An amazing durian snack
It’s a lobe of ripe, fresh durian, enclosed in a kind of cage of shredded taro, tied prettily with seaweed and then deep-fried – so your…
Chinese cheese adventures
You can read my piece about making cheese in Lunan County, near the Stone Forest in Yunnan Province, on the BBC website, or listen to the…
Chinese seaweed in Whitstable
We picked over Whitstable beach, finding empty winkles and oyster shells calcified into heavy white reliquaries. And then between a couple of groynes there was a…
A Chinese cheese tasting
My piece about inviting some chefs in Shaoxing (known for its stinky beancurd and other smelly fermented foods) to taste a selection of fairly whiffy Neal’s…
Sichuan pepper production at home?
Look at this beauty! It’s a tiny Sichuan pepper tree! It was a present from Richard S., a friend of the Oxford Food Symposium’s, who managed…
Quiz answer!
Yes, many of you guessed correctly, the dagger is a fishbone! To be precise, it’s a bone from the head of the Ya fish (é›…é±¼, a…
Why not eat insects?
A fascinating piece in the Guardian today about an FAO policy paper on the eating of insects. Apparently, senior figures in the UN and elsewhere are…
Science vs. Gastronomy
I was just looking through one of my notebooks, and found a rather endearing story. It was in Ningbo, at the end of a fabulous dinner…
A cake, sausage or stew to rule over us?
It’s funny how the UK’s weird and inconclusive general election result has brought out the food metaphors! The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, spoke of a…
Frog ovaries for dinner
When your dinner guests include a scientist who makes ice cream with liquid nitrogen at his own parties, and a food writer and broadcaster who is…