Chitterlings with shredded ginger, steamed pork with pickled mustard greens, stewed cabbage, red vinasse pork… there are so many widely known Hakka dishes, but often neither their preparation nor their flavor is truly authentic.

Take Hakka stir-fry, a dish as representative of Hakka cuisine as any. Yet most restaurants, even in Taiwan, don’t prepare it authentically. “They ruin even our signature dish!” ­Zheng urgently wants to right this wrong. She says the main ingredients of Hakka stir-fry are pork belly, squid and dried tofu. The dish must be stir-fried until it is quite dry, and it’s important to use soy sauce, not salt, for flavoring, so it won’t be too salty.

To demonstrate and pass down true Hakka cuisine, ­Zheng started out by entering cooking competitions. In 2005 the Hakka Affairs Council held the first Hakka Cuisine Festival, where she burst onto the scene, taking the gold for the northern region and the bronze for all of Taiwan.

Orders are mounting for Sister Duan’s pumpkin buns, red bean rice cakes, mugwort rice cakes and vegetable buns. (photo by Jimmy Lin)

Bitter turning sweet

Her version of stuffed stewed bitter melon, which she calls “Bitter Bringing Sweet,” is one of her specialties, and helped her win that northern regional championship.

She recalls how the judge, master chef Ah-Chi (­Cheng Yen-chi), asked her why she called the dish by that name. “My dish has a history,” she responded. “Hakkas have been in Taiwan more than 400 years, and we’ve always been a marginalized group. It’s not until in recent years, since the Hakka Affairs Council was established, that we’ve had government support and a new sense of hope. Appropriately, when bitter melon is stewed with mustard greens and minced meat, it takes on a sweetness. And the salted egg yolk on top, resembling the sun, suggests hope for a bright future.”

However circumstances may have improved for Hakkas in Taiwan, most people still carry a bunch of unfair stereotypes about Hakka food—that it’s oily and overly salty, say, or that’s it filling but rough and unrefined.

Zheng points out that the work that most of a population engages in has an effect on its culinary culture. Back when Taiwan was a predominately agricultural society, Hakka farming villages were mostly in remote marginal areas that were harder to farm. Cultivating the fields was hard work requiring a lot of perspiration, which meant the body’s salt stores had to be constantly replenished. Furthermore, back before refrigerators, Hakkas used red vinasse and salt to extend the shelf life of food, so food tended to be quite salty. But now that economic conditions are different, flavors are becoming lighter and more delicate.

Delicious Hakka vegetable buns have a filling made of daikon radish, ground meat, shiitake mushrooms and dried shrimp, as well as pliantly al dente skins.

Hakka creative snacks

Whether or not Hakka cuisine is considered by some to be unsophisticated farmers’ fare, Hakka desserts are undeniably varied and outstanding, particularly the numerous snacks made with rice flour. They are de rigeur at wedding and funeral banquets and birthday dinners. They include vegetable buns and glutinous rice balls eaten at Lantern Festival, mugwort rice cakes eaten on Tomb Sweeping Day, dough dumplings eaten at Dragon Boat Festival, and fa­ban and tian­ban sweet rice cakes eaten at Chinese New Year’s. Moreover no Hakka wedding, funeral or banquet would ever lack glutinous rice cakes.

Sticky (glutinous) rice is the foundation of all of these snacks. You first add water to glutinous rice flour to create a wet dough, and then squeeze out the water through a cloth to make a drier dough. Then you add any of various fillings to create a variety of pastries, sweet or savory.

Zheng’s deep feelings toward these Hakka pastries stem from her memories of busy life on the farm as a child. She explains that in order to provide farm workers with sustenance to keep them going between meals, Hakka farming society developed various rice-flour-based snacks. She remembers that her family most often provided rice noodles and silver needle noodles. “They just needed to be immersed in brown-sugar water, and they were ready to eat,” she recalls. “It was really convenient.”

Today Zheng is creating an improved “creative Hakka cuisine” with an emphasis more on refinement than on filling you up. Her pumpkin buns, red bean rice cakes, mugwort rice cakes, and vegetable buns all look beautiful.

Pumpkin buns and mugwort cakes have fillings that differ only slightly. For pumpkin buns, you fill the rice-flour dough with some healthy pumpkin puree, whereas for mugwort rice cakes you fill it instead with mugwort, which is particularly effective at warding off the ill effects of cool, moist weather, such as the plum rains of May.

Hakka red-bean rice cakes are sweet. The bright red color comes from red yeast, which helps to lower blood lipids. The filling is red bean paste. Vegetable buns usually have a filling of shredded dai­kon radish, shii­take mushrooms, ground meat, and dried shrimp. ­Zheng has recently tried using taro in the filling, which came out delicious as well.

Zheng also produces a food product known far and wide: Hakka shallot oil. Exactly how awesome is Sister Duan’s “Hakka Handmade Shallot Oil”? As soon as you open the bottle, its scent envelops you. It works well mixed in with noodles, rice, vegetables or stewed meat. The shallot oil is made by frying shallots and pork belly in lard. Most shallot oil on the market isn’t salty, but ­­Zheng has added a little salt to her version, so it has a stronger aroma and a distinct mouthfeel.

Eating vegetable buns on the Lantern Festival is a Hakka custom.

Made with love, packaged with care

She supplies her line of food products to the Tai­pei City Hakka Cultural Park and Breeze Supermarkets, and also takes orders directly online. The business is keeping her very busy, to the point where quite a few people are under the mistaken impression that she’s opened a restaurant, so she constantly gets calls from people wanting to book tables.

Now aged 72, Sister Duan is still hale and hearty, and she has in fact considered opening a retail establishment. “If I opened a business in a storefront,” she says, “I’d like to open something like Starbucks for Hakka pounded tea and snacks. And if someone wanted to learn how to make them, I’d be happy to teach them.”

When will Sister Duan’s pounded tea shop open a branch in Tai­pei, far from any traditionally Hakka region? There’s no way of telling right now. Nevertheless, if you want to eat fine Hakka cuisine, there’s no need to endure a painful wait. On a weekend or holiday pay a visit to the Tai­pei City Hakka Cultural Park, or place a group order. It’s not hard to get to eat the healthy and delicious food that Sister Duan has lovingly made and packaged.

Sister Duan’s shallot oil is made in the style that she learned from her own grandmother. It really captures the classic Hakka flavor.

To really capture the Hakka spirit, these pumpkin buns, made with glutinous rice dough and pumpkin paste, have pumpkin seeds and raisins arranged on top to resemble tung blossoms.