Family food culture, local food memories, workers’ table stories, and personal relationships with food.
Foodthink Says On Sunday, 3 December at 10:30, our editorial team, currently in Guangzhou for the Harvest Festival, will be hosting a discussion on pre-prepared meals and indigenous ingredients. One of our guests, Doudou, is a kitchen expert renowned for her home-made pre-prepared meals. She shared her journey and a…
I. The Beginning In 2018, in a scattered village in Hong Kong’s New Territories that was facing imminent demolition, I baked my first sourdough loaf using a jar of fermented starter I’d just received from a friend. Looking back, it hadn’t really risen properly; it could hardly be called bread.…
Foodthink says Foodthink has hosted several reading groups focused on fermentation. During the process of selecting books, we noticed something: while fermentation culture is booming among foodie circles abroad, why hasn’t it taken off in China? This is a sentiment shared by the publishing professionals featured in this article: China…
A Word from Foodthink Sour chillies are a traditional Chinese fermented delicacy, particularly popular in the south. While each region has its own unique flavour and slightly different supporting ingredients, the method and principles of fermentation remain largely the same: salt is used to create an ideal environment for lactic…
Perhaps you have already heard of homemade pickles, kimchi, or kombucha; they seem to have become the latest craze among young people. In reality, you may never have considered that fermented foods are actually staples in our kitchens—be it soy sauce, vinegar, wine, cheese, miso, or fermented bean curd, they…
I. The word ‘fermentation’ always evokes a sensory longing for foods with rich, mellow textures. Yet, rather than being a culinary art, fermentation is more akin to a gift from nature. As experience and knowledge accumulated, humanity learned to make slight adjustments to external factors, such as ambient temperature, working…
In Evil Valley, farmer Kouzi uses no pesticides and, though apples cannot be home-grown and pumpkins are beset by fruit flies, still learns to cherish those limited harvests.
Early autumn finally brought the first self-reliant harvest since the inception of Evil Valley. I particularly want to stress the “self-reliant” part: from transplanting the seedlings to the final harvest, I handled every step myself, taking complete charge of the whole operation single-handedly. Having moved into Evil Valley in…
Online sales have carried Yunnan’s toxic Jianshouqing wild mushroom beyond Yunnan, where unfamiliar diners face rising poisoning cases, while local eating depends on careful cooking, family caution and a light-hearted attitude to ‘little people’.
In Russian, summer is also known as the ‘dacha season’. Maxim Gorky wrote a short play, translated into Chinese as *The Summer Guest*, but originally titled *Dachniki* in Russian—which more literally translates to ‘the dacha people’. In 1995, the same story was adapted into a film titled *Summer People*. The…
