Hangzhou is a lovely town with abundant shade trees and serene canals throughout. The locals appear to enjoy their living here and help make for a very comfortable and relaxing visit.
Pey Dan (Century Egg) was incredible. Creamy with a bit of funk, what we get back home like eating cardboard by comparison. Texturally and flavor wise.
Feels great to take a leisurely comfortable walkabout after dinner and grab a sweet or two. Sadly, a simple pleasure we cannot comfortably indulge back in San Francisco.
I swear I need to bring a hit of Narcan when I hit morning markets!! I get an absolute high bouncing around amidst the cacophony of barking venders and value seeking shoppers. The energy and excitement is palpable and totally contagious!! We rush from stand to stand, fearing the best this or that will be snatched before our very eyes. FOMO!!!
I’ll start with Fruits and Produce first, then onto Proteins and Cooked Foods.
Fresh Cut Fruits stand. Yang Mei season is over, I did get a very refreshing Yang Mei Tea!
I’m guessing (but not sure) that those grapes are the famed “Shine Muscat” variety. If so, there are indeed very expensive in Japan. Due to the cost, I avoided buying them for years. Shizuoka Prefecture and especially neighboring Yamanashi Prefecture are well-known grape growing regions and thanks to that, they tend to be a bit more reasonable than they were when I lived in Tokushima. And they tend to be sold only in large bunches. But in Shizuoka, I found a small cup of 8 grapes for the equivalent of approximately $5.00 and tried some. While they were indeed quite sweet, I found them lacking in grape flavor.
Then one day on one of my walks, I found a lady selling “Shine Muscat” grapes next to a farm field. They were incredibly cheap…about $3.00 a bunch. I asked her how she could sell them so cheap and she explained they weren’t seedless (most Japanese grapes have many large seeds) and the skin was thicker than “Shine Muscat” grapes in the store. I asked her why and she said her family’s farm doesn’t spray the agricultural hormones on them to stop the seeds from forming and keep the skin from thickening. Yes, an agricultural hormone is sprayed on the grapes. I was disappointed to hear that. Here’s more on that:
“The method of producing seedless or large fruits using gibberellin, a type of plant growth hormone, was developed in Japan. This method has been adapted to Shine Muscat as well as many other grapes for table grapes.”
We first noticed these grapes in Japan a few years ago. The exorbitant cost deterred us from buying them at the time.
I think it may have been in Nagoya or Kanazawa a couple of years back that we finally sucked it up and bought some. Very nice, not life changing.
I was somewhat surprised to see these large grapes at the Hong Kong wholesale fruit market last year, at a reasonable cost. Since these were Japan imports, I expected the price to be even higher than in Japan, factoring in transport and additional handling.
That’s when I found out these were cultivated from Japanese seeds, grown in China. Thus the discounted price.
Japan struggles a lot with the illegal export/smuggling of seeds/branches/seedlings of highly valuable fruits (maybe vegetables, too…I’m not sure about that). But an important part of how these fruits, etc. are made so delicious is not only the selective breeding of them, but how farmers thin out the buds, seedlings to make each individual fruit, etc. larger/juicier/sweeter. That’s one reason why Japanese produce tends to be more expensive than in the West.
Shizuoka is famous for various types of melon. I was puzzled by what I saw at some green grocers there…tomatillo-sized little fruits…they turned out to be the very immature melons that farmers had picked. Locals in Shizuoka pickle them to make a type of Japanese pickles (“tsukumono”…the Japanese word for pickles.). As melons are in the squash family like cucumbers, that makes sense. Unfortunately I never saw the finished product in stores to taste them.
The Chicken on the header a sure sign this restaurant specializes in chicken. We arrived somewhat early and was only slightly ahead of the lunch crowd.
Bak Cheet Beef. White Cut Beef. This prep method on Chicken is familiar, but we had goat done this way the other day, now beef. Not likely to become a favorite. A bit dry and lacking flavor.
