Don’t be fooled, and don’t judge food by the name!
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Pineapple Bun is a popular food item in Hong Kong culture. It is a sweet fluffy bun with a crispy top crust. Some people eat it for breakfast and some eat it as an afternoon tea snack. It got its name from the appearance and not the ingredients.
There’re actually no pineapples inside the bun!
The only resemblance to the fruit is because the top layer with the gridded lines look similar to the outer shell of a pineapple. For those that don’t like to eat pineapples, you can still eat pineapple buns because it’s really good and the texture is amazing.
This is a podcast that I’ve produced called “Chow Now” and it is all about Chinese cuisine. My main goal is to take you on an audio foodie journey to explore different food items from the Chinese culture.
You can check out this episode where I talk more about Pineapple Buns:
It is common in Hong Kong culture to name food items that have nothing to do with the actual ingredients. Remember the last time going to a Chinese restaurant and looking at the English translation of the menu? Did it blow your mind and make you wonder what are these crazy chefs doing in the kitchen? Things like “Buddha jumps over the wall”, “Concubine Chicken” or “Wife Cake”, the list never ends.
I find it interesting that some Chinese people just automatically accepts that this food item is named this way. I have been to some restaurants that will go crazy with the names because they want to make the dish sound very delicate and increase the prices. You might notice that sometimes they replace the word phoenix with chicken, even though it is 100% a chicken dish. Just like “Concubine Chicken”, it is really just sautéed chicken cooked in wine with soy sauce, black vinegar and chili. But instead of simply calling it chicken cooked with wine, they named it after one of the Four Beauties of ancient China, Yang Guifei (concubine) from the Tang Dynasty. I must agree that a chicken dish named after a drunken beauty is more attractive than just saying chicken with wine and soy sauce.
In some cases, in order to make sure people understand what the food contains, restaurants make the decision of not using the literal translation from Chinese. Instead, the English name will appear to be more transparent and less artistic. When it is less artistic, it defeats the purpose of trying to make the dish sound more sophisticated.
Do you think that food names should be more transparent, or it should keep its originality?