Something for your inner child: creamy peanut milk & peanut buns

If you have never tried peanut milk before, you are in for a treat. This tastes of a happy Chinese childhood crossed with melted peanut butter ice cream. We really have nothing like in it the States, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why. 

It is also a dead simple recipe with no-fail, heavenly results.

Taipei in winter was always bone-crushingly cold, and I found that hot drinks were one of the best ways to deal with the weather. If they were sweet, so much the better, and if they were lusciously flavored, well, life didn’t get much better.

Bread filling of sugar & nuts

Summer in the city was just as bad: miserably hot and humid, and I would always be on the hunt for relief in the sweets shops that seemed to be on every corner. 

This drink was so popular that commercial ones were readily available. But the best ones were always house-made using some secret recipe or another.

This one is my favorite. I discovered that red dates added just the right fruity edge to keep this from being too saccharine or one-note. It is a very subtle touch, but makes all the difference in the world. If you have popsicle molds or an ice-cream maker, consider using this in either one. Your inner child will thank you.

Red dates & peanuts

Down below is a recipe for peanut buns that uses the dregs from the milk to make an utterly delicious bread. If you want to take this peanut tangent a bit further, consider rolling the dough around ground toasted peanuts and sugar. Simply amazing.

Peanut milk

Huāshēng nǎilù  花生奶露

All of China

Serves 4

8 red Chinese dates

8 ounces raw peanuts, preferably skinned

6 cups (or as needed) water, divided

2 tablespoons raw white rice

Pinch of sea salt

Rock sugar to taste

1 teaspoon vanilla (not traditional, but good)

Cook til thick

1. Start this recipe the night before. Place the dates in a small heatproof bowl and cover with boiling water. When the dates are plump, slit each one open and discard the pit; reserve the soaking water. If the peanuts are unskinned, put them in a medium heatproof bowl and cover them too with boiling water. Wait 5 minutes, drain the peanuts in a colander, rinse with cool tap water, drain again, and dump them out onto a terrycloth towel. Rub the peanuts in the towel to remove the skins. Place the peanuts back in the work bowl, cover them with tap water, and let them soak overnight; the next day, drain and rinse the peanuts in a colander.

Ribbons of peanuts

2. Put the pitted dates, peanuts, rice, and 4 cups water (including the date soaking liquid) in a blender and pulverize the peanut mixture on high for a few minutes to make it as smooth as possible. Strain the peanut milk into a medium saucepan. Return the solids to the blender, add another 2 cups of water to the blender, and repeat this step to extract as much flavor from the peanuts as possible.

3. Add a piece of rock sugar about the size of a small egg (or to taste) and the pinch of salt to the saucepan, and bring the slowly liquid to a boil over medium heat before lowering the heat to so as to maintain a gentle simmer. Cook the peanut milk a few more minutes until thick, stirring the bottom often with a silicon or wooden spatula. Taste the peanut milk and add more sugar, if necessary. When the peanuts taste fully cooked, remove the pan from the heat. Either serve it immediately or cool it to room temperature and chill for a couple of hours.

Roll around filling

Tips

The dregs can be used in Fast Steamed Breads to make delicious peanut-flavored buns: In Step 2, add the leftover peanut mash to the yeast mixture along with 2 cups flour. Knead and add more flour as necessary. Form and steam the buns as directed.

For extra deliciousness, mix ground toasted peanuts with brown sugar, and then spread it over the peanut-flavored dough, forming the ribbon breads as directed in Taro Steamed Buns. 

Lychee pearl tea

Pearl tea has taken over the world. There’s no two ways about it. 

It started out in the city of Taichung in central Taiwan, but this has turned out to be so popular that every place seems to sell it and everyone seems to love it.

And little wonder, because it simply is sweetened tea made chewy with big balls of black tapioca, which are called boba. 

Hot or cold, it’s easy and delicious. The only thing you need in addition to the special tapioca is some fat straws so you can suck up the boba. Some call it “pearl tea” in Chinese (zhēnzhū nǎichá 珍珠奶茶).

    

Once you get the hang of this drink, you can make endless variations using fruit juice, milk, coffee, or even milkshakes instead of the sweetened tea.

This is another one of those this-is-a-template-rather-than-a-recipe deals, and so you should play around with it until you find the perfect mix. This one just happens to be my favorite and also my own invention, as far as I know...

Pearl tea

Bōbàchá 波霸茶

Taiwan

Makes 4 cups

Boba:

Canned lychees

½ cup uncooked boba (big black pearl tapioca)

Water as needed

The juice from a (16- to 20-ounce) can of lychees, or ¼ cup agave syrup

Tea and the rest:

6 cups boiling water

5 tablespoons lychee black tea (or any other fragrant black tea)

½ cup (or more) finely chopped canned lychees, optional

Condensed milk to taste

Ice cubes

1. Cook the boba according to package directions. (Many different varieties are now available; some are quick-cooking, others take a bit of time. The label should tell you what to do.) Add the lychee juice or agave syrup to the hot tapioca and its liquid, stir, and let the boba soak up the flavor for a couple of hours at room temperature. (Boba become hard if they are refrigerated, so don't chill them unless it's absolutely necessary. Then, heat the boba up again in their liquid until they're soft again before using.)

 

Floral & fruity fragrance

2. Place the tea leaves in a strainer and rinse them with some boiling water. Put the leaves in a large, heatproof bowl and pour 6 cups boiling water over them. Steep the tea for about 10 minutes, and then strain off the tea into a pitcher. Chill the tea for a couple of hours.

3. To serve, mix together the tea, boba, and the syrup. Add the chopped lychees and condensed milk to taste. Put a few ice cubes in each glass and then distribute the tea, boba, and lychees evenly among them. Stick a fat straw and a long spoon in each one and serve.

Chilled sour plum infusion with osmanthus blossoms

My first glass of Chilled Sour Plum Infusion, or suanmei tang, came my way on a ridiculously hot, sultry late summer afternoon in Taipei, the kind of day that the Chinese call qiu laohu, or autumn tiger.

It was so hot out that even the cicadas had forgotten how to trill, and for some stupid reason I was walking down the street and finding it increasingly difficult to breathe and keep my eyes open at the same time.

The sidewalks were practically vibrating in the heat, and even the normally bustling downtown street corners were empty of all but the bravest hawkers. I desperately needed somewhere dark and cool to hide and something dark and cool to drink.

Passing by a sweets shop, I noticed someone downing a big glass of reddish liquid with absolute relish, the beads of condensation mingling with the sweat on his hands. Ah, I thought, that is exactly what I need.

Mr. Yao using an old style scale

I swung the door open and was greeted by a blast of cold air and shouts of welcome. My red face, bedraggled look, and soggy clothes must have been more than a bit scary, because as soon as a stepped inside, a wide-eyed shop girl said, "Help yourself" and pointed to a refrigerated case on the other side of the shop, which was crammed with icy homemade foods and drinks.

Sticking my head as far into the refrigerator as physically possible, I asked, "What's this?" and held up a sealed plastic glass of whatever the other person had been enjoying. "Suanmei tang," said the shop girl, adding, "It's our own secret recipe."

I thought, "Sour plums? Those insanely puckery boluses? In a drink? Yuck." But then was not the time to be picky. So I summoned up my few remaining synapses and forged ahead with my line of questioning: "Is it really, really tart?" "No, it's sweet, but it's made with sour plums. It's really, really good." "Ring her up, then," I mumbled, as I handed over a few coins and prepared for my first foray into the strange-sounding but persuasively cold and wet beverage.

Whacking a straw into the plastic cover, I sucked down a mouthful and swallowed before even tasting it, scared to even let it hit my taste buds. I was just too thirsty and hot. But halfway through the glass the flavors started to filter up through my nose and echo down my throat. Oh yes, she was right... it was good. It was better than good -- it was amazing, refreshing, and crazily delicious!

Plums, hawthorn, licorice & jamaica

Icy cold without any ice cubes to dilute the complex flavors, there were scents of fruit and flower in the darkly amber liquid along with an underlying taste of something woody. Sweet and salty and sour, it was unlike anything I had ever tasted. Completely sophisticated and amazingly refreshing. And boy, was it addictive.

I drank a second glass a bit more slowly, lingering over the perfume that filled my mouth and nose with each sip and finally started to feel ever-so-slightly human again.

Hm, a secret recipe, I thought. Why is there always a secret recipe involved?

I definitely tasted licorice root, and knew for a fact that sour plums were involved, so I wandered a few storefronts down to a herbalist's shop that also was very thoughtfully air conditioned and asked the guy in charge if I could get the makings for suanmei tang. "Of course!" he said cheerfully, and wrapped up a bunch of deliriously scented herbs that he graciously identified. He even told me how much sugar and water to use. Not much of a secret after all, I'm afraid...

So sour you don't want to eat as is. Honest.

Almost any good Chinese supermarket will have the fixings for this traditional Beijing-style drink and will even have it prepared as a concentrate in a bottle, but your best bet is always a herbalist shop where the ingredients are at their best. The plums, hawthorn fruits, licorice root, and osmanthus blossoms will all be wonderfully fresh and aromatic that way, but you can usually only find the osmanthus blossom syrup in busy Chinese supermarkets. 

If you can find an unsprayed sweet osmanthus (Osmanthus fragrans, which some people refer to as "sweet olive") bush in your area, it's not at all hard to collect the blossoms in autumn when they bloom and then add them to a thick sugar syrup to create your very own guihua jiang.

The following recipe makes a concentrate that is easy to store in the refrigerator for a few days during the hot summer months. 

Chilled sour plum infusion with osmanthus blossoms 
Guihua suanmei tang 桂花酸梅湯 
Beijing

Makes 4 cups infusion

3 or 4 sour dried black plums (suanmei)

Small handful sliced dried hawthorn fruits (shanzha pian)

Small handful sliced dried licorice root (gancao)

Small handful dried jamaica flowers (luoshenhua), optional

4 cups filtered water

2 hunks of rock sugar (the size of walnuts), or to taste; or, use agave syrup to taste 

Sliced hawthorn, also sour

2 tablespoons dried osmanthus blossoms (guihua) plus ¼ teaspoon sea salt, or 2 tablespoons osmanthus blossom syrup (guihua jiang)

1. Place the plums, hawthorn fruits, licorice root, and optional jamaica flowers in a sieve and rinse them well under running water. Shake them dry and place them in a 2-quart saucepan. Pour 4 cups filtered water over the dry ingredients and let them soak for at least an hour to plump them up.

2. Bring the pot to a full boil, and then lower the heat to a gentle simmer for about 1 hour. Add the rock sugar and optional salt, and simmer the infusion until the sugar melts; taste and add more if you want. Add either the osmanthus blossoms and salt or osmanthus syrup to the hot infusion so that the flavors can steep together, and then let the infusion come to room temperature.  

3. Chill it overnight to allow the flavors to develop. Strain and add enough ice water to make 4 cups, or to taste. Serve icy cold without any ice.

Tips

I'm incredibly proprietary and proud of this recipe because if you look around online, there aren't any good suanmei tang recipes in English or even in Chinese!

Jamaica and licorice

Once you get the basics down, feel free to improvise. Some people like cured Cantonese tangerine peel (chenpi) in here (get that at a Chinese herbalist's, too), and it's definitely delicious. But if you do that, take the jamaica flowers out. The reason is that each of these ingredients needs room to maneuver in the liquid, and if there are too many, they just jostle with each other and eventually cancel each other out to a large extent. At least, that's been my experience.

A Western but lovely twist is to use chilled carbonated water to top off the glasses at the end.

I keep on saying "without any ice." There's a reason for that: ice dilutes the drink. You don't want that here. At all. Trust me. Chill the heck out of the infusion, serve it in small glasses if the weather is sweltering, and keep the infusion at the ready in a thermos or a covered pitcher. There is a definite WOW factor to this drink that is impossible to describe. It's definitely not lemonade or ice tea. Once diluted, the magic just fizzles.

Dried and syrupy osmanthus

Use rock sugar and rock sugar only here, rather than white sugar. Regular sugar turns sour in the mouth, while rock sugar stays sweet. I don't know why. But it's night and day, really.

If you have a garden, and you live in a temperate climate, consider growing some Chinese plants like Osmanthus fragrans and Chinese jujubes (Chinese dates) and so forth. It's amazing the number of Chinese plants that can be grown here in California, for example. Check with your local garden center or university. Plus, you get the added delight of the divine scent of Osmanthus in full bloom, which the Chinese held as one of the most refined of all floral aromas. Smell it fresh and you'll understand.

Papaya milk redux

If you live in an area with a sizable Chinese population, you might already be familiar with this Taiwanese version of nectar of the gods: papaya milk. This is one of those perfectly designed sweet rewards for hot weather, and I can think of little that is ever as satisfying when the mercury rises, for it quenches thirst, fills the belly, and cools the brow. 

The streets and alleyways of Taipei have blenders going night and day to satisfy the demand for this great local drink. It looks like a milkshake, but isn't as sweet, and it has lots of vitamin C and all of those phyto-nutrients that you never learned about in Home Ec. So it's good for you. But more important, it tastes incredibly delicious.

My local Chinese market recently had some good-looking Hawai'ian papayas on display, and there was no way I could resist. Perfectly ripe and fragrant... how could I ever say no?

Smooth and delicious

When you do go in search of a tasty papaya, pass over the football-sized ones if you can and head for the smallish ones from Hawai'i. I've found that these have tons more flavor and fragrance, and they also are more expensive, which sometimes makes paying extra a bit hard. 

But look at it this way: this is a little like choosing a handful of fresh, ripe, still warm tomatoes at a farmer's stand over those pink softballs that supermarkets tend to display. Yes, Sungolds and Green Zebras are probably at least twice the price of flavorless imposters, but you're buying tomatoes because you want to taste them, right? So go for the gold.

I've monkeyed around with the usual recipe a bit because I wanted to cut the sweetness and amplify the healthier aspects. I can feel good about pouring out another glass for myself that way.  However, if you want to stick with what's tried and true, then by all means use all whole milk for the liquid along with sugar to taste in place of the agave nectar. 

No one would blame you if you did.

Papaya milk 
Mugua niunai 木瓜牛奶
Southern Fujian, Taiwan

Makes about 3 cups, or two 12-ounce glasses

1 very ripe Hawai'ian papaya
⅔ cup milk (whole, low fat, almond), plus more if needed
⅔ cup plain kefir or yogurt
Agave nectar to taste
Pinch of sea salt

4 to 6 ice cubes

It's gotta be ripe

1. Peel the papaya, cut off the hard stem end, slice the papaya in half, and remove the seeds. Cut the papaya meat into large chunks and toss them into a blender.

2. Add the milk and kefir plus a squirt of agave nectar and the salt. Whiz everything together until the papaya milk is smooth, adding more milk if the mixture is too thick. Taste and add more agave nectar, if needed.

3. Toss in the ice cubes and whir on high speed until the ice is completely smooth. Pour into 2 cold glasses and serve with a thick straw.

Hakka salted limes

The Hakka people in Guangdong province have a delicious cuisine that is only now beginning to be appreciated outside of the isolated hills and valleys that have been their home for generations. 

Far from the bounteous lands and rivers of Jiangsu, this is a land where simple economics demanded that they use every part of the pig and preserve anything that couldn't be eaten immediately. 

Be that as it may, the cuisine they created out 
of hardship almost equals that of the Shakers in its simplicity and ingenuity.

Take the sour little limes that are called calamondins. Native to China and appreciated as far away as the Philippines, they look like Munchkin tangerines but taste more like  kumquats, with their sweet skin and puckery juice. A bottled sauce is made out of them and is used for dipping savory tamales and other foods that require a bit of zip, but if you come across any fresh representatives of this adorable little fruit during the winter months, the Hakka people have come up with a great way to use them.

Fresh calamondins

Called "four season tangerines" (siji ju) in Chinese, the best place to find them tends to be in Filipino markets, or you can grow them yourself if you live in a warm climate. In fact, you might find yourself falling a bit in love with these fragrant little citruses, for they can be used in marmalades, to make homemade variations of limoncello, or even squeezed peel and all into a bracing limeade. 

The Hakka people tend to salt these little guys, which turns them into soft, pungent balls that still are sour but possessing a new level of fragrance. The salted limes are used in a number of different ways, mainly as a flavoring - much like Moroccan salted lemons - for fish, pork, or chicken dishes, where their citrus oils hover over the main ingredients and add a definite layer of freshness. This is especially delicious in winter dishes when fresh greens and fruits are scarce. Unlike salted lemons, though, the entire fruit is used in Hakka dishes. The salt is just dusted off, and then the limes are cut into thin slices before they and their juices are layered into whatever dish needs their assistance.

Salted lime tea

An unusual and particularly delicious beverage can also be made out of these salted limes. It's wonderful on a blustery day, particularly if you have a cough or cold, for the limes, honey, and hot water come together to form a soothing drink. 

Simplicity itself, it consists of just one of the salted limes (with the salt knocked off, of course) that is crushed in large cup. Boiling water is poured over it, more mashing ensues, and then you dribble in a tablespoon or so of local honey. Stir it around, invite the fragrant vapors up into your suffering sinuses, and then cuddle into a warm blanket with this homemade cup of Feel Better.

Hakka salted limes 
Yán sìjì jú 醃四季橘 
Hakka
Makes one jarful

1 pound fresh calamondin limes

Coarse salt of any kind (Hawaiian, rock, ice cream, etc.)

1. Wash and dry the limes carefully, but leave them whole. Wash and dry a lidded container that is large enough to hold them. Air dry both the limes and the container for a day so that there is not a hint of moisture anywhere; this is especially important if you live in a damp climate, since any moisture will turn to mold here.

Nestled in salt

2. Place the limes in the jar and cover them with the salt. Cover the jar and shake it around to evenly distribute the salt and to fill in any nooks and crannies. Open up the jar and add more salt as needed. 

3. Cover the jar and shake it every couple of days for a week just to make sure that there are no air pockets, and feel free to add additional salt. Place the jar in a cool, dark place and let it sit. Check it after a month. Depending upon how hot it is, how ripe the limes are, and how large they are, the salted limes will be brown and soft in a month or so. 

4. Once they have become completely salted, they will turn into soft, brown, juicy balls. Use very clean and dry chopsticks to fish them out of the salt, and cover up the rest of the limes with the salt while you're at it. The salt will become wet at the bottom of the jar from some of the lime juice, which is quite all right.