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Restaurant: Seshui Community Center 澀水社區中心

By Derek Lee
STAFF REPORTER
Friday, Aug 19, 2005, Page 15

Black tea meals are the latest thing in mid-Taiwan. PHOTO: DEREK LEE, TAIPEI TIMES

The newly popularized black-tea drinking culture is all the rage in mid-Taiwan now and seems ready to spread its domain of influence into the food sector soon.

More than five years after the disastrous earthquake in 1999, a group of residents from the Seshui Community in Yuchih Township (魚池鄉), Nantou County, are organizing themselves into a group offering black tea meals to their visiting guests.

After the killer temblor ruined the area, the surviving villagers refused to abandon their farmland and received technical and financial assistance from the government to offer gourmet dishes using black tea.

"The black tea harvested in our village is one of the best in Taiwan. It was one of the yearly articles of tribute to the Japanese Emperor in the old days," said one of the group's organizer's Su Shui-ting (蘇水定).

Su's wife Wu Chin-cou (巫錦綢) said a variety of local black teas were sampled. "We divided all the participating families into small units to work on their own gourmet-cooking recipes with black tea," she said.

"At long last, we all decided to adopt Taitea No. 18 (台茶18號) for its marvelously smooth taste and flavor when it comes to cooking with other ingredients. We can now offer more than 30 black tea courses, which you won't be able to have anywhere else."

The black-tea fish is the star dish so far. Taiwan tilapia is often selected to prepare the dish because of its refined quality meat. The soy-sauce sauteed tilapia is soaked in cooled black tea for around 30 minutes before it is served. The trick, however, is to prevent the fish meat from being overcooked and insinuate the pleasing flavor of black tea into the fish.

The coalfire-baked Chinese sausage goes surprisingly well with black tea. Yet, the secret of its preparation is to mix the ground black tea-leaf powder with sausage ingredients before, not after, the sausage is processed. The third most popular dish is, perhaps, pig-feet. The trotters are boiled with water, black tea leaves and other ingredients. As a result, the pig feet turn reddish rather than a dark brown color and are more appealing.

The only problem at Seshui Community Center at present is that reservations with a minimum of 30 persons are required. Otherwise, smaller visiting groups may have their black-tea meal at Aunty A-Man's Countryside Cooking (阿滿姨庄腳菜) nearby.
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