Indigenous Taiwanese Ingredients

Maqaw is so 2013

One of the most defining moments of my life in Taiwan is when I spent a month living with Aeles Lrawbalrate at her indigenous village in southern Taiwan and volunteering at her homestead and restaurant. It was a crash course in indigenous Taiwanese cuisine and botany and in that short amount of time, I picked up an uncanny ability to quickly identity edible and semi-wild plants. I say semi-wild because most of these ingredients are still being cultivated on some level, but not for mass consumption.

Here’s a round-up of some of my favorite ingredients used frequently by indigenous Taiwan:

Maqaw (馬告）
I’ll get this one out of the way first. Most people who think of indigenous Taiwanese food think of maqaw. It’s a endemic lemon pepper usually added in sausages or rubbed on top of wild, roasted boar meat. Common in Atayal tribes, it’s been the poster child of indigenous Taiwanese food for awhile. So much so that it’s fallen out of vogue with the fine dining restaurants in Taipei because it’s just so overused and cliche. Kinda like, truffle mania.

Cicong (刺葱)
Cicong refers to the leaves of a prickly ash tree. It’s in the same family as the Sichuan pepper, and shares a similar zing and burst of flavor. With its sharp, onion-like flavor, it’s often added to soups, stir-fries, and meat dishes to enhance their taste. To me, it tastes like a concentrated chicken boullion cube. The most common way to use it is to saute chopped up dried leaves with egg.

Betel Leaf （老葉)
Betel leaf is openly and lovingly embraced throughout southeast Asia, but is stigmizated throughout Taiwan because…

Signed copies of my James Beard-nominated cookbook Made in Taiwan can be purchased at Omnivore Books, Book Larder, or Kitchen Arts and Letters. Amazon is also currently having a 45% off sale.