As the popular saying goes: Delicacies in Guangzhou are made by chefs from Shunde, Shunde, administrated by Foshan city, has been nominated as a City of Gastronomy by UNESCO. If you decide to visit Foshan, please prepare to gain weight - Foshan will take care both of your eyes and your stomach with delicacies from street snacks to fine dinners.
Double-layer Milk Custard
It may be the top1 popular street snack in Foshan. It’s a famous dessert belonging to Cantonese cuisine. Made of fresh milk from water-buffalos, sugar and eggs, the custard could flirt with your tongue by its unique sweetness and smoothness. Due to good quality of the materials and mastery of cooking, the custard eventually presents a white flawless jelly-like surface. Although it is really sweet, it’s just too tasty and refreshing to bore you at all.
From the original flavor, ingenious local chefs developed Double-layer Milk Custard into various dairy products amongst ginger flavor, red bean flavor, fruit flavor and so on wherein the ginger has been in vogue for quite a long time. It is called “jiāng zhī zhuàng nǎi” now.
Ginger Milk Curd
Same as the original Double-layer Milk Custard, Jiāngzhī zhuàng nǎi is also made of water-buffalo’s milk, sugar and eggs, however, it has ginger as one new ingredient. Eating ginger could be really beneficial to help people nourish stomach, accelerate digestion, prevent cancer even resist senescence so gingers are widely used in Chinese delicacies.
This dessert tastes sweet too but with a little bit ginger-spicy. If you would like to try something distinctive, it is really a good choice for you.
Wonton Noodles
Wonton Noodles is a traditional Cantonese dish and you could eat the best of it in Foshan city. Locals wrap fresh pork or shrimps in wontons and boil wontons with noodles in soup.
You may see Ying’s Wonton Noodles restaurants everywhere in the city. Ying’s has been a time-honored family business since 1936 and it has a lot of chain restaurants due to its popularity, however, their wontons are all the same for cooking under the same recipe.
Lunjiao Rice Cake
Lunjiao Rice Cake presents cream white and crystal clear on the outside. It is a well-selling cold dish in summer. Made of a kind of long-shaped rice, wheat flour, eggs and sugar, it tastes soft but chewy. The pure sweetness makes it favored by both young and aged people.
Cantonese are good at making all kinds of rice cakes wherein the Lunjiao Rice Cake and Nine-layered Rice Cake enjoy widespread reputation throughout China.
Nine-layered Rice Cake
As Foshan locals are good at making rice cakes, they create one special for Spring Festival which is the Nine-layered Rice Cake. Consisting of 9 layers of different fillings, this cake tastes smooth and velvety with magical flavor. Cantonese is so creative that they could put everything into fillings: from vegetables to meat, bean to nuts, sugar to salt…everything you could eat can be added into the cake and the limit is only your imagination, however, it’s tasty. The color of the cakes depend on their pastes.
Butterfly-shaped Cookies
Bengsha is a popular specialty of Foshan, favored by locals and travelers all around the world. It originally appeared at Daliang Town (administrated by Foshan City now) in 1882 and have become popular ever since.
Bengsha is a kind of crispy butterfly-shaped cookies. It tastes both salty and sweet. It’s a popular snack favored by locals from all ages. The most famous brand is Lǐ Xǐ Jì.
Pork-filling Cake
Manggongbing, also kowned as Pork-filling cake, is a local specialty welcomed by visitors.
It is made of sugar, peanuts, sesame, pork, oil and other ingredients. The pork filling in the cake tastes sweet for it must have been sugared in advance. The whole cake tastes like Chinese moon cake which is the very gift for families and friends.
Braised Trotter
The Braised Trotter is a traditional Cantonese cuisine. After cleaning up the trotter, chef would use trotter’s skin to wrap up the lean meat and spices then stew them until the sauce is fully absorbed. The Braised Trotter tastes crispy outside while soft inside. Since it has a savory and sweet mellow which is quite similar to the trotters in Northern China, it is quite popular amongst travelers throughout the country.
Water Snake Congee
Chinese hold interesting contradiction over whether to eating snakes. The northerners consider snakes as something should be avoided since it is evil and poisonous while southerners regarded snakes as a kind of ingredients full of food and medical value. However, Cantonese know how to deal with snakes especially chefs in Shunde where Water Snake Congee has been world-renowned.
This congee would be smooth and sweet and you will find a lot of vegetables in it. Don’t worry about the snake since the experienced chef has already cut off everything that may be poisonous. If you would like to have a try, trust me, you won’t be disappointed.
Stir-fried Milk
This dish is to stir-fry milk with egg white and peeled prawns together. Tastes refreshing and sweet and the milk will just melt in your mouth, it is no doubt a feast for both your eyes and tongue.
It also requires high standard to both milk and the chef. To cook this dish appropriately, milk must be firstly water buffalo’s milk, for its fat content reaches up to 9% while the cow’s milk have only 2%, and high fat content means less water and richer milk-flavor; secondly very fresh because the materials’ quality decides the final taste of this delicacy. Furthermore, since milk, eggs and peeled prawns are all very easy to be done, chef should know the exact time and fire to cook it perfectly.
Although difficult it is to make, ingenious Foshan people still set its price quite reasonable. If you visit Foshan especially Shunde, you don’t want to miss it.
Chencun Rice Sheet
Chencun Village in Shunde is the birthplace to this rice sheets. It was originally produced in 1927 by a villager named Huang Dan and then became famous for its unique taste throughout China. There are more than 40 ways to cook meals with Chencun Rice Sheets wherein the most popular one is to steam it with vegetables and fleshes wrapped in it.
Chencun Rice Sheets have 3 main characters: full-bodied aroma, slight thickness and well-extended flexibility. And how good it is? Let me give you an example: sometimes when distinguished guests visit Beijing, the government would specially send men to Shunde to buy Chencun Rice Sheets back to host the guests. So if you have the chance to taste it, my advice is, seize the opportunity.
Shunde Stir-fry
Shunde Stir-fry should be the quintessence of Shunde cuisine because it consists of a series Cantonese home cooking dishes. From vegetarian diet to lavish meal, whatever you choose, you will be amazed by the food they cook.
Braised Beef Offal
To be honest, there are more than one way to cook beef offal and all of them are delicious. Although this kind of dish origins somewhere else in Guangdong, Foshan citizens pull it up to a new height.
In short, Foshan is renowned for its gastronomy culture throughout China even the whole world, to be honest, this is the exact place for eating than sightseeing.