Your Local Bakery
There's something special about a trip to a local neighborhood bakery that can't be quite captured in words. Here's a photo essay of the bakery on campus next to the cafe, which is pretty representative of your local neighborhood bakeries (the big chains and volume retailers have much better stuff).
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California-style rolls, cut up and stuffed in sesame seed buns. Mayonnaise is slathered generously across the bread. Some who do not know Taiwan believe that soy sauce is the most common and important condiment in Chinese cookery. This is seriously incorrect. It's mayonnaise that rules the roost.
Bacon, cheese, green peppers.
Delicate shades of green on a pastry called "Winter Love Song." The name is taken from a popular Korean TV show.
Mystery buns.
Here is the other important ingredient in Taiwanese cooking: meat dried, minced, and sugared. It will be found on top of or inside of just about everything.
Return of the mystery buns.
Shaped like the French pastry, but made of bread dough.
Another important ingredient in local food preparation is corn in kernels. Hard-boiled eggs, corn kernels, and cucumber slices, stuffed into buns and topped with ketchup.
What's underneath those spidery filaments of mayo? Tuna salad.
Blueberry, topped with sprinkled coconut. [Thanks to a read for the correction]
Not Mystery Buns -- these are stuffed with tuna. And left to sit all day.
Glazed bread stuffed with red bean paste.
What are they? Well, you're supposed to serve them with coffee.
The sign advertises European-style mixed grain bread, stuffed with red bean paste.
Chicken rolls.
Cucumbers, corn kernels, ketchup, and mystery meat nuggets.
Buns stuffed with minced, dried, sugared meat.
Taro buns of some kind.
Tarts and puffs. The puffs on the top right aren't too bad, baked pastry stuffed with factory-issue custard.
Fruit over fake whipping cream, contained in a dry crumbly shell.