Tasty Taiwanese Snacks and Drinks | Learn Chinese Now

Hey everyone, today we're going to be talking about Taiwanese snacks because someone left a comment asking us to do so. That's right, they wanted to know what kind of snacks we have in Taiwan and I go back to Taiwan every couple of years and every time I go back I'll also always go to the night markets and one of my favourite desserts, like sweets in these night markets is basically something called liáng yuán. We're going to show you a picture. You may see them when you go to Taiwan. Basically they're these tiny little kind of translucent balls and they have all sorts of different fillings in them like taro, mung beans, cantaloupe and all sorts of different fillings. They're my absolute favourite. They're kind of not too sweet and they're very cooling especially in the hot summer night so they're my favourite Taiwanese snack. 有没有哈密瓜的? 哈密瓜,绿色的有,有哈密瓜的。 Yes, it's very nice. That would be my favourite. What about you Ben? What do you like to have in Taiwan? Well, you know, in Taiwan I used to frequent this beef noodle establishment and beef noodle in Chinese is called 牛肉面. This isn't really a snack food but it's one of my favourite foods so we'll include it in there. And so you order this 牛肉面 but contrary to what you would think, 牛肉面 actually the basic one doesn't actually have any 牛肉, beef in it. You've got to order 红烧牛肉面, at least at that restaurant. So 红烧 is like braised, right? Or like... Something like that, yeah. So I remember the first time I ordered 牛肉面 I turned to the guy next to me, I'm like, Dude, 牛肉面怎么没有牛肉? And he was like, Stupid 老外. You know, and then they explained to me and the boss at that place became my friend and he introduced me to a lot of other food including 豆皮 which in this picture of my Taiwanese 牛肉面 you can see the 豆皮 next to it it's kind of like the skin from 豆浆 that drink. Soy milk, basically. So they make these in really large quantities. So we're going to put up some pictures and show you what they actually do. So they grind up the soybeans and make soy milk out of them and then they just basically let it out in the air and as the skin forms on top of the soy milk they peel it off and then the process starts again so they can keep taking these soy skins off the milk and it's really nice. They can cook it in all sorts of different ways. So you get a nice sauce on there Speaking of savory foods I really like to have Taiwanese oyster omelettes. I grew up calling them 蚵仔煎 and in Chinese characters it's 蚵仔煎 so it's basically oyster omelettes and they usually mix the omelette with some kind of glutinous flour so it's like this translucent sticky kind of goopy food and it's really really nice. I do also like another one that I know kind of makes Ben squirm. I really like pig blood cake so 猪血 is pig blood 糕 is cake so basically it's this glutinous savory dish that has pig blood in it and I've grown up eating it and I really like it. Every time I go back to Taiwan I try to have some. Yeah that I managed to avoid it for most of my time in Taiwan. You didn't get the real experience. Well one time a guy was like hey you got to just try it just try one bite so I took one bite it was disgusting but then he was like well since you've taken one bite you don't want to waste it you know that's important traditional Chinese culture can't waste food so you got to eat the whole slice you know ah it was horrible very disgusting I actually just like plain pig blood like the that's equally disgusting the coagulated it's really nice you have them in like soup in this hot and sour soup they always have them in hot and sour soup and when I have hot and sour soup overseas I never ever have get to have them in those dishes so it's quite a shame Okay well let's go and talk about some desserts now so a dessert I really like is sha bing which is the shaved ice and they we got a picture of it for you here they put this ice and then it's all like little shards of ice and then they put all this fruit and some ice cream on top of that it's really really good they also have actually they have all sorts of different toppings like they can have taro or they can have like red bean green beans I think Taiwanese people just like a lot of different fillings and different toppings on a lot of things and you just mix and match to see what you like and this is a great food to eat kind of like outside in the night markets or when it's a nice hot evening you go out and eat this sha bing on the street yeah it's awesome it's really nice so we'll talk about a few more desserts another one that's kind of unusual don't worry not all Taiwanese people eat this but it's a rou song bing qi lin so rou song this is kind of like shredded dried beef yeah we call them pork floss I think that's how it's called oh it's pork it's not beef it's pork no it's pork yeah well normally it's pork yeah so yeah we normally translate it as pork floss rou song bing qi lin ice cream so it's a shredded pork ice cream basically pork flavored ice cream yeah and they were selling it at this store in Taipei and my friend tried it and almost threw up and I never had the courage to try it I kind of do want to try it now that we've talked about it I just want to see how rou song would actually taste immediately because growing up we ate a lot of rou song in sandwiches or even on top of rice as well yeah it's a very common it's nice it's a nice food but I don't think mixing it with ice cream would really be it's kind of wacky yeah what else do you have? so and if you guys go to Taiwan and you encounter this rou song bing qi lin store and you want to try it try some and tell us how it tastes leave us a comment tell us what it's like okay so last year I went to Tainan which is you know tai and then nan means south it's like a big city in the south of Taiwan and I had their famous dou hua which is a it's a savory it's like a tofu but it's very very soft yeah it is tofu right it's like tofu pudding it's almost pudding like pudding like and you can have savory and you can have sweet but the one in Tainan is a sweet one dou hua and you can have all sorts of fillings with it like red bean hong dou green beans du dou and zhen zhu which brings us to our next famous Taiwanese Ben was very nice today actually got me a drink after I complained that he didn't treat his co-hosts well so this means I don't need to promise you I mean I have to stick around for a little while okay so this type of drink is called zhen zhu nai cha so yeah these black things are the zhen zhu yeah which means like precious pearls but you know it's made from tapioca and it's like chewy I think most of you would have had this drink but if you haven't tried it it's actually really nice it's kind of chewy and the tea is just milk tea but they have different flavors maybe you have something else yeah this is my qq tea kind of thing what does qq mean? you actually see this description for food a lot in Taiwan qq is kind of like a it's like describing the consistency of like a hen q yeah it's kind of like chewy chewy but not quite have this kind of resistance to it yeah so Taiwanese people like to eat a lot of q q de dong xi q de dong xi so this one is which is passion fruit and then qq which is the chewy some kind of which is iced tea iced tea yeah and this was one of my favorite drinks in Taiwan and I used to drink it a lot so there's an introduction to a few Taiwanese snacks and if you guys know some good ones you can leave us a comment tell us what you've been eating if you visited Taiwan yeah don't be too scared try whatever you you know you come across I think even if you just have one bite at least you can say to your friends afterwards I tried this I tried that otherwise you're gonna go home and thinking oh I only tried the safe looking stuff but it wasn't too adventurous so I'd encourage you to try a lot of different things cool well thanks very much for watching guys see you next time