Light, clean, and obsessed with seafood
If Cantonese food is about wok heat and Sichuan is about spice, Teochew food is about restraint. Steamed fish, clear broths, things served cold, and a table full of dipping sauces to make up for it. You've probably eaten it without knowing: fish balls, oyster omelets, kway teow and rice porridge shops all over Southeast Asia are Teochew.
The idea
The word Teochew cooks use is 清淡 qingdan, "light and clean." Poach, steam, braise, blanch; use as little oil as you can; let the ingredient taste like itself. Seafood is the center of it, because Chaoshan is a coast. The counterweight to all that restraint is the sauces, each one paired to a specific dish: tangerine oil (桔油) with fried prawn rolls, fish sauce with the oyster omelet, Puning fermented bean paste with poached fish, garlic vinegar with braised goose, a sweet vinegar with galangal for crab, and sa-de (沙茶) for beef. Galangal, which most Chinese cooking ignores, is the signature aromatic; people call it Teochew ginger.
The staples
How to read the dish cards: Peng'im is the standard romanization (tone numbers 1 to 8); sounds like is the loose spelling you'll see on menus and hear in the diaspora (≈ means it was generated automatically); literally is the word-for-word meaning of the characters.
The daily bread. A very watery rice porridge where the grains stay whole and settle loosely in the liquid, nothing like the thick Cantonese congee. Eaten at breakfast, at supper, when sick, when hungover. What makes it a meal is the spread of small salty dishes around it, the 雜鹹 zap-kiam: salted duck egg, preserved radish (菜脯, chai-poh), olive vegetable (橄欖菜, mustard greens braised black with olives), salted mustard greens, fermented tofu, braised peanuts, little salted fish, a preserved radish omelet. In Singapore the Teochew porridge shop is a late-night institution.
The dish of celebrations. A whole goose, ideally the huge lion-head goose of Chenghai, braised in a master stock (滷水 lo-zui) of soy, rock sugar, licorice, cinnamon, galangal, star anise and black cardamom that a restaurant keeps going for years and treats as its most valuable possession. Served sliced with garlic vinegar. The same pot does duck (which replaced goose across most of Southeast Asia), pork, tofu, eggs and intestines; the whole family is lo-mi, braised things.
Small oysters folded into a sweet-potato-starch batter and fried until the edges crisp, with fish sauce in Singapore or chili-vinegar elsewhere. Now a street food in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan, all of which learned it from Teochew and Hokkien migrants.
Teochew fish balls are hand-beaten from wolf herring or yellowtail until springy, and they're the reason every noodle soup in Southeast Asia has fish balls in it. The Shantou beef ball is younger: Chaoshan had almost no beef culture until the treaty port opened in 1860, and beef balls were invented in the early 1900s by Hakka migrants copying the fish ball, pounding the meat with iron rods to keep the fibers whole. The famous bounce is the point.
Only became a home staple in the late twentieth century and by the 1990s was a Chaoshan icon. A clear beef-bone broth, and a menu of up to ten named cuts of the same cow, each blanched for a few seconds and dipped in sa-de. There are now over 7,000 Chaoshan beef hotpot restaurants across China.
Teochew people went to Southeast Asia and brought satay home. Sa-de is the localized version: soybean oil, garlic, shallots, chili, dried flatfish and dried shrimp cooked into a thick, savory paste. It's the dip for beef, the base of sa-de kway teow, and it traveled on to Taiwan with Teochew and Fujianese migrants.
"Fish rice" is a whole fish poached in brine and served at room temperature with Puning bean paste, the archetypal Teochew cold dish: fish so fresh you'd insult it by seasoning it. Steamed pomfret with salted plum, mushroom and tomato is the banquet version.
Kway teow and its children
The most important word Teochew ever gave the world is 粿條 guê2 diao5, flat rice noodles. Say it and follow it south: Malaysian and Singaporean kway teow, Thai kuai tiao (ก๋วยเตี๋ยว), Cambodian kuy teav (គុយទាវ), Vietnamese hủ tiếu. All the same word. Every one of those countries' signature noodle soups descends from a Teochew noodle stall.
In Chaoshan: flat noodles in a clear pork or beef bone broth with fish balls or sliced beef, bean sprouts, a little garlic oil and fried shallots. The dry version, 乾撈, is the same noodles tossed in lard, sa-de or garlic oil with the soup on the side. This is the template for everything below.
In Chaoshan it's plain: flat noodles, chives, bean sprouts, pork. The Penang and Singapore version with egg, lap cheong, cockles, prawns and sweet dark soy is a Nanyang evolution that became one of the most famous dishes in Southeast Asia. Its cousin 炒粿角 is rice-cake cubes fried with egg and preserved radish.
Wide rice-flour sheets in a soy-based broth, with a plate of braised pork belly, skin, intestines and egg from the master stock on the side. A two-day prep. A Teochew-only dish that Singapore and Malaysia kept alive.
The peppery, clear Singapore version (pork ribs, a lot of garlic, a lot of white pepper, nothing else) is Teochew, invented around Clarke Quay in the late 1940s; the dark, herbal Klang version is Hokkien. The folklore is that coolies on the Singapore River gathered spilled peppercorns to flavor their ribs.
The kueh family
粿 guê2, spelled kueh or kway in the diaspora, means any cake made from rice flour, and the Teochew have dozens. They're festival food, offering food, and breakfast food. Every family has one it considers non-negotiable.
A translucent, chewy skin of rice and tapioca starch wrapped around garlic chives, steamed and then usually pan-fried on one side until it blisters. Eaten with chili sauce or sweet dark soy. For a lot of Cambodian and Malaysian Teochew families this is the single most important thing on the table, and the one grandmothers are judged by. The Penang spelling is ku chai kueh.
A pink, peach-shaped glutinous rice dumpling pressed in a wooden mold, filled with rice, peanuts, mushroom and dried shrimp. The peach means long life, so this is the kueh for Chinese New Year and for the ancestors' altar. The white version is for the Hungry Ghost month.
Dark green-black cakes made with the leaves of a wild cudweed herb, for Qingming, the tomb-sweeping festival.
Bamboo-shoot kueh (now usually filled with jicama in Singapore); radish cake, fried "white" or "black" with sweet sauce; and steamed rice cups topped with preserved radish. All three are Singapore hawker classics, all three are Teochew.
The Teochew rice dumpling for the Dragon Boat Festival, unusual for being half sweet and half savory in one parcel: red bean paste on one side, pork, chestnut, mushroom and salted yolk on the other.
Chaozhou's fried spring roll has a mung bean and pork filling. Popiah, the fresh unfried roll with braised turnip and a smear of sweet sauce, is shared Teochew and Hokkien heritage.
Cold dishes and 打冷
The Cantonese word for the Teochew late-night cold spread is da leng, and it's its own cuisine: cold crab (steamed and chilled, eaten with vinegar), fish rice, jellied pig's trotter, and 生醃 seh-ng, raw seafood marinated in soy, garlic, chili, coriander and liquor. Crab, mantis shrimp, blood clams. The nickname for it in Chaoshan is "Chaoshan poison," because once you start you don't stop.
Sweets
芋泥 orh nee, taro steamed and mashed with lard and sugar, topped with gingko nuts and pumpkin, is the Teochew dessert, and the dividing line between people who grew up with it and people who think it sounds weird. 返沙芋 is taro batons tossed in molten sugar until frosted white. There are sweet soups of gingko and barley or mung bean, and crystal buns. Teochew sweets are, like everything else, restrained.
The Cambodian Teochew kitchen
Around three quarters of Chinese Cambodians are Teochew, most of them from families that arrived from Jieyang and Shantou in the 1920s and 30s and ran the noodle shops, rice trade and market gardens of the country. The food they made became Cambodian food. Kuy teav is the Teochew kway teow soup, and the Phnom Penh version is the most elaborate one anywhere: thin rice noodles, a clear pork-bone broth steeped with dried squid, garlic oil, a brown dressing of oyster sauce and sugar, and toppings of minced pork, pork loin, liver, blood jelly and prawns, finished with bean sprouts, sawtooth coriander, holy basil, Kampot pepper and lime. It crossed into Vietnam as hủ tiếu Nam Vang, "Phnom Penh noodles," and into the diaspora through places like Seattle's Phnom Penh Noodle House, opened in 1987 by a refugee family.
At home, Cambodian Teochew families cook both traditions side by side. At New Year the altar gets a roast duck, a whole fish and noodles the way it would in Chaoshan; the next day the same kitchen makes Khmer sour soup. Chive kueh, braised pork with eggs, mue with salted egg and chai-poh, and kuy teav on Sunday mornings are the through-line. If this is your family, this is the section we most want your help with. Tell us what your grandmother made.
Gongfu tea
The Teochew drink tea the way other people drink coffee, water and beer combined: after every meal, during every conversation, and while doing everything else. 工夫茶 gang1 hu1 dê5, "effort tea," is the ritual: a tiny clay pot or gaiwan, three small cups set in a triangle, and Phoenix Dancong oolong from the mountains of Chao'an, a tea so fragrant it's called "the perfume of tea." The tea is brewed strong and poured in a circle across all three cups so each gets the same strength (the move is called "Guan Gong patrols the city"), then the last drops are dealt out one by one ("Han Xin counts his troops"). Three cups for a table of four means someone always waits, which is the point. In 2022 UNESCO inscribed Chinese tea culture on its intangible heritage list, with Chaozhou gongfu tea named as one of its living forms. It is probably the region's most important cultural export, and the easiest tradition to keep alive in a diaspora apartment.