Chinese Snacks Recommendation
I know in my normal FAQs and essays, I try my best to be all Mature and Professional and Responsible. But I’ve always wanted to put out littler blogs on more minor aspects of Chinese culture that I never can find the right approach to. Last night, as I was doing my fortnightly shopping on Yamibuy, it occurred to me—a lot of culture is tied up in food, isn’t it? I could try to write a blogpost on Chinese cuisine…but honestly, like I said, I’ve done very, very, very little domestic travel in China. Every time I go back, it’s to visit family. All I know is the cuisine of a very small area of Shandong, and I lived for a few brief years in Shenzhen. That’s it. So if I did write such a blog post, I’d just be summarising existing articles on the internet at that point, and I’m not sure what I’m doing would be of any value.
So instead, I put together a list of recommendations of snacks on Yamibuy. It’s a way to experience a lot of the food that I grew up with, without actually having to go through the trouble of getting a visa and going to China.
This is NOT a sponsored post. I’m not getting paid by Yamibuy or any snack manufacturers to promote anything. This is all stuff I genuinely, personally enjoy. There’s a load more cool snacks on Yamibuy though, so I do recommend taking a look around. But I only talk about stuff that I have actually put in my mouth and enjoyed.
Finally, this is meant to be a lighthearted, fun little recommendation list. Don’t take it too seriously. :P
The noodles in this are somewhat interesting, in that they’re super wide and very slippery when cooked just right. I ate like a dozen packs of these the first time I was pregnant. But honestly, I buy this brand of noodles just for the lamb soup. It’s strong with lamb flavour and super good as just a broth on its own.
Instant Noodles with Tomatoes and Eggs
Often times, I’ll get too lazy too cook, and just make do with some instant noodles. But after I’m done, I always feel unsatisfied, because they’re just a big bowl of carbs with no protein. Well, this brand of instant noodles comes with real, actual eggs in the flavour pack. And not just a tiny bit of egg either. They give you a pretty healthy serving. It’s super satisfying, and is my favourite lazy late night snack.
Kangshifu Braised Beef Noodles
These instant noodles are an ancient enough brand that they’re not a staple of my childhood, they’re a staple of my mom’s childhood. Apparently, my mom, my aunt, and my grandma used to actually fight over these noodles. It’s definitely a cornerstone of many Chinese people’s childhoods. As to its actual flavour, they’re what you’d expect, just a hint spicy. But what’s important is the flavour of nostalgia. Back before we had 11,000 different instant noodle flavours, and you had to deal with what you had.
Fuck the noodles in this. They’re not even important. Okay, okay, that was a bit harsh. You can absolutely have them if you want to. They’re a little bland for standing up to authentic scallion oil noodles that my dad makes. But they’re not bad. But the important part of this item is the free seaweed egg soup they put in every package. Drop a block of that shit in a bowl and add hot water, and it is some of the best fucking seaweed soup I’ve ever had. I am honestly mad that they don’t let me just buy 50 packages of just seaweed soup.
This shit is what my mom would feed me when I got sick as a small child, in lieu of medicine. It’s very sweet, and is basically sugary breakfast cereal, China style. Much like the braised beef noodles mentioned earlier, this brand has been around forever and is a cornerstone of many Chinese people’s childhoods. It’s still super good today, and all you gotta do is pull open the packaging and dig in with a spoon. It’s another one of my standard late-night snacks.
If you bought some of the instant noodles mentioned above, and want just a little more protein to go with it, but are too lazy to cook up any meat yourself (like me), then these are a great purchase. Whenever I feel like a package of instant noodles is juuust short of actually filling me up, I drop one or two of these bad boys in, and it’s perfect. You can eat them on their own as a snack too.
I’m a pussy, so I only ever buy the non-spicy version of these, which most other Chinese people would consider sacrilegious. If you’re brave, try out the spicy options—they’re far more authentic. These are basically Chinese pickles. Growing up, the first two decades of my life, my breakfast was always a big bowl of rice porridge, with five or six different Chinese pickles to liven things up. And that’s a very archetypical Northern Chinese poor people breakfast. These go well with steamed bread rolls too, when you’re too poor to have stir fry, but just eating bread by itself is too sad.
The ones I got were actually cherry blossom white peach flavoured, and they were delicious. But there’s no reason to think red velvet cake flavoured wouldn’t be just as delicious. Like all Chinese desserts, it has achieved the highest honour of being, “sweet, but not too sweet”. I know milk wine porridge sounds sus as fuck, but it honestly tastes just like milky oatmeal, with a drizzle of sake.
It says Seafood Soup, but the Chinese label says clearly it’s vegetable and egg soup. This is what I treat myself to, whenever I don’t want to buy a whole bunch of scallion noodles just to have delicious soup. It’s not a terrible second option. It’s a very quick and easy snack for those days where I feel like I’ve been eating too much meat lately and get paranoid about not keeping up with my micronutrients.
Yeah, this is basically just oatmeal made with coconut milk. But it achieves that “sweet, but not too sweet”ness that I look from my snacks. Most pre-packaged snacks in America are way too throat-curlingly sweet for me, and I can’t really stomach any of them. This is basically a safer option, for the ultra un-adventurous who’s too scared to try out the mixed congee. It is such a convenient, no-effort breakfast though.
Just realised that every porridge and congee I’ve introduced so far has been the sweet kind. Well, I admit it. I do have a big sweet tooth. But I appreciate savoury porridges too! It’s just that usually, if I feel like savoury, I’ll just make plain rice porridge and break out the pickles. But for people who have no idea how to make porridge, this is a great brand, packed with umami. I gotta say, I prefer their mushroom and vegetable porridge when it’s available. It’s just a lot less sus to me than canned abalone. But this particular flavour is mostly going to be mushroom too, anyways.
Yes, this is Chinese American food, instead of Chinese American Food. I’ve never encountered such a thing in actual New Orleans, but China has convinced itself that this is New Orleans Flavour. It’s not cajun, mind you. It’s not creole. It’s Chinese. This one is a little more fussy than other suggestions—you do gotta buy your own wings and cook them yourself. This is just the marinade. But these wings are endlessly popular with my siblings and disappear from the dinner table the second they’re presented.
These are to actual authentic Chinese glutinous corn what fucking the gap in your couch cushions is to actual sex. It is sad and humiliating and depressing and after you’re done eating them, you just sit around for ten to fifteen minutes, wondering if the world might be better off without you. But they’re the best you can get all the way in America. For brief moments in your life, they make you wonder if China isn’t that bad after all? Maybe you should move back, so you can actually eat glutinous corn whenever you want? Maybe you can put up with the Great Firewall? Maybe you can put up with 996 work schedules? Maybe your parents’ emotional abuse weren’t as bad as you remembered?
Do not apply butter.
Tiny little cakes stuff with chicken floss, which is just on the edge of sweet and savoury. They’re individually packaged, so they’re a great, lightweight snack to pack for outings to the park or long road trips. The bread peel is super thin, so you’re really getting your money’s worth of meat floss. The only downside is that there’s, like, forty of them in the box, and I can never finish all of them by myself.
Made with actual roses, tastes like actual roses. They’re a little on the dry side though, so I’d recommend pairing them with green tea.
These are extra-thin oreos, so both half of the oreo cookie add up to be the thickness of a normal oreo cookie. As a result, there’s also only half as much stuffing. But it really does taste like fig newton flavoured oreos.
Yes, it’s basically just eating instant noodles dry after sprinkling in the flavour packet—also known as the superior way of eating instant noodles. But here, they do it for you. This is another cornerstone of childhood in China. I remember we’d have a giant, wholesale crate of these and pull a couple of bags out every time there were guests over. My favourite are the New Orleans chicken wing flavours, but my toddler will eat any of them.
You can recreate the same experience for cheap if you buy the cheapest bag of ramen your local supermarket will sell, crush it up in the packaging, and sprinkle in the flavour pack.
Surely, you’ve had shrimp chips before? They’re a pretty standard snack to bring out for free at most Chinese restaurants in bigger cities, like tortilla chips at Mexican restaurants. But if you haven’t, these are pretty damn good. They’re salty, but not too salty, and I genuinely prefer them over potato chips.
This brand of rice cracker is yet again the cornerstone of my childhood, my daily snack. I can buy a giant family pack of these biscuits and eat them all by myself in the course of two days. They’re shockingly addictive, for how simple they sound. These crackers are covered with some sort of mysterious powder that has a flavour that I just can’t nail down, and my curiosity keeps my hand reaching out for just one more pack, just one more pack. I don’t care how many times the packaging tells me it’s just soy sauce and sugar, there is more complexity here. If only I could get one more really good taste…
Cucumber Flavoured Potato Chips
Every single person I have had try this (and it is easily over a dozen people) have had the exact same reaction. “Wow! That’s really cucumber-y.”
“But aren’t cucumbers just water-flavoured?” I can hear you asking.
That’s what I thought too, until I had these potato chips.
They’re not…good? Not exactly. But they are very, very cucumber-y. And the contrast between what your brain is telling you you are tasting, and the texture of what your mouth is telling you you are eating keeps me coming back for more.
Fried Crab Flavoured Potato Chips
It’s surprisingly convincingly crab flavoured! Why doesn’t Walmart have exotic Lays flavours on their shelves? Americans like crabs, right? If you check back every fortnight or so, Yamibuy always has more mysterious potato chip flavours. Like right now, there are a bunch of Mala Hotpot flavoured potato chips that I hesitated to recommend because I technically haven’t tried them. But my husband and I make a habit of buying up exotic potato chips every time just to see what they’re like.
As the name suggests, it’s tofu, made from fish. Like…reverse vegetarianism, where you substitute meat for plants? It’s made from fish, but it doesn’t taste too fishy at all. It’s mostly just a soft, chewy protein snack. These are all individually packaged too, and great for carrying on the go. My favourite are the barbecue flavoured.
It’s basically fish jerky (instead of beef jerky). It looks really hard and chewy from the pictures, but it’s actually super soft and flaky. Like all jerky, it’s super salty, and I need to make sure I have a big thing of water on hand before tearing into these, but the unique soft, melt-in-your-mouth texture is really delightful. The more you eat, the more you swear you begin to taste a bit of sweetness in them.
It’s honey-glazed pork jerky, and it is so goddamn good, holy shit. Whenever I have these around in the house, I’ll skip meals in favour of just eating piles of pork jerky. This is what I brought with me as a snack to the hospital, when I was giving birth. I have eaten over a hundred packets of these, and I am still nowhere done with them. Again, it’s not super chewy like beef jerky at all. It falls apart as soon as you start chewing it, and something about the texture just deeply satisfies some well-hidden autistic part of me that I can’t even describe. It is the food version of finally finding your g-spot and being like, “Ohhhhh! What the fuck do you mean I could’ve been eating this this whole time?”
I have no idea how these aren’t a standard nut in America, like cashews and almonds. They are my favourite nuts, bar non. They’re like tiny, itty, bitty, little pecans, but what makes them amazing is the flavouring that they’ve been marinaded in. I have no idea what it is, the packaging lies and insists it’s just sugar and salt, but fuck you. These taste nothing like the Senbeis. But this flavour has been widely acknowledge to be Hickory Nut Flavour, and all hickory nuts are flavoured like this now. It’s so good, that I now regularly buy other nuts that are hickory nut flavoured. Like hickory nut flavoured pecans, or hickory nut flavoured peanuts, or hickory nut flavoured sunflower seeds.
I know. All my friends made a face at me when I introduced the concept of “egg jerky”, but hear me out. It’s kind of not fair, because it’s not similar to other jerkies at all. It doesn’t taste dry at all, even though it’s technically a dried egg. It’s like…very firm jello. But savoury. It’s made from eggs, but it doesn’t taste like eggs. It tastes like the soy sauce marinade that it’s been flavoured with. Yes, very firm, savoury jello.
Hmm. That makes it sound even more disgusting than just egg jerky.
Whatever, trust me. They are so goddamn good. I ate ten bags of these in a week by myself and immediately went to order more. If you’re too lazy to even drop some marinaded eggs into your instant noodles, you can also just eat these as a snack afterwards, and they work just as well.
Of course, the best chestnuts are the type you watch a Chinese grandpa fry for you on the side of the road in his wok. But we’re not in China, and this is the best we can do. In order to preserve the chestnuts, they’re always in this rather sticky syrup that makes them both too sweet and kinda messy to eat. They’re still good, don’t get me wrong, but they’re more of a definitively sugary sweet snack, than a nutty one, like I prefer. Still, this brand is the best I’ve tried, in terms of at least getting the texture right. Often times, soaking in syrup for too long makes the chestnuts themselves weirdly sticky, and lose their original texture.
For some reason, the plastic spoons they give you to eat the coconut jellies with are at the bottom of the packaging, underneath all the coconut jellies. I’m too lazy to move all the jellies out, get the spoons out, then stack the jellies back in. So I just rip open the packaging, and suck the jelly out of it like I’m giving really good head to a plastic jar. It’s a great trick to perform in front of guests. I can hold the entirety of the coconut splooge in my mouth. The packaging is super tricky to open though, because there’s no convenient tab, so I literally have to stab it with a pair of sharp scissors.
My daughter also learned how to crawl exclusively so she can get to these coconut jellies and force me to feed them to her.
You can drink these like fruit juice, if you’re some sort of serial killer. Or, if you’re a normal human being, you can throw these into the fridge, and eat them later like a popsicle. I remember these being a part of my childhood before refrigerators were a part of my childhood, where it was up to the will of God alone whether it was going to be cold enough today that I actually got to enjoy them in popsicle form. The best flavour is, of course, random fruit flavour. Because the whole entire point to these popsicles is giving yourself up to fate.
Jelly drinks are like an upgraded version of the popsicles mentioned above. They’re the light at the end of a gruelling homework session, or three straight hours of piano practice. They’re the hope that keeps you going through another beating. I remember how I used to savour these. I’d take the tiniest of sips, leaving it up to the will of God once again whether there would be a jelly bit in this sip, or if it would be just juice. I would count how many jelly bits are in each bag, whether I had been blessed with a good harvest this bag, or if my yields are far below expectation. Now my son gets to drink these whenever he goddamn wants and he doesn’t even have to get whipped first, and that makes me want to punch him in the face a little. Just a little.
It’s just ordinary milk chocolate, but it tastes better than stuff I can buy at Walmart. I dunno why.
It’s milk candy. The only flavour option they have available is red bean flavour, but I honestly recommend you waiting until original flavour comes back, because that’s what people like myself actually grew up with. Here’s a link to some original flavour white rabbit candies locked up in a bizarre milk jar like container that’s supposedly super hard to get into. Don’t ask me. I have no idea why either.
These were a long-term resident in my jacket pockets and pants pockets up until the moment they were banned in China for giving too many people cancer. I honestly thought I’d lost them forever. And for years, I was furious. What the fuck did it matter whether people got cancer or not? What about my need to have candy that reminds me of cheap, shitty Chinese formula that also gave people cancer? Does nobody care about the children!? Imagine my surprise then, the first time I went to a Chinese market in the US, and lo and behold, they just had a big ‘ol bag openly for sale.
Did this candy stop giving people cancer? I dunno. I don’t care. It only pussy cancer we can totally treat like bladder cancer anyways. And maybe some reproductive damage. Whatever. My point is, it’s worth it. Eat it up before the FDA catches on, people.
Summer Solstice is coming up, and in preparation, Yamibuy is selling Zongzi, the traditional food to eat on Duanwu Festival. These are limited time—for half a year, you can’t buy any zongzi at all. I recommend stocking up if you like them. There are savoury zongzi and sweet zongzi. As time goes on, more variety should pop up. I recall last year, at some point, there were enough different flavours of zongzi that you really could have a balanced diet of nothing but zongzi.
There is a strong flame war on the Chinese internet that has been going since its inception, about sweet versus savoury zongzi. Sweet zongzi is generally preferred in Northern China (especially Shandong, where 90% of people prefer sweet zongzi). Savoury zongzi, on the other hand, is mostly preferred by rapists and child molesters.
The national drink of China, as officially certified by the CCP. The packaging swears at you in 90’s website popup colour schemes that it’s definitely made from coconut juice and coconut juice only. But it definitely doesn’t taste like what you actually suck out of a coconut. And it leaves a strange chalky residue in your mouth like you’ve been working in a coal mine for 20 years. What is it, really? Nobody knows. But the CCP assures you that it’s good for you. Do you not trust the CCP? Well? Do you, traitor?
A staple item seen around any dinner table where more than three middle-aged man is getting shitfaced drunk. If my family sits down at a table where there is a stack of 12 Wanglokats piled onto the lazy susan, I know I’m not getting out of there until midnight at the earliest. The packaging only promises to cool you down on a hot day, but it has never stopped generations of Chinese people from unerringly believing that it helps you sober up from getting drunk. If Wanglokat gave you the confidence to drive after getting drunk, is it responsible for drunk driving, or is the alcohol? A philosophical question that will be debated for decades to come.
It’s “milk”. It tastes like…”milk”. In that it tastes absolutely nothing like milk, but is definitely the flavour that someone would put together if they only learned about milk by reading about it in encyclopaedias. It’s like…drinking the abstract concept of milkiness, taught to an alien. It’s like the taste-bud version of what ChatGPT2 might have written about milk.
Served in a baby bottle, with a nipple, that you have to suck on to get the yogurt out of it. It’s the ideal product if you really need somebody to come punch you in the face, but you don’t know how to ask. Also comes in strawberry flavour.
This both made me laugh and made me SO hungry. If I want to try ordering, but I’m allergic to certain things (e.g., shellfish, gluten, eggs), do you have any tips for reading the ingredient labels?
I've always wondered whether people who grew up using chopsticks have as much trouble using knife-and-fork as I do using chopsticks. But I suppose nowadays forks are used widely in SE Asian countries too.