Apple pie pizza (Pizza Hut)

A lot of people hate dessert pizzas, and a lot of people hate Pizza Hut... ergo a lot of people will hate this post. In Taiwan's Pizza Hut buffet, you pay 299 NT (~$9) to go apeshit on an assortment of pizzas. The selection is hardly ordinary, with okonomiyaki, Hawaiian pork, pepper steak, General Tso's chicken, and Korean kimchi BBQ gracing the frequently rotating menu (oh, and they serve roast chicken too!). Maybe I've become desensitized to how special some of these flavor combos are, but no, the thing that caught my eye was the synergy between apple pie filling and pan pizza crust. I present you... the apple pie pizza.

To say it's life-changing would be a lie, but to deny that it tastes good would be an injustice. To summarize all that goes on in this culinary jewel, a slightly undercooked pan pizza crust is topped with an ever so thin layer of cheese, followed by caramelized soft apple pie filling, and glazed over with a light sugar syrup, which has a delightfully cinnamon flavor. Yes, the crust is still a tad oily (as are all pan pizzas from Pizza Hut), and the apple topping might have been a shade too sweet, but it's cheesy apple pie bread... there's no way that mix of ingredients isn't 100 sorts of incredible.
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Deep-fried cheese potato (起司馬鈴薯)

Mashed potatoes aren't really a staple in the everyday diet of Taiwanese people. Actually, most stereotypical American foods aren't (except for corn... they freakin' love corn), but if you fry any food item you can think of, Asians will probably eat it. I promise you that. In yet another stroke of genius, mashed potato is molded back into ellipsoid shape of a whole potato (so meta), dipped and battered in panko breadcrumbs, and fried until you get a giant nugget of soft potato wrapped in a crispy shell. If making a giant sized french fry weren't bad enough, it gets dissected, stuffed, and covered with pretty much whatever the hell you want on top of it. Cheese? Of course. Pineapple? Sure! Hot dogs, octopus, and broccoli? I was just about to curl up and die in excitement.

I chose to get the one that's basically their sampler. You get less of every topping (and none of the nifty ones like octopus), but you get a bit of most of the basic ones. As advertised, they pull a freshly re-fried potato from a vat of oil, cut a cross in it, and begin piling shit in like no one's business. Bacon bits, ham, turkey, corn (can't not have corn), pineapple, broccoli, mayonnaise, and a hard boiled egg get mercilessly piled on before cheese potato guy scoops two spoonfuls of hot cheese (American of course!) over the entire creation. It's beautiful (in the sense that you can't really look away from roadkill)! It's like you'd expect, a bit too much for your mouth to comprehend simultaneously, but at the same time, with flavors ranging from sweet to tart to savory, it's as confusing as it is delicious. Texturally, it's like eating mashed potato... but with the occasional crunch of a french fry crust. I don't know anyone who hates french fries... so there ya go.



You can find this in 士林夜市 (Shilin Night Market), where there exists a duo of carts serving the same thing. Both had massively long lines, and to be honest I couldn't tell if there was any difference between the two beside their names, and the fact that one used guys to advertise, and one used girls. Uh, good move girl cart. Anyway, for 55 NT ($1.75) you can get a fried potato, slathered in cheese, and piled to the sky with crap that you might, or might not, think belongs on a fried potato... slathered in cheese.
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Pan-fried pork buns (原上海生煎包)

It seems incredulous that I've never ever written about 生煎包 (sheng jian bao) before. While it seems that every combination of pork wrapped in carbs has been played out, I assure you this is not the case. This stuff is the shit dreams are made of. Some kids dream about clouds of cotton candy and lollipop trees... well, I dream of pork buns. Anyway... in what's the cross between gyoza pot stickers and steamed pork buns, you end up with a piece of culinary genius. A juicy ball of fatty minced pork, dotted with spring scallions, is stuffed inside a moderately thick layer of dough, which ultimately gets stuffed in a what's basically a giant wok filled with a thin layer of oil and water. After covering and waiting for the water to ultimately boil off, you're left with a pan filled with beautiful dumpling like buns.



Holy crap, you're lying so hard if you claim you don't want a part of that perfection right now. Fact you might not know: my hand was burning for that picture. It was straight from a new batch, and the oil was spilling out. The things I do for this blog... sigh. What can I say about this that the picture hasn't already explained? It has the juice content of a decent soup dumpling, the top layer skin isn't unlike a perfectly fluffy mantou glazed in pork oil, and the bottom is pan-fried to a perfect goldenrod, like that found on pot stickers. It's like the best combination of dough and pork I can think of.



These came from a shop called 原上海生煎包 (Yuan Shanghai Pan-fried Buns) located in 士林夜市 (Shilin Night Market). Their reputation for making kick ass pork buns is the stuff of legends (even non-tourist Asians are willing to line up for it!). Think about it, of all the places in Taipei that make these kinds of fried pork buns, these must be pretty remarkable if everyone likes them. The best part though, I saved for last. Get this, each of these sensual pockets of pork only costs 10 NT (30 cents). Let's think about this for a second. For any given meal in NYC, it's not unusual for someone to spend $15 minimum. This is the equivalent of 500 NT. You could buy 50 fried pork buns for that! You know how many people you could feed with 50 pork buns? I'm not sure either, but it's definitely greater than one. Seriously... why it's taken me so long to write about this stuff, I don't even know.
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Brown sugar shaved ice (水龜伯古早味冰店)

I usually don't care much for how a dish is plated, or how it looks. As long as it tastes good, well... I honestly couldn't care less if it looked like it just went 10 rounds with robot Jesus. Basically, if you put food in front of me, and I think it has even the slightest potential to taste awesome, then it's probably going in my mouth. When I saw this bowl of shaved ice though, in 公館夜市 at a shop called 水龜伯 (shui gui bo), it was love at first sight. Color me (pun intended) impressed. For just 50 NT ($1.50), you can buy a masterpiece... of shaved ice I mean.

Not unlike an artist's palette, this bowl of shaved ice blends glassy grass jelly, colorful mochi balls, red beans, almond tofu, starchy little balls (not mochi) made out of yam and taro, and puts it all over the most OG of all varieties of shaved ice... shaved ice made from brown sugar. Luckily, it's not just all looks and no substance. This shop, which predates my parents apparently, makes a mean bowl of shaved ice. Each of the toppings complements the others extremely well. The red beans provide an earthy sweetness, the almond tofu adds a subtle nutty fragrance, and the yam balls, mochi, and grass jelly provide for a myriad of contrasting textures, each worthy of their place. When you run out of toppings, the almond milk mixed with half melted brown sugar shaved ice is unlike any combination I've had elsewhere. Now, I won't say this is the end all be all shaved ice in Taiwan, but damn... it definitely ranks up there.

Seriously though, that's straight artwork. Find a prettier bowl of shaved ice. It'll never happen.
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