Snack
Food for between meals: street food, fried and filled bites, sweets and candies, rice balls. Several are fried, so oil temperature and batter decide much of the result. Basics to read first: Deep Frying: Temperature, Batter, and the Second Fry
Tenmusu (Rice Balls with Shrimp Tempura)
Bite-sized rice balls with a small shrimp tempura inside, wrapped in nori. They began in the 1950s as a staff meal at a tempura shop in Tsu, Mie, and became a Nagoya specialty. The tempura is dipped in a soy seasoning or salted while hot before it goes in, and because the flavour holds up when cold they are sold as bento.
Torta de Aceite (Crisp Olive Oil Flatbread with Anise)
A Seville pastry: a dough of flour, olive oil, anise and sesame rolled paper-thin, sprinkled with sugar and baked. It has no crumb; the whole thing is crust. In Castile the same name belongs to a thick, soft bread, and the Seville torta became something else by giving up almost all of its thickness.
Kembang Goyang (Rice Flour Rosette Fritters)
A Betawi snack from Indonesia: a thin batter of rice flour, egg, sugar and coconut milk, picked up on a flower-shaped iron that has been heated in the oil, then fried and shaken off the iron. The name means "shaking flower". The batter cooks on the outside of the hot iron, not inside it.
Tahu Sumedang (Acid-Set Tofu Fried Hollow)
Fried tofu from Sumedang in West Java. The soy milk is set with acid rather than a calcium salt; in Sumedang the coagulant is the whey left from the last batch, kept two or three days. Fried in very hot oil, it comes out with a crisp, mottled brown shell and an inside so soft it can be half empty. Served with bird's-eye chillies.
Seblak (Crackers Cooked Soft in Kencur Chilli Sauce)
A Sundanese dish from the Parahyangan region of West Java: unfried dried crackers boiled until soft, then cooked with egg or prawns in a paste of kencur, shallot, garlic and bird's-eye chilli. Chewy and hot. The name comes from Sundanese words for a stinging taste, and the sting is the kencur.
Kutsinta (Steamed Brown Sugar Rice Cakes Set with Lye Water)
A Filipino steamed rice cake: rice or tapioca flour mixed with brown sugar and lye water (lihiya), coloured orange with annatto and steamed in small moulds. Where puto is doughy, kutsinta is jelly-like and chewy, and only mildly sweet. Eaten with freshly grated coconut.
Yaki Manjū (Skewered Steamed Buns Grilled Under Miso Glaze)
A Gunma snack: plain buns of wheat dough fermented with koji and steamed, threaded on bamboo skewers, painted with a thick miso sauce sweetened with brown sugar and grilled until scorched. They harden as they cool, so they are eaten straight off the fire.
Oyaki (Flour Dumplings Filled with Seasoned Greens)
Oyaki from Nagano: a thin wheat dough wrapped round a filling of greens seasoned in advance, shaped into a round, browned in a pan and finished under a lid. It was eaten in place of rice in country too cold and steep to grow it.
Jakoten (Fried Fish Cake Ground with Bones and Skin)
A fried fish cake from the southern coast of Ehime: small fish with only the heads and guts removed, ground with their bones and skin, shaped into flat cakes and fried, with a gritty bite.
Akashiyaki (Soft Egg Dumplings with Octopus in Dashi)
A speciality of Akashi in Hyogo: a thin batter rich in egg, with wheat starch standing in for part of the flour, cooked round a piece of octopus and dipped in dashi to eat. Much softer and yellower than takoyaki.
Pork Pie (Hand-Raised Hot-Water-Crust Pie)
An English pie whose crust is made by melting lard in boiling water and pouring it onto the flour, then raised by hand into a tall wall and filled with raw pork. After baking, hot stock goes in through a hole in the lid and sets as a jelly in the gap the shrinking meat has left. Sliced cold or at room temperature.
Emping (Melinjo Nut Crackers)
Indonesian chips made by roasting melinjo seeds, peeling them and hammering each one flat, then drying them in the sun. There is no dough and no paste: the seed itself becomes the sheet, and it puffs and crisps within seconds in hot oil. A faint bitterness is part of the taste.
Yukpo (Soy-Seasoned Dried Beef)
Korea's traditional dried beef: lean round sliced thin along the grain, seasoned with soy sauce, sugar and honey, and dried. It is served at weddings and on the ancestral-rite table. Slicing thin, trimming away every trace of fat and drying fast at the start are the whole method — the rules for drying fruit and for keeping biscuits, all applied to one strip of meat.
Sata Andagi (Okinawan Fried Sugar Dough Balls)
An Okinawan sweet: a stiff dough of flour, sugar and egg, pulled into balls and fried slowly in oil at only 140-150°C. The outside sets first, then the centre swells and splits it open — a split read as a smile, which is why these are fried for happy occasions. Elsewhere a fried thing that bursts has failed; here the burst is the aim, and what drives it is neither water nor air but baking powder.
Popiah (Fresh Spring Rolls in a Griddle-Rubbed Wrapper)
A fresh, unfried spring roll from Fujian and Chaoshan, and the wrapper is the whole of the craft. The dough is almost as wet as a batter, but it is beaten long enough to build all the gluten it can, so it hangs off the hand in one piece. Rubbed in a circle on a hot plate and lifted away, it leaves behind only the film the iron has caught, which cooks to a sheet like paper. A moist filling of braised jicama goes in at the table.
Paçoca (Pressed Ground Peanut Candy)
A Brazilian peanut candy. Roasted peanuts are ground with sugar, stopped the moment their oil comes out and a squeezed handful holds, and pressed hard into a mould. There is no honey, no syrup and no water; the only binder is the peanuts' own oil. So the grind has an edge on each side: short of it nothing holds, past it you have peanut butter. The name comes from a Tupi word for "to crumble", and crumbling in the mouth is the point.
Kue Rangi (Coconut Sago Cakes Baked Without Oil)
A street snack of Jakarta's Betawi people: grated coconut and sago starch dampened with a few spoonfuls of water, pressed into a small mould and baked under a lid with no oil at all. There is no oil because the grated coconut, in the heat, gives up its own oil and a thick milk that bind the batter — the coconut is neither pressed nor reduced, kept whole in the cake, and still yields its fat in the mould. Spread with thickened palm-sugar syrup and eaten warm.
Kemplang (Grilled Fish and Tapioca Crackers)
South Sumatra's fish cracker: Spanish mackerel or another fish worked into a dough with tapioca starch, steamed, sliced thin, dried hard in the sun, and grilled over charcoal until it puffs — no oil at all, and dark scorch marks where the fire touched it. Eaten with sambal. It shows that the cracker trick of drying a cooked starch and then blowing it up with heat does not need a pan of oil to work.
Jamaican Patty (Turmeric Pastry with Spiced Beef)
Jamaica's half-moon pastry: a turmeric-yellow crust around minced beef cooked with curry powder, thyme and scotch bonnet. It is the British pasty after it met Indian and African seasoning in the Caribbean. The gold on the crust is not the colour of baking but a colour the turmeric put there first, so doneness is read from the base and the crimp, not from the colour.
Gimmari (Fried Seaweed Rolls with Glass Noodles)
A Korean street snack: seasoned, cooked glass noodles rolled tight in gim (laver), battered and fried. Other dishes that put glass noodles into a filling have to plan for the noodles swelling; gimmari cooks and seasons them first and lets them cool, so the roll can be packed tight. The weak point is the gim, so the noodles go in drained and cool, and the batter is what meets the oil. Eaten dipped in tteokbokki sauce.
Dalgona (Sugar and Baking Soda Candy Stamped with a Shape)
Sugar is melted in a ladle, a pinch of baking soda is stirred in, and within seconds it foams up and turns pale. It is tipped out, pressed flat and stamped with a shape. There are two ingredients, sugar and soda, and no acid at all: what makes the soda foam is the heat of the molten sugar. Too much soda and it turns bitter; leave the sugar too long and it runs on towards caramel and turns bitter that way.
Yueliang Xiabing (Moon Shrimp Cake between Two Spring Roll Wrappers)
A Taiwanese xiaochi: shrimp pounded with pork fat and garlic, spread thin between two round spring-roll wrappers and shallow-fried until it is round and golden like a full moon, then cut into wedges for sweet chilli sauce. Menbosha puts a shrimp filling between bread and fries it twice; this spreads the filling a few millimetres thin and does it in one. The holes pricked in the top sheet come from the same arithmetic.
Tklapi (Sun-Dried Fruit Leather)
Georgia's fruit leather: cooked, sieved fruit spread 2-3mm thin and dried in the sun. Sweet sheets of apricot or peach are eaten as they are; sour ones of cherry plum (tkemali) are torn off a piece at a time and dissolved into soups such as kharcho to sour them. Dry a whole fruit and the outside dries first and traps the water inside; spread it as a thin puree and there is no inside to trap it, so it dries in days.
Suman (Glutinous Rice and Coconut Milk Boiled in Banana Leaf)
A Filipino snack: soaked glutinous rice tossed with coconut milk and salt, rolled in banana leaf and boiled an hour. Fat slows water into raw rice, which is why mango sticky rice adds its coconut milk after steaming. Suman mixes it in first and loses nothing: the soak has already put the water in the grain.
Mianwo (Fried Rice and Soybean Batter Rings)
Wuhan's breakfast fritter: a thin batter of soaked, ground rice and soybeans poured into a ladle-shaped iron mould with a raised centre and lowered straight into the oil. The mould holds the shape, so the batter never has to hold a ring by itself, and the raised centre means it lies thick at the outer edge and thin round the hole — one fry, one fritter, a soft outside and a crisp inside.
Gibanica (Crumpled Phyllo Set in Egg and White Cheese)
Serbia's national pie: raw phyllo crumpled sheet by sheet, dipped in a mixture of egg and brined white cheese and packed into the tin. Only the bottom and top sheets lie flat; the rest of the pastry is the filling rather than the layers. Wet raw dough does not turn to paste here because what holds it is the egg setting around it, not its own dryness.
Frico (Crisp Pan-Fried Montasio)
Friuli's cheese crisp: aged Montasio grated into a dry pan with no oil and left until the cheese's water has bubbled away and its fat has run out and fried the protein left behind. Elsewhere a cheese that weeps fat, clumps and sets brown has failed; frico takes all three to the end, on purpose, and gets a lacy golden crisp.
Coffin Bread (Deep-Fried Toast Box with Creamy Chicken and Shrimp)
Tainan's street snack: a thick block of white bread deep-fried whole, its top cut open as a lid and the inside filled with a thick cream sauce of chicken and shrimp. A bread bowl drinks the soup it holds; this one is fried first, so its walls are sealed with oil before the filling arrives. The filling is thickened with a roux, and it is eaten straight away, before the unfried inside of the box goes soft.
Chapulines (Toasted Grasshoppers with Lime and Chilli)
Oaxaca's grasshopper snack: boiled and dried grasshoppers toasted crisp on a dry comal and tossed with garlic, lime juice, chilli powder and salt. Eaten by the handful or on tortillas with guacamole. The whole insect is eaten, shell and all, so there is nothing for cooking to tenderise. The one thing the cook controls is water: dry is crunchy, damp is leathery.
A-gei (Fried Tofu Stuffed with Glass Noodles, Sealed with Fish Paste)
Tamsui's street snack: a thick fried-tofu pouch hollowed out, packed with glass noodles braised in soy, capped with raw fish paste, steamed and served under sweet chilli sauce. Fried tofu has nothing of its own to stick with, so it cannot be closed with a seam. Instead the opening gets a lid of raw paste, and the steamer sets that lid into fish cake. The name comes from the Japanese aburaage.
Kumpir (Baked Potato Mashed in Its Own Skin)
A whole potato baked, split, and its flesh mashed with butter and kasar cheese inside its own skin, then piled with cold toppings — Istanbul street food. The vessel here is the skin. A boiled potato takes water on and a baked one drives it off, which is what dries the skin stiff enough to carry the weight of the toppings. So the mashing happens against the shell rather than in a bowl, and the flesh takes its butter without ever having left the heat.
Kokoretsi (Offal Wrapped in Caul and Wound with Intestine)
Lamb or goat offal — liver, heart, lung, sweetbread — threaded onto a spit, wrapped in a sheet of caul fat and then wound tightly all over with the small intestine, and turned over charcoal for hours. Offal of this kind carries almost no fat of its own, and where other fires deal with that by keeping fat away, this one wraps the leanest thing on the animal in nothing but fat. What stops it dripping is the turning: the fat renders, travels round the surface instead of falling, and the intestine on the outside tightens over it.
Corunda (Masa Folded into a Triangle in a Corn Leaf)
Michoacan's tamal. Where other tamales use a dried husk, a corunda is wrapped in the long green leaf of the corn plant itself, folded over and over until the masa inside is a triangle. It is usually not filled at all — masa, lard and salt. The leaf does the folding the dough cannot do, and what comes out of the steamer is eaten under crema and salsa roja.
Kerak Telor (Charred Sticky Rice and Duck Egg Omelette)
A Betawi street snack from Jakarta: sticky rice and duck egg cooked with no oil so they weld to the pan, which is then turned upside down over the coals. Pan cooking usually fights sticking; this needs it, because only food stuck fast stays put when the pan is inverted. The scorched layer is the kerak.
Brunost (Brown Whey Cheese)
Norway's brown cheese, made by boiling down the whey left over from making ordinary cheese until the water is gone. Nothing is curdled: no acid, calcium salt or rennet goes in. The colour and sweetness come from lactose browning with the whey protein, which is why it tastes of caramel.
Khai Phaen (Fried Mekong River Weed Sheets)
A Lao drinking snack: freshwater algae lifted from the Mekong, spread thin with seasonings, dried into sheets and fried for a few seconds. A sheet holds together the way paper does: wet fibres laid out thin bond to each other as the water leaves. No paste or starch goes in; the drying is the gluing.
Stroopwafel (Syrup Waffle)
The Dutch wafer baked thin in a grid-patterned iron, split horizontally through its own thickness while it is still hot, spread with syrup on the cut face and pressed back together. The syrup is not a filling; it is a softener. Krumkake says of the same kind of thin wafer that filled ones go soft within half an hour, which is why they are kept empty in a tin — and a stroopwafel is built to do exactly that. The syrup holds on to water, and over a few hours it pulls two crisp wafers chewy from the inside. So this is a biscuit that is better for having waited, and the only hard part is the split: a wafer off the iron stays cuttable for seconds.
Tokoroten (Seaweed Jelly Noodles in Vinegar Soy)
A Japanese summer snack: red seaweed simmered for an hour and the water left to set, then cut into strands and eaten with vinegar and soy. No agar powder goes in; the gelling agent leaches out of the seaweed's cell walls into the hot water. Freezing this jelly on Edo winter nights is how powdered kanten was found.
Shortbread (Butter, Sugar, Flour and No Added Water)
The Scottish biscuit that is short in the baker's sense. Gluten needs water to form, and none is added beyond the little inside the butter, so there is no gluten, no flake and no layers, and it crumbles. Butter set hard again holds it together, so it is cut hot and left to cool in the tin.
Jāņu Siers (Caraway Curd Cheese Pressed into a Round)
One of Latvia's national dishes: a caraway cheese pressed into a round. Acid-set curd loses calcium and stays grainy; Jāņu siers makes it smooth and flowing anyway. Bicarbonate of soda undoes enough of the acid for the casein to take up water and turn plastic, egg binds it, and it is pressed hot and sliced cold.
Liège Waffle (Yeast Dough with Pearl Sugar)
The waffle of Liège: a stiff yeast dough with coarse pearl sugar pressed into it. On a bun in a hot oven pearl sugar survives as white grains; in a waffle iron it melts into caramel in seconds. The difference is not temperature but contact: hot air and a cast-iron plate deliver heat at very different rates.
Churchkhela (Grape-Must Nut Strings)
Walnuts threaded on a string, dipped into grape must thickened with flour, hung to dry, and dipped again once dry. No single dip builds any thickness, so it takes five to eight of them over two or three days. The method is not the dipping but the drying between dips: lower a string into the pot while the last layer is still tacky and the new syrup drags the old one off instead of adding to it. The recipe is a schedule rather than a procedure.
Scotch Egg (Sausage-Wrapped Soft-Boiled Egg)
The British snack: a boiled egg wrapped in sausagemeat, crumbed and fried. The whole dish is one problem — there are two doneness targets inside a single object. The pork has to reach about 70°C and the yolk must stay under about 68°C, and they are one centimetre apart. You cannot hit both at once, so you stagger them in time: boil the egg short and stop it dead in iced water, chill the wrapped egg hard, and fry at 170°C rather than 190.
Gotgam (Dried Persimmon)
Astringent persimmons, peeled and hung for two months. The surprising part is that the astringency is never removed: nothing is washed out and nothing is added, but as the fruit dries its tannins link into molecules too large to grip the proteins in your saliva. The sugar that was always there suddenly reads as sweetness. The white dust that settles on the surface is not mould but that sugar, drawn out with the water and left behind as crystals.
Yeot (Grain Candy Made from Rice and Malt)
A Korean sweet with no sugar in it: the sweetness is made from rice. Sprouted barley, yeotgireum, carries amylase, which cuts rice starch into maltose. Held at 55-60°C for eight hours, a thick porridge turns thin and sweet; strained and boiled down, it becomes jocheong syrup, and further still a hard candy.
Farinata (Baked Chickpea Flour Batter, Crisp Outside and Creamy Within)
A Ligurian street food of chickpea flour, water, olive oil and salt, baked 5mm thin in a very hot oven. Chickpea flour has more protein than wheat but forms no gluten, so the batter can be stirred hard without toughening. Setting protein and gelatinising starch make it crisp at the edges and creamy inside.
Tea Egg (Marbled Egg Steeped in Tea and Soy)
Boiled eggs cracked but not peeled, then steeped for hours in black tea, soy and five spice. The shell works as a mask: the liquid gets in only where the shell is broken. Peel one at the end and the pattern on the white is an exact map of where you tapped it. The tea is not there for flavour so much as for its tannins, which bind to protein — they firm the outer layer of the white and are what makes the brown.
Brik (Fried Pastry with a Whole Egg Inside)
Tunisian street food: mashed potato, tuna and a whole raw egg folded into malsouka, a paper-thin pastry, and deep-fried. Fried parcels usually meet a wet filling's steam with a thicker wrapper; brik keeps the filling almost dry and the sheet thin. Ninety seconds sets the white and leaves the yolk runny.
Khanom Bueang (Crisp Rice-Flour Shell)
A Thai street sweet: rice-flour batter spread paper-thin on a hot plate until crisp, then folded while hot into a taco curve. There is no ferment and no steam. It crisps because it is thin enough for all the water to leave before the starch can set soft, and it keeps whatever shape it had then.
Madeleine (Shell-Shaped Teacake with a Hump)
The little shell-moulded cake from Lorraine, with a domed hump on its back. That hump is not decoration but the result of a temperature difference. Cold, rested batter meeting a very hot oven sets on the outside at once while the middle is still cold liquid, so the only place left to expand is upward through the centre. Bake the batter at room temperature, or in a lukewarm oven, and it rises evenly into a flat little cake instead. The most important ingredient in the recipe is the fridge.
Youtiao (Fried Dough Sticks)
Chinese breakfast: dough cut into strips, two of them stacked and pressed together down the middle with a chopstick, then fried as one. That single act of pairing is the whole dish. In hot oil every exposed surface sets within seconds, but the two pressed faces never touch the oil and stay soft the entire time. They are the only thing left that can still stretch, so the pair inflates like a balloon and the finished stick is hollow. Fry a single strip alongside and it barely swells at all, which is the whole argument in one test.
Chả Giò (Fried Rice-Paper Rolls)
Vietnamese rolls of minced pork, wood ear, glass noodle and vegetables wrapped in rice paper and fried. What most separates them from a wheat-wrapper spring roll is that the wrapper is starch rather than gluten. A starch film does not brown smooth in oil; it blisters into bubbles and shatters like glass, and it stays crisp far longer once cool. Which is why these can sit on a plate and still be worth eating.
Cornish Pasty
A half-moon pie from Cornwall whose filling goes in completely raw and cooks inside the pastry. Beef, potato, swede and onion are sliced thin and not a drop of stock goes in with them: the water the raw vegetables give up becomes steam, and that steam is what cooks the beef. The pastry here is not a wrapper around a filling, it is the vessel the filling cooks in.
Su Böreği (Boiled-Sheet Cheese Pastry)
A Turkish börek whose pastry sheets are boiled in salted water before they are layered, filled with white cheese and baked. The "su" in the name means water, and that one step is the whole dish. Baklava butters every sheet in order to keep the layers apart; this does the opposite and sticks them together. The sheets go in already fully cooked and hydrated, and what goes between them is not fat alone but a wet mixture of egg and milk, so the result is soft and continuous rather than shattering.
Arancini (Fried Sicilian Rice Balls)
Sicilian street food: saffron rice moulded around ragù and mozzarella, crumbed and deep-fried. Whether it works depends entirely on how cold the rice is. As rice cools, its starch recrystallises, and that is the force holding the grains to each other so the ball does not fall apart in the oil. Warm rice straight from the pan cannot be made to work however hard you squeeze it.
Sundae (Blood Sausage with Glass Noodles)
Pig intestine stuffed with blood, glass noodles and vegetables, then steamed. The blood is not there for flavour: it sets like egg when it heats and binds everything else into one mass, which is why a version without it falls apart the moment you slice it. Fill the same casing with something else holding it together and you get a completely different food.
Oyster Omelette (Sweet Potato Starch Pancake)
Taiwan's signature night market dish: a sweet potato starch batter poured over small oysters so it sets translucent, finished with egg and greens and flooded with a sweet-sour red sauce. The trick is not to make it crisp. The edges go crisp and the middle has to stay soft and glassy, and that half-set state is the whole identity of the thing.
Spam Musubi (Grilled Luncheon Meat Rice Block)
Hawaii's everyday snack: a block of pressed rice, a slab of luncheon meat glazed in soy and sugar, and a band of nori wrapped around both. Three ingredients, so it looks like assembly, and the reason it is still good once cooled comes down to two treatments — glazing the meat rather than merely frying it, and pressing the rice while it is hot so it sets instead of falling apart when cold.
Coxinha (Fried Chicken Croquette)
The chicken croquette in every Brazilian bakery. What decides it is not the filling but the dough: flour stirred into the broth the chicken was cooked in and cooked over the heat until it comes together, so the starch is already gelatinised and it can be pressed thin without tearing or bursting in the oil. Made with water instead of that broth, it becomes a different thing on the spot.
Kaya Toast (Coconut Jam Toast with Cold Butter and Soft Eggs)
Kaya — a jam of coconut milk, egg and pandan — spread on thin bread toasted hard, with thick cold slabs of butter laid on top, eaten with soft-boiled eggs and coffee. This is Singapore's breakfast. Not spreading the butter is the point of the dish, and the kaya is a custard cooked over water: put it on direct heat and you have scrambled eggs.
The rest of this kind12
- Hwangnam-ppang (Gyeongju Red Bean Pastry)
- Dorayaki (Red Bean Pancake Sandwich)
- Samosa (Punjabi Potato and Pea Pastry)
- Taiyaki (Fish-Shaped Cake with Red Bean Filling)
- Takoyaki (Octopus Batter Balls with Sauce and Bonito)
- Doubles (Curried Chickpea Flatbread)
- Hotteok (Sweet Pancakes)
- Soft Pretzel
- Poutine
- Nachos
- Onigiri (Rice Balls)
- Tteokbokki (Spicy Rice Cakes)