Slippery, Slimy, Chewy: The Texture of Chinese Food
Fermented black beans and fresh almonds
At dinner, our friend Alice picked something up with her chopsticks and popped it in her mouth. Her faced changed. One minute she was chatty and laughing and then suddenly scrunching up her face in utter confusion.
“What the hell?”
We asked her if she’s okay. She swallowed.
“What was that? It was kind of slippery, a bit slimy but chewy too.”
Our Chinese friends nodded in appreciation, thinking it was a compliment. None of the other Westerners took a bite from the dish - a jellyfish salad.
To one group she has described the worst qualities of a food: something undercooked or raw; to the other, a perfect trio of texture.
Texture is taken very seriously in Chinese cuisine. Only in recent years has the pretentious word ‘mouthfeel’ has started cropping up in Western vernacular, but in Chinese, kou gan, or mouthfeel, is a key element of food that goes back thousands of years. We fail to fully understand the delicacies of Chinese cooking if we don’t know how to appreciate mouthfeel. I have to admit, even I struggle with some things: the soft chicken cartilage in barbecues just doesn’t do it for me; a sea cucumber is fine but not something I would happily pay the price for; a chicken’s foot, while not unpleasant, is still a bit of a fuss for my poor little English mouth.
Indeed, fuss is sometimes exactly the point. Weaving your tongue and teeth around a knobbly toe, finding the joints and then pulling the bones and cartilage apart and crunching it all between your teeth is pleasing for Chinese mouths; it’s all the more delicious because of the work.
But some texture I can appreciate: the gooey centre of a thousand-year old egg, encased in the translucent jelly; rubbery seaweed; slippery potato starch noodles, the list is more yay than nay for me now, although it took time. Even the first time I had a sweet rice dumpling (similar to a mochi) I was utterly confused by the chewy, sticky texture.
In Western restaurants we praise a chef if a sauce is silky and smooth and if their meat and vegetables are tender. These qualities come from gentle heat and slow-cooking techniques. Tender vegetables would be considered overcooked in Chinese cooking (even al dente might be considered overdone), and where vegetables might be trimmed of hard stalks and veins in a Western restaurant, Chinese dishes embrace the tough chewiness alongside the tender leafs.
It seeps into the world of fruit too. I’m seen as a complete lunatic for picking up the soft pears, peaches and plums. Most Chinese are hunting for firm ones. They like the crunch of an underripe peach. The softness has no surprising mouthfeel.
Most Westerners love Chinese food, but the food we are exposed to in the West is tiny compared to what the entire Chinese cuisine is. Wok-fried food, dumplings, bao buns and chow mien, they’re all the same texture. Crunchy Sichuan pickles, chewy abalone, bony chicken or the raw, gritty texture of lotus root rarely make it into Chinese restaurants around the world, but to truly appreciate the depth of Chinese food, we really have to understand texture too.