Dip, Twirl & Twist with Cheese
Cheese is seriously a thing in Asia. Especially warm cheese. The Western ingredient is responsible for one food craze after another in restaurants. New, and even cheesier: dipping, twirling and twisting with cheese.
I previously wrote about Taiwanese (or Malaysian) cheese tea. Tea topped with a foamy layer of cheese – for that perfect Instagram cheese moustache. But now there’s twisting, twirling and dipping with cheese. For now, especially in South Korea, Hong Kong and Malaysia.
Reverse fusion
In Hong Kong and Malaysia, the phenomenon is called Korean. But Koreans call it a French-Asian fusion. Still, to us the cheese looks more Dutch or Swiss. Stringy melted cheese à la cheese fondue, cheese toasties and loaded fries with a thick, melting cheese cap. And not, for example, the typical French soft cheese with blue veins.
The melted hard cheeses are used for dipping, as at Sandoongi Tonkatsu, a Japanese-French fusion restaurant in Seoul. There, guests dip a Japanese deep-fried pork chop on a stick into a bowl of melted cheese themselves.
Or they’re used for twirling, as in Malaysia at K Fry Urban Korean, where the cheese bubbles on a hotplate while the staff wraps a layer of cheese around chicken nuggets to create K’razy spicy fried chicken bumbuk. At Hong Kong’s Sister Korea Café, spicy baby back ribs undergo a similar treatment.
Cheese flirtation
Why cheese? Just as Westerners like to flirt with Asian elements in their food, people in Asia enjoy flirting with European ones. And it hardly gets more European than cheese. Perhaps that’s because Asia has traditionally had little of a cattle-raising tradition, except among nomadic peoples. That’s why many Asians still can’t tolerate lactose.
Crunch + creaminess
Asian food is also characterized much more than its old-school Western counterpart by different textures in a single bite. The crunch of the dry pork chop or chicken nugget gains depth from the creaminess of the melting cheese. Although, to be fair, this isn’t entirely unfamiliar in the West either. Think: French cordon bleu – cheese (and ham) inside a schnitzel.
And finally, tableside preparations are extremely popular in Asia. Even though they are making a comeback here too, things are always just a little more exuberant at the table there.
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