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
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.
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.
