Hong Kong — Street’s snack

There are numerous streets’ snacks in Hong Kong, and these snacks are really popular among young adults. Every summer when I back to HK, I will definitely buy those snacks. Apparently, these snacks are cheap but super delicious. If you have a chance to visit HK, I highly recommended.

1) Ball Waffle (gai-daan-jai; gai-daan = egg) The ingredients of ball waffle are egg, sugar, flour, and light evaporated milk. Then this mixture will put into a waffle iron, which looks like a racket. Afterward the ball waffle will turn golden-yellow. It actually tastes like cake, but is less softened.Ball waffle start from 1960, a store’s employer did not want to waste the extra eggs. So he tried to put in flour and butter, and created this ball waffle.

It calls “ball” waffle (gai-daan-jai) is because the waffle iron has a lot of holes. “Gai-daan” in Cantonese means egg. So every ball is looked like an egg, that’s why it calls gai-daan jai. In recent years, a lot of store created different flavours, such as chocolate, strawberry, etc. However, remember to eat it when it is warm. Those ball waffles that put on the shelf probably turned cold and is not that delicious.

2) Hong Kong-style Waffle (“Grid Cake”) The ingredient of this HK-style waffle is just like the western one, but we do not serve with butter and syrups. These waffles usually make and sold by street hawkers and eat it warm on the street. They are similar to a traditional waffle but a little bit larger, round in shape and divided into 4 quarters. Butter, peanut butter, sugar, and evaporated milk are spread on one side of the cooked waffle and then it is folded into a semi circle to eat. In recent years, many store created different flavours too, such as chocolate, honey melon flavour. However, I still thought that the traditional one is the best.

3) Shark’s fin soup

Fortunately, it is not real shark’s fin, they are only cellophane noodles. The reason that using cellophane noodles instead of real shark’s fin is because people are pretty poor in the past, they do not have money to eat real fish fin. Therefore, a poor cook created this shark’s fin soup by using cellophane noodles, adding Chinese dried mushroom, auricularia auricular-judae, and slides of pork. Most of the people will serve with white pepper, chinkiang vinegar, and/or sesame seed oil as seasoning. Some would like to add slides of dace, and/or lettuce in the soup. Shark’s fin soup is one of my favourites. I like to add both 3 seasoning. Sometimes I do not like to add chinkiang vinegar because I think it’s a bit sour, but I will definitely add sesame seed oil and white pepper. These 2 seasoning will make the soup much more delicious.

To be honest, you are able to buy all these snacks on the streets in HK commonly. If you are going to Mongkok, you can find these kind of stores everywhere. These recommended stores are stores that are more popular in HK.