Malatang or pick and mix soup

It's been a couple of weeks since my last post, but you know how it is, food to overeat, drink to overdrink as per usual at this time of year. Anyway, after writing my post about my favourite noodle joint I thought I should treat the more cosmopolitan food lovers out there to a description of another uniquely Chinese favourite of mine. This is something I don't believe will ever be successfully introduced here because of its complete disregard of anything even vaguely health and safety orientated, but there's a certain charm to China's somewhat ironically anarchic disregard for our kind of obsessively beauraucratic nit picking. Well, it does exist, but it's a lot easier to just ignore. Anyway, I digress.

The mysterious and steamy broth.

Today I want to tell you about Malatang, a lovely and cheap delight to be found on many a street corner in the Middle Kingdom. Malatang is a bit hard to translate as the 'mala' flavour doesn't really exist outside of East Asia, but it roughly translates as 'spicy and numbing soup'. Tang is simply the word for soup and mala means a spicy numbing flavour derivative of lots of Sichuan pepper and some other stuff (search me, perhaps one of my Chinese friends will leave a comment). The base of the food is a spicy and numbing stock and the rest is up to you. You'll recognise Malatang places from the massive metal cauldron belching out steam and the fridges full of various fresh and frozen Chinese things, anything from bean curd to squid to greens to those fried breadstick things you get (I saw you can buy them in China town in London now) to quail's eggs to... I could go on. What you do is go up, take a basket with a number on, fill up your basket with whatever you desire and give it to the nice man or woman by the cauldron. They then dump all your ingredients into an individual basket in the boiling brown stock of doom, which gets reused all day (possibly longer, I'll look into the possibility of carbon dating upon my return to China). To those of you who are squeamish, get over it, you're really missing out on a delicious stock that is at boiling point all day anyway, it's really delicious as long as the establishment hasn't gone too crazy with the mala flavour.

The fridges of magical Chinese ingredients.

This food takes a bit longer than some Chinese foods, so it could be anything up to six minutes, maybe even seven if it's busy. However, when it comes you're treated to an enormous bowl of soup for anywhere between about 5 and 20 kuai (50p-£2), you can usually then go and help yourself to as much fresh garlic, chilli, mala spice and chopped up spring onion as you like. It's a marvellous dish, essentially a pick and mix soup, it's also a great option if you're new to China as obviously you don't really need to be able to speak Chinese because it's all self-service. For anyone living in Hangzhou my favourite was opposite EF East school just south of Jiefang-Jianguo lu kou on the left, really nice broth and friendly staff, beer for 3 kuai a pop too, don't listen to the unbelievers, it's much better than the one by the hospital. Right, that's it for now, I hope I haven't made you too ravenous.