Looking for foods to try and share a bit of my own culture. My family is cantonese viet and I grew up eating in a lot of traditional banquet hall restaurants. Usually these are dim sum menu for lunch and traditional shared foods for dinner. Most people have tried the common ones like siu mai (pork wrapper dumpling) and haw gow (shrimp rice dumpling) but my favorites are the uncommon ones like ngau zaap (beef offal) and baak wan fung zaau (pickled chicken feet).
Ngau zaap is basically braised brown sauce using off cuts, usually stomach and whatnot, with chinese radish. Its very savory, kinda like if you made an asian gravy.
Baak wan fung zaau is just chicken feet pickled in white vinegar. If you had pickled radish it’s essentially the same pickling and the chicken feet is gelatinous and a bit crunchy. You can also get them sometimes boneless since eating around the bones is kinda a pain. I really like pickled foods so this is one of my faves
America: Burgers and Tex Mex
NW Florida: Grits a ya ya, that shit it to die for.
Piggybacking off of you since I’m also American.
Wisconsin: Beer, Brandy Old-Fashioned, Bratwurst, Sauerkraut, Cheese (esp. cheese curds), Fish fry (literally just breaded and fried fish)
I gotta expose my total ignorance here. Hell is a cheese curd?! Y’all yanks are way into it and I suspect I would be as well.
(And now I’m starving look at your pic.)
The production of cheese involves separating milk into curds and whey. Whey is liquid and curds are solid.
Curds are basically the unaged, unprocessed initial stage of what one would consider to be cheese.
If you’ve never had cheese curd before, it’s not too different from fresh mozzarella, but it’s not as stretchy (mozarella is basically just kneaded curd). Good curds should be “squeaky” because of the high moisture content and clumpy texture.
Essentially, they’re fresh chunks of cheese that haven’t been aged. You can eat em fresh (if they squeak and are room temperature, that’s the best) or fried.
The Canadians also use em as a primary ingredient in Poutine