Best Taiwanese Dishes

My favorite restaurant in Zhuzihu does a killer three cup sweet potatoes.

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I really like the local take on kimchi. A sweet japanese slant that is barely fermented. Love it!

I also really love betel nut flowers. As a cold dish is WAY better. Be sure to tell the store to not put mayonnaise/cream sauce and especially DO NOT put those crap chocolate sprinkles on them. Im dumbfounded why they take what could be a fine dining veg and lower it like that. But request from the beginning. Its an amazing dish!

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They do a little bamboo stick filled with pork rice in Wulai that is undeniably tasty. (Apparently the rice was domesticated in china, and the pigs in the near east, but what can you do.)

Also don’t mind the salty water chicken. 鹽水雞 (no doubt those are the three incorrect characters) apparently that kind of superior KFC was domesticated most likely in Vietnam :grin:

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Ooh, not a fan of that stuff… :grimacing:

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I ate this in Hualien and was surprised when I first saw it, thinking “a Taiwanese tamale?” It was homemade and brought to a gathering. So it’s available in restaurants?
Thanks for the correct spelling; it sounded like “qinabu” when my friend said it but now I found the characters online using the Cinavu spelling (吉拿福)

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Yes! Zhu fan! It also has millet as a key grain. Great stuff!

Guy

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I’ve heard it described as the result of a nosebleed with snot and boogers.

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I guess the blood is that disgusting sweet gloopy “chili sauce” they put on it?

Yup, Haishan sauce (海山醬). The same stuff they put on a migao tube.


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If you guys hate the modified oyster omlettes so much, you should find the original oyster omlettes.

If you goto authentic Taiwanese seafood restaurants, such as 竹樂食堂 in Hsinchu city, you can find these authentic, non-bastardized versions of ô-á-tsian. A lot less goop and way more oysters and veggies.

If you goto traditional Taiwanese seafood restaurants in Tainan, order ô-á mī-suann (oyster thin noodles) and be surprised that it’s a stir-fry dish and not goopy soup noodles.

It looks simple, but it’s packed with flavor and definitely changed how I think about oyster thin noodles.

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I was actually thinking of this stuff, but it’s all the same to me.

image

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Looks better, but still a bit gross to be honest. Maybe I just don’t like oysters.

1000% better when drier. I mean, we are s
Literally still eating bathroom pipe and formosa plastics filters, but if we do that it should be drier…not goopy. I have the same arrogance with stinky tofu. The rotten soup dishes are just offensive!

Hey, I bought that once! I love hot sauce.

And that may be the only bottle of hot sauce I have ever thrown away because it had (long since) expired, rather than because I used it up.

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I don’t like stinky tofu but actually prefer the soup if I have to eat it

Not an amazing endorsement. That pic does look almost jelly like.

Pi dan when fried is surprisingly good

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Hope @Marco doesn’t kick me out as off-topic, but this brought me down memory lane. There used to be a small restaurant near NSYSU whose lady owner was a waishengren making a special type of noodles from Guilin with slices of crispy pork belly and pickled vegetables (all hand-made). We students would queue there during lunch hours not just for the noodles and the pork, but because of the spicy sauce that was… I can’t describe it… the best mixture of flavour and spiciness that I have ever had. I heard that it closed down during the years that I was not in Taiwan because the lady owner got sick. I wish her well, wherever she is now :cry: She would always give extra noodles and chit chat with us while cooking.

All this story to say that Taiwanese food is naturally a “fusion” and the product of the island’s complex history. For someone like me, who loves to eat spicy and hates the sweet red bean sauces that people down south call “spicy” :rofl: :rofl:, the food made by waishengren always has a special place. That’s probably why I love eating in Taipei: the biggest influx of waishengren on food over the decades.

Hell yes, I second that. Aboriginal food uses a mix of herbs that give a unique flavour to food.

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Agreed . I like food that doesnt rely on sauces to make them good. If they arent good without pools of sauce, they still arent good with them. I love a lot of aboriginal foods. Once they up their plant identification game and be a little less genocidal on their meat products ,i am all in. For now i avoid wild vegetables!

Kinda like McDonald’s fries… tastes great even without ketchup.

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