegedly sweet ones. I think Char Siew are the best.
Ah Boling: These are the greatest. Little, round, glutinous rice-flour dumplings with various fillings, served in clear, pandan syrup. Popular fillings include, peanut, black sesame, red bean. Mmm, I want this right now. I am stuck in bed, but there is a great place for this down the street at Bukit Merah. Maybe Tena and Zoë can get me some later. There is some similar north Chinese dish with wine in the soup (or the dumplings, I forget), but when I tried to order it at a restaurant, the waiter wouldn't let me, because he said I wouldn't like it. I was like, come on, I like lots of weird things. No, he said, even most Chinese people don't like this stuff. Only people from Sichuan. I chickened out at that point, but now I'm curious.

Little Eggy Tarts: these can be so right, or so, so wrong. At a bad dim sum place they are revolting, like scrambled eggs in pastry, plus sugar. At a good place, they are silky, lemony delights. You've got to be a risk-taker with these.

Pancakes With Peanuts: special thick Chinese pancakes with sweet ground peanut filling very tasty. Kinda breakfasty, not dessert-y. Similar, and good, pandan waffles.

And there you have it, folks! Of course there are many more weird Asian desserts in the world, like little glutinous rice balls stuffed with gula melaka and rolled in coconut (good!) and jewel-like agar-agar based slices of who-knows-what made into twenty colorful layers (bad). But it's a start. I left off the vast range of Indian sweets. I love rice pudding, and the twenty million varieties of fried dough things, but can live without cheese balls in rose syrup. Now, everyone get out there and eat something weird! But not with corn in it.

Comments

[Kip Manley]

Green tea ice cream with red bean paste on top: yum! --And though I've never had actual durian fruit hereabouts, the little Vietnamese grocery over on Belmont once had--you know those stick-like sugar wafers that usually come in vanilla and dry dusty chocolate and a pink strawberry Quik-like flavor? They had those in durian, which, not at all the same thing, I'm sure, but made for interesting pre-game snacking this one time. And a friend of mine scored some durian popsicles once, but I wasn't there at the time.

Gastronomica (which, by the way, excellent magazine, highly recommended, they had me with the article on native Antarctic cooking) had a piece on the Thai egg tarts once, and the photos were fine food porn: little white ramekins filled with the most incredible sunny, yolky gold, a color just on the edge of what's naturally possible...

[Matt Brown]

Wow, Belle, thanks for the info. Lots of that stuff sounds delicious. It's really criminal that I've been to San Diego for so long, yet I've sampled so little Asian cuisine.

[Anne C.]

Green tea ice cream is okay. But what I really love is almond cookie ice cream from the Chinese Ice Cream factory on Bayard St in NYC. Could not recommend highly enough.

[Josh]

Mango with sticky rice qualifies as a weird dessert? Maybe I've been living in the Bay Area too long. (I gotta disagree on the bubble tea, too. I'd never made the eyeball connection, but even so it's tasty.)

[bryan]

There's an obvious problem with lieing about hating foods one likes, which is that one must then remember one has told that lie about that particular food. This lieing would sooner or later get you found out, and cause the loss of at least some friends.

[ben wolfson]

Unless the pearl tea you can get in Singapore is much worse than what's available in Chinatown in Chicago and all the hell over Irvine, which I doubt, you are wrong wrong wrong in your assessment. Tasty tea + sweet, slimy balls of tapioca = good clean fun. And the big pearls & straws make passable projectile weapons.

And corn ice cream sounds pretty damn good to me.

[Tom]

On Mitchell's Ice Cream: Try their Halo-Halo dessert (despite the purple color, it's delicious). Their Ginger icecream is really, really good, but they only make it about two months out of the year.

Found a green tea & ginger icecream in a supermarket on Cortland yesterday...mmmm.

[Tom]

What about the little round cakes they sell on that bakery on Grant in Chinatown? They're great.

[Jacob T. Levy]

And the Indian sweets are a set of mistakes all their own. I've never understood how the various Indian cuisines can get every other course so very right and get dessert so very, very wrong. And it's not even as though all the Indian cuisines serve the same desserts. They go wrong in at least somewhat different ways. But wrong they all go, by my palate.

[Nasi Lemak]

Herewith the rules of Dessert Logic, the product of thirteen hours in British Airways economy class:

- Anything that could plausibly be part of an English fried breakfast is Not dessert; thus red or green beans are Not Dessert.

- Agar-Agar is Not Dessert. It is for biology class, where if you're lucky the samples you grow will end up hospitalizing your teacher.

- there is a tragic Cantonese dish involving a bowl of almond cream (yum) and a brainlike goop called silver fungus. This demonstrates the exclusivity rule of Dessert: anything which contains Not Dessert becomes Not Dessert. (Imagine enthusiastically spooning up the almond cream as it runs off the brainlike goop. see?)

- Dessert includes as major constituents only things from the list below:

fruit; chocolate; dairy-products; sweet pastries, biscuits, sponges and possibly breads; sugar-related-program-activities; nuts; minor flavourings (vanilla, coffee etc)

There is a partial exemption for rice, and the British are required to apologise for suet puddings. Finally the proof that pandan cake is Dessert is left as an exercise for the reader.

[drapeto]

Mango with sticky rice qualifies as a weird dessert?

these are people who do not understand the pleasures of agar-agar (which cognoscenti of the zha persuasion refer to as china grass). read their culinary disquisitions with polite scientific interest in the barbarian mindset.

They go wrong in at least somewhat different ways.

even the non-milky ones, non-neon-orange ones? i find that while encouraging barbarians towards milky desserts is a lost cause, a sweet puri goes over all right.

[Belle Waring]

I suppose I should have left out the fruit section once I said I was aiming for "weird" desserts; I geant you there's nothing weird about mango with sticky rice. I just included fruits for completeness' sake, because a lot of people who think they don't like Asian dessert aren't eating what actual asian people are having for dessert, namely, cut up tropical fruits. Nothing wrong there. But, barbarian or not, I'm sticking to my guns on the agar-agar, Drapeto.

[Matt]

My all time-favorite "asian" dessert was purchased in a chinese restruant in St. Petersburg, russia. It gets bonus points for it's great translation back in to english as the "fragile bannana". It's a bannana in a sweet batter, deep fried, and then covered in molten suger (much better than the honey option, by the way.) As you eat it and burn the hell out of your mouth you can't help but think, "oh, this is so good, and so fragile..."

[loy]

Don't forget "dao suan"--split green beans (they are yellow in color) in soup flavored with rock sugar, pandan leaves and thickened with sweet potato flour. Served hot with "you tiao" (Chinese fried dough sticks). Belle: if you don't like agar-agar and grass jelly, looks like you won't like "gui ling gao" either (Chinese herbal jelly, with emphasis on "Chinese herbal"). I remember gulping down bowls of grass jelly cubes in milk and sugar syrup as a boy. Grass jelly's supposed to have quasi-medicinal ("cooling") properties.

I've just had a most successful Hainanese Chicken rice dinner...and wishing for some Ah Boling. Too bad it's seems so hard to find Pandan leaves round the Bay Area. (Anyone knows?)

[Belle Waring]

Yeah, Loy, I wondered if I wouldn't make you hungry for Ah Boling with this post. Mmmmm. I didn't really know about pandan leaves when I still lived in the bay area, so I can't say, but have you tried Oakland Chinatown? Lots of the stores are run by Vietnamese people, but they do tend to have a good selection of fruits and veggies (even durian, but not very good ones. How can I tell this? Because the whole street doesn't smell like durians when they are piled up on a table outside...)

[loy]

Haha...well, durians are one thing. They are everywhere! (frozen variety for 99c/lb at Ranch 99; but it's just not the same...) Pandan leaves, and for that matter, the sweet dark sauce used for Popiah--they are just too Singapore-Malaysian to be easily found. But we'll will try again: after all, we did find salted fish, preserved eggs, salted eggs, Chinese New Year cakes ("nian gao"), dried longans and dried red dates there.

Which reminds me: don't forget sweet potato soup, with sugar, dried longan and a generous amount of ginger. And I've just been told (by wifey) that ginger is classic confinement (i.e., post delivery) food.

[Belle Waring]

Sweet potato soup is good. I actually got the name of a special confinement food delivery service from my Ob-Gyn, and I'm thinking of signing up. It might all be too "herbal", though...one Chinese confinement tradition I can get behind is that I'm supposed to be drinking a shot of Benedictine every night. You know, because of the herbs.

[dsquared]

The idea that Matthew Yglesias, of all people, has decided that he's not narcissistic, self-obsessed or irritating enough, leaves me struck with something approaching horror.

[Jeremy Osner]

Hey Belle, how do you feel about sago? I mean the gooey balls of very little flavor that get served (IME) in tea or on top of ice cream. I feel like I should like them, it seems like a fun thing to do with ice cream in theory, but last time I had it (Friday) it seemed to detract more than it added.

[Mitch Mills]

Great, and hunger-inducing, post. (One thing I like about Chinese is the separate words for being hungry as in having an empty stomach, and being hungry as in just wanting to have the pleasure of eating.)

Is the purple yam ice cream you mention maybe made with taro? Taro's sort of potato-like, but softer and less dry, and it turns a slight purplish shade when you cook it. I think the Mandarin name for it is yu nai, if memory serves correctly. I really like taro, but I do think it's a strange thing to make desserts out of.

Speaking of desserts, most Chinese meals I've had, and I've had a lot, end with fruit. All the great variety of sweet stuff available isn't really "dessert" (i.e. something you have at the end of a meal), so much as sweets you have at other times of the day. Kind of like in a lot of the Meditteranean. Is this also the case with some of the Southeast Asian stuff you've covered?

[Carlos]

I am pretty sure the purple yam is also known as 'ube' or 'ubi' slightly to the northeast of J&BHQ. It's Dioscorea, true yam, not Ipomoea, sweet potato, and really not taro, Colocasia. I think. It makes a garishly purple ice cream.

Surprised more candies haven't been mentioned yet. Haw flakes were my fave. Little disks of crisp astringent fruit leather, much like poker chips in size and color, packaged like fireworks. Took me years to figure out that 'haw' was actually the English word for the berry: haw thorn.

This is an American 'dessert', but brown rice and agar-agar do not make acceptable substitute ingredients for Rice Krispie Treats.

[ben wolfson]

Jeremy: I think that's what she was talking about with the bubble tea. Much as I like them in tea I think they'd be a bit weird on ice cream.

[Summer]

Hi Belle,

Have you ever had bai mu er (white tree fungus boiled with rock sugar)? It is the most horrifying thing I have ever tasted, and some pretty mediocre Chinese desserts are available in Atlanta, Georgia. The last sweet soup I had in a restaurant tasted, I swear to god, like blackeyed peas... But I don't think it is a dessert, it is some sort of herbal remedy that is "good for women," according to the friend who brought me some from Taiwan and cooked it up for me as a special treat. To my shame I could not even eat enough to be polite... the texture was like your description of agar-agar.

[Mitch Mills]

Oh, I know the difference between Dioscorea, Ipomoea, and Colocasia. I'm all into botany, especially as it relates to food. It's just I've never seen a purple yam, plus I think I vaguely remember seeing, maybe even trying, taro icecream or popsicles or something back when I lived in Shanghai. So I thought maybe Belle was talking about taro icecream and taro had been badly translated into English.

So do you know if the icecream is made from purple yams, or is it just colored purple to distinguish it from other flavors, the way coconut-flavored snow cones are often blue in the States?

I've had sweet soup made out of green mung beans or red azuki beans, and it does indeed taste strongly of black-eyed peas, although they're not very closely related at all. It was served as a regular dish, not as a dessert or sweet. It kind of registers as one of those category errors, i.e. "beans shouldn't be sweet like this." I actually thought it was fine though, I had no trouble eating it, it's just nothing I'd ever crave or order for myself. But I'm pretty good about making myself eat enough of almost anything to be polite, even sea cucumber.

[Carlos]

Ube is pretty damn purple; makes a color of ice cream almost exactly like a grape juice float. I don't think it needs additional coloring (though if more were added in commercial production, it wouldn't surprise me).