Great Mysteries of China: Discoverer of Fragrant Tofu
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Garreth Humphris
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4/21/2011 12:27:55 AM
There are a number of undesirable food sources around the world that people from other places cannot stomach - case in point, gorgonzola cheese.
I still cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would think that a quivering lump of rotten white creamy stuff that reeks up the place from 2 blocks away would be placed in someone's mouth!!!
Nature has given us a pretty good response mechanism - if something is red, it's probably poisonous (female lips, red wine, chocolate covered cherries - all poisons designed to delude men) and if something smells worse than a pair of nylon socks after a marathon in cheap Walmart running shoes then it shouldn't go anywhere near the mouth - I mean, that is why the nose is above the mouth isn't it, a gastrointestinal early warning system?
So how do people decide that eating gorgonzola be anything but deadly to your health and is there a museum somewhere with a statue of the first guy who tried gorgonzola? The bravest man alive... A homage to the vanquisher of evil fromage?
China too has at least one answer to the "it's so nasty, you wouldn't want to eat it - what the heck, we'll try it anyway" brigade of culinary curiosities and that is the incorrectly translated 'fragrant dofu' - funnily enough a quivering white lump of rotten white creamy stuff that can be detected within a 3 km radius.
I can tell you, if 'fragrant' defines the smell of an ocean outfall of raw sewage, or the waftings of a Louisiana swamp, then the description is correct!
One local shop that sells the stuff pensively describes it as 'odorous beancurd', which is a little closer to the mark but not by much!
My Chinese friend told me you 'learn to love it', but I don't really see how!! ...it sort of reminds me a bit of the frog in the boiling water story... You know the one, the frog jumps into a pot of boiling water and immediately jumps out again because, it's too hot... but if the frog jumps into a pot of cold water and is slowly made warmer and warmer, it makes no attempt to escape because it cannot detect the subtle increase in temperature of it's surroundings until... it is rescued by the lanky, pimply Biology student doing that horrible experiment!!! Maybe I am that frog and the water is just starting to get a little warmish!
So, if I get some of this stuff and place it a few blocks away and slowly, day by day have it inched closer to my home, then after about a month I should be able to tolerate the bicycle of the 'fried stinky tofu seller' cycling within a few hundred yards of me! That would be my aim anyway!
In fact, the stuff isn't too bad!!! Yes, it does smell really bad but the taste is only marginally more unpleasant than drinking cod liver oil straight from the bottle!
In my 'home' town it comes in 2 varieties, a plain steamed type found in restaurants and a seasoned fried variety that is found basted in recycled sewer oil and MSG on the streets in the evenings (incidentally, long after the emergency wards in the local hospitals have closed!). One of my foreign friends famously exclaimed 'man, this stuff tastes like the smell of a piggery', and I sort of had to agree with him on that one!!
But it is one of those culinary expeditions you have to try a least once when you are in China! The Chinese claim that you cannot call yourself Chinese if you have not walked on the Great Wall, but I'd like to add to this a dare/challenge to foreign visitors of China - you can't say you've been to China unless you have proof you have munched on 'fragrant dofu'. Post video footage on YouTube under 'Stinky Dofu Challenge' - I'll check it out next time I'm outside the great Firewall!
More culinary curios for you to discover are everywhere in China; for example, those luridly radio-active glowing 1000-year-old eggs?
You have to ask yourself - Who was the first person to eat those??
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They both smell like a sewer main has just burst immediately below your feet, thereby offering you the opportunity to enjoy eating something that smells like crap for your main course and then following it up with something that smells like crap for desert.
In spite of my whinging however, my wife has found a way to cook the fragrant dofu that tastes so good that I find myself holding my nose and forgiving it for its criminal smell. Not so, the stinky fruit.
You are probably referring to the Durian fruit when you mention the "stinky fruit". Davao, in Mindanao, Philippines is the land of Durian. The smell is just impossible to describe, smells literally like raw sewage or worse, but, amazing as it may sound, it is very tasty. The fruit is not only stinky, is also very ugly and full of sharp spikes, it is difficult to handle it without hurting your hands in the sharp needles. It is like nature made that a forbidden fruit, not supposed to be eaten, Gosh.
I love fruits, specially tropical fruits. Ugly alone means nothing, it can be ugly and tasty. Brazilian fruits are very ugly, but are usually delicious. You are probably familiar with the "Dragon Fruit" in China, very unpleasant looking fruit, but it tastes pretty good. I believe that comes from the family of the Kiwi fruit.
I have loved it years - when I first went to Malaysia about 20 years ago, I spent an afternoon eating it with vodka! Apparantly this is quite foolhardy because the combination of alcohol and durian can give you problems like 'instant death' since it affects you heartrate or something like that!
In Singapore, I sneak in to the Hawker centres for a Durian Ice drink - everyone else justs screws up their nose but I can't get enough of the stuff!
Other dishes included a mixed mushroom concoction, a stir fry, and get this - stinky vegetable. This was the first time I'd heard of "stinky vegetable" and while it was strange, being an inedible shell (maybe husk is a better word) with a soft center, it tasted great, in spite of the smell which approximate the stinky tofu, although not as seriously nasty. Resting in a great sauce the stinky vegetable is taken in your mouth where you squeeze the core out with your teeth, then spit out the shell.
Soon enough I'm sure I'll succumb to the stinky fruit, especially since Garreth has mentioned it coming in an ice drink. During China summers I'd probably drink ox blood so long as it came in ice.