Roaring Appetite: Chinese New Year Snack Trends 2022
Roar into the new year with these newfangled snacks and dishes.
I love the first two months of the year. It starts languorously as ‘jingle bells’ transforms into ‘dong dong dong chiang’. The calorie count continues to spike as yusheng takes over from turkeys as the centrepiece of dining tables, logcakes turn into nian gao and tubs of chocolate-coated marshmallows morph into pineapple tarts. Much as I enjoy feasting, I also enjoy looking out for what’s new to include my snack stash for this festive season.
Seeing Stripes
Chinese New Year goodies fashioned after Tiger, 2022’s zodiac animal is a given and F&B establishments have been putting their best stripes on their festive confections. Goodwood Park Hotel’s Tiger Gateau resembles the gigantic cat taking a face-down nap - the ‘tiger’, complete with ‘ears’ to nibble on, is curled up into a bright orange furball - an orange and brown-layered vanilla pound cake. The ‘stripes’ come in the form of brown-coloured buttercream and there’s even a tail! Confectioneries are banking on the lined patterns of marble cakes and sables to fit them into the tiger theme.
New Ways of Eating Bak Kwa and Love Letters
Chomping on bak kwa and pineapple tarts is a given during Chinese New Year. There are new ways of savouring these evergreen snacks this year - one of them is on a slice of kueh lapis. As if the thousand layered cake isn’t sinful enough, Ollella has topped the cake with chicken floss, chicken bak kwa and salted egg yolk for a sweet and savoury “Chinese New Year party in your mouth”. So this is how stuffing a mishmash of goodies into your mouth tastes like when you’re dodging the dreadful “Are you single?” questions from nosey relatives at festive gatherings.
Bee Cheng Hiang has also incorporated its signature barbecued beef jerky into vanilla-based ice cream. Those who enjoy sweet-savoury flavour combination will dig into this.
Teochew confectionery Thye Moh Chan is known for its salty tau sar piah or mung bean pastry. The special Chinese New Year edition is studded with bak kwa in its filling.
Ice cream parlour Apiary has rolled out a Love Letter-flavoured ice cream - a milk-based ice cream studded with shards of crushed buttery and fragrant egg roll.
Can’t decide if you prefer bak kwa to pineapple tarts? Have both of them at one go with Sourbombe Artisanal Bakery’s pineapple bak kwa tarts (made with French butter crust no less). Double the fun, double the calories.
Egg tarts stuffed with pineapple filling? Why didn’t someone think of such a combination earlier? Joy Luck Teahouse gives its popular egg tarts a festive spin by adding pineapple jam in between the buttery cookies crust and egg custard.
More local flavours
Cedele is known for pushing the envelope for Chinese New Year goodies. New additions include Chicken Rice Pops (chicken-flavoured puffed rice biscuits), min jiang kueh cookies that mimics the taste of crispy peanut pancake. And of course, the Ondeh Ondeh trend is still going strong - there is a buttery pandan cookie topped with gula melaka coconut filling. Move over lotus and additively bitter emping chips, fried beancurd skin, or tau kee, is the chip of the moment, with its light flavour and brittle texture.
Gula Melaka Cakes
After causing a stir in Tiger Sugar drinks (brown sugar boba), gula melaka is making its way into festive cakes. Crystal Jade has a gula melaka sponge cake crowned with walnuts, while Cedele has a dairy-free and feather-light gula melaka ogura cake.
More fillings in Kuih Kapit
The waffle-like biscuit, which is a flattened version of love letters that is folded into a quarter, is now stuffed with more adventurous fillings like White Rabbit milk candy, nutella, peanut butter and chocolate.
Spring beckons at Cherry Garden
Trust one of the esteemed Cantonese restaurants to serve up time-honoured dishes that brim with auspicious symbolism to usher in the Year of the Tiger. Open the meal at Mandarin Oriental’s Cherry Garden with the resplendent Prosperity Yusheng, a towering salad of julienned greens. What stands out from the other platters are magenta-hued buds of roselle flower that add a dash of freshness with its tart edge and chewy strands of Japanese octopus floats around the colourful confetti.
One of the new dishes is braised pork belly, which is adapted from Cherry Garden head chef Soong Kin Wah’s grandmother’s recipe. the tender slab is drenched in a brown sauce spiked with hua tiao wine and he added a fried mantou to square off the richness. The dish is rounded off with Chinese mushrooms and chestnuts that imparts some earthiness. Double-boiled soups are a cornerstone of Cantonese cuisine - the double-boiled spring chicken soup brings about poetic-looking clouds of snow fungus draped with orange cordyceps flower, floating amidst slabs of abalone, sea cucumber and fish maw in the soul-warming soup.
The steamed cod fish fillet, which I have had a couple of times at weddings in the Mandarin Oriental, has been updated with a trio of garlic dressing: black garlic for sweetness, crispy garlic for crunch, and a dash of savouriness from the chopped white garlic. CNY Set Menus are available till 15 Feb at Cherry Garden.
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Unusual zichar dishes for Chinese New Year
New Ubin Seafood is known for unique zichar dishes such as its Heart Attack beef fried rice and Chinese New Year is no different. An interesting dish is the deep-fried prawns coated in orange apricot mayonnaise. The cheerful-looking festive dish of cocktail prawns is embellished with cherries, prunes, dried apricot and mandarin oranges. The golden-battered prawns are juicy and the sweetness of the prawns is brought out through the citrus-kissed mayonnaise.
Another new dish is the hulking pork knuckle that arrives looking like “an Asian mont blanc”, quipped a dining companion at a tasting. The pork knuckle resembled a volcano with black moss spewing at the top of the fork-tender and slow-braised meat. The meat is accompanied by earthy chestnuts and dried oysters. Another highlight is the seafood ee-fu noodles, which a pile of wok hei-redolent flat noodles topped with sliced squid and prawns.
The Potluck wishes you a prosperous Year of the Tiger! Thanks for reading!
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