Breakfast that don't suck

Coffee and cigarettes for me.

Quote from: Calach Pfeffer on October 26, 2013, 03:01:31 AM

One snack I used to tolerate was what's known around here as the Shandong Jianbing. A large, thin pancake of, I suppose it must be a rice flour batter, is cooked on the spot, then optionally an egg is cracked over it and smeared about, and the whole thing folded in half, and a brown paste of some kind is applied along with a sprinkling of some finely diced green, I guess, shallot, and lastly a crisp wafer of some kind, around which the whole thing is folded up into a wrap. For a while there the dude who made them was using a paste that had some kind of herb seasoning, or seemed to, that added a fullness to the flavor, and they were tasty suckers. Then his paste changed or his chillis changed or he finally washed his hands or something. They were still good, but they'd lost that nearly Italian zest.

Yes, I know this food well. Here they also put in some meat or a sausage as well. Love them. 6RMB and I'm good to go in the morning.

There's lots of variants, and its pretty much China wide now, basically following Calach's excellent description. There's also a chain called Bing Boys operating in Australia: around $8 = 45rmb!!
In Shanghai it was my son's daily breakfast as a 4-5 year old. We went back to the old uni. 2 years ago-he was 13 then- and the danbing lady remembered him.

Yeah used to eat those sometimes in Zhejiang but it still can't compete with toast and marmite and fresh orange juice or a nice UK Fryup.

They used to be 2.5 around here. Even with the huotui. (Or maybe 3 - I may be misremembering.) Competition sprang up a few years back in the form of two other cooktops producing what in my opinion was an inferior copy. Still, the dude diversified. He has optional huiguo rou to add now and some other stuff that might, bizarrely, be noodles. Still seems more like a luncheon object than a fast breaker.

I went supermarket shopping today and once again despaired at the packaged crap available. I don't know what it's like in other places, but here there's a vast array of what seems to be basically the same product - bite sized, preserved and overly syrupy... stuff. Technically, the number of products is huge, but somehow not. They are to eating what instant noodles are to dining.

Pfft, I can't substantiate the opinion. It's just a sense of no variety.

Break...fast?

 


However, I have found western Oatmeal brands here in mid-sized stores. A dollop of peanut butter and some dried fruit makes for a solid belly bomb.

Or crack an egg in a bowl and soak a piece of toast. Toss it a few times in a pan, smother with ketchup and you can walk and go!

I also have to second the opinion concerning Baozi - there's a place by my house where the rou bao swim in grease but the qing cai xiang gu bao a perfectly delightful. If you can find cong you bing give that a whirl!

I concur that Ji dan bing is so totally delicious if maybe not the most nutritious.
Though it seems I am quite fortunate as by me I can still get one with you tiao, that cracker bread and some meat in it all for 3 RMB with an overall size much larger than what I have had in the bigger cities when I visited them.

I can also still pick up bao zi for less than 1 RMB.

I'm not a fan of traditional breakfast foods in Asia. I usually just have fruit, yogurt, toast, or cereal or oatmeal.

In China I sometimes bought 菜包.