VERY TRADITIONAL CHINESE BREAKFAST FOOD TOUR in China - Beijing Hutong!

You guys eating kidneys? Yeah, we're eating kidneys. I'm scared. All right, everybody. In this video, we're about to go on a Hutong breakfast tour. And a lot of these dishes that we're about to eat are not really easy to find outside of Beijing. And a lot of the recipes are hundreds of years old. Check it out. So this is a different form of You Tiao, You Tiao, Andrew. This is like the bracelet version. You know what reminds me a little bit? In Fujian, they also have a ring version of Cong You Bing. Oh, snap. Yo. Is that the Chanel bracelet? This is pickled radish. This is dou zhi, the Beijing exclusive, right? And then we've got the round You Tiao bracelet. But I noticed it's not as spongy as You Tiao because it's fried all the way through. So it's really crispy and it kind of snaps. Oh, that's crunchy. Locals like to do is crunch everything up and eat it like a cereal. Let's dip it first. Okay, yeah, let's do it. And then so this is... Jiao chua. Let's do it, guys. All right, this is the first jiao chua in dou zhi. Whoa, funky. Very funky. Visually, I thought it was like black sesame. It's not. It's not black sesame. So tell me what you tasted in here. It's not that bad after you take a second bite. Kind of tastes like some... Sour milk. So the sourness goes away really quickly. It washes down super fast. But that first initial one second, you're like, oh, man. Beijing people know how to wake up in the morning, bro. You need some of that. Oh, my gosh. This looks like a cinnamon churro cereal. Cheers, guys. Kind of like an iron type vibe. Like, you know, throw up on the potassium or something. Delicious. That was a great appetizer. It really woke me up. My taste buds are all firing. Let's go to the next spot. And over here, we have You Tiao, which is basically Chinese fried churro. And it's plain. So you can just dip it in the soybean milk. Tell us more about this tofu naan. In northern part, like especially Beijing, it is savory. But in the southern part, people like it to be very, very sweet along with like, you know, red beans and sugar. And even in Chengdu, they would put in like pig brains in there. So that's why it was initially called tofu naan, which means tofu brain. And that is tang you bi. It's literally the same as You Tiao, but with brown sugar on top. You Tiao and dou jiang, aka Chinese donut and soy milk. There's like a roasted sweet flavor to the dou jiang. I wasn't expecting that. No, you know what? I wouldn't say it's salty or sweet. It's like a stronger soybean flavor. I've never had soy milk that tastes like this. You can see the brown sugar cooked on the inside. I love this. This is good with coffee. There's like a very sweet pastry, something light on top with honey, right? Almost like a piece of toast with honey. Like French toast. This is surprisingly not as oily as one would think. They cook things a little bit differently here. I think it's kind of the same thing pretty much, but the details are different. Here we go. That just tastes like a hot and sour soup, except with tofu in it. Yeah, and it's not sour or hot. So maybe a sweet vision. Even with the tangyou bing, man. How's that level of sweetness? Really? Yeah. Try it like that. Sweet, savory. What a combo. Yo, that dou zi dao is not funky. That one's cool. The next stop is steamed dumplings and baozi. We have arrived at our third Beijing hutong breakfast spot. So here we have zheng jiao, which are steamed dumplings and baozi, which are bao. So they have the same fillings. It's both made of pork. The only difference is that the dough for the baozi has yeast inside, whereas the steamed dumplings don't. So they have different kinds of textures. And they also have different kinds of stories behind it as well. So before that, yeah, you guys can put in some black vinegar. Who wants chili? So not only is this breakfast, people drink it for late night snacks and hangover food as well. Baozi. Heavy breading. More than the meat. I would say that that is 70% baozi, 30% xiaolongbao. Jiaozi. Oh, that's good. The skin is chewier. And it reminds me of the Hangzhou jiaozi, but just minus the juice. What did you guys prefer? I actually prefer you guys. I'm going with the zheng jiao, the steamed. I like this so much more. I like the jiaozi. Yeah. So do you guys know more about food culture? Where do you think dumplings originated from? Near Shandong province, there used to be a general. And the weather was too cold, and his soldiers used to get frostbite all over their ears. He found this medicinal herb, so he made it into an ear shape. And then he put it in soup, and it just magically cured everyone's frostbitten ears. On that note, I think we gotta go to the next spot. So over here, we're gonna get some marinated halal beef. It's actually my favorite stuff on the street. It smells so good. Marinated halal beef. Oh, nice. I'm excited. And they have all other stuff, like cow intestine and lamb face. It's not cheeks, it's just like the face. Do you guys want the soft part or the hard part? I would like to try both. How about this? No, no, no. Oh my god, it's so pretty. Let me stick a little. It looks super Taiwanese, right? Kind of, yeah, like a night market thing. Yeah. You guys, this is a very traditional hui dish. Hui are one of the two different groups of Muslim Chinese people. Okay, I like it because there's like this garlic sauce you put on top. There's cilantro. Onions. There's onions. So there's two kind of types of beef. One is a little bit more adventurous, a little bit harder. AKA halal beef. Wow. That tastes like pastrami. Wow. Cold meats. Messing with that. Yo, this one, this piece is fire. It does kind of taste like the banquet dish, you know, the cold beef. That comes in like the eight treasure appetizer. But with more flavor though. Yeah. You guys are having the kidneys? This looks like a hutong brick. You guys eating kidneys? Yeah, we can be scared. I'm scared. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of that. It's very irony, right? I'm gonna taste it down with a fatty piece right now. That's really good. The kidney? Yeah, the kidney. Okay. So he has got it cranked up to the max volume. Before our next spot, we got to stop and get some jianbing. If you guys have seen, I actually did a jianbing episode in LA, in Pasadena. There's a spot called Me and Crepe. And I made my own jianbing. Oh, that is hot. You cannot tell how hot this is. May I say that this is... Very neat, yeah. It's probably the cleanest looking jianbing I've ever had. Jianbing. It's actually really well done. I like how it's still very crispy. The crepe is really, really soft. And the inside's crispy, but it's not too crispy. Good amount of everything in there. Chili, the sauce, the green onions. All right, let's try the really spicy one now. This is like mega deluxe. Oh my gosh. Version of a jianbing. You can see why this is a breakfast favorite. It's kind of like equivalent to a breakfast egg McMuffin with the carbs, with the meat, with some vegetables. Who throws some cheese on there? I think that's like a breakfast burrito right there. Jianbing. Let's pick out some fruit. I would say that just going around some hutongs made me realize that New York's Chinatown specifically is actually not that different from China. So we're gonna try some egg-filled pancakes. And the most interesting thing is that they have a magic... Not magic, but like a really cool oven. So basically they pan fry this first and then they would slide the pan out. Inside there's like a fire oven. So they would put it in there. So it gets like really crispy and really, really... What culture is this thing from? Han nationality. There used to be a lot of jidan guanbing carts. But since it just takes up a lot of time and energy to make these because you have to roll the dough like a million times and then bake it for like a million times. So there are not a lot of vendors who choose to sell them. This is a jidan guanbing. Shit, what a contraption. Wow. Everything but the kidneys and plate. Yeah, no kidneys, please. They've got the jidan guanbing. Canned egg biscuit. It's like a taco or a... I should say a gordita. It's hot. Let's go. It's kind of like a chong you bing, right? But much thicker. Wrapped around everything else. We're gonna try some lamb soup. Chinese people swear by lamb soup because in the summer you eat this and you sweat all the heat out and in the winter it keeps you warm. How would you do a lamb soup commercial? What would it be like? So delish. What is your experience with lamb soup, Fiona? Usually I'll have something similar to this with the noodles and I see if you want, they add vermicelli noodles in here. So it's like a mi fan. So there's a table next to it. So this one actually, there's no... This is not a yang rou tang mian, right? This is just yang rou tang. I just want to add some condiments. We have ground black pepper. Oh, definitely. This is MSG. Oh, shizzle. Give me that MSG. All right, guys. This is the lamb soup yang rou tang. This is going to keep you warm in the winter. Yeah. I feel like there's so much calcium in this bone broth. Do you know how long it's been stewing for or boiling for? The original soup that keeps getting reused to build on the next day's soup is 10 years old. So there's a chance that there are molecules from when I was here 10 years ago. A lot's changed in Beijing over 10 years, but not this broth. It kind of tastes like bone. Yeah, it does actually. Absolutely tastes like bone. I'm sure they use a lot of bone in there. Yo, this is really good. This reminds me of dipping in the salt in a Korean barbecue. Strips of tofu skin with sesame seed oil. I would almost call this like tofu leather. Flavor-wise, it's amazing. I don't think this is the traditional way to eat it, but I'm not a traditional guy. We don't have noodles in this soup, so I'm going to use the tofu as noodles. Some of the foods that I thought were funky, whether it's lamb soup or the tofu naan, aka tofu bread, it was less funky. This is the meat and the vermicelli. We got the vermicelli bread. How is it? Does it change it? Add to it? It's an addition. In my opinion, tastes closer to the Korean seolleongtang than it does pho. You guys must already all know that coffee culture is not that big in China. This place is called Bear Brew, and it's called Bear Brew because the owners here look like big friendly huggable bears. All right, everybody, that wraps it up for our hutong breakfast crawl. Shout out to Lost Plates for hooking it up. Shout out to Nicole. Without supervision, you're probably not making that happen. Even as an expat ABC foreigner here, I do not know any of the places that Nicole took us on this food tour. And you live in the hutong. Yes, I do. My micro takeaway is just that the food was less funky, even the things that theoretically should be funky, things that were fermented, things that people find gross. It actually wasn't that gross. My big picture takeaway is that people are still really like, to almost live a small village life in a big city is very interesting. It's very charming. I think my micro take on it was everything that we ate that was bready, I thought it was going to be oily, but on the contrary, not. My macro take on it was that breakfast is universal. We had all breakfast food, but most of it had dough. Most of it had eggs. And we all love that in the morning. I would say you can tell how hard Chinese people work by what they eat for breakfast here. But yeah, I think it's really cool that in a city like Beijing, and they're not necessarily poor, they're just like down to live a simple life. And they have nice... Some of them even have like... I see some nice cars parked. Yeah, it could be a rejection to modern day capitalism or... I don't think it's a rejection. I think it's just a preservation of a lifestyle that's outside of that. So cheers, guys, to the hutong. Thanks so much to the hutongs. All right, guys, that wraps it up for our hutong tour. In the comments below, let us know if there are any other interesting tours we should take around Asia, and definitely specifically China too. Until next time, we out in Beijing.