Tasty tubers: staple nutrition
Print Edition
AS the weather warms up, appetites often cool down.
To make sure that nutrition levels don’t fall off at the same time, many people chose a versatile diet of grains and “rough” staple food, such as root vegetables like taro, sweet potatoes and yams.
Restaurants offering home-style Chinese meals often have a dish called “abundant harvest” on their menus. It may be a veggie wrap that replaces flatbread with sheets of raw bean curd served with a dipping sauce, or it may be a bamboo steamer full of peanuts and vegetables such as green soybeans, corns, carrots and pumpkin, cooked without additional seasoning.
Steamed “abundant harvest” is popular year-round. It’s an ideal starter to stimulate the appetite and make a diner feel full without eating too much. Plus, the dish is fun to share with others.
Steaming root vegetables and adding grains and cereals into porridges are among the most common ways of getting staple foods into the diet.
There are also creative and more delicious dishes that transform the somewhat “boring” ingredients into imaginative main courses, healthy desserts and beverages.
Taro is a vegetable not commonly used in Western cuisine, but it is popular in China. In fact, the root can be found in almost anything — ice creams, cakes, milk tea, soups and even pork rib stews. It has a firm texture, starchy content and mild taste.
For evidence of the taro craze, look no further than the menu in Chinese McDonald’s outlets. It features a taro pie, with an insanely sweet, gooey taro filling sealed in a crispy crust.
Taro root is available in farmers’ markets across China. The species Colocasia esculenta, with large corms and dotted purplish flesh, is called lipu taro, and the smaller, softer and starchier Colocasia antiquorum is also known as eddoe.
Purple taro products sold in markets are made with Colocasia esculenta, although excessively colorful taro milk tea and ice cream may also be helped by added food coloring. Beverage chain Attakai Kokoro Tea Shop has a taro milk drink that adds chunks of steamed taro to the milk blend.
In savory dishes, taro can be cooked with all kinds of meats and vegetables. Boiled taro can be prepared by stewing chunks of the tubers in soup stock until tender and the water has evaporated. It is seasoned with chopped scallion and a splash of hot oil to give the dish a boost in flavor.
Lipu taro can be steamed with salt, light soy sauce and oil to make a popular dim sum dish. Small cubes of cooked taro can be topped with pork rib cuts, then steamed to let the taro absorb all the flavor of the meat. Taro can also be braised with chicken, pork and duck as a replacement for potatoes and carrots.
Eddoe taro is called yunai in China. It’s a smaller variety that can be steamed and served with sugar as a dessert or added to savory dishes, especially duck stews.
In Jiangxi, Fujian and Zhejiang provinces, taro dumplings add tapioca flour to crushed steamed eddoe paste to make a skin to wrap around savory pork fillings. The dumplings are served in soups or with dipping sauces.
Yams
The yam is a staple food widely used in Africa and Asia. Chinese cuisine deploys a variety of uses because various kinds of yams have different tastes and textures. It is also considered a beneficial vegetable used in traditional Chinese medicine. Hence, the Chinese word for yam is shanyao, which translates as “mountain medicine.”
Thicker, rounder yams are huai shanyao, or Chinese yams. They are relatively less starchy than other yams and can be thinly sliced and tossed in the wok with vegetables like carrots and black fungus for a light summer stir-fry. The skin of the Chinese yam is easy to peel once the vegetable is steamed.
In Japan, the Chinese yam is called nagaimo and it’s eaten raw and grated, often as an complement to noodles.
A much thinner yam on the market is called tiegun shanyao, or “iron stick” yam. It is the best quality of Chinese yam and a specialty of Jiaozuo in Henan Province. The yam was named because the marks on the raw yams are similar to rust.
This yam is starchier and tougher than common Chinese yams. The flesh becomes dry after steaming. These yams are ideal for adding to chicken or pork rib soups that simmer for a long time. They don’t go well in a stir-fry.
In some supermarkets and online grocery stores, one can occasionally find purple yams, a large tuber full of anthocyanins, which are believed beneficial against a number of human diseases. These yams, mostly cultivated in southern China, can be used in stir-fries, casseroles, cakes and soups.
Be aware that fluids from uncooked yams can cause the skin to feel itchy and may cause skin rash. One should also be cautious about cutting the slippery raw yam with a knife to avoid getting hurt.
Sweet potatoes
The sweet potato, a distant relative of white potatoes, is mostly used in sweet dishes or added to steamed rice or porridge. Some recipes mix sweet and white potatoes for extra flavor. In northern China, the sweet potato often appears white inside, but that variety is starchier and but less sweet than the yellow-fleshed variety common in southern provinces.
The purple sweet potato, also known as the Okinawan sweet potato, is a vibrantly colored, smaller root vegetable cultivated in many countries. It’s even sweeter than regular sweet potatoes and often used in desserts for its beautiful color. The popular Okinawan Haupie pie in Hawaii is made with the purple sweet potato.
Baked sweet potato is a popular street-side snack in China, especially in winter when something warm in hand is so comforting.
In Cantonese cuisine, sweet and warm soup desserts are called tong sui, which translates as “sugar water.” One popular dish is the sweet potato tong sui, which is made by simply boiling cubes of yellow-fleshed sweet potato in water until tender.
Baked sweet potato chips are considered a healthy alternative to traditional potato chips.
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