Eat, chew, pray: Smelly Tofu, rosted chicken feet and delicious pork blood

Have you ever eaten a German bratwurst that tastes exclusively of Corriander? It looks black as the night, it is crunchy like the German original and apart from the fact that it is served skewered on a little stick, it might as well have been bought in the sausage's home country. This, however, is Taiwan, the best country in the world if you want to come to eat quite strangely.

The Taiwanese  (see my older post) do this incessantly, they chew and swallow, they snack and forage, they buy food and they treat themselves to a small meal in between. Taiwan, the Republic of China, which is still not recognized by most countries in the world, is a true paradise for gourmets, but even more so for people who are curious about food that is not available anywhere else.

From ordinary yeast dumplings to a snail called abalone, which is not a shell but looks like a pearl is about to fall out at any moment, from stinky tofu called chòu dòufǔ ( 臭豆腐), which is not just its name, to roasted chickenfeet as a snack, Taiwanese cuisine holds more excitement than that of most other cultures.

Often, people here prefer to eat what elsewhere would be cut away from the food before it ends up in the oven. The fish is almost always raw, the sauce sweet or very, very spicy, the meat thinly sliced and hotly fried. If you order ice cream, that's exactly what you get: frozen water from the faucet with some fruit dumped on top.

To the palate of visitors, most of the stuff here is hard stuff. The taste of the black coriander sausage, for example, is something you can't get rid of for days. But at least the sales clerks are happy to see the contorted face of the guest after the first bite. The attempt to eat stinky tofu, however, then goes into even more daring territory: even 20 meters from the sales booth, it smells like an animal graveyard at the height of summer.

Unmoved however the technical personnel at the conditions prepares the stinking Tofu mass for the sales. To do this, tofu is deep-fried, then a hole is cut in the middle and vegetables and lettuce are placed inside. It smells then still worse than next to a defrosted refrigerator full of steaks after four weeks without electricity. But it should taste, claim people who claim they have tried it.

Just like everything else in Taiwan tastes: the crab, which the guest is allowed to pick out personally from the crawling in a box in the kitchen. She lands briefly on the scales, then immediately in the cooking pot. The sushi, which is made from any kind of fish in Taiwan.

If it is not small and silvery and is preferred by the Taiwanese as a nibble. The thickened soup with cuttlefish wrapped in fish paste, the oyster omelet made of eggs, oysters and chrysanthemum leaves, eaten with medium hot sauce and coriander. Or "Wūmǐgāo" (烏米糕), a treat made with raw pork blood and rice.

It often sounds worse than it looks, but sometimes it still doesn't taste good. Apart from the fact that some of the animal species popularly used for a dish are on red list of extinction species, radish omelet eaten and boiled pork patties with cucumber are edible but typical national dishes. Those who are not Taiwanese will hardly understand what is supposed to taste so great about it.

But even capitalist China has its oases. There are quite normal steakhouses, fish restaurants, which even fry. And pubs like the Revolver Bar, which only offers snacks, but with the slogan "No Coldplay" attracts everyone who wants to drink beer, listen to indie bands and spend their evening with small talk, just like back home in Europe or the States.

Food is eaten beforehand, gladly also at one of the innumerable mobile stands, which speak for love of the Taiwandesen to the lasting meal. In square bowls they offer balls with unknown fillings, meat balls, fat minced meat and soups in all colors of the rainbow. The care taken in naming their dishes also speaks to the love of the locals for their cuisine: "medicinal herb of the immortals" is the name of a dessert consisting of an indefinable juice with bits of jelly.

Taiwan's most famous eateries, by the way, have no roof. They stand in the night markets and offer "finger food," which can consist of just about anything that grows somewhere or is in a barn. Here you can find rolls filled with boiled or deep-fried meat, exotic appetizers, succulent snacks and sweet desserts that no one can tell you exactly what's inside. 

Really delicious are the crepes, crispy flour pastries with various fillings, which can include seafood. Deep-fried gelatin ice balls with a slightly sweet taste are a good last course, easiest after a shawarma (沙威馬) called a fairly standard sandwich with spiced and grilled chicken white cabbage, tomato slices, onion slices and ketchup.

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