Round Mass of Food 2: Yunnan's Revenge

My favourite cookbook, Hot Sour Salty Sweet, follows the authors' culinary adventure down the Mekong River. It includes recipes from Laos, Cambodia and Thailand but also has entries for Yunnan province in the south-west of China. The trip to Vietnam took me through Yunnan where I found food deserving of being in a cookbook.

My first experience of the cuisine came at a Kunming noodle stall. With Chinese characters and no pictures, one of the staff picked out a plate of noodles with thick, spicy sauce. I could see the chili peppers. There was shredded chicken, sliced pork, a soft goat's cheese and tiny, crunchy croutons. The variety of flavours and textures filled the hole in my stomach and cleared out my sinuses.

Down the road in Tonghai, I found the street of flaming woks. The entire lane on one side had open flames and coal-fired grills. The stall where I stopped laid out various meats and vegetables with bowls of noodles; they sat next to a big pot of steaming broth, the ingredients for noodle soup. Beside the grill lay piles of skewered and spiced meat: pork and beef and seafood.

I stuck with bao dzu. The girl put a wok over the fire, then a metal stand with a hole at the centre into the wok. She ladled water in and placed a tray of uncooked bao dzu over the stand's hole. Another girl covered the tray with a bamboo teepee. It was a tower of metal and fire and wood to steam my pastries.

When the finished product came, I was given the standard condiment in Yunnan: a bowl of chili sauce with green onion and cilantro. The spice and freshness of this sauce turned bao dzu, a Chinese standard, into a regional specialty. I munched away and stared into the night while noodles stir-fried to my right.

Farther south, Gejiu provided equally great food. Shown around by a local who worked at my hotel, my first meal came at a stall down an alley. The two of us picked ingredients from a slotted, cafeteria-style window. Ground beef came in a rich, tomato-y sauce. Mushrooms kept their fungal flavour in amongst the chili peppers. The steak arrived with the texture of jerky and a slow heat. Roast cashews and spinach in a piping hot broth provided a counterpoint to spice.

I next got a taste of Yunnanese barbeque. An old man with wide eyes, a toothy grin and strict, but sparse grey hair manned the grill. Wielding scorch-tipped chopsticks, he handed over slightly darkened potatoes and pastries. We dipped them in a sauce, spicy and salty and sweet all at once, our knees to the low wooden table, the flies circling on a warm afternoon.

The following day, I headed for Vietnam and wished I could take the food with me.