The chip butty, found mostly in the UK, is a sandwich of chips, a.k.a. French fries, stuffed between two slices of sturdy bread. To be honest, the concept was a bit confusing at first. One cold winter morning, I pondered while munching on the ridiculously satisfying layers of deep-fried golden potatoes, ketchup, bread and mayonnaise: Why would you put fries in a sandwich? Going through all the effort of frying the potato strips, and then putting them into a sandwich anyway, you might as well eat toast with more toast in the middle, to save electricity, oil and effort.

As starches are staples, they’re not usually coupled with each other and are usually less intense in flavour – in a word, bland. It was akin to finding some bread on your rice, or mashed potatoes mixed with noodles. Yet one morning, when deciding what to have for breakfast one muggy morning in Taipei, the obvious dawned on me: that this happens all the time, and that in fact, my favourite breakfast item, fan tuan (rice wrapped around a fried dough stick), was also a starch within a starch. What’s more, another breakfast mainstay, shao bing you tiao (a fried dough stick tucked into biscuit-like bread) is even more extreme, placing a fried starch inside another fried starch.

The thing is, neither of these is bland at all. Frying adds a savoury touch to the shao bing you tiao, and you can add soy sauce if you want your daily dose of sodium in one go. Fan tuan comes in both sweet and savoury varieties. The latter are delicious, crumbly dried pork and pickled vegetable making for a dry and portable form of breakfast porridge, but it’s the sweet variety that I like the most. Sweet fan tuan is simpler, with nothing added to the rice and fried dough but sugar. Generous amounts, too. The whole warm mixture, just-starting-to-fall-apart glutinous rice blanketing the crispy dough, is just the thing to go with a bowl of warm soy milk (which is also preferably saturated with sugar).

This particular cafe I ended up at that morning, Yonghe Doujiang Dawang, has an open storefront, and the muggy air coming in from the street is blown back by electric fans. Colour-wise, everything inside is a varying shade of fluorescent-lit white or brown, but for some reason the morning here feels anything but drab. The lady who makes the food bustles out front, a television carrying daily scandal blares in the back, and from the basics comes the best sort of comfort breakfast you can get. Fan tuan is made to order, so the dough remains crunchy and the rice warm and soft. Shao bing you tiao is not assembled until the last minute, so the oil doesn’t settle into a soggy mess. There are several branches of this place throughout Taipei, but the setting here, cosy to the core, gives off no hint of this.

In Beijing, those hankering after fan tuan can find it at Yonghe Dawang, a fast-food chain store not to be confused with the Yonghe in Taipei. The interior is reminiscent of McDonalds, and a realisation that starch-on-starch actually depends a lot on fresh and contrasting textures sets in quickly. There, the rice is stale and the dough chewy. Yonghe Dawang’s worst offence, however, is its stinginess with sugar.

I suppose starch within a starch isn’t really that crazy after all. It’s like having a meat inside another meat, as in bacon-wrapped sausage or turducken. It’s good stuff, and – who knows – maybe the next step will be potato sushi.
I will keep my eyes peeled.

Yonghe Doujiang Dawang
Fuxing South Road, Section 2

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Taipei, travel.