Beijing, Capital CUISINE, Peking Duck and Muslim Food

OK, so I've been doing a lot of complaining since arriving in Beijing. But every dog has his day, and to be truthful, the city is not without its merits. Food is one of those merits. I've thrown together all the food pics I have taken in an effort to give you a little smattering of what the food is like here. Now keep in mind, China is a massive place and therefore every province has its own thing going on food-wise. Beijing is located in Hebei provence in north China. It is bordered by Inner Mongolia (part of China) to the north, Korea, which is across the Yellow sea to the east, Shandong (where Hong Kong is and Cantonese is spoken) to the south and nothing you or I would be familiar with to the West (Shanxi). So that gives you a little idea of the diversity of cuisine in the actual city of Beijing which, by the way, has 11.5 million people in it. That's 3 million more than New York City, making it about about 5 times the size of Taipei, and about 8 times the size of Philadelphia. 

So first off is the world renown Peking Duck. I must apologize in advance because we went to another Peking duck restaurant with a fantastic spread and I lost the pictures :(. So these pictures don't even come close to doing it justice. I'll post more when I got back to that place with the nice spread. Basically, the Peking duck comes with scallions, mu shu pancakes, brown sauce and sugar. You put the scallions and the brown sauce on the pancake, dip the duck in sugar, and away you go! Duck is crispy and very fatty and very delicious. I would not say it is the healthiest option however.

Next up is the Muslim Cuisine in Beijing. There is a decent population of Muslims in Beijing, many of them hailing from the forcibly annexed province of XinJiang, which borders Tibet to the north. Their food is bloody fantastic, but you won't find pork there! The food is a wonderfully spiced combination of Chinese food and I'm not really even sure what else…Afghan? One thing that they do that I really appreciate is they put cumin into quite a few dishes. The seasoned and moderately spiced cumin lamb with onions has got to be one of my favorites. You can get all the basic Chinese dishes but they all have a bit of a muslim twist on it. The first place was a restaurant in West Beijing.

Eggplant and Cumin Lamb

Fried Rice, Muslim Style

Cumin Lamb

XinJiang Dark Beer…mmmmm

The second place, which I am not even going to attempt to name due to the very complex characters on the sign is one that Judy's Beijing born coworker took us too as an example of "real Beijing food". It was a Hot Pot (Huo Guo) place in South Beijing. It took us about an hour to get there in the car. Hot pot, for those of you who are not familiar, is a style of eating where raw meat and vegetables is served at the table and then cooked in a boiling pot of water, sometimes with various spices or seasonings added. Taiwanese people are absolutely bonkers about hot pot, but it is also fairly popular in Beijing. Japanese style hot pot is called "Shabu Shabu". It's all basically the same thing. 

At this particular place, and I assume at many of the Muslim places, the lamb is butchered "Halaal"style. From what I understand about Halaal, it is butchering done in as humane a way as possible. It tastes better too because it is hand trimmed along the marbling lines for a more tender cut. 

The sauce at Hot Pot places is always different depending on where you go. I'm not entirely certain what exactly was in the sauce but there was some vinegar, peanut something, garlic, scallions, and I believe some kind of paste made from fish…I don't know really know. Your guess is as good as mine. I've been to one of these places before where you make your own sauce and there is like 10 saucers of unidentified (in English) substances that you can put in…one of which was a saucer of pure powdered MSG. 

Anyway, the sauce was very tasty indeed. They eat all the parts of the cow as well. The hoof, the inside of the neck, the stomach, you name it, they eat it. I tried the throat which was actually quite good but I didn't try the stomach. I just didn't have the "stomach" for it. ZZING!

Mala Tofu. Hard to describe, but something like Tofu Hummus perhaps with something like feta cheese in it and tingly hot peppers. Very good!

The beef slices for dipping in the hot pot. 

Left is the sauce, on the bottom, slices of cow foot, on the right is the hoof, in the middle sauce for the cow foot. 

Judy's coworkers and in the middle that is the pot that we cook things in.

A bread pastry with cumin…very tasty!

Cow Stomach

Judy's coworkers from Hong Kong and Singapore chowing down on some cow stomach. I lost my beef in the pot once and plunged in to pull out some of that alien looking stuff once and dropped it back in as I reviled.

Halaal Lamb