Sesame Tea Eats: Chinese Sweets

There are so many options for Chinese desserts, but in general, Chinese desserts rarely seem to be the centerpiece of the meal (unlike American or Italian meals where the cheesecake or tiramisu might become the highlight of the whole meal). While a few Hong Kong style cafes specializing in desserts have opened up in the San Francisco Bay Area, I have yet to find one that offers the full gamut of possibilities.

Sesame Tea Eats showcases some of the most popular and unusual desserts that you may or may not find in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Boiled

Sweet dessert soup offers a balance to a Chinese meal, especially when you've eaten fried or spicy dishes. It's meant to soothe the palate and aid in digestion. In Cantonese, it's called tong shui, or sweet water. Served hot or cold, dessert soup seems to be fairly unique to Asian cuisines.

- White Fungus and Grass Jelly in Dry Ice - The white fungus, sometimes known as cloud fungus, is rehydrated and then cooked in boiling water. The grass jelly is often available in a can, but it can have a very bitter taste to it. The jelly is added after the white fungus soup is cooled. The dry ice creates that steamy effect and keeps the dish cold. This version is fairly mild in flavors with the sweet syrup covering a lot of the cubed bitter jelly. This photo came from our visit to Sweet Dynasty in Hong Kong.

- Black Sesame Soup - served hot or cold, real black sesame soup doesn't come from a powder (which could have fillers), but is ground from whole black sesames to make a paste. Water and sugar is added and the soup served thick so that it coats the back of the spoon.

- Red Bean Soup - served hot or cold, with or without tapioca. Dried azuki beans are soaked and boiled until the beans break down a bit, leaving some of the skins intact. The version shown in this photo has tapioca and the soup is a bit lighter/milkier than what is often found, perhaps due to the addition of milk or coconut milk. Red bean soup is typically made with a bit of dried, aged tangerine peel to give it another layer of flavor and is often boiled for several hours (but could probably be done faster with an InstantPot).