[纯素／云南] "Traditional" Vegan food in Yunnan, China: the Basics.
26 November 2016 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
hey guys this may be the least creative
video you've ever seen on YouTube but a legitimate question I get is what the hell does vegan cuisine look like in Yan'an and this is asking really about what is authentic Yunnan style cuisine and then within authentic Yunnan cuisine what dishes happen to be vegan what type of food happens to be vegan right so if you go to a vegan restaurant in Yunnan this is not what you're gonna get some of the things you're gonna see here at a normal vegan restaurant actually if you ask for them verbally they probably can't make it but it's not on the menu this is really traditional stereotypical authentic unities food that happens to be vegan and these photographs were taken at a non vegan restaurant although the particular dishes are absolutely 100% vegan we'll go through them one by one first up Cong sin tai hollow heart vegetable from my perspective there's almost no point in trying to use the names of the different green vegetables here precisely partly because there are local dialect issues involved with partly this is a great example there are at least two different species of plant that are referred to with this same name so to genuinely different species but if you order this so what plant you get the flip a coin you're not really sure what you're in yet if you ask if they have this but this is really traditional local food first and foremost you're gonna notice in a sense there is no sauce right this is just this type of green vegetable and again I don't know you'll get something resembling this but maybe not the same species of plant tossed in hot oil in a wok not even that much oil it's oil and water if you actually look at the liquid there you can see little beads of oil and that's because the liquid is mostly water when you lift it up you know you lift up out of the bowl with your chopsticks the liquid drips off of it and then you mix it into your rice in your bowl in some ways this style of cuisine is more monastic than what you might get in a Buddhist monastery I personally dig it I really enjoy sitting down and eating a whole meal which is nothing but white rice and undercooked green vegetables does the other gonna say if you're British or something you will actually think this is undercooked the style of cuisine again typically they really toss this through hot wok quickly so it's kind of halfway between a salad green and a cooked vegetable it's not like a European idea where you cook you know peas until they're they're completely dead to their core and you know for that same reason I mean actually even just you know what just look at the bits of garlic the bright white garlic on screen there to call that cooked this is pretty close to raw garlic right so you get the sense these greens have been wilted but in a sense not really fully cooked so that is very typical of Yunnan cuisine and it's also not that great for present preventing communicable diseases right you can you can get sick from eating this stuff keeping it all the way real this is another green vegetable I eat this kind of stuff all the time here I have no idea what this is called in Chinese or English or what species it is I go into restaurants and I basically ask them what kind of green vegetables do you have and we take it from there this is a mung bean soup this is a traditional or typical vegan soup I'm sorry again obviously it's not listed on the menu as vegan this type of diced vegetable and bean soup or stew I guess you got to ask 10 times are you sure there's no pork fat are you sure there's you know you're not throwing in some bits and pieces of meat or something but this was absolutely hundred-percent vegan so in this case I'm guessing what they do basically is they stew the beans and then toss in the chopped up green vegetables and again the chopped up green vegetables they're not really that cooked which is great I mean it's healthy but they're you know they're they're kind of wilted rather than really thoroughly cooked and again like it's hard to describe it as having a sauce it really just tastes like it's ingredients they throw together some green vegetables some salt a little bit of oil you can look at the surface of the liquid it's not that much oil and it is what it is you know the ingredients just all speak for themselves so very very different from other regional cuisines of China very different from what you stereotypically get in Hong Kong I have lived in Hong Kong in the past or the style of cuisine that was exported from Hong Kong to Canada and San Francisco in many parts of the Western world normally every restaurant even a meat a meat eating restaurant will have a couple of different types of mushrooms available and sometimes they'll have photographs of them sins of a shelf we actually go up and look at the fresh mushrooms and pointed the ones you want and this is what they'll do with them this is really again Yunnan style there they're cooked they've just been tossed in a little bit again mostly water you're not actually looking at much oil they're they're tossed in a pan with boiling water and a little bit of oil and salt and some other vegetables and again even though the mushrooms you can see they've wilted look at the other vegetables look at the red peppers they're they're almost raw right they're not even compared to Mexican cuisine if you had red peppers of that Mexican cuisine they wouldn't look like a salad pepper they would look thoroughly cooked and here they're not so again I do like this cuisine I can say both good and bad about it here is a map odo food Mapo tofu will unless you're in a vegan restaurant it will always be made with some meat unless you ask for it verbally to admit without meat it obviously doesn't need meat and here again this tofu is not very thoroughly cooked they've they've tossed it through with basically a red chili sauce and the main flavor here is actually not the red sauce the main source of flavor here is what we call Szechuan pepper which you can see left-of-centre there's a black dust that is Szechuan pepper there are some people who hate Szechuan pepper I don't know why but very much your sort of traditional and distinctive element of Yunnan cuisine made perhaps especially here in the capital city here in could Ming but the other dishes you've seen I would say were a hundred percent typical of what you get by the side of the highway anywhere in your name province you're the only vegan options here you get by that side of the highway ian's this dish in particular map of dou foo there are many variations I would just say this it's not a narrowly defined dish you get quite a variety what if you order this dish you're gonna get something red you get something involving tofu and you have to specify that you don't want any pork you don't want any Me's and then this but what it looks like and what it tastes like will vary quite a lot there's another famous dish year that I wanted to photograph for this video but the restaurant didn't have it but it is a distinctive Yunnan dish and they do not use this any of the standard words for grandmother in Chinese there are many many words in the dictionary meaning grandmother and the Chinese language but there's a local dialect word a local Yunnan hua word that is not in the dictionary and they combine that with the word for potatoes and that again is one of those dishes were normally any traditional Yunnan restaurant will have their own way of making it for better or for worse so grandmother's potatoes in general people in Yunnan eat a lot of potatoes and they eat a lot of um you know red tomatoes they eat a lot of tomatoes in the diet which is again unlike other parts of China however this meal we did not have tomatoes or potatoes I think that's because yesterday we had a lot of we had a lot of potatoes on the table it started only the day before these these photographs were taken so that's it folks I mean you know it's simple it's pure in a sense like you can taste the ingredients very directly sadly it is dangerous if you live in your nan you are gonna get sick all the time you are gonna get bacterial infections in your stomach you're gonna get diarrhea get diarrhea amoebic dysentery um it's not safe you not even if you're freaking and even though I do really like I like eating raw green vegetables I like eating lightly cook green vegetables there is sadly a logical reason why my ancestors when they were cutting down trees in rural Canada were eating you know horrible European foods like baked beans where by the way if you don't know a traditional they would dig a hole in the ground throw the hot coals in the in the hole put in the pot of baked beans and let it boil for 24 hours that was traditional so when you boil the hell out of added beans for one thing you start off with white beans and you end up with brown beans because they've been cooked in sugar for such a long time you also kill all of the bacteria and you render them something completely safe and reliable to eat which this stuff definitely is not I'm now in could Ming I'm moving out to the border with Myanmar into Hong so I'm going from a very temperate ma you know mild climate out to the tropics where communicable diseases are way up on another level so I hope you guys stick with me you're probably gonna see some more bizarre food videos from my life in China assuming I can still access the Internet in the years ahead
video you've ever seen on YouTube but a legitimate question I get is what the hell does vegan cuisine look like in Yan'an and this is asking really about what is authentic Yunnan style cuisine and then within authentic Yunnan cuisine what dishes happen to be vegan what type of food happens to be vegan right so if you go to a vegan restaurant in Yunnan this is not what you're gonna get some of the things you're gonna see here at a normal vegan restaurant actually if you ask for them verbally they probably can't make it but it's not on the menu this is really traditional stereotypical authentic unities food that happens to be vegan and these photographs were taken at a non vegan restaurant although the particular dishes are absolutely 100% vegan we'll go through them one by one first up Cong sin tai hollow heart vegetable from my perspective there's almost no point in trying to use the names of the different green vegetables here precisely partly because there are local dialect issues involved with partly this is a great example there are at least two different species of plant that are referred to with this same name so to genuinely different species but if you order this so what plant you get the flip a coin you're not really sure what you're in yet if you ask if they have this but this is really traditional local food first and foremost you're gonna notice in a sense there is no sauce right this is just this type of green vegetable and again I don't know you'll get something resembling this but maybe not the same species of plant tossed in hot oil in a wok not even that much oil it's oil and water if you actually look at the liquid there you can see little beads of oil and that's because the liquid is mostly water when you lift it up you know you lift up out of the bowl with your chopsticks the liquid drips off of it and then you mix it into your rice in your bowl in some ways this style of cuisine is more monastic than what you might get in a Buddhist monastery I personally dig it I really enjoy sitting down and eating a whole meal which is nothing but white rice and undercooked green vegetables does the other gonna say if you're British or something you will actually think this is undercooked the style of cuisine again typically they really toss this through hot wok quickly so it's kind of halfway between a salad green and a cooked vegetable it's not like a European idea where you cook you know peas until they're they're completely dead to their core and you know for that same reason I mean actually even just you know what just look at the bits of garlic the bright white garlic on screen there to call that cooked this is pretty close to raw garlic right so you get the sense these greens have been wilted but in a sense not really fully cooked so that is very typical of Yunnan cuisine and it's also not that great for present preventing communicable diseases right you can you can get sick from eating this stuff keeping it all the way real this is another green vegetable I eat this kind of stuff all the time here I have no idea what this is called in Chinese or English or what species it is I go into restaurants and I basically ask them what kind of green vegetables do you have and we take it from there this is a mung bean soup this is a traditional or typical vegan soup I'm sorry again obviously it's not listed on the menu as vegan this type of diced vegetable and bean soup or stew I guess you got to ask 10 times are you sure there's no pork fat are you sure there's you know you're not throwing in some bits and pieces of meat or something but this was absolutely hundred-percent vegan so in this case I'm guessing what they do basically is they stew the beans and then toss in the chopped up green vegetables and again the chopped up green vegetables they're not really that cooked which is great I mean it's healthy but they're you know they're they're kind of wilted rather than really thoroughly cooked and again like it's hard to describe it as having a sauce it really just tastes like it's ingredients they throw together some green vegetables some salt a little bit of oil you can look at the surface of the liquid it's not that much oil and it is what it is you know the ingredients just all speak for themselves so very very different from other regional cuisines of China very different from what you stereotypically get in Hong Kong I have lived in Hong Kong in the past or the style of cuisine that was exported from Hong Kong to Canada and San Francisco in many parts of the Western world normally every restaurant even a meat a meat eating restaurant will have a couple of different types of mushrooms available and sometimes they'll have photographs of them sins of a shelf we actually go up and look at the fresh mushrooms and pointed the ones you want and this is what they'll do with them this is really again Yunnan style there they're cooked they've just been tossed in a little bit again mostly water you're not actually looking at much oil they're they're tossed in a pan with boiling water and a little bit of oil and salt and some other vegetables and again even though the mushrooms you can see they've wilted look at the other vegetables look at the red peppers they're they're almost raw right they're not even compared to Mexican cuisine if you had red peppers of that Mexican cuisine they wouldn't look like a salad pepper they would look thoroughly cooked and here they're not so again I do like this cuisine I can say both good and bad about it here is a map odo food Mapo tofu will unless you're in a vegan restaurant it will always be made with some meat unless you ask for it verbally to admit without meat it obviously doesn't need meat and here again this tofu is not very thoroughly cooked they've they've tossed it through with basically a red chili sauce and the main flavor here is actually not the red sauce the main source of flavor here is what we call Szechuan pepper which you can see left-of-centre there's a black dust that is Szechuan pepper there are some people who hate Szechuan pepper I don't know why but very much your sort of traditional and distinctive element of Yunnan cuisine made perhaps especially here in the capital city here in could Ming but the other dishes you've seen I would say were a hundred percent typical of what you get by the side of the highway anywhere in your name province you're the only vegan options here you get by that side of the highway ian's this dish in particular map of dou foo there are many variations I would just say this it's not a narrowly defined dish you get quite a variety what if you order this dish you're gonna get something red you get something involving tofu and you have to specify that you don't want any pork you don't want any Me's and then this but what it looks like and what it tastes like will vary quite a lot there's another famous dish year that I wanted to photograph for this video but the restaurant didn't have it but it is a distinctive Yunnan dish and they do not use this any of the standard words for grandmother in Chinese there are many many words in the dictionary meaning grandmother and the Chinese language but there's a local dialect word a local Yunnan hua word that is not in the dictionary and they combine that with the word for potatoes and that again is one of those dishes were normally any traditional Yunnan restaurant will have their own way of making it for better or for worse so grandmother's potatoes in general people in Yunnan eat a lot of potatoes and they eat a lot of um you know red tomatoes they eat a lot of tomatoes in the diet which is again unlike other parts of China however this meal we did not have tomatoes or potatoes I think that's because yesterday we had a lot of we had a lot of potatoes on the table it started only the day before these these photographs were taken so that's it folks I mean you know it's simple it's pure in a sense like you can taste the ingredients very directly sadly it is dangerous if you live in your nan you are gonna get sick all the time you are gonna get bacterial infections in your stomach you're gonna get diarrhea get diarrhea amoebic dysentery um it's not safe you not even if you're freaking and even though I do really like I like eating raw green vegetables I like eating lightly cook green vegetables there is sadly a logical reason why my ancestors when they were cutting down trees in rural Canada were eating you know horrible European foods like baked beans where by the way if you don't know a traditional they would dig a hole in the ground throw the hot coals in the in the hole put in the pot of baked beans and let it boil for 24 hours that was traditional so when you boil the hell out of added beans for one thing you start off with white beans and you end up with brown beans because they've been cooked in sugar for such a long time you also kill all of the bacteria and you render them something completely safe and reliable to eat which this stuff definitely is not I'm now in could Ming I'm moving out to the border with Myanmar into Hong so I'm going from a very temperate ma you know mild climate out to the tropics where communicable diseases are way up on another level so I hope you guys stick with me you're probably gonna see some more bizarre food videos from my life in China assuming I can still access the Internet in the years ahead