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Breakfast recipes from hidden China open ‘new world’ in British-Chinese author’s cookbook

  • In Zao Fan: Breakfast of China, Michael Zee’s recipes take home chefs on a journey and put Chinese morning meals on the map

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Hongyou chaoshou – red oil dumplings – is a popular breakfast dish in Sichuan province. The recipe features in Michael Zee’s cookbook Zao Fan: Breakfast of China, among others for little-known breakfast dishes from across China. Photo: Bloomsbury Publishing

It was a moment of serendipity that allowed Michael Zee, the British-Chinese food writer behind the social media sensation SymmetryBreakfast, to find some of the most treasured recipes featured in his new cookbook, Zao Fan: Breakfast of China.

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Towards the end of 2022, he had finished recording a recipe for baba – a puffy, delicately fried breakfast bread served daily as part of the staff meals at Miao Lu vineyard in China’s Yunnan province – and was on his way to Chongqing by train.

He decided to stop in a village in Guizhou province to take a photograph of meat pies stuffed with fish mint (a plant with an astringent fish flavour) he had come across a couple of years earlier.

The restaurant that sold them turned out to be closed, so he booked into a hotel for the night and early the next morning returned to get the shot.

Michael Zee, author of Zao Fan: Breakfast of China. Photo: Michael Zee
Michael Zee, author of Zao Fan: Breakfast of China. Photo: Michael Zee
He then got back on the train to continue his journey, but within an hour came news that Chongqing had gone into lockdown because of a Covid-19 outbreak.
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He got off the train and changed his ticket to Chengdu. Nervous about the Sichuan capital also going into lockdown, he headed into the mountains. There he found many things he was not expecting.
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