Chinese desserts

Someone was talking about how Chinese restaurants in their area always served pistachio ice cream.

Here, it's mostly almond and fortune cookies with orange slices. But I love it when they have mango pudding! It's so creamy and more like a flan than a pudding. And sometimes they have apple dumplings deep-fried and covered with a hard candy shell that almost breaks your teeth.

Dim sum desserts I am obsessed with are the eggy custard tarts and chewy sesame balls filled with red bean paste. Yum!

I was really trying NOT to miss that lovely chinese bakery in Oaklands Chinatown---but "eggy custard tarts and chewy seseme balls,filled with red bean paste" brought it all back---it was a corner building that they opened up entirely in good weather. If it was open---it was busy!!! Wonderfull tasty bites of stuff i have no idea what they were at all but they were GOOD!I would go there and point at stuff till the box was full and then pay them some rediculously cheap price. This would keep me in dessets and morning coffee knoshes for the week and i almost never had any idea at all what any of these things really were!

Janie---my wife--is particularly fond of bananna fritters---esp from one--now gone place--that stuffed fresh bananna segments with a sweet bean paste--then dipped them in a sweet tempura-like batter and served with a fruit sauce---they were really good--but not always available---evidently stuffing the banannas--which made them really so good---was a pain to do without having the bananna fall apart.

I love dim sum sweets, especially the egg tarts and those sesame balls. The most unusual chinese dessert I've had is the sweet red bean soup often served at the end of banquets. Kind of an acquired taste, but I've come to enjoy it - it's quite soothing and comfort-food-like.

quote:

Originally posted by Rhodes

I love dim sum sweets, especially the egg tarts and those sesame balls. The most unusual chinese dessert I've had is the sweet red bean soup often served at the end of banquets. Kind of an acquired taste, but I've come to enjoy it - it's quite soothing and comfort-food-like.

Years ago on a trip to NYC, I insisted on finding a good mom and pop place in Chinatown for dinner with a local friend. We found a grand little place, and when we came out, we noticed a Chinese bakery across the street. My Manhattan friend had never been in one and I had never heard of one, so we explored.

Perhaps accustomed to people who had never tried Chinese baked goods, the proprietor offered us a sample of everything we looked at. So many samples made us feel guilty and we bought the biggest bag of desserts I've ever seen. Everything we sampled was delicious. I wish I could remember the names of some of them. A few minutes later, across Canal Street, we bought some more baked goods from an Italian bakery.

We got uptown an hour and a half before our Broadway show began, and I wanted to visit a cafe and enjoy our bounty over coffee. My New York friend thought me nuts, but there was a cafe just across the street from our theatre. We went in and I introduced myself to the senior person on duty. I asked if we could buy coffee and enjoy the desserts we had collected. I told him I was a tourist and would be happy to pay extra for the priviledge. I also invited him to help himself to anything he liked. He smiled and said he'd like to make us some fresh coffee. We drank the good, fresh coffee, ate Chinese and Italian pastries, enjoyed the owner's warm company, and argued when he wouldn't let us pay. And when the play, a musical based on the life of Bob Fosse, was even better than we'd expected, Jan and I recognized that we had just shared a rare day.

JimInKy: Great story and that was very nice of you to offer to pay extra for the privilege of using the space.

Paul E. Smith
Knoxville, TN

The sweet red bean soup Rhodes talks about is only one of many variations of "sugar water" (a literal translation of the term "tong sui")--sweet soups--that we Chinese serve as desserts. And they are, contrary to what Rhodes notes, not unusual at all. In fact, some fo the common ones include:

1. Sweet Mung Bean and Barley soup flavoured with dried orange peel.
2. 8 treasures sweet soup including dried lotus seeds, dried white wood ears, beancurd sheets, barley, gingko seeds, dried flower petals etc in a clear sugar broth.
3. Black glutinous rice soup--thick, comforting and topped with rich coconut cream.
4. Sweet wheat porridge--served hot with palm sugar and rich coconut cream.
5. Peanut sugar water--peanuts ground into fine powder and cooked into a thick and rich sugary treat.
6. Almond soup--same principle as peanut sugar water
7. Dark 8 treasures soup--dried longans, dried lotus seeds, dried red dates etc in a clear but dark sugary broth.

Other Chinese desserts include fried pancakes stuffed with sweet red/aduki bean paste, mooncakes, light-as-air cookies called "soh" (many different types) and candied fruit and seeds.

Here are a couple of interesting articles:

one on Chinese biscuits (what you guys call cookies): http://www.shiokadelicious.com/shiokadelicious/2004/01/you_say_cookies.html

and one on Chinese sweets: http://www.shiokadelicious.com/shiokadelicious/2004/01/making_a_list_a.html

It's partly a photoblog too so I guarantee you'll be salivating madly

Ice cold Lychee Nuts, served with the syrup and a large almond cookie. Followed by a bag of dried Lychee Nuts for snacking on in the car in the way home from the restaurant.

The place I go to serves a milky tapioca soup. I can eat/drink two bowls [|)]

quote:

Originally posted by Jellybeans

The sweet red bean soup Rhodes talks about is only one of many variations of "sugar water" (a literal translation of the term "tong sui")--sweet soups--that we Chinese serve as desserts. And they are, contrary to what Rhodes notes, not unusual at all. In fact, some fo the common ones include:
....
Here are a couple of interesting articles:

one on Chinese biscuits (what you guys call cookies): http://www.shiokadelicious.com/shiokadelicious/2004/01/you_say_cookies.html

and one on Chinese sweets: http://www.shiokadelicious.com/shiokadelicious/2004/01/making_a_list_a.html

It's partly a photoblog too so I guarantee you'll be salivating madly

Great - thanks for the elucidation!

And I love that cold dessert soup of agar-agar cubes with fruit cocktail. Yum!

I know I mentioned the pistachio ice cream in a post, but those were the days of being served with silver-domed bowls and such (not when I posted, but when I recall the dessert options). Not having a tremendous sweet tooth, I do love steamed pork buns, which are something of a savory-sweet treat.