Today, I get to write about something I’m known to go on and on about: Taiwanese tomatoes! In Taiwan, tomatoes are very often treated as a fruit, enjoyed on dessert plates, and even in shaved ice shops. If you know me, you also know how much I hate the “fruit vs. vegetable” dichotomy, so there’s a bit of a rant (read: love letter to ambiguity) in here about that, too.

This week, we’re launching Yanshui dried tomatoes, which came to us as a windfall. Contrary to what you might expect, these are a lightly sweet treat and have little in common with the more familiar sun-dried variety, which I would never eat whole. They’re so good, we’re calling them “fruit snacks” in the office. And, yes, they are seasonal and quantities are limited.

As for the handsome guys, well, read on.

Take me to the Tomatoes

Once upon a time, my family and I went on an Alaska cruise with my aunts, uncles, and cousins for a Cheng Family Reunion. It was then that I realized my Aunt Judy was an expert cruise passenger, and a hilarious one. More than ten years later, so much of that trip is still encoded in my daily language and inside jokes.

One of my favorites: “drop point was good,” something she would say to compliment our bowling abilities (yes, there is bowling on cruise ships, which is counterintuitive given they’re always rocking side to side). She meant that even if the ball ended up in the gutter, it looked good at the moment it hit the lane (the so-called “drop point”). What an encouraging concept—I’m constantly telling myself that my metaphorical “drop point was good” in many of life’s most challenging moments. In other words, effort counts, even if things don’t go exactly your way.

Another originates from her description of one of the cruise social coordinators (whose job is to dance the Macarena with you the very moment the ship casts off) as a “hank, youngsome” guy. She meant “young, handsome,” but no matter. An attractive man has come to be known as a “regular Hank Youngsome” in our family, forevermore.

Which brings me to the actual topic of this newsletter. Not men, but tomatoes: specifically, a hardy variety of cherry tomato that grows well in the salty, alkaline soil of Yanshui County in Tainan, nicknamed 帥哥番茄, or… “handsome guys.”

Much of the farmland in Yanshui was created by the silting up of the Yanshui Harbor, which created an alkaline, salty soil. Additionally, Yanshui is situated at the tail end of the local irrigation system, and doesn’t have as much access to freshwater for farming as other regions nearby. This is a difficult agricultural environment, but local farmers found that the Handsome Guy cherry tomato not only grows very well there, but also takes on a unique salty, sweet, and tart taste from the salinity of the soil.

Because of their hardiness, they are exceptionally drought-tolerant and don’t need greenhouses to grow well, which allowed for more farmers to plant them without significant investment. This article in Agriharvest Taiwan points out that most of these tomatoes are grown in open-field, laissez-faire cultivation 放任式的露天栽培, which means that the plants are grown outdoors without being trellised, staked, or trained.

They’re generally harvested from November through March. To deal with peak-season oversupply of these handsome guys, the Yanshuei Farmers’ Association began to dry them and even make candy from them. Because of their thicker skins, they are well suited to preservation, and the dried versions have become so popular locally that they sell out every year.

After trying one of their tomato candies (not the same as the dried tomato, and hopefully something we can offer at a future date), we were so impressed that we added ourselves to their waitlist. We luckily (and unexpectedly) received a small supply of the dried ones, and are excited to launch them today as a seasonal offering.

We hope to get more next year, but can’t guarantee it, so act now if salty-soil dried tomatoes that taste like candy are a must-have for you. They are for us—I’ve had to firewall my remaining photo samples from the rest of the office, lest they get eaten.

Take me to the Tomatoes

Dried “Handsome Guy” Tomatoes

Take me to the Tomatoes

If you weren’t convinced that tomatoes are also fruits, you will be after having one of these dried tomatoes by the Yanshuei Farmers’ Association 鹽水區農會. The dried version has a snappy skin that gives way to a tender and sweet interior. It’s lightly salty, surprisingly sweet, and zingy. Texturally, think of a raisin meeting a medjool date.

The process for making these begins with ripe handsome guy tomatoes. After picking them by hand, farmers wash them, then preserve them using minimal sugar and salt. The sugar is used primarily as a natural preservative, but it also helps to balance out the acidity of the fruit, resulting in a bite with complexity.

Each bag contains individual sachets packed with three to four dried tomatoes. They’re great to snack on while traveling, working, or any other time you need a sweet and sour pick-me-up.

Available in single bags or as a bundle of two.

Take me to the Tomatoes

Tomato Is a Fruit and This Is Not Mutually Exclusive as Far as It Also Being a Vegetable Goes

Ok, the whole “did you know the tomato is actually a fruit” thing that is often presented to children as a trivia item has always annoyed me, because yes, it is a fruit, in that it is the swollen ovary of a flower and contains seeds, but it is also a vegetable, which is a culinary distinction. This is true for a jalapeño, an eggplant, a cucumber, and a squash, too, but those are rarely referenced in the headline.

Instead of complaining, it might be more productive to point out that our language here is limited. Fruit has both a botanical (ripened ovary) and culinary (sweet) meaning, while vegetable is a term only used in the culinary context and encompasses many parts of the plant. In the US, tomatoes (a fruit, botanically) are generally used as a vegetable, and that’s not a rejection of their technical classification. Fruit and vegetable are not mutually exclusive!!!!! People!!!

In Taiwan, tomatoes are regarded as both a vegetable and a fruit, in the culinary sense. You’ll see it in beef noodle soup stocks, tomato egg stir-fry, brined in plum vinegar, and even as an ingredient in hot sauce. Heck, you can even find it in our Spicy Soy Paste.

It’s also encountered in sweet contexts: on fruit plates (see above), stuffed with plums, or dipped in crystallized sugar to make tomato tanghulu. One of my favorite ways to enjoy tomatoes, Tainan style, is dipping fresh slices in a sauce made of Taiwanese soy paste, ginger, licorice powder, plum powder, and brown sugar. It’s the ultimate uncategorizable fruit-vegetable continuum dish. Patty Lee of Lei made a salad for our recent Star Route Farm Fundraising Dinner based on our shared love of this snack.

And finally, another lovely example of the Taiwanese embracing of tomato as fruit-vegetable: tomato shaved ice, made with pickled tomatoes, plums, and brown sugar. This is on my list for my next trip, available at 杯子和糖 Cup and Sugar in Tainan.

Take me to the Tomatoes

Before I Go

• Taiwanese? by Eric Sze is now officially out! Eric, the chef and owner behind Wenwen and the now-closed 886, is a longtime friend of the shop, and we’re so excited for his contribution to Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American food discourse. Aptly named, the book takes the stance that the answer to the oft-asked question, “what is Taiwanese food,” may be to question your assumptions and not worry too much about definitions. You can also read the newsletter I wrote about it here.

Take Me to the Book

• Kuai Kuai Seaweed is back in stock online and in-store! This limited-edition flavor is made using two kinds of seaweed, cultivated off the coast of Hualien: sea cabbage (aka green laver) and sea lettuce. It’s savory, marine, and toasty, with a crisp and airy texture.

• We have some Dried Pearl Guava that is reaching its best-before date in December, so we’ve decided to put it on sale. Please help us move through our surplus stock and reduce food waste, too.

Stay tuned for so many more fun things, including brand new sparkling tea, a whole new line of ceramics, the upcoming release of our 2027 lunisolar almanac, and two more episodes of Cooking With Steam.

a regular Hank Youngsome,
Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉

Written with editorial support by Amalissa Uytingco, Jasmine Huang, Lillian Lin, and Natya Regensburger. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with friends and subscribe if you haven’t already. I email once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. For more Taiwanese food, head to yunhai.shop, follow us on instagram and twitter, or view the newsletter archives.

This week I have the pleasure of introducing the most exciting thing in Taiwanese-American food since dried cabbage (serious): Eric Sze’s forthcoming cookbook, Taiwanese?, written with Elyse Inamine and photographed by Alex Lau. We’re so excited about the book, we’re making signed copies available for preorder, along with a bundle of Eric’s favorite Yun Hai products. Books will ship starting October 20th, the official publication date.

Please also stay tuned for an invitation to a cookbook talk with Eric Sze in our Long Island City studio (read: office).

Take me to the Cookbook

This morning, I joined our friends Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu, of A Broad and Ample Road, for a live conversation about Yun Hai, Taiwanese cuisine, and Taiwanese identity. In my opinion, their newsletter is required reading for anyone interested in the daily life, culture, and politics of Taiwan. They are rooted in Taipei, and write for a global audience across subjects like religion, law, advocacy, and literature. Their review of Taiwan Travelogue was one of the first I read, back when it was longlisted for the International Booker Prize.

I’m honored to have joined them for a fun conversation between friends. If you were able to make it, thank you for joining! In case you missed it, here’s the video:

One of the topics of conversation: how I would describe Taiwanese food to someone new to the cuisine?

This remains one of the most challenging questions I’m ever asked (and believe me, I’ve been asked a lot of hard questions, see: Taiwanese Geopolitical Situation). I pontificated that maybe it shouldn’t be an easy one to answer, because Taiwanese cuisine has been shaped in so many ways: from post-war US aid and the 1949 Chinese migration, to fifty years of Japanese colonial rule, to centuries of Hoklo and Hakka settlers, all the way back to the Austronesian peoples who were there first. And contemporary Taiwanese food culture continues to evolve.

Part of my long, evasive, but also completely committed answer:

“The way that I like to talk about Taiwanese food is that it is kind of a melting pot of its own. Taiwan is a place of this world, and so much of the world has landed and drifted through Taiwan. I feel that the food is also quite inventive. It’s still emergent.”

To elaborate, I reached for the thing that grounds me in the cuisine: agriculture. Taiwanese food is profoundly shaped by what’s grown there (though of course not only, see: Beef Noodle Soup). To think through Taiwanese food, you have to think through Taiwanese agriculture and all the forces that have influenced it, from traditional techniques to imported foods.

Rice may hold part of the key. Penglai rice (蓬萊米), grown widely across Taiwan as a daily staple, is a short-grain japonica variety that can thrive in a subtropical and tropical climate. It was developed during the Japanese colonial era by agronomists who wanted to grow their preferred style of short-grain rice in Taiwan, and who bred new varieties that could withstand the heat.

Before that, Taiwan largely ate zailai mi (在來米), a long-grain rice brought over by settlers from China, closer to the long-grain rice of Fujian and southern China. The shift to a stickier, chewier short-grain rice as the everyday staple was a wholesale change in rice preferences across Taiwan’s fields and kitchens. This was a big deal, and short-grain rice grown in the tropics is something distinctly Taiwanese.

Michelle pointed out that rice comes up in another context, too. In contemporary analysis of Taiwan’s ability to withstand a blockade or invasion from China, food resiliency is a metric. How much rice can Taiwan grow to feed itself? What we eat and where it comes from has always been political and a source of power or liability.

Taiwanese? by Eric Sze

This discussion with Albert and Michelle was timely, because today I’m writing to introduce you to a forthcoming cookbook by Eric Sze, a friend of the shop and the chef-owner of Wenwen and 886 (now closed, we miss it).

The entire book is an exploration of this question, and is aptly named Taiwanese?, taking the stance that the answer to “what is Taiwanese food” may be to question your assumptions and not worry too much about definitions.

Take me to the Cookbook

From the intro:

Taiwanese? is about the Taiwan I know. The dishes I grew up eating in Taipei that show an inadvertent fusion of food, from the gloopy, bonito-infused oh ah mee swa my uncle loved to the Burmese touch of shrimp paste in stir-fried water spinach. The dishes I researched and re-created in my new home of New York City that set the fundamentals so I could play around—intentional fusion—and allowed me to break down Taiwanese food and find new overlaps with other cuisines and techniques…

Taiwan epitomizes fusion, with the influx of everyone from Japanese colonists to Fujian immigrants, who have all contributed to the food culture, and I’m leaning into that with Taiwanese?

I got my advance copy last week, and I think this book goes even further than Eric’s introduction suggests. It does not apologize for breaking the rules, and it also suggests that breaking the rules is a major part of the Taiwanese culinary ethos. This may not happen at every food stand every day, but it does show up in the history of the cuisine, over and over again, as different traditions and ingredients have found a home in the Taiwanese palate (rainbow sprinkle mayonnaise bamboo shoot salad anyone?).

There’s a whole section about Eric’s attempt to codify lu rou fan (braised pork rice) by touring as many eateries as he could, only to conclude that “it was futile to define and label lu rou fan.” The chefs were just too inventive. This national dish of Taiwan is also a national playground, and Eric suggests that eventually someone will “braise it with carrot juice.” Its evolution is its legitimization.

Eric’s book is an homage to all the rule breakers that came before him. What would Taiwanese food be without them?

I’m super excited to be partnering with Eric and his publisher, Hardie Grant, to offer signed copies of the book to our customers, bundled with Yun Hai products (selected by Eric) that speak to different parts of our (evolving) Taiwanese identity: dried Irwin Mango (because fruit), the Tatung (because steam), the penglai rice mentioned above, and a very special Taiwanese Pineapple Soy Sauce that represents the way Taiwanese food evolves with each generation (which also happens to be one of the brews he uses for his annual oh ah mee swa party).

And please save the date for a cookbook talk in our brand-new-and-still-being-built-out studio (I’m painting one wall myself tonight, breaking news, team). We’ll release tickets soon. October 25th, Long Island City!

Take me to the Cookbook

Before I Go…

Don’t miss our Sleepy Tofu Mattress Giveaway, in which I star in an advertisement for my favorite Taiwanese mattress brand, and you comment and tag a friend for a chance to win the best darn portable futon you’ll ever sleep on.

Live from New York,
Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉

Written with editorial support by Amalissa Uytingco, Jasmine Huang, Lillian Lin, and Natya Regensburger. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with friends and subscribe if you haven’t already. I email once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. For more Taiwanese food, head to yunhai.shop, follow us on instagram and twitter, or view the newsletter archives.

Season Three of Cooking with Steam, our self-produced Taiwanese cooking show on YouTube, focuses on holidays and festivals. Follow along as I prepare customary festival foods and share a few suggestions to make American holidays a little more Taiwanese.

Episode Two: Mid-Autumn BBQ is out now. It’s all about tofu as the main event. Fittingly, it’s also sponsored by my favorite bean curd-loving mattress brand, Sleepy Tofu. Thanks, Spencer!

New Episode Out Now

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival! 中秋節快樂！

This is one of my favorite holidays of the year, possibly because it coincides with (and ultimately distracts from) my birthday, but also because it’s a celebration of the truly magnificent character of the fall season. As a lover of all things field, flower, friends, and farm, it gets me every time. What did we do to deserve so much?

It’s customary to celebrate this time of year with mooncakes, a round pastry reminiscent of the shape of the moon. If you missed ours, we have made a few more available on the site to ship next week for belated holiday celebrations.

(P.S. It seems that these largely arrived in great shape, but if you had any delivery problems, please don’t hesitate to reach out to support@yunhai.shop. We got a couple of heartbreaking reports of crushed boxes.)

一家烤肉萬家香: When One Home BBQs, Ten Thousand Homes Smell Good

That’s the slogan from a Wan Ja Shan 萬家香 soy sauce commercial, which may be the most successful ad in Taiwanese history, if you count the creation of an entirely new way to celebrate a centuries-old holiday as success.

In the early ‘80s (estimated), Wan Ja Shan and rival Kimlan 金蘭 both pushed barbecuing for the holiday to sell their competing sauces. It went “viral” (to apply the language of the present), and a tradition was born.

And I guess that’s my cue:

COOKING WITH STEAM Season 03 Episode 02
Mid-Autumn Festival
sponsored by Sleepy Tofu
好蒸氣 第三季 02 | 中秋節

All Cooking with Steam Episodes

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We typically host a BBQ (read: rager) at our shop for this festival, but we sadly had to skip it this year. Our front sidewalk and the entire block are under the thumb of a massive construction project next door.

Not to worry, I’m BBQing on screen instead, pomelo hat included.

Fun fact: my producer and director strongly suggested I not wear the pomelo hat on screen for very long, fearing I would regret and redact all the footage. Yes, this was an actual meeting. No, I didn’t listen.

In this episode, I demonstrate three (yes, THREE!) different preparations for BBQ tofu on a ceramic konro grill. These are original recipes based on favorite tofu dishes in Taiwan, and are not necessarily traditional in the truest sense.

When writing this episode, I first thought of doing a survey of different skewer ingredients common at a Taiwanese BBQ. In testing them, I realized that tofu was one of the hardest things to get right: too easily bland, undercooked, overcooked, or rubbery. However, tofu, in all its forms, is consistently my favorite part of BBQ in Taiwan: savory, unctuous, saucy, and full of different textures (crispy, velvety, and Q). I decided I’d make this ep a primer on grilling bean curd, and threw in a couple BBQ sauces, too.

Recipes: BBQ Tofu, Three Ways

Each recipe features a different kind of tofu, and some ideas for how to prepare it. Feel free to mix techniques, swap sauces, or vary the garnish with what you have on hand.

Get the Recipes

The first recipe is a BBQ Dougan Sandwich that uses packaged pre-braised pressed tofu, aka dougan 豆乾, as a vessel for pork floss, salted scallion, and sour mustard greens. It’s based on the 夾心豆干 stuffed tofu I’ve had when visiting different mountain towns in Taiwan. The tofu is usually braised, but I decided to grill it! So yummy! We should sell this in the shop, no?

The second recipe is Orchid Cut Baiye Tofu Skewers. This is pretty much a total invention on my part, employing a cutting technique I’ve seen for fried and braised tofu and taking inspiration from Taiwanese Blood Pudding 豬血糕, which is skewered and smothered in peanut powder (I swapped in chili peanut powder, see below) and cilantro. I used baiye tofu 百頁豆腐, which can best be described as “a fish cake but tofu.” It has a springy texture. When cut this way, it chars beautifully and absorbs (sucks!) the sauce in all the nooks and crannies.

Fittingly, I’ve dressed it with Dracula Paprika, a chili seasoning mix from Taiwanese spice brand Awakened Taste. We’ve got a limited number available on the site now, just for this episode!

And last, but not least (ok yes, least, as in least amount of work), I make BBQ Tofu Skin Skewers, or 烤豆皮串. Tofu skin, more commonly known in the US by its Japanese name yuba, is the film that forms at the top of a vat of soy milk, which is then skimmed off and dried or rolled. This is one of the freshest forms of tofu (I often think of it as “young tofu”) and very easy to prepare. Simply thread it onto a skewer and brush with soy paste. It crisps up very easily, but has a soft, laminated texture on the inside.

Get the Recipes

Watch the Show

Introducing Dracula Paprika 十味麻成香

As mentioned, we have a special one-time ingredient launch for this episode of Cooking with Steam, and that is Dracula Paprika aka 十味麻成香 or “ten flavors numbing become fragrant.”

It’s a truly phenomenal spice mix with dried chili, licorice, white sesame, black pepper, kombu, soybeans, peanuts, and Sichuan pepper. Don’t be fooled by the size of the jar: a little goes a long way. One pinch for two to four skewers; it’s spicy.

This is made by our friends at Awakened Taste, a Taiwanese spice company and seasoning brand based in Kaohsiung.

We have 65 (yes, only) jars available, and of those I’m reserving at least 5 for just me. Don’t sleep! Unless it’s during the day (not the first Dracula joke in this email, btw). Here’s another one:

Take me to Transylvania

Just Kidding, Take me to Dracula Paprika

Sponsored by Sleepy Tofu

Speaking of sleep, this episode was sponsored by Sleepy Tofu, my favorite mattress brand. In fact, I reviewed their original foam and spring models for The Strategist several years ago here.

Take me to Sleepy Tofu

Since then, they’ve come out with a new product: a lightweight, foldable “tofuton.” They sent me one to demonstrate on the show. I never thought making a cooking show meant I’d be fake sleeping on screen, but then again, who am I to know such things.

These really are the best: a guest bed in your closet. I received two for the demo, and immediately ordered two more at the behest of our director. For what it’s worth, I also plan to order at least one more for studio naps, because I have my own company and we can do that.

Friends visiting recently from Taiwan were overjoyed to find out that they’d be sleeping on a Sleepy Tofu mattress (“so good 啊!”). And my parents? Loved it; no issues sleeping on the floor.

The Sleepy Tofu Foldable Mattress is:

• 100% designed and made in Taiwan.

• Firm and supportive, and great for floor sleeping, which is common in Taiwanese homes. Can also fold into a seat.

• Two layers: supportive EPE foam on the bottom and Sleepy Tofu's signature elastic foam on top.

• Only 6 kg (about 13 lbs)! It's about 4" thick and tri-folds to roughly 35 × 27 × 13 in, small enough for a closet, under a bed, or a car trunk.

• $299 with an included fitted sheet and optional storage bag add-on.

You can get one here. The site is all in Chinese, truly designed for Taiwanese people living abroad who need a “Taiwanese sleep experience” to feel at home. Now you know about it, too. Translation apps make purchasing through their familiar Shopify interface a breeze.

Pick one up or look out for a giveaway next week on Instagram!

Take me to Sleepy Tofu

Ingredients and Equipment

Here’s a guide to the other ingredients, equipment, props, and accessories featured on the show.

Shop the Cooking With Steam Collection

Ingredients

• Awakened Taste Dracula Paprika

• Dong He Camellia Oil

• Empress Pineapple Miso Hot Sauce

• Wu Yin Seasoned Rice Vinegar

• Yu Ding Xing Pineapple Soy Sauce

• Yu Ding Xing Vat Bottom Soy Sauce

• Yu Ding Xing Firewood Soy Paste

• Yu Ding Xing Spicy Soy Paste

• Zhou Nan Frost Salt

• Zhou Nan Dunaliella Algae Salt

Prep Work and Kitchen Gear

• Kinka ceramic konro grill: it’s like the little red Tatung of diatomaceous earth grills

• Maestro Wu cleaver

• A 15-year-old round ironwood cutting board from an Asian grocery store in Detroit

• My trusty old Blendtec blender, gifted to me by my mom

Plating and Decor

• The celadon dragon and phoenix plate, celadon grooved bowl, white plum blossom cup, and white diamond-patterned saucer are previews of a forthcoming product launch: ceramics modeled after the iconic plastic pink dinnerware commonly used during bando 辦桌, or roadside banquets in Taiwan. Sign up for our waitlist here to be notified when they drop.

• The stainless steel platters are from Building Block Etc., a super cute shop owned by Taiwanese-American handbag designers in LA.

Accessories and Clothing

• Tang shirt with knot buttons from Taiwanese-American menswear line A/C Space

• Apron from Fog Linen

• Earrings from Rest Objects

• Cow print Taiwanese Mary Janes from Wax Apple

• Yellow linen pants from Wax Apple

  

Gratitude and Acknowledgements

We couldn’t have done this without the support and passion of our friends and community. So much love and gratitude to Night Shift, who produced this, and all our creative collaborators for giving the show its unique voice.

Credits

Produced by Night Shift and Yun Hai
Made possible by Tatung Taiwan and Sleepy Tofu

Team:
Lisa Cheng Smith, host
Rich Ho, guest talent
Trigg Brown, guest talent
Jessie YuChen, food stylist
Nicole Wang, culinary assistant
Amalissa Uytingco, culinary producer
Cat Yeh, BTS producer
Sam Broscoe, producer
Alec Sutherland, director & editor
Nathan Bailey, director of photography
Rob Woods, camera operator
Taylor Dekker, camera operator
Alexandra Egan, art director
Meena Kim, production assistant
Hikari Tezuka, hair and makeup
Mark Tumas, editor
Mark Maloney, editor
Kyle Garvey, sound mixer
R. Hollis Smith, mix
Dustin Wong, music
O.OO, graphics
Jil Tai & Ben Hill, motion design and title sequence
Leo Chang, language advisor
Rachel Watson, BTS photography

Our Set

Our set features props from Taiwanese, Taiwanese-American, and international friends worldwide, creating those Taiwancore vibes we love so much at Yun Hai.

Thank you for the beauty Natoora, Hai-Hsin Huang, Building Block, Mikey Chen, Lillian Li, Emilie Liu, Debbie Carlos, Matthew So, Kelli Cain, Material Kitchen, Mogutable, Felicia Liang, Sam Tilney, Lulu Yao Gioiello, Eric Sze, Julianne Ahn, and Leh Lin.

And much gratitude to our friends who contributed to wardrobe: Judi Rosen, PearWare, Rest Objects, a/c space, and The Wax Apple.

Special Thanks

Hollow, Chong-Lim Lee and Christian Patterson, Maggie Chang, Shirley Liu, Samantha Tilney, Ivan Wu and Feng Hsieh, Jess Wang, Lillian Lin, Jasmine Huang, Natya Regensburger, Jeremy Hersh, & the entire Yun Hai Team, our partners, and our wonderful community.

Before I Go…

The 2027 almanacs are here and we’ve just christened our new studio with their photoshoot. We’re making them available to the waitlist for early orders in just a couple weeks. Sign up!!

Sign Up for the 2027 Almanac Waitlist

Our Taiwanese rices are now available in bulk. Introducing short-grain penglai rice and purple glutinous rice in large 2 kg sizes. Buy and save!

And not really an update, but thought you’d like to see this photo I took of a pomelo hat at a club last year. It wasn’t the one I was wearing.

I vant to suck your blahd,
Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉

Written with editorial support by Amalissa Uytingco, Jasmine Huang, and Lillian Lin. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with friends and subscribe if you haven’t already. I email once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. For more Taiwanese food, head to yunhai.shop, follow us on instagram and twitter, or view the newsletter archives.

Today, I’m writing with the best news! After a year-long hiatus, we’re bringing The Foundry Bakery’s Taiwanese mooncakes back to our online and physical shop for the Mid-Autumn holiday, available for only three short weeks. Act fast—the order deadline for the first delivery (week of September 14th) is September 13th (sorry!). If you miss that one, there are two more batches afterwards. And, we’ll also have them in store from September 18th and on (call first, please!).

Scroll on for all the flavors, including a new one we’ve introduced since we last collaborated in 2024. And keep scrolling for a peek at our packaging design process and the old-school Taiwanese bakeries that inspired it.

Finally, if you’re keeping an eye out for our annual Taiwanese Mid-Autumn BBQ, we’re sad to report we must skip it this year. The lot next to our shop is under construction, and, as of now, they’ve got the entire block walled off, including the sidewalk just outside of the shop, and there simply isn’t enough room. Hope to see you soon, anyway.

Take me to the Mooncakes

I’m pasting an unedited, unretouched, .HEIC image (directly airdropped from my phone) of four beautiful mooncakes made by The Foundry Bakery. I have to show you how glorious they are, even after being touched by the uncanny Apple post-processing algorithms. No filter, no AI retouch, just pure handcrafted mooncakes in the all-revealing sunlight and hyperactive camera software.

Total eclipse of the heart. I’m so excited that we’re bringing back these exquisite cakes, made completely from scratch by The Foundry Bakery, our good friends and collaborators in St. Louis.

This year we are offering four flavors in an assorted box of six. Each set contains two taro, two mung bean black sesame, one red date goji walnut, and one red bean salted egg. They are extra large, extra planetary, extra fancy. The coloring comes from natural ingredients like beet juice and turmeric; the fillings are all made from scratch, starting with whole beans and taro; the crispy laminated shell is built by hand by master baker Ray Yeh himself.

Just look at the cross section on the red date cake. You can see the goji berry seeds:

The cakes will be packed in an easy-to-recycle kraft paper box with graphics inspired by old-school Taiwanese bakeries. The packaging is en-route, but here’s my mockup in studio.

Read on.

Take me to the Mooncakes

The Foundry Bakery

The mooncakes are baked for us by The Foundry Bakery, a Taiwanese-American bakery in St. Louis founded by Ray and Leah Yeh. They opened it after graduate school at WashU, where Leah was working on an MBA and Ray was studying genetics. I discovered them in 2023, desperately seeking Taiwanese food while visiting my in-laws. We’ve been friends since, and launched our first collaboration in 2024. I’m thankful to Ray and Leah for sharing their talents with us!

Their mooncakes are made in the Taiwanese style. To me, that generally suggests a flaky, laminated dough, made with 油酥, or an oil roux, as opposed to the softer molded types more commonly seen in Hong Kong. Foundry adds their own touch: a many-layered, visibly flaky laminated shell 明酥 that’s crispy, soft, and melt-in-your-mouth. This is the textbook definition of the texture word su 酥, which is also a character used in words describing shortbread. Exposing the layers isn’t just beautiful, but a way for the baker to show their skill: when all the edges are exposed, there’s nowhere to hide an imperfect job.

Take me to the Mooncakes

This mooncake box is truly special and is the product of a collaboration between two small Taiwanese businesses working across time zones. Foundry did the very hard work of making the cakes, and we took on creating packaging and imagery that reflect all that goes into them.

Mooncake Flavors

The mooncakes come in four flavors, including a new red date flavor this year. Here they are in all their glory, shot on a mirror and split in half, with our poetic little descriptions.

Take me to the Mooncakes

Taro 芋頭酥月餅: Made from fresh, hand-mashed taro, this monochromatic mooncake is simple and decadent at the same time. The pillowy texture of the taro contrasts with the structure of the impressively laminated crust. The color reminds us of that silvery evening light in deep autumn. Each set contains two.

Mung Bean Black Sesame 綠豆椪月餅: This is The Foundry Bakery’s take on a classic Taiwanese-style mooncake. It features a pale (lunar) crust, delicately prepared mung bean paste, and a surprise soft middle of black sesame paste. The many laminations in the crust speak to the art required to craft it. The contrast in the sandy texture of the sugared black sesame and the smooth texture of the bean paste is almost cosmic, like a planet’s crust to its core. Each set contains two.

Red Bean Salted Egg 蛋黃酥月餅: This one’s made from whole organic red beans pureed into a rich, nutty, and sustaining filling. Cushioned within, like a treasure, is a salted egg yolk. No, not the dry crumbly kind, but the decadent, savory, sunny kind. The laminated crust is thin, light, and holds it all together. Shiny from its egg wash and topped with black sesame seeds, the cake makes a striking and familiar visual on the table. Each set contains one.

Red Date Goji Berry 紅棗枸杞酥月餅: A new addition to the set, this cake is a classic pairing of jujube, goji berry, and walnut, with beet juice for color. The flavor is fruity, from the date and berry, but also rich with red bean aroma. The walnut offsets the sweetness of the filling with its crunch and signature sophistication. The flaky outside looks pink in some light, and red in others, like the ephemeral sanguine moon. Each set contains one.

Take me to the Mooncakes

Ordering Details

If you’d like a set, please order one online, or come into the shop to pick one up!

They are shipping out in three batches:

• Week of Sept 14th (order cut off date Sept 13th, sorry for the rush)

• Week of Sept 21st (order cut off date Sept 20th)

• Week of Sept 28th (order cut off date Sept 27th)

We’ll have them in store from around Sept 18th, while supplies last.

The mooncakes are baked to order and shipped right away. They are estimated to arrive in up to 4 days from the ship date, depending on your location. Most orders are shipped via UPS and should arrive by Saturday of the week they are shipped, barring unforeseen circumstances.

Shipping is free, and we’re offering discounts on two or more sets, because that really helps us save on the shipping margin.

Take me to the Mooncakes

Regarding the Packaging

Mooncakes are notoriously fragile and hard to pack! They also (notoriously?) come in the most fancy of packages.

Here’s an “Hermès” “bag” that’s actually a mooncake box:

And a suitcase. TSA pre-check approved!

These are admittedly fun, but I’ve always favored old school bakery and packaging that made the most of economical materials like string and paper.

My favorite mooncake packaging looks like this:

This is from Old Ancient Moon Pastry Shop 舊古月製餅舖, a mung bean cake bakery in Kaohsiung. Their no frills packaging exudes grandma style. The economy! The purple ribbon but no bow! The floral stock photo! Their rich, red stamp!

When creating our packaging, I wanted to reference this lightweight style, and make something charming and easy to recycle. These packaging styles evolve from need and improvisation, and work for small businesses that don’t have the ability to manufacture large custom production runs. I also appreciate that they are easy to break down. I hate ripping apart elaborate gift box packaging and shoving it into the recycling like I just bought a new monitor.

Another reference is this mooncake packaging from Xiexingzhen Pastry Shop 協興珍餅店, where they stack cakes sideways and wrap them (like Sainsbury biscuits) with one piece of paper, a sheet of cellophane, and a lot of skill. If you wrap it the right way, the flavor name faces out, functioning as signage as well as packaging.

An article in the Liberty Times about this bakery stated the need for economical gifting solutions as a motivating factor behind this packaging. A festive, innovative, paper wrap fit the bill. In fact, the name of this style of cake is 封仔餅 hong-á-piánn, which comes from the Hokkien word for bundle, or 封. They’re widely gifted in Taitung during the Mid-Autumn Festival.

This bakery also employs one of my favorite moves ever: tying down a square piece of paper turned forty-five degrees, so the string holds down each of the corners around the box, no tape. A class act as far as topology is concerned. Classic black calligraphic type and very large phone numbers are a hallmark of the style, too.

I took this as my starting point in trying to create a paper wrap for our collaborative mooncake box. I knew a piece of paper tied down might not fly the first time around with the shipping we had to do, so I opted to reference it instead:

We have the additional responsibility of shipping ours cross-country, and the visible edge lamination is quite fragile, so we really want to minimize shaking around. Try as I might, I could not find a stock box to fit them, so I commissioned a custom fit from our favorite box maker. We invested in a cutting tool in the hopes that we will be repeating this again. So do participate! :n)

Here are my notes on the fit sent to the box producer for the round two sample:

Sidenote and only sort of related: while I was working on this, I thought about this very amazing improvised pizza box I once saw in Milan, where two strips of cardstock were bent around a pizza pie and taped down. The whole assembly was then slid into a bag, and the cardstock kept the bag off the surface of the pizza. This works for walking home with it, not delivering by e-bike, and it’s genius. I love featherweight stuff like this. I sketched it and texted it to a friend while I was working. Here it is:

Here’s an initial mockup of the box, testing the fit and thinking through the string. No bow!!!

Next I fine tuned the graphic to try to add a little color and festivity. I also changed out the newspaper background, transitioning from green to black where the bakery needs to align the wrap to the creases of the box. These mocks are looking a little more muted than actual, by the way—home inkjet.

Finally, the string! String and ribbon are so hard to get right; they’re a make or break. In the mockup above, I used yarn, but it got too fuzzy. Craft ribbon is too frilly. Jute and burlap can shed a bit too much. I was looking for twisted paper cord that was 2mm in diameter. I searched for this online and found it at an online shop called May Arts.

When I received it, the first thing I noticed was a (somewhat) prominent Made in Taiwan text on the front of the spool:

I don’t know what it was about this, but my Taiwan Pride radar went off. The way this was printed on the front in a font slightly larger than the 6pt minimums typically used got me thinking. I went to the site, and lo and behold:

Mae, the founder of this ribbon company, was a Taiwanese bow and silk flower maker that used ribbons from Taiwan. She founded this business to bring in the things she loved to use. From the site, it seems she has passed and that her family (or family friends) are operating the business. Melting!

Running this business can be very challenging and so much work. I love it with all my heart, and moments like these really make me feel connected to all those in the past and future who have elected to do the same. It’s cosmic.

I am happy to report that the cording is beautiful, simple, and well made. I hope to source it for the holiday wrapping in our shop and have already sent them a request! Please shop with May Arts!

I’m leaving a little bit of mystery here on the final product: I’d normally share a finished photo, but all the components are en route to the bakery right now. You’ll have to order a box to find out which colors we ended up going with. Don’t forget to reserve!

Take me to the Mooncakes

Miscellaneous Fun Stuff

• Sort of related fun fact: shao bing 燒餅, a flaky flatbread often baked in a tandoor and a darling of Taiwanese breakfast shops the world over, is also made with oil roux, and is related to Taiwanese mooncakes in technique. I’ve been experimenting with them, and made nearly one hundred minis for Natasha Pickowicz and Lindsay Peckham’s community bake sale for Make the Road NY. An early test:

• Just had to share this packaging design brief from the Sainsbury Archive, where I went digging for their 1960s biscuit wrapping. Gotta start implementing something like this at Yun Hai. I love to see historical design and creative process, how things were made before everyone had computers.

• And finally, we’ve got QQ Horse and QQ Snake safari hats in grown up sizes! We’ve got you covered, literally. A small number of hats are now available online and in store.

grandma style,
Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉

Written with editorial support by Amalissa Uytingco, Jasmine Huang, Lillian Lin, and Natya Regensburger. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with friends and subscribe if you haven’t already. I email once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. For more Taiwanese food, head to yunhai.shop, follow us on instagram and twitter, or view the newsletter archives.

This is a rare moment where all I have to tell you is that we’re running a sale. A cute little anniversary sale to celebrate the cute little anniversary of our cooking show, which has been running for three years. We’ve poured so many hours (thousands) and dreams (thousands) into this series. Thank you so much for helping us make it a success.

Fom September 4th through September 7th, online and in-store (except we’re closed on Labor Day), save on select ingredients, kitchenware, and home goods featured on Cooking With Steam—including Tatung electric steamers, bamboo steamer baskets, Taiwanese penglai rice, and Yu Ding Xing soy sauces.

Shop the Sale

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Shop the Sale

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Before I Go…

It’s almost Mid-Autumn Festival, my favorite holiday of the year. Yun Hai x The Foundry Bakery mooncakes will make a return very soon. We’ve completely retooled the packaging and introduced a new look and more protective cartoning. Here’s the protoype, so cuuuute. Quantities are limited, so sign up for the pre-order release!

Sign up for Mooncakes

On September 12th, from 10am-2pm, Yun Hai will be tabling at Taste Taiwan, Learn Mandarin: A Cultural Celebration, taking place at the Tzu Chi Long Island Education Center. Come learn how to cook from Taiwanese master chefs Chang Ko-chin and Lu Kai-yuan, watch a musical performance by the Grammy-nominated Tendrum Art Percussion Group, and shop goods from Taiwanese vendors.

Finally, this Sunday, September 6th, join me at Our Little Bake Sale, a fundraising event for Make the Road, a nonprofit supporting immigrant communities across New York City. I’ll be serving up experimental shaobing 燒餅, making the most of late summer produce (like the bushel of corn we won at a raffle) and trying out some hair-brained ideas I got while not sleeping (shaobing au chocolat?). The event is free, but you can pre-purchase pastry tokens here.

Like and subscribe,
Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉

Written with editorial support by Amalissa Uytingco, Jasmine Huang, Lillian Lin, and Natya Regensburger. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with friends and subscribe if you haven’t already. I email once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. For more Taiwanese food, head to yunhai.shop, follow us on instagram and twitter, or view the newsletter archives.

This week, I’m thrilled to share Season Three of Cooking with Steam, our self-produced Taiwanese cooking show on YouTube. This season focuses on cooking for holidays. Come along with me as I spotlight traditional Taiwanese festival foods, and share a few suggestions to make American holidays a little more Taiwanese.

New Episode Out Now

Also, this is the last week to take advantage of our first-time online customer promotion! If you’ve never shopped online with us, use the code HUANYING88 for a lucky $8.88 off your order of $50 or more.

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Happy Ghost Month! *screams*

In the 7th lunar month, the gates of the underworld become permeable, allowing the spirits to roam free in the land of the living. Or so it’s believed by many in Taiwan. These 好兄弟 (aka good brothers) are not just roaming. They have appetites: the desire to eat, to drink, to occupy your body. You know, all your typical creature comforts.

This is happening now, by the way, August 13 to September 10. Hold on to your butts, don’t go in the water, don’t whistle at night, and for goodness sakes do NOT pick up any loose items you see on the ground, especially red envelopes or money, lest you end up married to a dead person.

But, try not to worry. Unlike the western conception of haunting, which really offers nothing in the way of practical remedies (exorcism not being practical), Taiwan’s Ghost Month tradition offers a simple protective measure: feed the ghosts. There’s nothing some good food and a cold beer can’t smooth over.

Ghost Month may be the closest thing Taiwan has to Halloween, but it’s entirely different. For many (including me, all jokes aside) this is a serious festival rooted in Buddhism, Taoism, and ancestor worship. The offerings are made out of compassion and respect. Read about it here.

In this season’s premiere, on the occasion of the Hungry Ghost Festival (tomorrow, August 27th), I share a bit more about this festival, the ghost-appeasing offerings known as pu du 普渡, and two traditional foods you can make to feed the ghosts (and yes, yourself, too).

COOKING WITH STEAM Season 03 Episode 01
Hungry Ghost Festival
好蒸氣 第三季 01 | 中元節

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Pudu 普渡, or Hungry Ghost Offering

You will see ghost “buffets” around Taiwan throughout the 7th lunar month, especially on the 15th day of the month during the Hugnry Ghost Festival. These are piled high with offerings for the spirits, always placed outside, so as to not inadvertently invite the spirits into your home or place of work. They remind me a little bit of my parents’ garage after a trip to Costco: loaded with bulk snacks, ready to feed the ghosts and all their school friends, too.

Though beer, Kuai Kuai, and packaged snacks are common, more traditional offerings on the table feature taro. Ghost Festival coincides with taro season, and the word for taro, 芋, sounds a bit like the word protect or 護 hu. Apropos.

Taro cakes (and radish cakes) are one of my favorite snacks, and I learned to make them from Siang Kháu Lū (雙口呂), a cultural kitchen in Taoyuan, Taiwan run by our friends Chou Pei-Yi and Huang Teng-Wei. They are dedicated to preserving traditional rice-based Taiwanese cuisine, and source the Taiwanese rice we carry in the shop.

(If you’d like to learn more from Teng-Wei and Pei-Yi, please check out their online cooking class. It’s all in Chinese, but you can follow these steps to translate it into English. Highly recommend!)

Recipe: Taro Cakes, Two Ways

Get the Recipes

In today’s episode, we’re making two traditional taro cakes. First up: 芋粿巧 ōo-kué-khiáu. These old school Taiwanese snacks are made from short grain penglai rice, glutinous rice, and taro. They’re pressed into a crescent shape, which mirrors the shape of divination blocks used during bai bai 拜拜, or the worship of gods and spirits. They’re savory and chewy and rich, and I love them sprinkled with Taiwanese pepper salt.

The second is the more common version of this snack, known simply as 芋頭糕 taro cakes. These are similar to radish cakes you might find at dim sum, but made from taro root instead. To make them, I blend whole long grain zailai rice kernels with taro root to make a batter. I also keep some of the taro in matchstick shape, to introduce more texture.

Get the Recipes

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Ingredients and Equipment

Here’s a guide to the ingredients, equipment, props, and accessories featured on the show.

Shop the Cooking with Steam Collection

Ingredients

• Siang kháu Lū penglai short grain rice

  • out of stock until early Sept

  • bulk size coming soon

• Siang Kháu Lū zailai long grain rice

• Dong He shallot oil

• Dong He peanut oil

• Zhou Nan frost salt

• Yu Ding Xing Firewood Soy Paste, for garnish

• Nyonya Sauce, for garnish

Prep Work and Kitchen Gear

• Maestro Wu cleaver

• A 15-year-old round ironwood cutting board from an Asian grocery store in Detroit

• My trusty old wok from a since-closed shop in Chicago

• Vitamix blender

• Green 11-Cup Tatung Electric Steamer and a bamboo and cypress steamer

• Disposable steamer paper

  • Normally, I’d use the cotton steamer cloths we carry, but disposable paper is slightly easier for this dish because the taro can get sticky.

Plating and Decor

• The pink incense bowl on our altar is a preview of a forthcoming product launch: ceramics modeled after the iconic plastic pink dinnerware commonly used during bando 辦桌, or roadside banquets in Taiwan. Sign up for our waitlist here to be notified when they drop.

Accessories and Clothing

• Taiwanese Huichung linen shirt and pants from The Wax Apple

• Exquisite corpse frog necklace from Pear Ware

• Apron from Chifa LA

• Earrings by Sophie Buhai

Gratitude and Acknowledgements

We couldn’t have done this without the support and passion of our friends and community. So much love and gratitude to Night Shift, who produced this, and all our creative collaborators for giving the show its unique voice.

Credits

Produced by Night Shift and Yun Hai
Made possible by Tatung Taiwan and Sleepy Tofu

Team:
Lisa Cheng Smith, host
Rich Ho, guest talent
Trigg Brown, guest talent
Jessie YuChen, food stylist
Nicole Wang, culinary assistant
Amalissa Uytingco, culinary producer
Cat Yeh, BTS producer
Sam Broscoe, producer
Alec Sutherland, director & editor
Nathan Bailey, director of photography
Rob Woods, camera operator
Taylor Dekker, camera operator
Alexandra Egan, art director
Meena Kim, production assistant
Hikari Tezuka, hair and makeup
Mark Tumas, editor
Mark Maloney, editor
Kyle Garvey, sound mixer
R. Hollis Smith, mix
Dustin Wong, music
O.OO, graphics
Jil Tai & Ben Hill, motion design and title sequence
Leo Chang, language advisor
Rachel Watson, BTS photography

Our Set

Our set features props from Taiwanese, Taiwanese-American, and international friends worldwide, creating those Taiwancore vibes we love so much at Yun Hai.

Thank you for the beauty Natoora, Hai-Hsin Huang, Mikey Chen, Lillian Li, Emilie Liu, Debbie Carlos, Matthew So, Kelli Cain, Material Kitchen, Mogutable, Felicia Liang, Sam Tilney, Lulu Yao Gioiello, Eric Sze, Julianne Ahn, and Leh Lin.

And much gratitude to our friends who contributed to wardrobe: Judi Rosen, Pear Ware, Rest Objects, a/c space, and The Wax Apple.

Special Thanks

Hollow, Building Block, Chou Pei-Yi, Huang Teng-Wei, Hai-Hsin Huang, Maggie Chang, Shirley Liu, Samantha Tilney, Ivan Wu and Feng Hsieh, Jess Wang, Lillian Lin, Jasmine Huang, Natya Regensburger, Jeremy Hersh, & the entire Yun Hai Team, our partners, and our wonderful community.

Before I Go…

• To celebrate the launch of the third season of Cooking With Steam, I’m making a very limited amount of taro rice cakes (frozen) to pick up in our Brooklyn storefront! Look out for an announcement for preorder on our Instagram next week.

  

• Finally, I’ll be helping out at the annual Star Route Farm Dinner this weekend on Saturday, August 29th. Chef Patty Lee and Wine Director Matt Turner of Lei will prepare a celebratory dinner using fresh produce from Star Route Farm and other ingredients from partner farms working with The 607 CSA. It’s sold out, but just thought you might be interested!

Q: What is a ghost’s favorite snack?
A: Taro-r

bai bai 拜拜,
Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉

Written with editorial support by Amalissa Uytingco, Jasmine Huang, and Lillian Lin. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with friends and subscribe if you haven’t already. I email once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. For more Taiwanese food, head to yunhai.shop, follow us on instagram and twitter, or view the newsletter archives.

This is Studio Notes, a paid series within that newsletter. It’s an informal exploration of the things on my desk—cultural references, first-hand research, and archival material—all in relation to how we tell stories, create spaces, and design products at Yun Hai. Your paid subscription supports the free newsletter and our cooking show, Cooking With Steam.

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Before we get started, I wanted to share a few things of note. First, Season 3 of Cooking With Steam is about to drop, and the trailer is out! We’re cooking Taiwanese festival foods and making American holidays a little more Taiwanese. Check it outtttt:

Second, we’re running a little promotion at the shop to raise awareness about our online store after a wonderful season of press for the physical shop (Food52, NBC, and Flavor). Thank you!

Save a lucky $8.88 on your first order of $50+ with code HUANYING88 through 8/27.

I know most of you aren’t first time customers, but not to worry, we’ve got something special coming up for existing customers too.

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It’s been a summer full of cooking, a summer full of joy.

A summer full of one million dishes to do, and surplus ingredients, and deli containers, and herbs, herbs, herbs, and more herbs.

A summer of pop-ups, cooking show shoots, dinners with friends, camp food, and recipe development. I don’t think I’ve ever cooked more creatively or more frequently.

Taiwan Canteen 台灣食堂

In this week’s studio note (or this summer’s, as it were), I want to tell you about Taiwan Canteen 台灣食堂, an experimental pop-up series I kicked off last month, bringing together the here and the there. The “here” being whatever place or state of mind I’m in, and the “there” being Taiwan, and all the excitement to be found within that cuisine, of which I am a lifelong student.

This is a Yun Hai project, but also a bucket to capture concepts that don’t fit neatly into the traditional cooking we usually lean into. It honors all the ways we might cook at home: experimentally, improvisationally, with what’s on hand, what’s around, and what’s given to us. Opening up the ways I interpret Taiwanese cuisine allows me to incorporate more of what’s around me: readily available pastas instead of Asian noodles in a rural community, day old baguettes from local bakers, and all the produce bursting out of the ground in upstate New York.

Finally, the idea of the canteen 食堂 is distinct from the idea of a restaurant. It’s a casual, communal eating place that makes the most of whatever we have to nourish our people. It’s no frills. At the canteen, you bus your own table, maybe even have your own tissue pack for napkins.

Of course, the inspiration for this comes from around Taiwan. My moodboard:

If you’d like to be notified directly of Taiwan Canteen events by email or text, please sign up here for a casual ping. Otherwise, read on for a recap of the first two.

01 & 02 Cool Noodle

The first iterations of Taiwan Canteen happened across two Wednesdays—July 15th and August 5th—when I had the opportunity to cook lunch at Hamden General Store, a grocery store and farm kitchen in the Western Catskills (that’s the Great Western Catskills to you, buddy).

When crafting the menu, I thought all the way back to the very first pop-up I cooked, with my friend Michael. He made focaccia. I made Taiwanese cool noodle. We fabricated a sweet little cart out of 1x2s and trellises, played Teresa Teng on a crunchy little speaker, and hung paper lanterns up in Italian colors (red and green theme strong, even then).

I wanted to revisit this idea, concocted so long ago between friends. I thought about how Italian pasta was so often subbed in home kitchens of Asian immigrants for noodles. When Asian brands weren’t available, we got spaghetti…in sesame sauce. I was also reminded that during the pandemic, one of my favorite local restaurants here, Hollow, survived by making meal kits with restaurant-prepared sauces and packaged bucatini.

I mashed these memories up for Taiwan Canteen: Cool Noodle and came up with a menu equal parts Taiwanese and other stuff, utilizing the best of what local farms in the area had to offer.

Here’s what I made, across both dates:

Appetizers

Taiwanese Cucumber Panzanella
fermented black bean, green peppercorn
or
Taiwanese Cucumber Gazpacho
tahini, black sesame oil, green grapes

My homage to Taiwanese cucumber salad. I love this salad but I had to mix it up. In the panzanella, I soaked Solinsky’s excellent day-old baguettes in cucumber puree and exploded it with herbs and fermented black beans. In the gazpacho, I added sesame paste and green grapes instead of the traditional tomato. Muah muah muah.

Hot and Numbing Cabbage Slaw
su chili crisp, worcestershire sauce, sun-dried cabbage
or
Hot and Numbing Wok-Blistered Cabbage
su chili crisp, worcestershire sauce, hand torn leaves

Two versions of the same dish, with slight variation across the events. The first was a picnic slaw, bulked out with rehydrated dried cabbage for sweetness and texture. The second took on the character of fire, with blistered palm-sized cabbage leaves instead of the shreds, and more heat. This was a crowd favorite; a recipe for this follows at the end of the newsletter, for paid subscribers.

Main

Cold Sesame Peanut Bucatini
amber river soy sauce tomato jam, peanut sesame paste, and local herb(s)

A hard riff on Taiwanese Peanut Noodles, made with bucatini instead of the typical Taiwan-style noodles. I added a burst of tomato soy sauce jam (made by slow roasting local tomatoes with amber river soy sauce) as a nod to the Taiwanese love of soy and tomato together. Basil and shiso made an appearance; their leaves run amok all summer in the garden.

To make the bucatini work, I alkalized it by boiling the pasta in lye water, creating a yellow appearance and a springy texture that more accurately matches that of a Taiwanese cold noodle. This way, the sauce clings instead of being absorbed, and the pasta takes on the mild flavor of a pretzel.

Dessert

Kumquat Kirsch Oolong Jelly Bowl
black oolong, agar agar, condensed milk, cherries
or
Peach Iced Tea Jelly Bowl
black oolong, peach syrup, bitter almond milk

I’ve learned that relatively few people order dessert, but I refuse to stop making it, because jelly desserts are my favorite kind of food. For this pop-up, I incorporated in-season fruits (cherries, first, then peaches) into memories of my favorite iced tea beverages. I set double-brewed, sweetened oolong tea with agar agar or konnyaku starch into jelly, then dressed it with fruit syrups. To finish, I used a small amount of condensed milk or a house made bitter almond milk.

I love research and recipe development, but the best part of doing pop-ups like this is the opportunity to connect with others. I’m so grateful to the folks at Hamden General, Lucky Dog Organic (who literally gave me frisée out of the ground, day of), Berry Brook Farm, Hollow, Solinsky’s, Uplands, and Greentopia for all the wonderful ingredients and support. And thanks to Kento Igarashi, Jam Murray, Chris Roeleveld, and Rafael Roy for coming by to help out. And of course, I’m so grateful to everyone who attended and helped spread the word!

Upcoming Events

In today’s newsletter, I’m sharing my recipe for the Hot and Numbing Wok-Blistered Cabbage. But first, a quick rundown of upcoming Taiwan Canteen and Yun Hai events:

Grill Time: a Taiwan-inspired BBQ
Saturday, August 22nd, 1pm
Hudson Wilder
142 Plymouth St, Brooklyn, NY

I’m grateful to Hudson Wilder for inviting me to be a culinary resident for a one day Taiwan-inspired BBQ pop-up, featuring recipes from forthcoming episodes of Cooking With Steam. Ghost Month Taro Cakes and Mid-Autumn BBQ Tofu skewers, plus a few apps and desserts from my summer cooking at the canteen. It’s a vegetarian and vegan BBQ, so come one, come all!

See the Menu

Taiwanese Melon Stand w/ Natoora
Sunday, August 23rd, 12-3pm
Yun Hai Shop
170 Montrose Ave, Brooklyn, NY

We’re opening a one-day-only Taiwanese melon stand. We’ve teamed up with Natoora to bring you a taste of the Bonny Melon, a rare Taiwanese cultivar prized for its sweet-sour flavor and climate resilience. It’s the sour candy of the melon world. Cool off with freshly sliced Bonny Melons, sprinkled with Taiwanese plum powder; melon fen guo 粉粿 (sweet potato starch jelly, concocted by yours truly, just for the occasion), and whole peak-season fruits for sale.

Here at Yun Hai, we love to champion Taiwanese agriculture and traditional foods. Our interest isn’t only what’s happening in Taiwan, but how Taiwanese growers and agriculturalists make waves in our world. This melon is one of those ways.

See the Menu

Farm Dinner 2026
Sunday, August 29th, 4-10pm
benefitting Catskills Agrarian Alliance and Star Route Farm
with Chef Patty Lee and Wine Director Matt Turner of Lei
and musical guests BABAS and PEEPERS
852 County Hwy 40, Charlotteville, NY

I'm on the board of the Catskills Agrarian Alliance, a farmer-led agrarian non-profit, and I'm helping to organize the annual farm dinner (and contributing a few dishes to a phenomenal menu by our friends at Lei, too). I look forward to this dinner every year, connecting with our community and the land.

Tickets Here

My god, it’s going to be an August to remember! Now onto the recipe.

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This week, we’re launching “sticky rice tubes” aka stainless steel steamer ramekins, an accessory for the Tatung electric steamer that will enable you to steam lots of little things at the same time, but also make tubular cakes. They’re simple: a bit of stainless steel formed into the perfect shape and size for maxing out Tatung real-estate.

The design for these comes from a Taiwanese traditional rice pudding, traditionally prepared in a cylindrical form. It’s a favorite food of Lillian Lin, our COO. Many of you who have come through our shop or slid into our comments have said so, too. Read on to learn more, and grab the recipe I’ve developed for you to easily make this Taiwanese favorite at home.

Speaking of new launches, we’ve been hard at work over the last few months. Stay tuned for the latest season of Cooking With Steam and more product launches in the fall. Oh, and we just submitted our Fall 2027 lunisolar almanac to the printer, be sure to sign up for the waitlist! So excited.

Take Me to the Ramekins

Form follows function? Or form follows the woody stems of a giant supergrass belonging to the Poaceae family?

Enter tube rice pudding, or 筒仔米糕 tong zi mi gao/tâng-á-bí-ko, made by layering a container with braised pork, mushrooms, dried seafood (and more), then packing in seasoned glutinous rice. It’s steamed, overturned onto a plate, and dressed with sauce. If zongzi 粽子 and oil rice 油飯 shared a second cousin, it would be this little tower of power.

The form of this dish has its origins in Taiwan’s National Tube: bamboo. The Ministry of Education’s Hokkien dictionary confirms that this dish was originally steamed in the hollow stalk, and the form persists today:

Tube Rice Cake
tâng-á-bí-ko

Bamboo-tube rice cake. A famous Taiwanese snack. The rice cake is steamed in cup-shaped sections of bamboo tube, giving it a bamboo fragrance — very delicious. Nowadays most have switched to metal cups for steaming.

How endearing that this entry also confirms this is “very delicious.” Delightfully unobjective. I’d like to see this in more dictionary entries about food. I took the liberty of updating the OED banana split entry to follow suit.

But let’s not branch off into splits, and circle back to tubes.

There’s a significant family of dishes where bamboo tubes are stuffed with meats, nuts, rice, and seasonings, and steamed to create a cylindrical pudding. These can vary widely, from the cup-shaped version we’re featuring here to a skinnier bamboo segment stuffed with rice that’s sliced or cracked open. I’ve seen these steamed over a fire while camping and sold at street stalls on the eastern side of the island. There’s also a Tainan style mi gao that doesn’t involve a tube, and that’s very special, too (here’s Lillian’s favorite Tainan-style mi gao stand, recommended by a taxi driver and open until midnight).

Tong Zi Mi Gao

Tube Rice Pudding is more a format than a formula. The general gist: meaty toppings are rich with shallot flavor (usually braised or stir-fried, sometimes marinated and steamed with the cake); the rice is seasoned (with braising broth, shallot oil, or soy sauce); and the overturned structure is dressed with a runny sauce (a friend let me know that 甜辣醬 sweet chili sauce is “already so good,” but “could go next level” with 海山醬 hai shan jiang sea mountain sauce, included in the recipe I share below).

I’ve seen them topped with a fried egg, steamed with a tea egg, or mixed with bits of taro (yum) in the rice. I’ve gone rogue and even made them topped with bacon, but that’s a concept for a different day.

Today we’re launching the bamboo-analog steamer ramekins that make this dish possible: stainless steel cups designed to fit four or five to a Tatung steamer. They’re equally useful for bamboo steamers, metal steamers, or any other set up you might already have. Use these to make tube rice pudding at home, but also steam many things at once, from leftovers to individual soups.

Take Me to the Ramekins

In honor of the woody stems of a giant supergrass belonging to the Poaceae family, I have written a recipe for tong zi mi gao that uses our shallot oil, making this dish as accessible as ever. Of course, it also features our hyperyummy log-grown mushrooms and a selection of Taiwanese black soybean soy sauces, all of which contribute to an old school 古早味 flavor. Once you’ve got the traditional one down, I’d encourage you to riff! Heck you could even go steakhouse and put a white button mushroom on top and baby corn on the side, why not.

Recipe: Tube Rice Pudding

At the link below, you will find a recipe for tube rice pudding that includes a very important shortcut: our crispy shallot oil. This saves you the step of slicing, slow-crisping, and seasoning them, and brings a very true-to-life old school Taiwanese flavor to the whole affair. I adapted this from many many YouTube videos and much trial and error; feel free to adjust the salt and seasoning level according to your preference. If you plan to use a lot of sauces, you may adjust the soy sauce down a tad. If you prefer to just add hot sauce, keep it seasoned as is.

Get the Recipe

A few notes: the number of servings is approximate, and depends on how full you pack the ramekins and the size and shape of your toppings. This recipe is enough for four full ramekins. If you want to ensure 5 very full ramekins, just size up a little bit, increasing the rice and toppings by about 5-10%.

Magically, you don’t need to grease the ramekins before filling. The fat in the toppings and the texture of the rice will release from the mold easily. Just be sure to turn it over while it’s still warm — don’t let it cool down too much or it will stick. If that happens, just reheat it for a while. Take a look at how easy this is:

Finally, you can pop them in the freezer to resteam later. Freeze directly in the ramekin (sealing the top), or demold, let cool, and wrap in plastic wrap. If you do demold them, just be sure to resteam them in the original vessel, sans plastic wrap.

Get the Recipe

The Tubes In Question

As mentioned, we now carry the conventional ramekin for this style of rice pudding, a stainless steel cup known colloquially as 米糕筒 or sticky rice tube. You could also call it 不鏽鋼蒸杯 or stainless steel steaming cup, and though that wouldn’t be as cute, it does kind of get to the heart of the matter: this stainless steel tube can be used for so much more than rice cake. Use it for steamed eggs, flan, black sugar cake, or even to reheat small portions of leftovers in your Tatung steamer.

Take Me to the Ramekins

Like our other Tatung steamer accessories, these sticky rice tubes are designed specifically to fit our steamers. Four fit readily in a 6-cup and five in an 11-cup. If you want to steam for a crowd, layer more bamboo steamers on top. If you’re a daredevil, stack them, à la tong zi mi gao shops.

Because they’re made from stainless steel, the ramekins are corrosion-resistant and non-reactive when exposed to acidic foods. They’re easy to clean, dishwasher safe, and oven safe. We sell them in sets of four or five, and individually, too.

Take Me to the Ramekins

Take Me to the Ramekins

Before I Go…

• Yesterday, I popped up at Hamden General in the Catskills with the first iteration of Taiwan Diner. This concept is a vessel for exploring Taiwanese food through the lens of “the here and the there,” weaving all my interests together in a culinary-editorial project of improvisational nature. Stay tuned for a future studio note where I share all the dishes and how I folded Yun Hai ingredients into the concept.

  

• If you haven’t yet heard from top food influencer Josh Ku at Win Son, we now offer 7% off three bottles of soy sauce or soy paste in store and online. Did you know we also offer bulk discounts on many of our other staples? Check out the full collection, and save.
  

  Buy in Bulk

• In other news: our 2027 Yun Hai x O.OO Lunisolar Almanac is officially in production! Thanks to your feedback on our last calendar, we made some significant changes to this one that improve legibility (clearer “good” and “avoid” layout) and expand functionality (lunar phases!). We also worked with artists for the first time—look forward to new holiday and weekend imagery by cartoonist and illustrator James Kuo, as well as photographer and hot pot entrepreneur Hsun-Chih Chan. Sign up for the waitlist below:

  Sign up for the 2027 Almanac Waitlist

  

• Finally, I wanted to share a few items on quick sale. We ordered a few too many bottles of peanut oil for wholesale—this is your chance to get more for less! Save 20% when you get a bulk-sized peanut oil. We also have some bags of sun-dried cabbage at 10% off. Steam dried cabbage with your rice, rehydrate them into a soup, or toss ‘em into a stir-fry to add some fiber to your meal. For the Taiwan Diner pop up, I added this to a cold cabbage slaw, which augmented already crisp cabbage with chew and sweetness. Check out our quick sale section for more:

Shop the Sale

And that’s all for now. It’s been a big, busy, wild few months. XO!

Nowadays most have switched to metal cups for steaming,
Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉

Written with editorial support by Amalissa Uytingco, Jasmine Huang, Lillian Lin, and Natya Regensburger. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with friends and subscribe if you haven’t already. I email once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. For more Taiwanese food, head to yunhai.shop, follow us on instagram and twitter, or view the newsletter archives.

This is Studio Notes, a paid series within that newsletter. It’s an informal exploration of the things on my desk—cultural references, first-hand research, and archival material—all in relation to how we tell stories, create spaces, and design products at Yun Hai. Your paid subscription supports the free newsletter and our cooking show, Cooking With Steam.

To celebrate my return to writing and an eventful spring season, this one has no paywall!

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Time flies when you’re having fun…or working hard, as the case may be. It’s been too long since I’ve written. Almost six weeks! Happy belated AANHPI month! Happy Pride! Happy Dragon Boat Festival (p.s. we have three kinds of zongzi in store this month, eeeee)!

We celebrated heritage in full force this season: our most eventful spring ever, with six events in as many weeks. They ranged from Taiwanese cultural festivals in SF and NYC to afternoon tea with Rose’s Pineapple Shorts and Lucas Lee Ho to a Taiwanese Waves album swap. I’ve also jumped headfirst into final preparations for the production of Season 3 of Cooking With Steam, our self-produced Taiwanese cooking show.

This year’s season explores Taiwanese festival food, from Taro cakes for Ghost Month to classic Lunar New Year dumplings. Here I am testing out ideas for a Mid-Autumn BBQ. Hint: it involves bean curd.

We go on set next week; break a leg (can I tell myself that?)!

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a heritage food purveyor, what our responsibilities are (culturally), and how to more meaningfully connect our work (importing food) to the place that I live (New York).

We’re told that eating local is one of the best things we can do, but immigrant foods are often from afar. This advice may box them out. It’s also not ok to look only towards the specialized, rarified, and faraway, as I’m tempted to do. We cannot consider the food we eat in any context other than the entire world itself.

How should we eat in a world where Taiwanese food was once restructured by a government-coordinated effort to recenter it around American surplus grain? Where US trade policies and wartime fuel surcharges make it harder and harder to successfully bring in culturally resonant foods, not to mention affordably?

I’ve long wanted to connect participation in our local food system with Taiwanese agriculture in a directly intentional way. This past month, we put our collective efforts towards that, staging several events exploring international agricultural solidarity from the vantage point of a heritage food purveyor in America.

In late April, Enoki (best little Asian grocery in Saugerties) hosted We Are a Bean People, a soy sauce talk and tasting with Shannon Lee—founding editor of The Amp at Asian American Arts Alliance, the editor of Artlab Editorial, and a dining critic for Times Union covering the Hudson Valley—and me.

In this intimate event on a rainy day, we explored the humble soybean as a foundational and magical ingredient across Asian diasporic cuisines—linked with fermentation, craft, and longevity—in opposition to its negative association with American agribusiness here.

To demonstrate the magic of soybean alchemy, I served a dish that features soybean three ways: cold tofu dressed with fermented black beans and Taiwanese soy paste, topped with a cold relish I made from impulsively foraged garlic mustard. It was so much fun, I repeated it a week later in the shop, this time with tofu I made myself (more on that later) and an additional cold sesame iteration of the dish.

On May 9th, farmer Christina Chan of Choy Division staged her annual Asian vegetable seedling sale at our store, bringing hard-to-find, culturally relevant plants to our community of home gardeners, just in time for growing season. We sold over 400 seedlings in a few hours. What a joy to witness this love of planting, and we hope all the sweet and holy basils grow big. Ours certainly is!

On May 11, we hosted a Taiwan Farm Dinner with Progressive Hedonist, an event series committed to building climate resilience through joy, and Win Son, a celebrated Taiwanese-American restaurant, to benefit the Catskills Agrarian Alliance, an agricultural nonprofit working with local farmers across the region to increase food access and build a healthier food system. Like Choy Division, their operating farm, Star Route, is a member of Choy Commons, “a nonhierarchical cooperative of Asian-led farms engaging our communities in building food sovereignty for the Northeast.”

Chef Trigg Brown and Brian Girouard put together a menu featuring spring produce from Star Route Farm and Taiwanese artisanal ferments, grains and preserves from Yun Hai. Ramps and garlic mustard were hand foraged by Star Route Head Farmer Amanda Wong, and we featured purple rice from Lai Chin-Sung, a farmer and activist in Yilan in Taiwan. Here’s the whole dinner:

I contributed that cold tofu dish I had started working on at the beginning of the month, and roped Trigg into making tofu from scratch using Taiwanese ocean minerals as a coagulant. We made the tofu in bulk just after the aforementioned seedling sale.

These ingredients became a lens into how food moves around the world, and what local, global, and migratory food systems have to do with each other and our health as a planet. We gathered a few speakers for the evening: Amanda Wong, head farmer at Star Route; Kimberly Chou, co-organizer of Taiwan Food and Farm Tour and Yun Hai team member; and myself — in a Q&A moderated by Dana Cowin of Progressive Hedonist. We spoke about our roles in this worldwide project: Amanda as a local agriculturalist, me as an importer, and Kim, bridging the gap by connecting farmers across the world for knowledge and cultural exchange.

Through this dinner we were able to raise $3,000 for Star Route Farm and the Catskills Agrarian Alliance (in part due to the raffle run by my two willing and sweet children), which covers about two days of labor on the farm. The night was electric, full of energy and conversation, and it was such a privilege to be able to host CAA community members, nurturing those who nurture us all year through their farm work.

Thank you to all who participated and gave: Dana at Progressive Hedonist for co-hosting; Trigg Brown and Josh Ku of Win Son for the venue; Brian and the Win Son team for a perfect night of food, drink and hospitality; Yenwei Liu for the design of the fliers and menu; Tianna Kennedy and Amanda Wong for their years-long work in the Catskills; Kimberly Chou for building bridges across our communities; Rafael Roy and Kelin Verrette for their beautiful documentation; my mother for shepherding my kids through their raffle task and being my mom; and, of course, Amalissa Uytingco, Jeremy Hersh, and the rest of the Yun Hai team for their support in this event and all the work we strive to do.

Kim offered to put her experience of the evening into words. What follows goes far beyond a recap. It’s an account of what international agricultural solidarity looks like, as experienced through her work organizing the Taiwan Food and Farm Tour.

Taiwan Food & Farm Tour: the Ancestral Past and Possibilities of the Future, by Kimberly Chou

I’m smiling big when I think of this month’s Taiwan Farm Dinner, co-hosted by Yun Hai and Progressive Hedonist: Win Son’s dining room packed with new and old friends, collaborators and fellow travelers, all gathered to raise funds for Catskills Agrarian Alliance and Star Route Farm.

The dinner was an opportunity to learn not only about the orgs’ farmer-led food sovereignty work in upstate New York, but to explore what international solidarity can look like between farmers, food producers and food workers—plus everyday consumers and enjoyers—from here to Taiwan.

We engaged through conversation—a Q&A featuring Lisa, Star Route head farmer Amanda Wong, and me, moderated by Dana Cowin, touching on everything from the economic challenges of farming to ancestral healing—and through a menu of transnational dishes, all part Catskills, part Taiwan. May all community gatherings be blessed with salt bittern tofu (handmade by Lisa and Win Son chef-owner Trigg Brown), dressed with Yun Hai-imported fermented black beans and Star Route-foraged wild garlic mustard and radish!

In deep seriousness, we are in a critical time on the clock of the world, to quote legendary Asian American movement leader Grace Lee Boggs. It’s a time of immense struggle and heartbreak—but it also holds real possibilities for change. We, together, can get us through the fire. In these past few years, when the issues we’re confronting feel almost uncomprehendingly giant, I have found hope and grounding in connections that feel local and concrete, especially in food justice organizing. Building with other Asian diaspora folks committed to equity and self-determination for all (including the Choy Commons farmer cooperative, of which Star Route and Amanda are a part) has added another layer of depth and sweetness.

Last year, I launched Taiwan Food & Farm Tour with Li Schmidt of Cultural Roots Nursery and Scott Chang Fleeman of Shao Shan Farm, an initiative that invites Asian American food workers and land stewards to Taiwan for cultural exchange, skill sharing, land-based healing and internationalist solidarity building, in partnership with leaders in Taiwanese traditional foodways and regenerative agriculture.

We piloted our first trip in November, traversing the island for a week with eight farmers from California and New York. From Taipei’s community gardens to Pinglin’s native bee habitats, from the lush paddies of Yilan deep into the mountains of Hualien, we met with more than 20 farmers, producers, chefs and food business operators—including Lai Chin-Sung, godfather of Taiwanese agroecology, community farm school founder and the producer of Yun Hai’s purple rice (also served at the dinner).

We harvested tea seeds for camellia oil (at Greenlight Farm 綠光農園); planted red quinoa to resist soil erosion (at Pangcah, the largest indigenous organic farm in its region); and engaged with black soybeans at multiple stages of their life cycle: touring a Yilan honcho 吳慶鐘’s production facility which makes value added products like black soy milk for his farm and others, visiting a small-batch soy sauce workshop 島匠商行 (used in the Louu popcorn Yun Hai carries in store!), and weeding black soybeans in Guangfu, Hualien from their nemesis, a kind of spiky amaranth (which we learned from indigenous farmer and community leader Ke Chunji, is also one of Amis people’s most beloved wild greens).

All along the way we asked our hosts about their challenges and found that many are unsurprisingly similar to ours. The crises of land access and affordability. Farming against climate change—especially in Yilan, which now experiences its historically heavy rainfall in half as many days a year, and Hualien, heavily hit by a typhoon in 2025 amidst recovery from an earthquake in 2024. Loneliness in these physically demanding, economically precarious pursuits that struggle to appeal to younger generations.

But our dreams and beliefs mirrored each other, too: a desire to actually make a living through small-scale, regenerative farming or artisan food production. To shift expectations away from tech and industrialization and toward these land-, people- and care-centered ways of existing.

And all along the way our hosts remarked on how surprised they were that we were all farmers from America—all Asian, from different backgrounds—traveling across the world to meet with them. This trip transformed all of us, on the Asian American side, on the Taiwanese side—in multiple directions.

“Your visit has given me a deeper understanding of the international landscape,” said Ke 姊 (big sister) after we met. “I realized that there are farmers in the world who resonate with me, caring about feelings, about effort, and about the next cycle of life on earth.”

From my own learning and reconnection to Taiwan in recent years, through family travel and food justice organizing, it’s not lost on me what a gift it is to visit my motherland—or to even know what it is, a seemingly simple thing stolen from so many due to imperialist and capitalist legacies of displacement, land theft, occupation, and enslavement. Even with today’s Asian American farmers—who make up less than 1% of farmers in the US—many are considered first-generation farmers. Certainly some are folks who have pivoted from different careers or backgrounds, while there are others who are disconnected from farming in their lineages—whether these histories feel inaccessible due to migration or assimilation, or from structural violence, like the U.S. government’s incarceration and land theft of Japanese Americans during WWII.

I know my work in building international networks of resilience comes with a mandate for (re)connection and healing—my own and others. I continue to learn from and be inspired by folks who are healing and remaking bonds to their ancestral homes and cultures of origin, including Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, Black Farmers United NYS and Soul Fire Farm.

In trying to hold these intertwined commitments, from here to Taiwan, I think of Chin-Sung 大哥 (big brother) sharing one of his favorite memories together: harvesting lotus root, barefoot in the mud, all of us giggling in friendly competition and delight. It was a gray afternoon and Yilan’s famous feathery rain was falling, but we spent so much time mucking in the paddies that he and the fellow farmer hosting us joked that we were harvesting too much—and they were only “borrowing” that plot from a friend to show us!

“When you all jumped in the paddy field, I saw you connecting to your parents’ ancestors’ earth, laughing and playing like children,” he said. “It went beyond my expectations. I was deeply moved by everyone’s strong desire to be close to the land.”

As Taiwan Food & Farm Tour grows, we are dreaming of how to expand our reach beyond our hosts and delegates — without sacrificing the power of these intimate exchanges. In the next few years, we aim to bring new cohorts to Taiwan while also organizing Taiwanese farmers like Ke 姊 and Chin-Sung 大哥 to visit us in the States.

I know that what might feel like small, distinct efforts—a farm fundraiser dinner in Brooklyn, a weeklong trip for a handful of farmers—can have major reverberations.

By sharing our stories, seeds, techniques, and markets with each other, we are building the social and economic infrastructure necessary to create new global paradigms in agriculture—where land workers and food producers who value their own labor, plants and the planet can not only survive but thrive, pursuing sustainable livelihoods, growing and producing culturally resonant foods.

Kimberly Chou Tsun An 周存安 is a writer, community organizer and culture worker based in Brooklyn, NY, with roots in Taiwan and Detroit, MI. Her work plumbs the intersections of land, food, culture and care in pursuit of what it means to be living (not just surviving) in this present moment, while grounded in the ancestral past and the possibilities of the future.

Before I Go

As rewarding as it is, this work is grueling for everyone and almost never financially lucrative, but she’s right that it reverberates and makes a profound difference. In today’s letter, I see all the lines of this beautiful tapestry we’re weaving across the world, and I feel the resonance. If you’re also moved, and in the position to support financially, please consider donating to Catskills Agrarian Alliance or Taiwan Food & Farm Tour (select “taiwan farm delegation” in the form). And, as always, your continued business, newsletter subscriptions, and support for Yun Hai funds all the community-oriented work we’re able to do. So, thank you!

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I gotta get back to my holiday cooking (dress rehearsal), but here are a few more updates before I sign off:

• Tariff, Rebates, and Chaos: Boutique Businesses Wonder What’s Next, by Andre Keh, covering our experience over the past year managing tariff chaos in the New York Times.

  

• Our friend Eric Sze of Wen Wen and 886 has opened pre-orders to his forthcoming book, Taiwanese?, a personal and historical-leaning traipse through all that is, is not, and maybe is Taiwanese food. Pre-orders make a big difference to best-of lists, so don’t delay!

• We’ve just launched discounted bundles of soy sauce, for all you repeat customers. Now buy in sets of three and save up to 7%, or order with an included pour spout and save 5%. While you’re at it, don’t miss our Father’s Day Gift Guide!

• As always, please check out our quick sale section, featuring products nearing their best-by date, which doesn’t mean all that much except that we need to sell them at a discount :D

• We’re hosting a Build-a-Character Pear Wear jewelry pop up in store on June 20th! So cute! Don’t miss out on these pieces by artists Mika Agari and Chuggy Roro. Tickets include a 30 minute build session and finished glass charm; get them here.

  

• To celebrate Dragon Boat Festival, we have our annual seasonal bamboo-wrapped sticky rice dumplings (zongzi) in store. Swing by for a classic northern style, a rice flour based hakka style, or QQ red bean jelly, through the end of June and while supplies last. They’re easy to reheat in a steamer:

• Ok phew and finally, lots of lovely folks shared our story last month! Catch Lillian and our friend Henry Hsu on a Kron4 tv segment about steaming dumplings, a shop visit with Andrew Chuang of Xing Fu Tang, and a generous and sweet profile of my daily life in the shop by Leo Chang and Boyu Huang for Taipei Cultural Center.

Now off to make the show!

cooking with bean,
Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉

The ideas and opinions expressed in Studio Notes are mine, and don’t represent the larger Yun Hai organization. Thanks to Amalissa Uytingco for the proofing. I read all email replies and comments, so please reach out. Photographs, unless credited, are by me. If you enjoyed this newsletter, share it with friends and subscribe if you haven’t already. I email once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. For more Taiwanese food, head to yunhai.shop, follow us on instagram and twitter, or view the newsletter archives.

This week, we launch… furniture! Really! We’ve imported a small amount of our favorite plastic stools, verifiably made in Taiwan.

As you’ll read below, outdoor seating is an engine of Taiwanese street life; almost nothing feels more familiar. Plastic stools are seen all over Asia (and all over the world), enabling collapsible democratic seating everywhere. But every country has a different selection, and we’ve imported our favorite versions directly from Taiwan.

We’re offering two kinds: the ubiquitous, date-colored red stool (pictured above and below), and an even older format, a three part stool with a design dating back to the 60s. Both Made in Taiwan.

And while we’re on the topic, I wanted to share 來坐 Grab a Seat, a Taiwanese outdoor party put together by our friend Janet Liu. It’s happening this weekend in New York City, centered around the idea of sharing stories around a table and featuring programming like a Lantern Painting Workshop and an exploration of Pantoh (Taiwanese roadside banquet).

Take Me to the Taiwanese Stools

I’m telling you now, but you may already know: I have a longstanding love affair with stools and chairs that I just can’t walk away from. I’m not referring to the design feats accomplished with stacked cardboard (Gehry) or stuffed animals (Campana Brothers) intended as high end gallery pieces. It’s the old, world-weary seats that call my name. Those that have served many times over, holding our collective human weight in position on their slender legs and their petite feet, somehow never getting in the way of ours.

Think of them as micro-architecture. A portable structure with one function—to support. Have you ever brought a folding chair to the beach? Or a lawn chair to the campsite? Or parked yourself outside a sidewalk cafe that had just enough room for a little perch? And enjoyed the heck out of it? Humans need to sit down, and when we do, something magical happens. Space transforms. We stop moving through it and it becomes our setting, our stage.

Chairs and stools hybridize the shape of the body with the shape of the world. The seat and back reflect the human form, but the supports take on the language of columns and beams, transferring our forces to the ground. They are talismanic connectors in that way. What did I tell you, I’m chair crazy.

Here’s a drawing I came across many years ago by the architect Le Corbusier (pioneering Swiss-French modernist architect active in the first half of the 20th century, if you didn’t know). I actually can’t find the original attribution and don’t know where I first saw it (an out-of-print Atelier Bow-Wow essay?), but found it again, employing many differently phrased queries over the course of three hours, cited in this paper by Tahi Kaminer.

In the drawing, we first see Sugarloaf Mountain and the mouth of Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro. To translate the caption: This rock of Rio de Janeiro is famous. Then, we pull out to see the rest of the landscape. Around it rise disheveled mountains; the sea bathes them. And then, a figure in a chair. Palm trees, banana trees: tropical splendor animates the site. One stops, one installs one's armchair there. And then a building is imposed around the figure; a room emerges. Crack! A frame. Crack! The four obliques of a perspective! Your room is installed facing the site. The landscape enters whole into your room.

It’s meant to convey, among other things, how architecture can orient people to the landscape and (in my opinion) how it asserts control over our relationship with site. But the first reading for me has always been about the seat as a first architectural gesture, reflecting an intention to be there. Its presence suggests a desire or need to occupy. When the seat is full, it orients the human figure to the context it’s in. When empty, it reflects a human presence and the imprint of the absent occupant.

I recall this drawing often when passing through the streets of Taiwan, where the seat is so often the engine of urban use. See below, a small collection of documents from my many unorganized photos of seating in the wild:

A series of plastic stools scattered throughout a street in Taiwan creates the dining setting for a night market. You can see the yellow dividing line under the stool of the far leftmost person.

It’s common to see the plastic stools supporting production, too, as a surface for work. Here, in Taipei:

These stools are also clues to sidewalk use, which changes with every hour of the day in Taiwan. Here, in Kaohsiung, we see some red stools out with a stainless steel table on a quiet morning. But we also see stacks of green ones and a couple of traffic cones, which indicate the area gets much busier at another time of day, likely spilling into the street. It’s a happening spot.

Stools stacked neatly on the sidewalk might also indicate the presence of an invisible eatery, because the cart is closed up or the sign is obscured. These say: we’re not here now, but come back later and we’re prepared to accommodate you.

Taiwanese street culture, like me, adores its stools and takes care of them in ways that we could really learn from. Here we’ve got old ones still in use. Stacked dutifully and with care; cherished despite their age and inexpensive material. Blessed by their utility and taking on the character of battered seashells passed from creature to creature. (Humor me, I recently took care of some hermit crabs and am now viewing the world through their tiny eyes and bottom-feeding habits).

I wrote about this (and other related architectural texts and the history of monobloc plastics) in Little Red Stool, sent when we launched our little ceramic replica stools a year and a half ago. Head there to read more about the phenomenology of seating in the Taiwan streetscape, with examples:

Big Red Stools

As part of our Taiwanese everyday object collection (mailbox, ga ji dai tote, hinoki chopsticks, etc), we thought it would be lovely to bring in one of the most ubiquitous structures of all: the stackable stool. Today, we’re launching full size, stackable plastic stools, all made in Taiwan. We don’t have all that many stocked, as furniture is a new experiment for us. If we sell out (is it possible?), we’ll be restocking more a few months from now.

We have two types: the maroon stool pictured in many of the tableaus above, which are quite a bit sturdier than the standard issue we’ve found around NYC. The plastic is a bit thicker, the feet have rubber stoppers, and the seat is reinforced. They stack like a dream. We use them at home to support plants, accommodate extra dinner guests, and pull up to craft hour or music lessons.

Take Me to the Red Stool

We’re also launching a lesser-known and even more vintage plastic stool, a three-part number that breaks apart into a small stack. We call them Chess Stools, because of their pawn-like look. They’re actually an interpretation of a mid-century French design that dates to the 60s, originally designed as an inexpensive seat for fishermen, with a compartment in the top that can be used for storage. Brigitte Bardot was pictured with one, and the stool skyrocketed in popularity. The design of the Taiwanese-produced stool is slightly different, but is clearly influenced by the construction and corseted shape.

Take Me to the Chess Stool

The prices on these are definitely higher than you’d see in Taiwan. Full transparency: we’ve kept them as low as possible while also considering the shipping and storage costs. You can see our drawings for logistics calculations below. Most of the cost is in the shipping, so buy in multiples to save up to 48%!

紅色塑膠椅 Taiwanese Red Stool

We’ve long had a diorama-sized version of the red stool in our collection, but now, we’re bringing you the real thing.

Take Me to the Red Stool

Deep red with sleek, faceted curves, this plastic stool can be used indoors or outdoors. Set a bunch of stools out in the backyard to host a Mid-Autumn BBQ, Taiwan-style, then stack ‘em up in the garage to easily store them away. Bring a stool indoors for extra seating or decor—a nod to Taiwanese street life (even better if paired with a Taiwanese mailbox).

喇叭椅 Chess Stools

Teleported straight from that bygone era, this palindromic vermillion-red/chartreuse-green number is sleek and low-profile, evocative of 1970s pop design. In addition to sitting, you can also use the top compartment for storage.

Take Me to the Chess Stool

When you want to put them away, simply break them down and stack the parts for storage, as seen below:

And if you get multiple stools, you can customize their color combinations: red on red, green on green, and red on green (which, of course, we’re partial to for its resemblance to our Yun Hai Tatung Family Cookbook).

They also stack beautifully if you’re in the market for a red and green totem for some reason (who isn’t).

Before I Go…

• Just a note to consider revisiting this excellent and on-theme song Sitting is the Opposite of Standing, at one point a go-to sing along in my household. It’s a couple years old now, but I think we need to hear it again. We deserve to sit. It’s the opposite of running around.

• On Friday, April 25th, join me at Enoki Catskill, an Asian market in Saugerties, NY from 12-2pm for a soy sauce talk and tasting. I’ll be sharing a bit more about how our Taiwanese black bean soy sauce is made, and bringing tasting samples. Shannon Lee, of the Asian American Artists Alliance, will be joining me for in conversation. Look out for more details on our IG account next week.

  

• On Sunday, May 2nd, save the date for a special Soy Sauce Sundae Social where we’ll be featuring Taiwanese soy sauce by Yu Ding Xing in ice cream sundaes. Look for soy sauce ice cream by Win Son Bakery, soy sauce caramel by me, and toppings (like seaweed almond crisps) from our shop. More details to come!

And finally, I wanted to share an upcoming project that’s very near and dear to my heart, benefitting local farmers and connecting our global food systems with our local ones.

This year, I joined the board of the Catskills Agrarian Alliance, an agricultural nonprofit working with farmers in the Catskills to increase food access and build a healthier, more just food system. They do many things, from running a farm that supplies mutual aid organizations and a CSA, to creating a farmer-led logistics network that supports smallholder farms getting their goods to market. This growing season, our store will be a pick up point for their CSA.

After years of engagement with small farmers in Taiwan, it makes me so happy to connect with and contribute to our local food system meaningfully. Food is local, grown in the place where we live, but also migratory, moving as people do. I’m grateful to the CAA for their contribution to the furtherance of agriculture in the Catskills region, and am happy for the opportunity to serve them.

Keep an eye out for an invitation to a Taiwan Farm Dinner on May 11th, to benefit the Catskills Agrarian Alliance and Star Route Farm, presented in collaboration with Dana Cowin of Progressive Hedonist and hosted by Win Son. We’re not quite ready to announce yet, but here’s a preview of what’s to come, for our dear readers:

Progressive Hedonist and Yun Hai come together to celebrate the intersection of Taiwanese culinary tradition and locally grown produce — exploring how we eat, near and far, and what that reveals about climate change awareness and agency.

The night will benefit the Catskills Agrarian Alliance (CAA), an agricultural nonprofit working with local farmers across upstate New York to increase food access and build a healthier, more just food system.

Chef Trigg Brown of Win Son will cook with spring produce sourced from Star Route Farm, located in the western Catskills and affiliated with CAA, alongside preserves, grains, and ferments from Taiwanese farmer-artisans, provided by Yun Hai. Together, these ingredients become a lens into how food moves around the world — and what local, global, and migratory food systems have to do with the climate crisis.

The evening will be punctuated by a roundtable discussion moderated by Dana Cowin of Progressive Hedonist, an event series committed to building resilience while sharing climate friendly practices through food and joy. Joining us for that will be Amanda Wong, head farmer at Star Route Farm, and Kimberly Chou, co-founder of Taiwan Food and Farm Delegation.

Stay tuned for more, and, as always, thank you for reading.

Crack! The four obliques of a perspective!
Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉

Written with editorial support by Amalissa Uytingco, Jasmine Huang, Lillian Lin, and Natya Regensburger. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with friends and subscribe if you haven’t already. I email once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. For more Taiwanese food, head to yunhai.shop, follow us on instagram and twitter, or view the newsletter archives.

This is Studio Notes, a paid series within that newsletter. It’s an informal exploration of the things on my desk—cultural references, first-hand research, and archival material—all in relation to how we tell stories, create spaces, and design products at Yun Hai. Your paid subscription supports the free newsletter and our cooking show, Cooking With Steam.

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When I started Yun Hai in 2019, I opted out of producing short-form email marketing and decided to go all in on long-form storytelling. If I was going to put my effort into something, I wanted it to be able to stand on its own, with original and lasting value. Nothing throwaway.

That commitment has manifested as this newsletter, now in its fifth year. I hope the words posted here outlive me in their impact, no matter how small the ripple. Sharing cultural stories and culinary knowledge is paramount—our mission to stand for Taiwanese sovereignty comes first. Our products are a means to that end, and not the other way around.

This has led to constant tension between telling a story and selling a product. What’s editorial? Commercial? Can the two meet? How do we walk the line between culture and commerce, art and business?

In my intellectual life, everyday experience and the domestic arts are a core area of interest. It’s our most intimate space, built on our histories, our triumphs, and our tragedies. Within this sphere, I find there to be infinite space for improvisation and creation. And within that, infinite latitude for joy and subversion. The way we live is the sum product of everything we’ve ever done, as a species, as a culture, and as individuals. Call me romantic, call me a homebody.

The production of food is included in this larger interest. Agriculture is culture, and it’s generative, too. In this context, agricultural products could be thought of as the punctuation of a massive human effort, generations long, instead of a commodity to be sold. Another meaning for the word product is the result of multiplication, as in a multiplication of effort, knowledge, and sensibility. The thing itself is just the tip of the iceberg, and the iceberg is human.

Unfortunately, the speed of production, frictionless commerce, big data, unethical labor practices, and all the trappings of late stage capitalism undermine this interpretation. It’s not escapable, we’re complicit by the nature of the society we live in, though we can fight to change it.

If exploitation is the starting point (whether resources, labor, consumer groups, regulations, or market gaps) and monetary gain is the end goal, the story falls apart. It’s no longer human but becomes anti-human.

Within this perspective, “SHOP NOW” is never enough for me. The products we select are the expression and manifestation of a long story. There’s so much friction in producing them, that I think there should be some in consuming them, too. We should work to understand, seek to know.

The big question for me is how do I, as a distributor, give people an opportunity to pause and and appreciate how lovely our world is and how much has gone into their daily experience?

Time, Terroir, Taiwan

We had the idea to use the strength of what we’ve built over the past half decade to distribute small, free productions that share stories of the people that we work with. Between the shop, our wholesalers, and shipped orders, we could easily get a few thousand copies of printed matter out to our audience without additional logistics and for a low cost.

Little Dumpling Book kicked off our booklet series. Today, we continue it with Time, Terroir, Taiwan, a lovingly composed pamphlet that celebrates the soy sauce brewing process in Taiwan. It features our dear friends and third-generation soy sauce brewers, Yi-Cheng and Yi-Che Hsieh, and their family. This book captures only a fraction of what we’ve learned from them over the past seven years and is a follow-up to a documentary of the same name, produced by Yun Hai in collaboration with another dear friend Steve Chen, of Chen Office, in 2021. So many dear friends, I can’t stop loving them.

There’s some tension here. Because these pamphlets are, in the end, marketing materials, they can’t also truly be zines (in my opinion). But, we can take the ethos of the format (inexpensive, simple to put together, experimental, fun) and apply that to what we’d like to say.

This pamphlet has no buy button, no tracking cookies, and exists to be read, enjoyed, saved, and shared. It does, however, have a QR code that links to the documentary, which is so worth a watch if you have 15 minutes or so:

Find these booklets for free in every order (while supplies last), and in our shop. If you’re a wholesale customer, we’ll happily send you a stack. And if none of the above will work, send a SASE (self addressed stamped envelope, remember those) big enough to fit a 5”x7” postcard to the shop and I will gladly return it to you, filled.

Design Notes

Designing this was no small matter. I’ve been working on this for almost a year, on-and-off. Some things go quickly and some things very slowly, and, for me, that’s just the nature of creation. Artists may tell me to trust-the-process; marketers may suggest time-is-of-the-essence. They’re both right, I guess.

In any case, the objective was simple: share Yu Ding Xing's story more widely.

We thought we might be able to put the newsprint we wrap glass bottles with in the store to this purpose. We print 5,000 sheets at a time with an Asian-American web-printer based in Long Island City. Because we’re already printing them, we could embed the story of Yu Ding Xing into the sheet, and spread the word without spending any extra money.

In this decadent (in the original sense of the word) age of AI, I thought I should get back to something physical. I started by hand drawing titles and printing out photos to place onto scrap pieces of newsprint and similarly sized kraft paper. The plan was to then scan these compositions to create a special edition newspaper.

The design was more challenging than expected. It’s somewhat clear how one might make a sell sheet with product descriptions, bullet-pointed material, and a clear offer. It’s much more difficult to place text and image together on paper in way that’s a delight to handle, read, and remember. It changed at least seven times, evidence below:

More after the jump on how we arrived at the final design.

Read more

This week, I have the pleasure of reintroducing one of our longest-stocked products: Fermented Black Beans! This shit is ancient! It’s been around since the 2nd century BCE and has been flavoring our food and probioticking our guts ever since.

We’ve sold it for seven years (that means I’m old now), and I have never once written a newsletter about it. We’ve just relaunched it in new packaging inspired by Taiwanese herbal and medicine shops, with updated recipes to match.

New and improved and as old as ever.

Finally, you may remember that last time, I told you about QQ Horse and QQ Snake. Well, the zodiac workwear has landed. Preorders have shipped and they are all available to order. Please join me in the cult of the little jumping horsey, thank you.

*And a small aside: in this newsletter, and always and forevermore, when Yun Hai says “black bean” we mean “black soybeans,” which are classified as a superfood because of the anthocyanin in their pigment. They are distinct from the more commonly encountered yellow soybean. Fun fact: the ones our soy sauce brewers use often have green kernels, which are very special and nutrient-dense indeed.

Take me to Fermented Black Beans

Take me to QQ Horse

We are a bean people.

My mother spake it thus, pointing to her nose and referring to the Taiwanese spread in front of us. An instant hit in our family home, this idiom has remained an inside joke of choice since its emergence thirty-some-odd years ago. As kids in Texas, beans to us meant the cowboy variety, and the dishes on the table had nary a pinto in sight. Actually, no visible beans at all.

But (and this is not the first time I have surfaced this in the newsletter), Mom was right. She was talking about the soy sauce, the bean paste, the tofu, the sprouts, the mung beans, the adzuki, and, of course, the DOUCHI!

Take me to Fermented Black Beans

Douchi 豆豉, or fermented black beans, is the original fermented soy food, existing since at least 200 BCE. It is the king koji kernel, the natal nugget, the soy singularity, the origin of soy sauce.

According to Soy Info Center (a wow very thoroughly annotated compilation of thousands of soy-referencing historical documents), the oldest known douchi were discovered in 165 BCE, enshrined:

Fermented black soybeans are found clearly marked in Han Tomb No. 1 at Mawangdui near today’s Changsha, Hunan province, in south-central China. The tomb was sealed in about 165 B.C. and was first opened in 1972.

This is corroborated in a short paper by Chen Jianming of the Hunan Provincial Museum in Changsha, China, entitled On Chinese Delicacies 2,100 years ago: a Case Study of the Mawangdui Han Tombs in Changsha.

This charming paper almost reads like a menu. The author illuminates the foodstuffs found in the tomb, which were listed on an official inventory written on wooden tablets attached to bamboo cases (bills of lading also date back to 200 BCE, btw). Death’s larder included “such spices as sauce, meat sauce, fish sauce, fermented soybeans, salt, sugar, honey, sweet wine, ginger, mustard, and bitter leaves.”

This discovery confirmed douchi as the oldest known fermented soy food in the world. Fermented black beans are the progenitors of soy sauce, which was first known as chizhi 豉汁 (or fermented black bean juice). According to Soy Info Center, this was “a kind of soy sauce with no wheat, resembling Japanese tamari,” mentioned as early as 150 CE in The Shiming by Liu Xi, one of the earliest etymological dictionaries published in China. Sounds a lot like the Taiwanese soy sauce we distribute, also made with black soybeans and no wheat.

Douchi are still in wide use today. Though the specifics of production may vary, all are made by inoculating soybeans with koji (Aspergillus oryzae) or other compatriots in the mold world, salting them, and letting them ferment. Our friend Ken Fornataro recently did a deep dive on making a version of these at home in Cultures Group, his lo-technology hi-technicality newsletter on fermentation.

We’ve carried douchi since the very early days of Yun Hai, when we started importing Taiwanese black bean soy sauce from third-generation brewery Yu Ding Xing 御鼎興 in 2019. They make Taiwanese soy sauce in a traditional manner, which starts with—you guessed it—fermented black beans.

The brewers set aside a portion of the inoculated black soybeans before heading into the soy sauce production process. This portion ages and cures for another year or so, before transforming into their fullest fermented black bean flavor.

When I saw a small jar of these in their office, I knew I had to have some for my planned holiday soy sauce launch (I had a feature in Bon Appetit scheduled to be published a few short months later), but with no time to devise packaging, I ordered big bulk bags and packed them myself in NYC, in stand up pouches with a simple stamp.

Since then, the fermented black beans have been consistently well reviewed, tend to sell out, and we absolutely adore them. I am not one to speak in superlative, but I do think they’re the best out there. Others agree:

In addition to the retail pouch, we have always sold this in 2 kg bags to restaurants like Win Son, so if you’re a restaurant, hit us up!

These little beans are such a big part of our day-to-day parlance that they’ve become affectionately known as “FBB” in the office. This is so second nature to me, that I forget people don’t readily know what I’m talking about.

We’ve finally worked out a new packaging design that’s worth its salt (snort), and are excited to reintroduce this ancient condiment in a tidy little jar that references Taiwanese everyday life.

Red-Topped Faceted Column Jar, for Lack of a Better Name

Take me to Fermented Black Beans

It’s been almost seven (!) years since we first started selling fermented black beans. They’ve flown under the radar for that entire time, with the constant idea that “we would eventually update the packaging.” This goes to show that it’s hard to change a product after launch (are you with me fellow product developers). Once we released it in a stand up pouch, in a stand up pouch it stayed.

The packaging was actually pretty ok, but could be done better.

First, the pouch didn’t show the product or celebrate what was inside. This is something we really care about at Yun Hai. It isn’t so much a desire to “elevate” a product as an intention to communicate it.

Second, they’re hard to pack. Stand up pouches take up very little room in storage, but they need to be expanded and held open to be filled cleanly.

And third, the original packaging, made of kraft paper and mylar film, is not the easiest to reuse or recycle. Only a limited set of facilities can recycle that specific mix of materials.

Of course, I looked no further than the daily life shops of Taiwan, where packaging is abundant and also abundantly recycled. I’ve long loved the red topped jars and bottles found in herbal and medicine shops. They’re inexpensive, lightweight, easy to fill, easy to get, available in many sizes, and are so beautiful, with the refractive effect of reeded glass captured in its faceted shape.

Our packaging also references the stamped labels commonly in use on these same jars, with typefaces varying from product to product or shop to shop. The labels, bordered with a strong red or blue stripe, also come in many different sizes, and are easily found at any stationery store.

We decided to package the black beans into one of these jars and encase it in a lightweight box, which solved all of our problems. You can see through it (box has a window); it’s affordable; it channels Taiwan sensibility; it’s easy to fill; it’s not a headache for the vendors to get, and, as it turns out, it’s made of PET, one of the most widely accepted 100% recyclable plastics in use today.

Take me to Fermented Black Beans

More on the plastic point: we try to avoid plastics as much as possible, and lean into glass, metal, and paper. It’s not always an easy choice, when reviewed holistically. Aluminum requires lots of water to produce and glass is heavy to ship. Mylar film pouches are lightweight and recyclable, but difficult to find facilities that accept them. The PET used in this jar is the same material that soda bottles and peanut butter jars are made from, and if you’re going to go plastic, is probably the best bet for now because it is so easy to recycle.

Though I’d love to package these in a wax coated paper or similar, we do need a reliable vapor barrier that can be affordably and securely transported. This new iteration may look like more plastic than the kraft paper stand up pouches we were using previously, but it’s actually a far more recyclable product, and can also be reused!

HTCWFBB
(How to Cook with Fermented Black Beans)

Douchi are a perfect seasoning. They impart a rich, savory flavor to any dish. Find them in well-known dishes like Flies’ Head (quintessential chive explosion), Clams with Black Bean Sauce (Canto favorite), Mapo Tofu (a weeknight staple), and Twice Cooked Pork Belly (dec-a-dent, also kind of easy).

Think of them as a non-dissolving soy sauce bouillon. Take them out of the jar, soak them for five minutes, then rinse. Go from there.

The easiest thing to do is to fry them with garlic and ginger as a base for a quick improvisational stir fry (my tip: one veggie and one protein only with this flavorful mix). You could even go so far as to mash them up and blend them into a rich vinaigrette. I’ve even seen people make FBB butter. They’re just beans. Perfect, magic, punchy little beans.

I cooked through a few of my favorite recipes this past weekend, photographing them on a tray balanced on a stool, with a tripod on a cookbook and a tofu light in hand. All I can say is that for every good image there were many blurry ones. I prefer to photograph by chance.

Without further ado, here are the dishes. Bury me with them.

Ma Po Tofu
麻婆豆腐

This recipe is the oldest in the Yun Hai book, and uses our hot-and-numbing Su Chili Crisp to make short of the work, transforming this dish from an involved preparation requiring roasting and grinding Sichuan peppercorn to a weeknight staple.

Q: Why is this so good?
A: FBB
A: And Su.

Get the Ma Po Recipe

Take me to the Su Mala

Take me to Fermented Black Beans

Flies’ Head
蒼蠅頭

No insects were harmed in the making of this dish; a large number of fermented black beans serve as their stunt double. This dish takes a little bit of pork, a whole lot of chives, a palmful of FBB, and as few or as many red chili peppers as you like—and transforms them into a pulse-quickening, hash-like dish best eaten with lots of rice. A Taiwanese homestyle favorite. My tip: go 1:1 on the chives and pork by weight, and use a cold-pressed peanut oil to warm up the whole dish.

Get the Flies' Head Recipe

Take me to the Peanut Oil

Take me to Fermented Black Beans

Ozzy Hsieh's Green Pepper You Tiao (!)
青龍椒豆豉油條 (!)

This original recipe was generously provided by Ozzy Hsieh, the producer of our fermented black beans (also an excellent chef). It’s something between a chao bing (shredded scallion pancake stir fry) and a…panzanella (don’t crucify me Taiwanese and Italian readers)?

Day old Chinese cruller is sliced up and tossed with a rich dressing made from tomatoes, chopped peppers, spicy soy paste, ketchup (👍), and, you guessed it, FBB. It’s warm and there’s no acid, so technically not a panzanella at all, but the tomato and pepper sauce absorbed by the yeasty cruller brings a Mediterranean vibe, in my HUMBLE OPINION. I did once have an Italian/Taiwanese food cart with my friend Michael, so if this feels like a stretch, chalk it up to that ongoing fantasy.

In any case, it was amazing! This was gone almost before I had time to photograph it; I was yelling at my family to “please do not eat from the pot during a photo shoot.”

Crullllllllers — get ‘em frozen at the Asian grocery store and whip this up in a pinch. Good with rice, too, especially if carb-loading.

Get the FBB Cruller Recipe

Take me to the Spicy Soy Paste

Take me to Fermented Black Beans

Before I Go…

• Pick up your QQ Horse and QQ Snake Merch online or in store! We’ve got sizing samples at the shop if you’d like to try them on. Make this your winter-spring transition piece of the 2026 season. Honestly, great over a swimsuit, I would know.

• Speaking of the store, we’ve just restocked on nos books and added more Taiwanese art book titles and stationery (including elementary school Chinese writing practice books). Come see us!

• I had a wonderful time speaking as a featured presenter at the Asian American Arts Alliance Town Hall hosted by the Museum of Food and Drink earlier this week. The theme was Culinary Arts; thanks to all who shared their work and pitches! Learn more about this organization and their wonderful events here.

  

• We continue on the march to Yun Hai Press with the release of a lovely informational pamphlet all about the Hsieh Brothers and what they’re doing for Taiwanese soy sauce at Yu Ding Xing in Yunlin, Taiwan. More details on this in a forthcoming newsletter, but as of today, one copy is being included in every order. It’s a small but big thing. We always seek to walk the line between culture and commerce, representing our producers without beating our customers over the head with product speak.

  

• And finally, if you are in the Bay Area, don’t miss Lillian (co-owner and COO) at Preserved in Oakland tomorrow, 3/27. She’ll be running a soy sauce tasting spanning Yu Ding Xing’s offering, including our new fermented black beans. The new soy sauce zine will be on site as well! The event RSVP is full, but please join the waitlist to be notified of any last-minute availability.

And with that, I guess I better get back to figuring out the whole it’s two but also three thing.

new and improved and as old as ever,
Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉

Written with editorial support by Amalissa Uytingco. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with friends and subscribe if you haven’t already. I email once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. For more Taiwanese food, head to yunhai.shop, follow us on instagram and twitter, or view the newsletter archives.

Happy Lantern Festival! I’m so happy to announce that our Lunar New Year QQ Merch is ready for preorder, shipping late March. QQ Horse, this year’s zodiac animal, is done up in a Western wear-style, inspired by early cinema and my hometown of Houston. I’ve also included QQ Snake in complementary khaki, to make up for last year and not leave you snakies in the lurch. Though snakes may prefer lurches.

A quick word about merch, too. If you’re willing to wear it, merch is a wonderful way to show your support for small brands! It’s one item that we can make domestically (tariff-free), on relatively short notice (great cash conversion cycle), helps fund upcoming projects (noodles), and spreads the word about our brand (depending on how much you wear it). No pressure at all, but thought it would be nice to share that perspective, as you encounter other small brands making cool stuff.

And now, onto the introductions.

Preorder the QQ Merch

Visit Us In Person

**Please note the QQ Merch is preorder only and will ship late March. Preorder items cannot be purchased with other products—they must be in a separate cart.**

Every Lunar New Year (more on that later), I draw a mascot to embody the zodiac changeover and set my intentions through the development of a character. They’ve ranged from a lovely little ox to a beckoning dragon.

The only requirement for this line of zodiac merch is that the animals have the letters “QQ” as eyes. This is inspired by the Taiwanese phrase “Q” (diminutive “QQ”), which is a term used to describe the perfect bouncy texture for everything from bawan to boba.

I also have a long standing love affair with this letter combination, because of its usage in early internet marketplaces, as in ebay, as in Leica 280mm f:4.8 Telyt lens, late style, US SELLER ”LQQK“.

Usually, we silkscreen our QQ zodiac mascots on a shirt, but this year we went for embroidery. Looking for a t-shirt? We’ve still got Hu Ye Tiger god shirts, too. Scroll on.

Introducing QQ Horse

This year’s mascot comes to you by way of my past.

Preorder the QQ Merch

When I was in kindergarten, I was given the assignment of coloring in a horse. I gave mine a brown coat and a black mane, carefully rendered. Satisfied, I looked over at my neighbor, who had dressed hers in multicolor, a shiny princess. I ripped mine up and made a copy of hers, and never forgot the sense of regret I felt afterwards.

QQ Horse is Kindergarten Horse risen again, shining in postponed glory, adorned only by a pair of glittering, golden glasses. (I happen to be severely myopic and this is also a nod to that whole thing.) She’s embroidered onto a denim shirt, symmetrically mirrored across the centerline, inspired by Western wear and my deep Texan-Taiwanese roots.

I also have to admit that back when I was a design director at Areaware (sadly closing this year after a long, wonderful run), I’d often call things “a little horsey” to indicate they were a bit awkward and not ready for primetime. The irony of this does not escape me. Thanks to my friend Michael Hunter at Le Puzz for endearingly pointing this out ha ha.

But more than anything, this year’s horse is an invitation to run, bespectacled with clarity, into the future.

I struggled to draw QQ Horse this year (I struggle every year), and tried to avoid the barbie horse tropes of big hair and plastic-like body. As I worked, I thought of Eadweard Muybridge, who birthed a form of early cinema when trying to understand the mechanics of the horse’s movement. He set up a series of cameras with tripwire shutters and captured a horse at a gallop.

The work, or series of works, is titled The Horse in Motion. People used to believe that the horse flew over the land with legs splayed in front and behind them (aka the flying gallop). Muybridge showed that yes, the horse does separate completely from the ground, but only with legs tucked awkwardly and expertly beneath. I tried to capture this moment of suspension, a moment of forward motion divorced from earthly matters. And a moment that spearheaded the development of cinema.

LQQK:

Meet QQ Snake

Last year, I failed to complete the QQ Snake assignment, for reasons only partially explained. So, like QQ Horse, QQ Snake rises, summoned into existence by my completionist heart.

Preorder the QQ Merch

In trying to draw a snake, retroactively, I kept coming into forms that felt defensive (ready to strike), exoticized (sumptuously coiled), or politicized (god forbid I accidentally make a don’t tread on me flag). I looked into Muybridge again, and found that he had also studied the motion of the serpent. Unlike the yang horse, the yin snake is hard to read, a bit arbitrary in its position, and doesn’t seem to have a need to go anywhere at all.

I took from it that a snake was a line in space. Wherever its head has gone, so too its tail. I had a thought about the continuous relationship between past and present, as I drew the zodiac animal in the very end of the snake year. And I thought about how transformation need not be directional, but creeping.

I wondered what I might do with a line, and, very directly, I hid a Y and an H into QQ Snake’s body, representing Yun Hai. I started with the tail, and curved around the letter forms into the head. I added two wide open bright eyes, your standard forked tongue, and two nostrils, in homage to my sister’s hognose snake named Agnut. Finally, I added a segmented belly, to give it a little tread (on me).

Last year’s snake has motion, it starts at the tail and moves towards the head, which brings us just about to the present, ready to shed skin and transform.

LQQK:

QQ Merch

We put QQ Horse and QQ Snake on a new series, internally dubbed Zodiac Workwear, Practical Attire for Any Situation.™ The horse, fittingly, is emblazoned onto denim, and the snake onto khaki.

The workwear collection is now available for preorder, shipping late March. Preorder items cannot be purchased with other products—they must be in a separate cart.

Preorder the QQ Merch

I love a good oversized workshirt—I have at least 25 in my closet, either inherited from my dad or picked up at a thrift store in the image of him. I love to wear a size L and roll the sleeves up. It’s my uniform. Mirror selfie for fit reference, I’m 5’4.”

Also included are ball caps and kids’ safari hats, to round out the collection and keep things sporty.

We’ve worked closely with our partners at General Wear, Inc. (my new fave embroidery shop in NYC) to produce this “spec”tacular line. I made many prototypes, carefully specified the blank stock, annoyed the sh- out of everyone, and postponed this at least once to get it just right.

These are in production and will be embroidered in New York City, just a few miles away from our shop.

Preorder the QQ Merch

QQ Merch

Here’s a quick “roundup” of the whole line. How many more cowboy puns will be used in this newsletter? Lariat’s wait and see.

Work Shirt

These button-down work shirts have a 90s cut. Two zodiac animals are mirrored across the centerline, embroidered on the yoke of the garment, channeling a western wear aesthetic and calling back to Lisa Cheng Smith’s Texas roots, an important hotbed of Taiwanese activism back in the day!

QQ Horse: Long Sleeve Denim Shirt
100% cotton, 7 oz.

QQ Snake: Long Sleeve Twill Shirt
100% cotton, 5 oz.

Features:

• Double-needle stitching throughout

• Button-down collar

• Left chest pocket

• Rounded adjustable cuffs

• 4” wide QQ Zodiac embroidery on front left and right chest

• 1.75” wide Yun Hai logo embroidery on front pocket

Baseball Cap

These five panel baseball caps have an adjustable slider and fit even the largest of heads, as verified on said girl’s trip. They’re adorned with a zodiac animal on the front and a Yun Hai logo on the back.

QQ Horse: Light Blue Denim Newhattan Baseball Cap
QQ Snake: Stonewashed Khaki Newhattan Baseball Cap

100% cotton

Features:

• 3” wide QQ Zodiac embroidery on front

• 1.75” wide Yun Hai logo embroidery on back

• Sliding buckle

Kids’ Safari Hat

These kids’ safari hats are just what’s needed on an adventure. They’ve got venting grommets up top, buttons on the side to flip up the brim, and an adjustable neck strap. They’re adorned with a zodiac animal on the front and a Yun Hai logo on the back.

QQ Horse: Sky Blue Newhattan Safari Hat
QQ Snake: Khaki Newhattan Safari Hat

Around 55 cm circumference.
100% cotton

Features:

• 3” wide QQ Zodiac embroidery on front

• 1.75” wide Yun Hai logo embroidery on back

Yee Haw

Not much more to say, but I’ve “corralled” a few links for ya:

• Our Ai Yu Jelly Kit and Sesame Peanut Paste are on quick sale! We bought too many! Help us out and pick up a few units here.

  

• It’s Lantern Festival, and that means it’s time for tang yuan. We’ve got some in the frozen section of the shop. Or, check out the last episode of Cooking With Steam to make some with me and my friend Jess.

• If you’re in the mood for something Taiwanese with a Texas flair, check out our collection of fermented chili sauces by our friends at Empress Hot Sauce. I’d recommend Ghost Pepper Maqaw for a real kick.

  

And now, for my next act: how to combine a run bing and a burrito. Just kidding, run bing all the way. Or maybe flautas. I don’t know.

A little horsey,
Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉

Written with editorial support by Amalissa Uytingco, Jasmine Huang, Grace Jung, and Natya Regensburger. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with friends and subscribe if you haven’t already. I email once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. For more Taiwanese food, head to yunhai.shop, follow us on instagram and twitter, or view the newsletter archives.

This is Studio Notes, a paid series within that newsletter. It’s an informal exploration of the things on my desk—cultural references, first-hand research, and archival material—all in relation to how we tell stories, create spaces, and design products at Yun Hai. Your paid subscription supports the free newsletter and our cooking show, Cooking With Steam.

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One day, I dream of opening a small Taiwanese eatery, in a rural area upstate, supplied by its own garden, the farms of friends, and the exquisite foods we bring in from hardworking craftspeople in Taiwan.

This idea, an overwhelming desire, is absolutely a romanticization of a quiet life, and an underestimation of the business of running a restaurant, but I still believe, under some set of magical circumstances, it might be attainable. I would love for it to flourish financially, but would be equally happy with a retirement-style endeavor in humble environs for a very few people, more an invitation to an on-and-off project for friends rather than a sustaining business. On-and-off projects are all worth doing if you love them enough.

Last week (it feels like forever ago), I went to a magical place in Tainan that will be my forever model eatery. Almost every rule of conventional American hospitality was broken to create the most hospitable place I’ve been in recent memory.

Read more

This is Yun Hai Taiwan Stories, a newsletter about Taiwanese food and culture by Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉, founder of Yun Hai. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, sign up here.

The second season of our Taiwanese cooking show, Cooking With Steam, explores Taiwanese food through the lens of 古早味 gu zao wei. This phrase translates to “ancient flavor,” but largely refers to pre-war Taiwanese foods that feel especially homestyle to me.

Watch the Show

The final episode of Cooking With Steam’s second season is out! I team up with my friend and collaborator Jess Wang of LA’s Gu Grocery to bring you Hot Grass Jelly and Tang Yuan 燒仙草, one of my favorite Taiwanese desserts, and perfect for the winter weather.

Lantern Festival, falling on the 15th day of the first lunar month (March 3rd this year), marks the end of the Lunar New Year Spring Festival period. During this time, it’s customary to make a tang yuan dessert to enjoy with your loved ones—the roundness of tang yuan 湯圓 and the yuan 圓 in its name symbolize togetherness and unity.

In this episode, Jess and I make tang yuan as a topping for hot grass jelly, a thickened pudding made with grass jelly herb. I’d enthusiastically describe this as the opposite of ice cream: warm, heady, and full of sweet herbal notes. The toppings add texture of all kinds, from the crunchy, toasted walnut to the chewy, sweet bite of the tang yuan.

I always say that one of my favorite things about Taiwanese traditional desserts is the N U T R I T I O N. This one is made from beans, walnuts, rice, spirulina, and herbal tea, with a little bit of rock sugar.

The secret to making tang yuan, learned from Jess, is going by feel. You’ll see in the episode how we judge the dough (with cheese analogs?), and add water or rice flour as needed. As seen below:

COOKING WITH STEAM Season 02 Episode 05
Hot Grass Jelly and Tang Yuan
好蒸氣 第二季 05 | 燒仙草

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Meet Jess Wang

Jess Wang is an artist, pastry chef, and fermentation educator based in Los Angeles.

After a decade of experience in restaurant and catering kitchens, she started Gu Grocery, a Chinese Taiwanese grocery that’s been operating in the form of pop-ups and workshops in LA for several years. She collaborates with her Taiwanese-born Wenzhounese mama, Peggy, to preserve old family recipes and develop new ways of making food. She’s about to take Gu to the next level with the opening of a brick and mortar grocery and deli in LA’s Chinatown.

I’ve learned so much from her over the course of our friendship, not just about Taiwanese food, but also how to thoughtfully engage in community and family while inviting people into traditional foodways. For example, while preparing her grocery to open, she’s been teaching tang yuan making classes throughout the Los Angeles Public Library system. We’re so happy that she was able to make an appearance on the show, amidst all she has going on, and so grateful for her time and knowledge (and also the hardboiled egg she peeled for me on set).

In her words:

Gu Grocery is a dream come true Chinese Taiwanese online store offering high quality pantry staples and a collection of everyday home goods. We regularly pop-up around LA to serve a bakery deli menu of sorts, featuring nostalgic snacks, some surprises, and familiar comfort foods to nourish you.

Our long term goal is to open a shop where we can continue serving our loyal pop-up customers while also meeting the needs of the diverse residents of the Chinatown community. Located in the heart of Chinatown, our future brick and mortar store will accept EBT and offer senior discounts.

You may be wondering what Gu means? Gu stems from the Chinese character for mushroom that is traditionally a symbol of prosperity and fertility. In Mandarin, it is also the word for Aunty, which honors the strength and generosity of women who have filled the role of intergenerational caretakers in our families 🍄

Inspired by our fungi friends and their crazy mycelium network - we believe in the power of a community and see ourselves as just a few among many spores in supporting you on your food journey. Whether it’s creating access to healthy food options or providing opportunities to learn about fermenting, cooking together is a wonderful healant. We invite you to join us in the heart of the Gu kitchen.

So much of this is inspired by and informed by Jess’s mother, Mama Peggy, whom we also adore. She came to Frankie Gaw’s First Generation Book Opening party (hosted at Yun Hai) and spent the whole evening celebrating with us (and went and got pizza for everyone too). Her generosity says it all.

If you’re ever in LA, don’t miss your chance to experience Gu Grocery at one of their many pop ups or their forthcoming space in Chinatown.

The Recipes

Hot grass jelly is really easy to make! The tang yuan are a cinch, too, once you’ve got a sense of how the dough should feel. Once you’ve got the basics down, it’s fun to play with colors (dragonfruit juice!) and fillings (black sesame!).

I love making a big batch of tang yuan all at once and freezing them. You can freeze them directly after rolling, and cook them from frozen too. Just separate them on a baking sheet or platter, and par-freeze them for an hour or two before transferring them to a container or plastic bag for long-term storage, to prevent sticking.

I prepare the grass jelly tea in a Tatung Electric Steamer, but you can also do it in a stockpot on the stove. The full recipes are posted on our site. Get the recipes or the grass jelly herb below:

Get the Recipes

Get the Grass Jelly Herb

Ingredients and Equipment

I love to show off my collection of ceramics, props, everyday objects, and kitchen tools on the show, many of them gifted by friends or collected personally over the years. Here’s a little more information on what I used this episode.

The HeySong 黑松 glass is a vintage piece I found while shopping in Taiwan.

The blue and brown bowls for holding the toppings and serving the final dessert were made by my friend and ceramicist Matthew So. The green colander for holding the non-dairy creamer is from a little hardware store I walked past years ago in Taiwan.

I brew the grass jelly tea in the 11-cup Tatung Steamer.

And, we used grass jelly herb that we import ourselves as the foundation of this dessert.

Shop Featured Ingredients

Please reach out with any other questions on sourcing or ingredients. Happy to help, as always.

Gratitude and Acknowledgements

We couldn’t have done this without the support and passion of our friends and community. So much love and gratitude to Night Shift, who produced this, and all our creative collaborators for giving the show its unique voice.

Credits

Produced by Night Shift and Yun Hai
Made possible by Tatung Taiwan

Team:
Lisa Cheng Smith, host
Jessica Wang, guest talent
Jessie YuChen, food stylist & guest talent
Nicole Wang, culinary assistant
Amalissa Uytingco, culinary producer
Sam Broscoe, producer
Alec Sutherland, director & editor
Nathan Bailey, director of photography
Rob Woods, camera operator
Taylor Dekker, camera operator
Alexandra Egan, art director
Kyle Garvey, sound mixer
Jinho Myung, editor
R. Hollis Smith, mix
Rebecca Alexander, hair and makeup
Dustin Wong, music
O.OO, graphics
Jil Tai & Ben Hill, motion design and title sequence
Rachel Watson, behind-the-scenes photography

Our Set

Our set features props from Taiwanese, Taiwanese-American, and international friends worldwide, creating those Taiwancore vibes we love so much at Yun Hai.

Thank you for the beauty Mikey Chen, Lillian Li, Emilie Liu, Debbie Carlos, Matthew So, Kelli Cain, Material Kitchen, Mogutable, Felicia Liang, Sam Tilney, Lulu Yao Gioiello, Grace Jung, Eric Sze, Julianne Ahn, Alice Chai, Stephanie Smith, Rio Chen, and Leh Lin.

And much gratitude to our friends who contributed to wardrobe: Everybody World, Judi Rosen, Whimsy and Row, RMS Beauty, and Christine Mai Nguyen.

Special Thanks

Russell Wang, Maggie Chang, Shirley Liu, Ivan Wu, Feng Hsieh, Hollow, Chris, Leon, Simon, Agnes, Jim, Lillian Lin, Jasmine Huang, Natya Regensburger, Jeremy Hersh, Cat Yeh & the entire Yun Hai Team, our partners, and our community.

Before I Go…

• Join us at Yun Hai Shop (170 Montrose Ave), for a Lunar New Year party to ring in the Year of the Horse this coming Sunday, 2/22, between 12 and 4 pm. We’ll have a New Year’s toast at 2 pm, followed by a joss burning ceremony, led by our friend Kimberly Chou 周存安. Enjoy complimentary tang yuan (black sesame and peanut), Win Son pineapple cakes, Taiwanese snacks, hot tea, and more!

  

  RSVP Here

• Lunar New Year QQ merch is coming for lantern festival! We’re going all embroidery this year and are in the process of perfecting the last samples. Sign up to be notified when these drop!

  

• And while you wait, don’t forget that our Hu Ye Tiger God Shirts by Emilie Liu are back in stock. Get yours before they run out!

  

  

Thanks, as always, for all your love for Cooking With Steam! We’re excited to wrap season two and get to work on the next one.

going by feel,
Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉

Written with editorial support by Amalissa Uytingco, Jasmine Huang, Grace Jung, and Lillian Lin. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with friends and subscribe if you haven’t already. I email once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. For more Taiwanese food, head to yunhai.shop, follow us on instagram and twitter, or view the newsletter archives.

Today, I have nothing more to do than to wish you a Happy Lunar New Year and invite you to our store this coming Sunday, February 22nd, to celebrate with us in person. We’ll have tang yuan! We’ll have red envelopes! We’ll have a community altar! We’ll be burning joss ceremonially with our friend Kim! And I’ll just be back from Taiwan with many goodies to share from the Lunar New Year markets. Hope to see you; details are at the end of this letter.

Don’t forget about our Little Dumpling Bundles, discounted 12% (打88折), and our Little Dumpling Book, included free in each order online and in store, while supplies last.

And finally, a heads up that we’re putting the finishing touches on this year’s QQ zodiac mascot, dropping around Lantern Festival in early March. More soon!

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Tonight, we welcome the year of the fire horse, or 丙午年 bing wu nian.

Passionate yang fire combines with the already hot, swift, stupendous nature of the horse into an explosive formula. A raging double conflagration will bring simmering tensions to the surface, followed by rapid change and upheaval. Clarity and conviction will be needed; boldness will be rewarded and hesitation challenged. We must drive like we know where we’re going.

I hope that the fire horse will bring about swift change in the right direction, burning away destructive forces and leaving flowers in its wake, as so expertly illustrated in this decoration I saw hanging in a bawan 肉圓 shop in Hengchun 恆春 town, in the very south of Taiwan, only yesterday.

I’ve never passed the new year (guo nian 過年) in Taiwan before, but I’m here now with my family of four. It’s been so inspiring and fun to experience the frenzy of preparations, layer upon layer of decoration, and the togetherness of the communities we’ve visited.

Growing up in the states, Lunar New Year was never an official holiday. My parents celebrated with colleagues and neighbors in university halls, community centers, and Chinese restaurants, planning around everyone’s work schedules, as few had time off. We all made the time.

Being in Taiwan this year and experiencing Lunar New Year as a national period of rest, celebration, and worship is new to me. It feels like a homecoming—with the customs of my family magnified by the lens of full-on cultural immersion—and an education—with so many new things to see, taste, and understand.

We’ve been happily flaneuring and taking in the energy of the new year. In Taipei, we visited the traditional Lunar New Year Market on Di Hua Street with friends, where I sampled way too many sweet things and bought something like 5 pounds of New Year candy to give away in the shop when I’m back. Highlights for me were the traditional biscuit stand (I also bought 5 pounds of these for the store); the wide variety of dried seafood snacks, from sweet, sinewy dried squid to crispy fish chips; and the very lovely calligraphy shop selling spring couplets and auspicious decorations (also 5 lbs).

In Tainan, we lost ourselves in the streets surrounding the Yamuliao Traditional Market 鴨母寮市場 in the North District, filled with adorned fruits, flower arrangements, sticky rice cakes (nian gao 年糕) of all kinds, barbecued and stewed meats, and packets of herbal remedies and stock starters. The stalls were overflowing with abundance for family gatherings and offerings to the gods and ancestors.

As things have quieted around the arrival of the holiday, we’ve moved to Kenting National Park, with the idea of taking in the spectacular natural beauty of Taiwan as the world around us comes to rest. It’s a wonderful time to relax and reflect on life from the vantage point of Taiwan.

Lunar New Year Celebration at Yun Hai

Join us at Yun Hai Shop (170 Montrose Ave), for a Lunar New Year party to ring in the Year of the Horse this coming Sunday, 2/22, between 12 and 4 pm.

RSVP Here

We’ll have a New Year’s toast at 2 pm, followed by a joss burning ceremony, led by our friend Kimberly Chou 周存安. Enjoy complimentary tang yuan (black sesame and peanut), Win Son pineapple cakes, Taiwanese snacks and candies straight from Taipei’s Lunar New Year markets (5 lbs, see above), hot tea, and more!

We also welcome you to bring offerings for our communal altar—citrus fruits, good luck foods, talismans, lottery tickets—as we honor past energies, transform the stagnant, and welcome in the new! Joss paper and incense will be provided.

On this day, all purchases in-store will be a lucky 88折, or 12% off. Receive a free Little Dumpling Book (our newest book of recipes) and a pack of red envelopes with every order.

RSVP is not required to attend, though we would appreciate your kind response to help us plan!

RSVP Here

Before I Go…

I urgently need to share this image of the official face of the Year of the Fire Horse, as seen at a wedding salon in Hengchun.

And, if you’re in the New York area, I want to make sure you know about the Asian Vegetable Club, a weekly subscription of lovingly grown East Asian vegetables and herbs running from May 28 to Nov 5, 2026. Each vegetable share includes locally grown produce at its absolute peak, and will be available for pickup every Thursday from 4 to 8 p.m. at five NYC locations across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens.

It was put together by our friends at Choy Commons, “a nonhierarchical cooperative of Asian-led farms engaging our communities in building food sovereignty for the Northeast.” They’re the best. Learn more here or sign up here.

And with that, I’ll get back to my…

raging double conflagration bringing simmering tensions to the surface,
Lisa Cheng Smith 鄭衍莉

Written with editorial support by Amalissa Uytingco, Jasmine Huang, Grace Jung, and Lillian Lin. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with friends and subscribe if you haven’t already. I email once a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. For more Taiwanese food, head to yunhai.shop, follow us on instagram and twitter, or view the newsletter archives.

Happy Year of the Fire Horse! I’m sitting in the airport waiting to board a flight to Taiwan. I’ll be spending the Lunar New Year there with my family for the first time.

This week, I’m excited to introduce Little Dumpling Book, our first ‘cookbooklet,’ shipping free with all orders during the Lunar New Year period. This is a special collaboration with our friends at Taiwanese cooking blog CHOOCHOO-ca-CHEW, who have just launched a new online dumpling course. (P.S. They’re offering Yun Hai customers 10% off the course with code YUNHAI). We’re also offering Little Dumpling Bundles, recipe kits corresponding to the book, priced at 12% off (or 88折, scroll down for explanation).

In addition, our Year of the Horse Red Envelopes are here! We make red envelopes every year with O.OO, our design collaborators in Taiwan, who print them in their risograph studio. We’re including one set free of charge in every order over lucky $88; just be sure to add a set to the cart.

And! as! promised! QQ Horse and QQ Snake are happening this year. If you read my last newsletter, you know I never made QQ Snake, and now I’ve made that right. Scroll all the way to the end of the letter for a sneak peek and a rundown of more upcoming events.

Take Me to the Dumpling Bundles

Take Me to the Red Envelopes

Check Out The Dumpling Club

Make dumplings like you never have before, because it’s hard times right now and we need all the symbolic unity, hope, and prosperity we can get.

Dumplings have come to symbolize good fortune, and are especially popular during Lunar New Year. Making them together reinforces our bonds, reaffirms our best intentions, and sets the tone for a fresh start to the year. Freeze them and gift them to your neighbors and friends. Invite people over to share them with you in the coming months. Let food be a means to connect and show care.

Last Friday, Yun Hai participated in a national strike for one day. We closed our brick-and-mortar and online shop for 24 hours to protest and condemn ICE, remember those who have been killed and hurt by them, and to stand in solidarity with all those resisting in Minnesota. ICE OUT EVERYWHERE.

We did this to make noise by being quiet, and to exercise our right as business owners to close, communicating that we prioritize people over profit, community over convenience. It was our way of demonstrating to the world what we care about and what we will not stand for.

With a responsibility to care for and provide for their employees, many businesses couldn’t close for the strike, and we respect that, too. But many of them stood in solidarity with those protesting in Minnesota, regardless, and said so. Thank you to all those who closed, all those who supported, all those who protest and resist, and all the immigrants in this country who continue to show up for their friends, family, co-workers, and community, despite the dangers they face.

Instead of business hours, we held gathering hours, and invited folks to come to the shop to share jam sandwiches and something warm to drink. A few friends stopped by to share stories, experiences, hopes, and angers. I felt angry, but also found hope in stories of decentralized networks of aid, communication, and support.

It felt powerful to stand in a circle with those across the country to vocalize our commitment to humanity, and that it still exists and isn’t for the taking. It was its own kind of dumpling making: connecting with each other, setting and affirming intentions, and bringing about what I hope will be an inflection point at a time when every day brings new lows. ICE OUT EVERYWHERE.

This Lunar New Year, we’ve collaborated with Minnesota-based Taiwanese cooking blog, CHOOCHOO-ca-CHEW, to bring you original dumpling recipes and curated product bundles. All this is the brainchild of Tiffany Alexandria, who grew up in Taiwan and has worked tirelessly to bring Taiwanese food to her community in Rochester, Minnesota. When we started the collaboration, we didn’t know what would be happening in her state a few months later.

I reached out to her just after the strike to ask how we at Yun Hai could help. Here’s her thoughtful reply.

So how can people in New York help? I think continuing amplifying the voices of people in MN is so important, we want people to know the truth, the situation we’re living in and any other city could be next, we definitely don’t want that. People need to learn and know how severe this actually is and take it seriously to drive changes for the whole country.

Here is a list of organizations I gathered from friends who are on the ground helping or reporting on what’s happening:

The Salt Cure Fund to support Minnesota’s restaurants.

Marcia Howard 38th Street: a collection of links to support the various organizations at the intersection where George Floyd was killed.

COPAL Minnesota, the MN chapter of a member-based organization established to improve the quality of life of Latiné families.

The Alliance of Chicanos, Hispanics and Latin Americans (ACHLA) a grassroots nonprofit serving the Rochester area and southeastern Minnesota.