A few posts from my time in China will sneak in once in a while as I go through the thousands of photos I took over the year. This one is sort of ‘on theme’ as I have posted recently on both my current employment sitch and some things I’ve gotten up to at home on the baking front. In this post, I’m covering baking in China – a snapshot of the insides of a bakery in Haikou, Hainan. (All pics are clickable for enlargements, as usual.)
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When China and food appear in the same thought bubble, you usually also find the words ‘rice’ or ‘noodles’. You don’t usually think ‘bread’. Baking is just not part of the culture. The closest thing to bread that falls within typical Chinese cooking would be steamed buns or ‘baozi’ (see some fancy ones set up on a circular steaming tray on the left, and on the right, a poor-quality photo I took of stacks of metal trays full of buns sold to passers-by on the street in Haikou). Image may be NSFW.
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Yet, from small cities to the metropoli of Beijing and Shanghai, bakeries abound. In the latter locations, you do find expats with their own set ups; there is enough of a foreign clientele available to support the costs of setting up and producing Western breads.
So what do you find in a Chinese-run bakery?
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You do get something that tries to pass itself off as bread. I have no idea what they are baking with in terms of flour, especially in very small places like the little town I lived in in Hunan province. The bread is spongy like Wonder Bread. You will often find raisins or seeds. Sometimes, you get a lovely lavender-coloured bread made with taro root. Image may be NSFW.
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The bread is almost always encased in plastic and is often sliced.
The loaf pictured here has a price tag of 5 yuan, or about 70 cents.
There are, of course, other things on offer, but they all maintain a common characteristic – a sponginess. I don’t consider China to be a ‘dessert’ culture, but there is what I would imagine is a quite recent obsession with cakes, cookies, and cake decoration.Image may be NSFW.
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One of a few exceptions to the Chinese pastry is the moon cake, which is traditionally eaten during the Moon Festival or Mid-Autumn Festival, which I posted on in fall of 2010 (see link).
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I’ve done a post or two on birthdays (Nicole’s b-day and that of a student of ours – you can see the cakes in these posts) and the fact that smearing cake all over the faces of party attendees is probably more important than actually eating the cake. It is a shame actually, as a great deal of effort is put into decorating. Image may be NSFW.
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There is almost always a battery-powered musical lotus put on top as well (at least in rural Hunan province). I’ve included a shot of a cake I managed to capture in the process of being decorated – in my small town, one bakery had a window onto the street from the cake decorating room where you could stop and watch.
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I didn’t eat a lot of Chinese bread or pastries myself. Towards the end of my stay in the countryside, I did start buying some bread to toast for breakfast when I got tired of either beef noodle soup or steamed buns or dumplings in the mornings. We were equipped with a toaster oven, strangely enough.
Despite the fact that I enjoy baking, and am currently working in a bakery as a baker’s assistant, I don’t eat a huge amount of bread or cake. I am a chocoholic, though. We all must have our weaknesses…
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