The Power of the Pickle

The pickled mustard greens of Gongguan

When Hakka people first came to Taiwan, they mainly lived in backwater mountain areas with few natural resources. Accordingly, they developed methods to preserve food including pickling and sun-­drying. Their most famous pickled food is suancai, made from mustard greens. Dark green and naturally bitter tasting, leaf mustard (Brassica juncea) is transformed by salt and time into a golden-yellow color with a delicious astringent taste. If the pickling and sun-­drying periods are extended, pickled mustard greens become slowly transformed into foods with distinctly different flavors known as fucai and meigancai.

Taiwan Culinary Arts Association director Hsu Zong notes that there are three communities in Miaoli ­County’s Gongguan Township that produce suancai. Among them, Dakeng and Ren’an emphasize their use of traditional pickling methods, whereas Zhongyi concentrates on mass production with the help of machinery. The main season for harvesting and pickling mustard greens is in winter, from November to March. In the fields of James Chen, a farmer in the Dakeng neighborhood, we see large, plump heads of leaf mustard waiting to be harvested. Chen uses roujia leaf mustard to make suancai; it has shorter leaves, thick, fleshy leaf stalks, and fine fibers. Meanwhile, long-leaf mustard greens, which can reach six kilograms in weight, are more suited to making meigancai, which is dehydrated to a greater degree (for every six kilograms of leaf mustard used to make meigancai, only 600 grams remain).

Chen says that the most unique aspect of making traditional Hakka suancai is the process of repeatedly switching vats in order to ensure that the brine remains salty enough naturally prevent the food from spoiling.

Meanwhile, fucai is made by removing suancai that has been pickled for seven to eight days from the vat, washing it, then drying it in the sun for one day, and placing it back in the vat with salt spread on each layer, leaving it to pickle for five to six days, then removing it from the vat and repeating the above steps. After three such cycles, it is left in the vat to ferment for three months. As for meigancai, this is made by taking fully pickled fucai and sun-drying it until its moisture content is around 5%. Then it is stored indoors for at least six months to allow it to develop its unique flavor.

Common dishes made with suancai include pork soup with pickled mustard greens, and fried pork intestine with pickled mustard greens. Both combine pickled vegetables with meat and manifest the strong salty and oily taste typical of Hakka cuisine. Although the methods used for making suancai in different Hakka communities are generally similar, each household has its own unique flavor. Therefore, consuming suancai dishes not only can evoke the childhood memories of Hakka people, it also provides an opportunity to appreciate the different pickling methods used by each family.

Dried bamboo shoots from Zhushan

Taiwan is known as a “bamboo kingdom,” and bamboo shoots are grown throughout the island. In the north people cultivate mainly giant timber bamboo (Bambusa oldhamii), whereas in the central and southern parts of Taiwan they grow mostly Taiwan giant bamboo (Dendrocalamus latiflorus). Pickled and dried bamboo shoots play an essential role in Taiwanese cuisine.

Major Taiwan giant bamboo shoot producing regions in Central and Southern Taiwan include Gukeng in Yunlin County, Zhushan in Nantou County, and Dapu in Chiayi County, and these are also the places that produce dried bamboo shoots. After farmers harvest their bamboo shoots, they are sent to a processing plant where they are blanched using large amounts of hot water, after which they are sealed in vats where they undergo natural fermentation.

When we visit the Zhengxing Agricultural Products Company in Zhushan, as we step into the processing plant our noses are assailed by the rich smell of dried bamboo shoots. Pointing to a vat of bamboo shoots, owner Chuang Kai-hsing explains after one and a half months, when the fermentation is nearly complete, salt is added to prevent the shoots from going bad. A bamboo shoot can be divided into three parts: the base, the heart (containing the hollow pith), and the tip. The base and heart are mostly diced to be used in the stuffing for meatballs (bawan), or cut into long strips to make pickled bamboo shoot condiment. Meanwhile the tip, which is the most tender part, can be shredded for direct consumption or sun-dried to make dried bamboo shoots.

The peak harvest season for Taiwan giant bamboo shoots is from June to mid-September each year, and sun-drying of bamboo shoots begins around October. A month in the sun turns the shoots from a light yellow color to orange-yellow. The sight of large expanses of bamboo shoots drying in the sun has become typical of Zhushan. It may look easy to sun-dry bamboo shoots, but in fact they must be turned over regularly so that both sides dry evenly. Chuang’s mother, now in her seventies, has been sun-drying bamboo shoots since she was a girl. She knows from a single touch whether the shoots have been dried long enough. Chuang’s father was the first in his family to produce dried bamboo shoots. He recalls that when he was young, Japanese merchants would come to Zhushan to place orders; they required that the water content of the shoots should be below 20%, and they should be trimmed to have a neat appearance, as they were used as a topping for ramen. At the peak, Taiwan exported 60,000 60-kilogram bags in one year. Although today the bamboo shoot harvesting and drying business has declined greatly, there are still wholesalers in Japan who believe the best dried bamboo strips come from Taiwan. The Dotch Cooking Show, which formerly aired on Japanese TV, even visited Taiwan to film a segment in which they sought out premium-quality dried bamboo shoots.

Bamboo shoots are still an important element in Taiwanese cuisine. Soy-stewed pork is accompanied by shredded bamboo shoots, there are diced bamboo shoots in meatballs, and bamboo shoot strips are ­ir­replace­able with braised pork knuckles.

The annual process of sun-drying bamboo shoots creates a distinctive scene in Nantou County’s Zhushan Township.

After being fermented, bamboo shoots can be shredded and used as raw material to make bamboo-shoot condiment, which is packed in jars.

Bamboo shoot tips, which have a fine and tender texture, can be shredded or sun-dried. They are an important element in Taiwanese cuisine.

In days gone by, large quantities of dried bamboo shoots—turned golden-yellow by drying in the sun—were exported to Japan.

Soy-stewed pork with dried bamboo shoots.

Pobuzi from Zuozhen

The immature fruits of the tree Cordia dichotoma, called pobuzi in Chinese and known in English by various names including fragrant manjack, Indian cherry and Sebastan plum, have such an astringent taste that even birds have no interest in eating them. In Taiwan, however, they are part of the national cuisine. The main methods of preparing pobuzi are to pickle them in brine and press them into a flat cake, or else to add flavorings such as black bean soy sauce or rock candy and put the finished product in jars. Pobuzi cake is mainly consumed as a side dish with rice congee or fried eggs, while the version that comes in jars goes well with steamed fish.

The main areas where pobuzi is grown in Taiwan are in Tainan and Chiayi, and the harvest season is from June to September. The best known is Tainan’s Zuozhen District, where the land is chalky and saline and the topsoil is easily washed away by heavy rains. Oddly enough, this creates an opportunity for the drought-­tolerant pobuzi. Pobuzi seeds have been found in an “ash pit” in the Siraya cultural strata of the Niaosong Culture archeological site excavated at the Southern Taiwan Science Park, indicating that the Siraya indigenous people began eating pobuzi very early on. In addition, in the 1990s the Zuozhen Farmers’ Association produced a pobuzi cookbook and actively promoted this food, so that Zuozhen became synonymous with it.

Mu Cuiling, an instructor in the association’s Extension Section, notes that when pobuzi is harvested, they first select a branch and cut it from the tree, then strip the leaves off the branch, and clip off the fruits one by one. After bringing the harvested fruits home, the fruits must first be washed and blanched by simmering them in water for two to three hours, until the pectin all dissolves out. Next, they are flavored with salt and pressed into small bowls to mold them into cakes, or they can be directly put into jars with black bean soy sauce or rock candy added.

Besides Taiwanese of Southern Fujian ancestry and the Siraya people, the Hakka also have a tradition of consuming pobuzi. The Hakka music group Sheng Xiang and Band even has a song whose title is the Hakka word for this food. The song depicts a woman working on her own to harvest and pickle pobuzi.

It is especially noteworthy that only Taiwanese consume pobuzi as a food. In an article entitled “Who Were the First People to Eat Pobuzi?” the writer Ku Piling mentions that when she discussed this question with botanist Kuo Chen-meng (known as the “god­father of ferns”), he mentioned that pobuzi grows wild in India, along the coast of Guangdong in China, and in the Philippines, but in none of these places was it developed into a part of dietary culture. Yet in Taiwan, located in the tropics and possessing many relict species that have survived from the Ice Age, people have done so. He surmises that when humans first came to Taiwan, there may not have been many edible plants, so people who lived along the coast pickled pobuzi in brine. Not only did this eliminate the astringent flavor, the pectin that dissolved out of the fruits helped them stick together, making this food easier to carry.

Although there is as yet no scientific or archeological evidence to answer the question of who first at pobuzi, this mystery undoubtedly adds a soupçon of additional flavor whenever we eat this food.

When pickling pobuzi, one can add various ingredients such as pineapple, garlic, or peanuts, according to taste.
(courtesy of Hsu Zong)

Pobuzi pressed into flat cakes is often paired with rice congee. (courtesy of Hsu Zong)

Steamed fish with pobuzi.