FOOD BY REGION-CHINA

 CHINA

Turnip cake (simplified Chinese: 萝卜糕; traditional Chinese: Jyutping is a Chinese dim sum dish made of shredded radish (typically Chinese radish or daikon) and plain rice flour. 

The less commonly used daikon cake is a more accurate name, in that Western-style turnips are not used in the dish; it is sometimes also referred to as radish cake, and is traditionally called carrot cake in Singapore. It is commonly served in Cantonese yum cha and is usually cut into square-shaped slices and sometime span-fried before serving. 

Each pan-fried cake has a thin crunchy layer on the outside from frying, and soft on the inside. The non-fried version is soft overall. It is one of the standard dishes found in the dim sum cuisine of Hong Kong, China, and overseas Chinatown restaurants. It is also commonly eaten during Chinese New Year, since radish ( chhài-thâu) is a homophone for "good fortune" ( hó-chhái-thâu) in Hokkien. In Taiwan, turnip cake is also commonly eaten as part of a breakfast.

Preparation

To prepare a turnip cake, Chinese radish (similar to daikon) are first shredded. Chinese radish, either the white-and-green variety or the all-white variety, is one of the key ingredients since it makes up a large portion of the cake. The other key ingredients are water and rice flour. 

Corn starch is sometimes added as it aids in binding the cake together, especially when a large number of additional ingredients (see list below) are added. The ingredients are stirred together until combined.

Additional ingredients that provide umami flavouring can be also added. They include chopped-up pieces of:

1. Dried shrimp
2. Dried Shiitake
3. Chinese sausage
4. Jinhua ham

These flavouring ingredients may first be stir-fried before being added to the radish and flour/starch mixture. Somewhat more luxurious cakes will add larger amounts of these ingredients directly to the mixture. 

Cheaper variants, especially those sold in dim sum restaurants will often just have a sprinkling on the top, to keep costs down.

This combined mixture is then poured in a steamer lined with greased aluminium foil or cellophane, and steamed at high heat for 40 to 60 minutes until it solidifies into a gelatinous mass.

Note that variations for specific tastes do exist omitting some of the ingredients above and adding others.

For those with allergies to radishes, some recipes substitute turnip for radish. Taro or pumpkin cakes are other variants.

Uses

Although the steamed turnip cake can be consumed straight with soy sauce, they are commonly cooked again to add additional flavors. For instance turnip cake can be sliced into square pieces when cooled and then pan-fried until both sides turn golden. 

It is served with chili sauce and/or Hoisin sauce on the side, as condiments.

Turnip cake also be stir-fried and made into the dish Chai tow kway.

Mantou

Mantou, often referred to as Chinese steamed bun/bread, is a kind of steamed bread or bun originating in China. They are typically eaten as a staple in northern parts of China where wheat, rather than rice, is grown. They are made with milled wheat flour, water and leavening agents. 

In size and texture, they range from 4 cm, soft and fluffy in the most elegant restaurants, to over 15 cm, firm and dense for the working man's lunch. (As white flour, being more heavily processed was once more expensive, white mantou were somewhat of a luxury in preindustrial China.)

Traditionally, mantou, bing, and wheat noodles were the staple carbohydrates of the northern Chinese diet, analogous to the rice, which forms the mainstay of the southern Chinese diet. They are also known in the south, but are often served as street food or a restaurant dish, rather than as a staple or home cooking. Restaurant mantou are often smaller and more delicate and can be further manipulated, for example, by deep-frying and dipping in sweetened condensed milk.

They are often sold precooked in the frozen section of Asian supermarkets, ready for preparation by steaming or heating in the microwave oven.

A similar food, but with a filling inside, is baozi. In some regions, mainly in Shanghai, mantou can be used to indicate both the filled and unfilled buns.

Etymology

A popular story in China relates that the name mantou actually originated from the homophonous word mántóu meaning "barbarian's head".

This story originates from the Three Kingdoms Period, when the strategist Zhuge Liang led the Shu Army in an invasion of the southern lands (roughly modern-day Yunnan and northern Burma).

After subduing the barbarian king Meng Huo, Zhuge Liang led the army back to Shu, but met a swift-flowing river which defied all attempts to cross it. 

A barbarian lord informed him, in olden days, the barbarians would sacrifice 50 men and throw their heads into the river to appease the river spirit and allow them to cross; Zhuge Liang, however, did not want to cause any more bloodshed, and instead killed the cows and horses the army brought along, and filled their meat into buns shaped roughly like human heads - round with a flat base - to be made and then thrown into the river. 

After a successful crossing, he named the buns "barbarian's head" (mántóu, 蠻頭, which evolved into the present day 饅頭).

 Variations in meaning outside northern China

Prior to the Song Dynasty, the word mantou meant both filled and unfilled buns. The term baozi arose in the Song Dynasty to indicate filled buns only. As a result, mantou gradually came to indicate only unfilled buns in Mandarin and other varieties of Chinese.

In many areas, however, mantou still retains its meaning of filled buns. In the Jiangnan region, it usually means both filled and unfilled buns. 

In the province of Shanxi (山西) mantou is often called momo (饃饃), which is simply the character for "steamed bun".

The name mantou is cognate to manty and mantı; these are filled dumplings in Turkish, Persian, Central Asian, and Pakistani cuisines. In Japan, manju (饅頭) usually indicates filled buns, which traditionally contain bean paste or minced meat-vegetable mixture (nikuman 肉まん "meat manjū"). Filled mantou are called siopao in Tagalog. 

In Thailand, they called filled "mantou" as "salapao".In Korea, mandu (饅頭) can refer to both baozi or jiaozi (餃子). In Mongolia, mantuu are basically the same as the Chinese mantou.-wikipedia