Just as the old saying: you will miss your family when a traditional festival is upcoming. While in Wenzhou, the old Wenzhou people love to eat delicious foods as a method for enjoying the festival.

One of the reasons that Wenzhou people so love to eat foods may have a lot to do with the deliciousness and affordable prices of those Wenzhou foods. Most of the delicious and authentic Wenzhou delicacies are hidden in the grassroots gathering places such as the breakfast stalls, the farmers’ markets, the school gates and the midnight-snack stores. Therefore, you can eat your fill within RMB 100!

The Food for Breakfast
The Most Down-to-Earth Breakfast

A bowl of glutinous rice plus a bowl of soup made up of seaweed & deep-fried dough sticks is the standard breakfast configuration for many Wenzhou people.

For those Wenzhou people studying or working at other places outside of Wenzhou, 99 out of 100 people will miss Wenzhou's glutinous rice. And the one left may have already taken a train back to Wenzhou to eat this delicious rice.

The authentic Wenzhou glutinous rice is cooked in large wooden barrels with a special scent.

As same as the “Zongzi” which has an internal contest between its 2 kinds of tastes: the sweet and the salty, Wenzhou's glutinous rice also has two kinds: the sweet and the salty. The sweet taste-kind is to add a spoonful of granulated sugar into the glutinous rice and stir it to eat. Most older women like this kind.

The salty taste-kind is suitable for both young and old. Take a bowl of steamed glutinous rice from a large wooden bucket, sprinkle with chopped dough sticks, and pour a spoonful of broth boiled with minced meat and shiitake mushrooms, then stir to eat with a spoon! With the tastes of fried dough sticks, mushrooms and broth, every granule of the glutinous rice is showing its temptation. The more rice you eat, the more delicious you feel.

Wherever there is a school, there is tempting food around it. This is an universally applicable truth in China.

It’s particularly popular with fried snacks at the school gates of Wenzhou.

A large iron pan in which a lot of food materials get soaked with half-pot oil, cabbage, sausage, banana, bean sprouts, dried bean curd, chicken wings, dumpling skin... All the ingredients are skewered into a string and placed in a plastic basket. You cal pick anything you like and soak them into oil.

Whenever the stall-holder throws the stick into the frying-pan, the frying-pan immediately starts to bubble. At this moment, the timid girl will unconsciously step back, watching the stall-holder quickly flip the stick by the big clip, cook the foods, turn off the fire, put the stick with foods  into a plate, brush a few mysterious spices on the foods, take a paper towel from the bottom of the table, strap the stick at its bottom and hand it over to you. The whole set of moves is completed in one or two breath.

There are also deep-fried turnip pastry that Wenzhou people always favor, man and boy. The deep-fried turnip pastry is not a literal pastry, but a fried grated-radish cake. The deluxe one also is supplementally added with minced meat and eggs. There are two kinds of deep-fried turnip pastry: the round-shaped and the plum-shaped, but now the plum-shaped kind has become less and less.

None of the children who love to eat sugar can escape the temptation of "Dingding” sugar.

"Dingding" sugar is actually maltose. The sugar-seller will use a small shovel and a small hammer to break up the freshly-made maltose into pieces, and then sprinkle the fine-powders ground with fried rice to avoid the adhesion of the separated sugar pieces.

When the sugar-seller knocks on the shovel and the small hammer, it always makes a "squeaky" sound, so it is also called "Dingding” sugar." Authentic Wenzhou maltose is very light. When you put a piece into mouth, the first taste you have is the smell of fried rice noodles, then the special sweetness of maltose. And it always be sticky on your teeth.

For Wenzhou people, the memory of summer is not only the old popsicles, but also a black and white jelly powder. The white one is called "water jelly", and the black jelly powder is called "grass jelly". They are transparent jellies that are very cool and quench thirst effectively. Of course, it is also necessary to use the grandmother's toothpaste for seasoning, mint flavor, especially refreshing.

The farmers’ market is the gathering place of grassroots cuisines, and it is also the most sparkling place in the city.

When it comes to Wenzhou, everyone thinks about live seafood, but in addition, there are more grassroots foods in the market.

One of them is a large grilled shrimp baked with live shrimp.

If you have been to the Wenzhou people's banquet, there must be a grilled shrimp dish in the first few cool dishes. The noodles should be added with grilled shrimp as well as the fried rice.

There is also Wenzhou Fishball, one of the famous Chinese snacks, that is made up of fresh fish mixed with ginger, diced green onion and potato powder. Every Wenzhou woman knows how to make a bowl of fresh and delicious fishball soup.

In that time when KFC and McDonald were not popular, the cooked food district in the Farmers’ market was a paradise for carnivores. Fried chicken legs, fried pork chops, fried meat slices, large sausages, and loaches, each with a bright red color, makes people drool.

The person who said that Korean pickled radish is crispy must have never eaten the turnip of Wenzhou.

It’s getting dark, shall we have a shower and fall sleep quickly? In Wenzhou, that is impossible, because the midnight snacks here are so delicious.

Fried dumpling, this must be included!

For a perfect fried dumpling, the bottom color of the dumpling must be fried to be brownish but not blackened. A whole pot of fried dumplings with a total number of a hundred ones will be swept away by Wenzhou people in a minute or two.

What are the beef entrails? The ox tripe, heart, lung are minced to pieces and put into hot pot. Then add pepper, scallions, parsley into it. Next you will know what the delicacy means.

If you go to Wenzhou next time

Wenzhou still has a lot of foods waiting for you to discover.