Just outside the temple, Steve and Fuchsia encounter a street vendor
selling a tantalizing and wholesome snack.
[Fuchsia Dunlop] So, Steve, in the old days everywhere you went in Chengdu, you'd find all these snack sellers
selling what they call "Xiaochi" — small eats.
These favorite little local snacks.
And I'm really excited to come across this one! Because this is, um....
This is the equipment carried by a traditional seller of flour bean curd, silken bean curd [...]
And they always used to carry these black and red wooden barrels with all their gear,
their flavorings, their bowls, but these days they're quite hard to find.
This is silken bean curd that's tofu that's not been pressed,
so it's really custard-y and light and melt-in-your-mouth.
Still warm. It would be freshly made.
[Speaking Chinese]
Soy sauce.
Chili oil.
[Fuchsia Dunlop] Inevitably. [Chef Steve Jilleba] Of course, right?
[Fuchsia Dunlop] Finely cut scallion.
A bit of [....]That's preserved lovely [....] Crisp and sour.
Deep-fried soybeans.
A bit of ground roasted Sichuan pepper for that lip tingling zing.
[Speaking Chinese]
A little bit of sugar.
[Speaking Chinese]
[Fuchsia Dunlop] Look at that. [Chef Steve Jilleba] Oh my God.
[Chef Steve Jilleba] So soft. [Fuchsia Dunlop] Yeah, so tender and slippy. Beautiful texture.
[Chef Steve Jilleba] Oh, the texture is amazing. Goes well against the the onions.
[Fuchsia Dunlop] And always crispy crunchy things on top. [Chef Steve Jilleba] Fantastic.
[Fuchsia Dunlop] This is one of the real traditional old Chengdu snacks.
In the past, there were so many of them, many which have become famous now.
Although you don't see them on the streets any longer, like dan dan noodles,
and there were Zhong Shui Jiao — the wonderful spicy dumplings that we've had
with soy sauce and garlic and chili oil and all kinds of delicious snacks....
And part of the sort of sounds of the old city of Chengdu,
we could walk around the street, you'd hear someone's shouting out.....
[speaks Chinese]
And so, it's just sort of — you could lie back in a teahouse and just listen and hear all the different sounds.
Some people knocking out little tunes on a piece of metal.
Ah, it makes me really nostalgic seeing this.
[Chef Steve Jilleba] So, you knew the sounds and then you knew the food.
[Fuchsia Dunlop] Yeah, yeah, yeah..... [Chef Steve Jilleba] That's fantastic.
[Fuchsia Dunlop] You'd know when to leap out of your seat and rush to get a bowl full of warm doha
[Chef Steve Jilleba] Very good.
[Narrator] To sample a variety of traditional street snacks in Chengdu, such as dumplings and noodles,
head for Jin Li Street where many vendors sell their specialties side by side.
Fuchsia takes Steve on an insider’s tour one afternoon and introduces him to some of her favorites.
[Fuchsia Dunlop] You know, Steve in the past, there were snack sellers all over the streets of Chengdu,
and they'd walk around the old lanes of the city calling out
what they were selling and people would come out of the houses to buy.
But with the redevelopment of modernization of Chengdu, a lot of these old streets have gone.
And so, a lot of the snack vendors have disappeared.
And one thing that the local government has done has been creating this rather touristy area,
of sort of traditional-style architecture,
but they've brought together a whole lot of people selling different Sichuanese traditional snacks.
Yeah, so it's a chance to see some of the traditional methods of production
and maybe taste a few interesting things.
In the Sichuan countryside, you get a lot of these kinds of snacks which are made of glutinous rice,
different kinds of cakes, some sweet, some salty,
and this one is wrapped in bamboo leaves.
[Speaking Chinese]
Yeah, so glutinous rice in brown sugar.
[Chef Steve Jilleba] Ah, very good. [Fuchsia Dunlop] Yeah.
[Fuchsia Dunlop] It has.... [Chef Steve Jilleba] ....Kind of a raisin-y type taste to it.
[Fuchsia Dunlop] Yeah! [Chef Steve Jilleba] Am I right? Did you get that out of it?
[Fuchsia Dunlop] I do. And it has one they call that [....], from the leaves — that clear bright fragrance,
that you get from sort of greenery.
[Chef Steve Jilleba] Very interesting. [Fuchsia Dunlop] Mmmm.
[Fuchsia Dunlop] Steve, this is a really old-fashioned Sichuanese street snack,
which used to be just demonstrated and sold at temple fairs,
because it's quite dramatic.
It's called "three cannon shots," Sān Dàpào, or "three big bangs."
So, you can see he's shaping these balls of warm cooked glutinous rice
and he's going to bang them into a basket full of toasted soy flour.
[Sound of balls bouncing]
And then tossing them in the toasted soy flour which has a nice kind of toasty flavor.
[Sound of balls bouncing]
A lot of these snacks used to be street snacks,
sold by individual vendors, either just on an everyday basis, or at special occasions like spring festival temple fairs.
But now you tend to find them on display only in places like this.
You can also eat them sometimes in restaurants where they do whole set menus of street snacks all brought together.
There you are.
The Chinese don't really — they don't have a dessert course at meals,
but sweets snacks can sometimes be eaten, you know, just on an occasional basis.
Quite messy.
[Chef Steve Jilleba] Great texture. Sesame seeds and then they got the little sweet — but they aren't very sweet at all.
[Fuchsia Dunlop] No, I mean compared with Western taste, the Chinese really don't have a sweet tooth.
At least in most parts of China. There are some areas where they do eat some sweet things, but....
Certainly in Chengdu. Sweetness is usually looked as a seasoning in other dishes, you know....
Sweet and Sour. There's complex chili vinegar....
You know, fish fragrant flavors.... But um, yeah....
And even the sweet snacks, yeah, they're nowhere near as sweet as French pastries or....
So, a bit of salt in the bottom of the bowl....
Brown roasted Szechuan pepper....
Vinegar. So, that's brown rice vinegar with a wonderful rich and mellow flavor,
bit like Italian balsamic, but not quite as strong.
And this is some soy sauce with a lovely dark color.
And now that's from the chili oil with the chili sediment.
Often in kind of folk cooking and street cooking, you'll get a lot of the chili sediment,
which gives it a coarser texture, but a more aromatic spicy flavor.
And he's just poached the rice noodles in the water just to warm them up....
There's celery, to bring a kind of freshness to it.
Spring onion, scallion, finely chopped....
Zha cai — and that's a very famous Chongqing pickled vegetable rather than like the Cha tsai we seen in the markets.
A sort of mustard tuber that's partly dried with and then preserved with spices.
So, that's a classic sour and hot, in this case, from brown rice vinegar and chili oil.
There's another kind of sour and hot flavor that you can get from vinegar and white pepper.
[Chef Steve Jilleba] They got the heat of it. Green onions. Really nice, nice flavor. This — got a little bit of a burn on the top of the tongue.
No, that's good. That's a good burn.
[Fuchsia Dunlop] And this kind of thing — like a sour and hot thing — is very refreshing on a muggy day, you know?