Latiao Lunacy (辣条）

[liuzhou]

I've mentioned the craze for Luosifen which led to 6 million sheep following each other to Liuzhou over the CNY holiday to try a dish half of them hoped to hate.

 

But it's not the only insane craze. 

 

Back in summer 1998, when I was living in Hunan, there was catastrophic flooding which wiped out the soy bean harvest.

 

Thousands of farmers were hit by disaster. A couple of the more enterprising kind started making a kind of snack product using wheat flour rather than the hard-hit soya flour normally used in their cuisine.

 

Basically they made wheat gluten strips which they slavered in chilli. These they called S: 辣条; T: 辣條 (là tiáo), 'spicy strips' and sold them outside schools for mere cents.

 

Latiao - image from Meituan food delivery app.

 

A billion dollar industry was born. Most of the customers were and still are schoolchildren who went crazy for the addictive if not nutritious snacks.

 

According to an article in Global Times, China's uber-nationalist State-owned English language 'newspaper', latiao has gone viral globally. I don't believe a word of it. In China, yes. Globally?

 

Have you or your children, grand-children, great-grand-children even heard, never mind fallen for this?

 

For the record, I've never eaten them.

 

A non-hysterical history of the craze is here.

 

https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2024/02/stripped-down-the-story-behind-chinas-favorite-snack/

 

 

Edited March 7 by liuzhou (log)

[ElsieD]

Here in Canada, I've never heard of it.

[FauxPas]

9 hours ago, liuzhou said:

Have you or your children, grand-children, great-grand-children even heard, never mind fallen for this?

 

I hadn't heard of them before now but I see that T&T Supermarket carries the Wei Long brand ones at least. T&T is a Vancouver-based grocery chain that specializes in Asian foods. They carry big ones and mini latiao but hard to know how much they sell or how many other stores in Richmond, BC (large Chinese-Canadian population) might also sell them. 

 

https://www.tntsupermarket.com/eng/51537101-wei-long-big-la-tiao-400g.html

 

https://www.tntsupermarket.com/eng/51537001-wei-long-mini-la-tiao-360g.html

Edited February 29 by FauxPas (log)

[liuzhou]

I managed to photograph the ingredients list on a packet of these this morning. Are you ready?

 

Ingredients : wheat flour, drinking water, vegetable oi, edible salt, sugar, irradiated spice, irradiated chili powder, food additives (sodium glutamate, Glyceryl monostearate, cyclamate, 5'- flavor nucleotides disodium, Sucralose, neotame, tert-butylhydroquinone, compound leavening agent (disodium dihydrogen pyrophosphate, sodium bicarbonate, monocalcium phosphate, calcium carbonate), curcuma longa, monascus red, capsicum red), food flavor.

 

That is 'food flavor'; not food.

 

 

[liuzhou]

Here is another version in straw form.

 

 

Almost the same ingredients. They smell awful and the one broken bit I tasted lived down to the promise of the smell. And they tasted stale. Truly revolting. 

 

 

 

Edited March 7 by liuzhou (log)

[Mjx]

I can't tell whether all these versions are crunchy: I've never tried a crunchy wheat gluten strip, but I've had several versions of the chewy/flexible ones. The're not everyhere here, I don't see people wandering about eating them, or the empty packets on the ground, but they're readily available in SEA food shops. I find them kind of disgusting, but my boyfriend loves them, and if he opens a packet, the MSG slathering guarantees that if I try one, I will continue to eat them until there are none left.

[liuzhou]

29 minutes ago, Mjx said:

I can't tell whether all these versions are crunchy: I've never tried a crunchy wheat gluten strip, but I've had several versions of the chewy/flexible ones.

 

The one little piece I tried wasn't particularly crunchy but I got the impression it was meant to be but was stale.

 

I was expecting them to be more chewy/flexible, yes.

[liuzhou]

1 hour ago, liuzhou said:

 

The one little piece I tried wasn't particularly crunchy but I got the impression it was meant to be but was stale.

 

I was expecting them to be more chewy/flexible, yes.

 

Just noticed this on the packaging.

 

 

In the red lips the last character is 脆 (cuì) which means 'crispy'. The whole white lettering reads 'spicy small crispy'. They were spicy; not crispy.