Got Buns?

In order for me to have left with any sense of closure or pride, my last meal in China had to be good. I wanted something particular to China, yet comforting, filling, one-person sized, and under 14 RMB (appx. 2 USD). The solution was surprisingly simple: STREET FOOD!

The neighborhood I lived in was a street food jungle – skewers, dumplings, noodles, savory pancakes, chestnuts, chicken feet – you name it. (Yes, chicken feet. Pickled. From what I’ve heard, they’re good.)

But I had something particular in mind – steamed buns. Chinese steamed buns can be eaten for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, and are pretty easy to find in America; just check out the frozen food aisle at your local Asian grocery market. Sure, prepackaged buns can satisfy a starchy craving. But there’s something about freshly made, bamboo-steamed buns made by a smiling lady and sold at a shoddy street stand that really hit the spot. While I don’t have any pictures of the stands themselves (or the nice ladies), the steamers look like this:

Oodles of buns are steamed together and the steamers are stacked, one on top of the other (as per the right side of the picture). Buns can be either sweet or salty, and generally the street vendors sell the following flavors: red bean, pickled vegetable, regular vegetable, and meat. The fancier vendors might have black sesame or chive and egg, but my favorites are red bean and regular vegetable.* So, red bean and regular vegetable I got, with an ear of corn that was steamed alongside the buns.** The damage? A cool $0.50, which I paid for with the remaining change that I was trying to use up before leaving.
I enjoyed my unadorned meal alone in my empty apartment on my mysteriously stained bed (it came with the apartment).

Neither photogenic nor fancy, but I really didn’t miss either of these qualities as I munched away the last meal of a monumental experience…especially not with a bedroom view like mine.

*I call this kind of bun “regular vegetable” to differentiate it from the pickled vegetable variety, but in Chinese, it’s simply called a vegetable bun, and each vendor has a different take on it. Some use lettuce, some carrot, some mushroom – my favorite vendor makes her veggie buns using lightly fried cabbage and shitake.

**A word on Asian corn: it’s good, but it takes some getting used to, if your corn palate is American. While American corn (bless you for being so delicious) is sweet and juicy, corn found in most Asian countries is drier and subtler in both taste and color. The first time I had it I hated it kind of a lot, but after a few go-arounds it grew on me, to the point that I truly believed it rivaled my love for American corn. Then I came back to America and remembered what I had been missing.

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