Tasting The Taiwanese Culture One Bite (And Mistake) At A Time
The tea tasted great. Even tho I forgot to buy the milk and never did get the boba right.
And while no self-respecting Taiwanese chef would let me near their kitchen after seeing me struggle with the batter, the scallion pancakes turned out to be quite tasty.
PubClub.com was asked to take part in a 90-minute on-line cooking demonstration organized by Taiwan Tourism as the country is ready to open up again to visitors. More than 60 travel and lifestyle bloggers from across the USA participated, which featured a chef from Taipei walking us through the process of making two of the country’s traditional food & drink items.
We we were supplied all the ingredients in advance (except the milk – oops!) along with cooking instructions.
Well let me say that while I can cook certain things – American foods such as toasted sandwiches and omelettes are a speciality – I am not a natural when it comes to Taiwanese cooking.
I got off to a bad start when I picked up the wrong box for the pancakes and added starch instead of more flour to a bowl. The portions in our instructions were in grams and millimeters and my Google search results were apparently off quite a bit when trying to convert the measurements to cups.
I also didn’t add enough water and then over-compensated by adding too much water. Instead of perfect dough I had something like looked like Lisa Douglas’ hotcakes on Green Acres.
So I spent much of the remainder of the demonstration continually adding flower to the dough and – by the end – did manage to get it to to the point where I could use it. After adding in freshly-chopped scallions, I had created a very tasty “PubClub version” of Taiwan’s scallion pancakes.
The black tea also turned out great. But it was just the tea by itself because, as I mentioned earlier, I forgot to buy the milk. The Tropical Pearl (Boba) tea is really a frothy concoction that looks like a coffee cappuccino and since I really don’t like my tea that way that anyway, it would up being perfect for me.
The boba is a pasta that includes brown sugar and while I made the dough okay, it didn’t look to appetizing after I boiled it, so I just tossed that aside.
In the end, I felt that I had made the two items to my satisfaction. But to have the real thing, I’ll just have to go back to Taiwan.
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