Early Look: Cantonese Rice 'Plates' (碟头饭)
Added 2024-06-18 05:43:38 +0000 UTCOk, so... you know those cliché, food bloggery, white people “rice bowls”?
As people interested in the cultural dimension of food, there’s always something so incredibly odd scrolling through Instagram and seeing them pop up. They feel like... an anachronism for 2024. They’re always these haphazard mishmashes of relatively random ingredients from random pockets in Asia – Chinese style stir fried vegetable, Japanese style boiled eggs, Korean style canned tuna salad… all squirted with a generous helping of Thai chili sauce.
I know that they’re the 21st century culinary equivalent of a tiki bar.
I also… kind of like them.
I mean, often times the recipes in said blogs are about as culturally grounded as the costume design in the movie Aladdin. But for me, I can’t help but enjoy the style of eating. Because the standard Chinese way to go at rice – small bowl, dishes transferred bite by bite from a main serving plate – is a great system, of course. But often I find myself drawn to larger bowls of rice… wanting to smother it with something saucy, wanting to devour the rice together with my dish in singular glorious bites.
Luckily, big bowls of rice also exist in China too, in the form of an (often lunch) platter called Gaijiaofan (盖浇饭), or Dip Tau Fan (碟头饭) in Guangdong. They're explicitly served over rice, often sauce-laden, and are… fantastic for us rice-bowl-lovers out there.
So with this video, we wanted to show you three Cantonese Dip Tau Fan options: (1) a saucy beef and egg, (2) chicken with shiitake, and (3) spam and fried egg, together with a seasoned soy sauce.
