相機後吃: Camera Eats Last
Lo-fi Taiwanese Food Blogs, Empress Hot Sauces, Ghost Pepper Soy, and a Recipe for a Spicy Taiwanese Marinade for your July 4th Chicken
This is Yun Hai Taiwan Stories, a newsletter about Taiwanese food culture by Lisa Cheng Smith, founder of Yun Hai Taiwanese Pantry. If you are here but haven’t subscribed, please sign up below!
This month, I reflect on a personal fear of posting text-only recipes and share some lo-fi Taiwanese food blogs where text ≥ image. Then I announce two very exciting product launches and share a recipe for a Taiwanese July 4th Marinade. And, we introduce Polina Tai; her in situ photos of Taiwan will be featured on our instagram the next two weeks.
Common Marketing Wisdom® tells me I should put the product launches first, but I didn’t. Just scroll all the way down or jump to our site here:
相機食後
Camera Eats Last
When I started this newsletter, I intended to produce a recipe video every month. That downgraded into a more reasonable ambition to take a “shareworthy” iPhone photo, then quickly disintegrated into a loose promise to post something (anything) to my Instagram stories once a week.
Guess what! Still totally unrealistic for me!
The production of visual content has been a personal obstacle to sharing food and recipe writing. It occurs to me that many home cooks who have the desire to share their family recipes and day-to-day discoveries may be in the same boat. The casual type-up is not enough to fill most blog templates—impossible to thumbnail for an instagram post and won't work in a gallery format. Text-friendly out-of-the-box infrastructure doesn't really exist anymore for amateur publishers, at least not in a way that's competitive with image-heavy platforms. The amateur recipe post relies on a cover image. What are we missing out on?
Generalizing here, but recipes don't require images for good results; both vintage and contemporary cookbooks reflect that. Fuchsia Dunlop's Land of Plenty has only a few color plates per chapter. Carolyn Philips' tome of Chinese and Taiwanese cooking, All Under Heaven, is entirely unphotographed. My favorite recipes are stained and crumpled printouts of emails from my mother. A beautiful image isn't a prerequisite to a beautiful recipe. And a beautiful recipe doesn't always make a beautiful image. Brutti ma Buoni, you know?
Back before Martha Stewart was (one has to assume) banned from posting personal pictures to her Twitter account, her feed circa 2013 was full of less-than-professional food photography. Her unashamed photo behavior impressed upon me that the personal experience of making and eating food has very little to do with how it's captured. 100% believe her on the below, by the way. Laugh at the pond water, but also imagine the cedar smells wafting up from the raw matsutake warmed slightly by the savory broth absorbed by a silky porridge, and tell me you don’t wish you were eating that.
I should qualify this a bit; I love great food imagery, and deeply appreciate the talent and time it takes to create excellent imagery for excellent recipes. Choo-choo-ca-chew’s Taiwanese recipe compendium might be one of the greatest resources on the English-speaking internet. This article is about embracing the inner me and being unafraid to measure up. From this moment, I vow to post more recipes in a text-only format. I hope you will too, and that they flood the internet like bulletpoints on a Geocities page.
Lo-Fi Taiwanese and Chinese Food Blogs
In my search across the internet for obscure Taiwanese and Chinese recipes, I've collected a few favorite sites that are heavy on the .txt and low on the .jpg, mostly because they were designed and launched before the current image-heavy era. Cooking doesn’t go out of date, and I’ve found some of my best information at the below sites.
Jodie's Kitchen
kitchen.j321.com
Mouth-wateringly styled Gua Bao and Beef Noodle Soup recipes are not hard to come by on the internet, but Jodie's site is the only place I've seen a recipe for Taro Purple Sticky Rice and Sweet Licorice Tomato, plating left to the imagination. Jodie runs a cooking school in Taiwan and she is a quick reply by email if you shoot her a question. I read all her posts and instantly became a more intuitive cook.
Micky's Favorite Taiwanese Recipes
mickyrecipes.blogspot.com
A tiny and sadly defunct site with simple but passionately collected Taiwanese recipes, broken images, and little gems of ingredient wisdom. This is where I learned that most sweet potato starch is labeled as tapioca starch in Chinese grocery stores in America.
Chinese Soup Pot
chinesesouppot.com
Last post April 2013. This sophisticated, encyclopedic tome of Chinese soups feels like a living relic from a now dead civilization light years away. Last post 2013? What happened? Why doesn't anyone ever seem to know they're about to stop posting, forever? Will this happen to me?
Clove Garden
clovegarden.com
Impressively detailed one-pager on fermenting Xue Cai at home and a very legit Amaranth with red fermented tofu recipe by Andrew Grygus. Self-actualizing the internet the author would like to see in the world.
Clovegarden was conceived in 2004 as a commercial site, selling stuff for a living. That prospect has become more and more remote as time passes and the need passes - though it is still possible. Should this site become commercial in any way, all the information resources, existing now, or added in the future, will remain free.
The site is still under intensive development, though it gets harder to see that as the site becomes larger and larger - and a lot of time is currently being spent updating old pages to current standards - much has changed since 2004. It currently contains over 5000 indexed pages and at least twice that in photos.
…
It is possible other people's content will be included in the future, but to date nobody has expressed any interest.
Madame Huang's Kitchen
carolynjphillips.blogspot.com
Carolyn Phillips, author of All Under Heaven and keeper of the AMAZING TREASURE OF A BLOG Madame Huang's Kitchen has retired the old blog in favor of a new visual format. Visit the old one and read it all to absorb much Taiwanese cooking knowledge from her time living there. Pray that it never goes offline and then subscribe to the new one, too.
New Products! Empress Hot Sauce and Ghost Pepper Soy
Now that I've admitted to being text-based, I can announce two exciting new product lines and comfortably share my unphotographed recipe for a Taiwanese-style spicy BBQ Chicken Marinade, just in time for the 4th of July.
Empress Hot Sauce
Empress makes naturally fermented, small batch hot sauces with hand-selected chili peppers and locally sourced produce from Taiwan. All are additive free, gluten-free, and vegan.
Denner and Jane founded Empress Hot Sauce in Taipei in 2020. They scoured markets for locally grown fruit and worked with farmers from Pingtung and Taitung to get the right chili peppers. The early production runs were made in an off-hours kitchen in Taipei. Since then, they've become popular in markets and restaurants around the city. This is their first major export and we’re proud to be representing them!
We’re launching all three flavors: Pineapple Miso, Pomegranate, and Irwin Mango (in order of 辣). These are a Taiwanese take on American-style hot sauces, equally at home on your Al Pastor Tacos and your Ba Zhang.
Maruso Ghost Pepper Soy Paste
Maruso is the US branch of one of Taiwan’s oldest soy sauce producers, founded in 1909 during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. They still make some of their soy sauce the old way, with black soy beans (no gluten) and terracotta vats.
Ultra special to Maruso is their Ghost Pepper Soy Paste. The pepper is subtly worked through the sauce, providing a a well rounded flavor with a building heat. The ghost pepper flavor shines through but is not oppressively hot. Perfect for marinades or adding a little 辣 to any dish.
Recipe: Spicy Taiwanese-Style BBQ Chicken
I created this to try to nail down the night market bbq chicken. This isn't that (I think I need some licorice powder) but it's damn good! Sweet, savory, tangy, spicy. The acid and the salt act as a tenderizer and a brine and this will keep even skinless boneless breasts relatively juicy.
Ingredients
2 lbs chicken parts (thighs with skin and bone in plz)
Marinade Ingredients
1/2 c. Vat Bottom Soy Sauce
2 T soy paste (ghost pepper for spicy, firewood for not, or a combo)
1 T rice wine
1 T rice vinegar
3 tsp sesame oil
3 T Taiwanese black sugar (or conventional brown sugar)
3 scallions, cut into 1" sections and lightly smashed
3 cloves garlic, smashed
1 T mirin
1/4 - 1/2 t Empress Hot Sauce of your choice, to taste (Pineapple Miso, Pomegranate or Mango, listed in order of hotness)
Steps
Mix all the marinade ingredients together. Since we're making it spicy, add the spicy ingredients (Empress Hot Sauce and Ghost Pepper soy paste) at the end, while you taste. Adjust for your desired spice level.
Marinate the chicken for at least 4 hours or overnight.
Then just grill as normal, flipping every so often, until 160 F (white meat) or 165 F (dark meat) internal temp is achieved.
While the chicken is grilling, boil down the marinade until it coats the back of a spoon. Use this as a basting liquid on the grilled chicken in the last 5 or so minutes of grilling.
@eeatscoast Instagram Takeover
Finally, keep an eye out for an instagram takeover the next two weeks by Polina Tai of @eeatscoast on @yunhaishop. Polina spent four months in Taiwan earlier this year and did what I could never do—post daily photos of great Taiwanese food without concern for natural light or the perfect overhead angle. Great photos and great information.
Camera Eats Last,
Lisa Cheng Smith
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Thank you for sharing all these great resources! I'm new here but love what you do already.