Guilin Food
Guilin, a beautiful city, has lots of delicious food, which attracts numerous tourists to come, from main courses to snacks, from fruit to beverage.
Famous dish
Yangshuo beer fish, is a local dish in Guilin, famous for its delicious taste and special cooking method. Its ingredients are fish, green fresh pepper and tomato, and seasoning are peanut oil, light soy sauce, dark soy sauce, beer, oyster sauce, ginger, and green onion. The fish is carp hunted from Li River, and its scales won't be removed. It is first fried in oil of high temperature till its scales become curly and the surface becomes yellow, then other ingredients and seasoning are added. After cooking, the fish tastes spicy and delicious, without fishy smell, and the fish meat is tender.
Quanzhou cuxueya/全州醋血鸭, is a local dish of more than one thousand years in Quanzhou county, also popular in the whole Guilin. It is a duck dish, and its ingredients are duck, duck blood, and bitter gourd, and the seasoning are vinegar, pepper, basil and ginger. Before cooking, vinegar is added into the duck blood. When the duck is well cooked, the blood is added into it. Though this dish doesn't have a good looking, it tastes well.
Hehuayu/禾花鱼 is a dish of fish, popular in the whole Guilin, but Quanzhou Hehuayu is more famous. Hehuayu is a kind of small fish living in paddy fields and streams, and its food is mainly Hehua, this is why it is called Hehuayu. The ingredients of this dish are Hehuayu, and sour bamboo shoot, and its seasoning are ginger and pepper. The fish is first fried in oil and then other ingredients and seasoning are added in. This dish is spicy and sour, and though the fish is fried, its meat is soft and tender.
Braised meat with Lipu taro/荔浦芋扣肉, is a traditional dish, and popular in Guilin. its main ingredients are Lipu taro and pork, and the seasoning are fermented tofu, soy sauce and green onion. Taro and pork are cut into slices and fried in oil, and then they are put in a bowl and seasoning are added in. The last process is braising. This dish doesn't appear in household daily eating, because the cooking is complicated and time-consuming, and it usually occurs in feasts of wedding and festivals.
Except this dish, Guilin still has other popular dishes, like duck wrapped with lotus leaf and steamed duck with ginkgo nut. One cooking is very popular in household daily eating, and it is Niangrou/酿肉. Chopped meat is put in green pepper, bitter gourd, viviparous, Chinese eggplant, tofu and so on.
Snacks
Guilin mifen/桂林米粉 is a kind of rice noodles in Guilin, and it has three types, the gravy , the broth, and the freshly-cooked. For the first two, rice noodles are heated in boiled water, and then added with different meat. The gravy mifen is added with stewed meat, and the broth with meat soup. While as for the freshly-cooked, it is cooked with rice noodles and fresh meat and vegetable after you make an order.
Liangfen/凉粉 is a kind of local beverage for relieving summer heat, which is fragrant, sweet, smooth and refreshing. It consists of smooth semisolid paste and sugary water. The paste is made from a kind of herb, called liangfen herb, which is a local herb in Guangxi.
Douhua or beancurd jelly/豆花 is a traditional snack in Guilin, and it looks like a pudding. Douhua is made from soybean which is made to soft toufu. The eating method is very easy: add brown sugar into the soft tofu.
Oil-tea/油茶 is a special snack in Guilin, and Gongcheng oil-tea is much famous. The main ingredient of oil-tea is black tea leaf, and it is fried with oil to a little burnt, and then water, salt, peanut powder and ginger are added, and cooked to boiling. After the oil-tea is well cooked, parched rice and green onion are added into it. While in drinking the tea, you may prepare other snacks, like steamed bun, cake, biscuits and so on. The oil-tea is a little bitter and has a strong smell.
Where should you go to eat such delicious food and snacks? You may go to restaurants and hotels to eat those dishes, and snacks are sold in lots of places, and a food street is the perfect place to eat those snacks. Guilin has several food streets, like Shangshui food street, and shopping centers also have lots of delicious food, and in the surrounding of shopping centers, there are also food streets. In Zhengyang pedestrian street, there are many delicious food, which is the center of Guilin and has a huge visitors flow.
