If Your Ice Cream Comes With Peanuts And Cilantro, It’s Probably Taiwanese
It’s my first night at a Taipei night market. I lick my bowl clean from the first dish I try—you yugeng, a sort of thick, clear squid chowder. Then there’s o a jian, jiggly oyster omelets drenched in a sweet-sour sauce. Grilled sausages the size of my thumb with whole cloves of garlic in a paper bag. I can’t remember how many dishes I eat—12? 20?—in the hours before my group decides it’s our last one for the night, a dessert.
But I remember sitting on a curb with my classmates, who I’d just met that day, biting into a burrito-like rolled crepe of ice cream smushed with crushed peanuts and cilantro and thinking, so very full and contentedly, that this is where I was meant to be.
I’m 22, a college senior, and spending my last semester of school (huzzah!) ever in the land where my mother was born and raised. The last time I had been in Taiwan I was six years old, and my grandparents still lived there. In the 15 years in between, while I grew up in New York and New Jersey, my grandparents, aunt, and uncle all moved to the U.S. from Taiwan and became permanent American citizens, like my mom.
Taiwan became a mythical island where half my family was from—but that we had no reason to visit anymore. Until I was 21, and got accepted into a scholarship program at a university in Taipei.
I was thrilled to be there. No matter the tiny, four-person dorm room where I slept. Or the mosquito net that I draped around my bed at night. No matter all the people staring at me on the street because I looked more Western than my half-Asian, half-Caucasian genetics betrayed. It was my first time in Taiwan without my family, as an almost-adult. And everything I tasted felt vaguely familiar, yet novel and cool.
Which takes me back to that ice cream burrito. Little did I know it when I first enjoyed it in the early 2000s that this dessert was originally a specialty of Taiwan’s Yilan County, in the island’s northeast. It’s comprised of ingredients and flavor combinations that are nowadays recognized as quintessentially “Taiwanese,” explains Grace Jung, creator of the podcast Connecting With Taiwan, and who was born and raised in Yilan County, and is now based in New York.
“As a child, I would get rolled ice cream with peanut from a street cart similar to the ones that sell Italian ices in New York City,” says Jung. (Initially, she was not too keen on the cilantro sprigs, so she asked vendors to leave it out.)
As she got older, Jung came to realize that this dessert was not only unique to Yilan but also featured a traditional vegan, Taiwanese style of ice cream known as ba pu 叭噗 (probably an onomatopoeia for the horn that was honked by vendors who peddled it). Oftentimes, it was made from taro, which gives the ice cream body without the help of dairy or eggs. Other times, it could be pineapple or passion fruit-flavored. (Tapioca starch also helps give it a plant-based custardiness.)
By the time I was enjoying the Taiwanese ice cream crepe with peanut and cilantro, vendors were selling it with other ice cream flavors like strawberry and vanilla, too. As unique as the traditional ice cream base is, I think it’s the peanut and cilantro that make it such a memorable, quintessentially Taiwanese dessert. After all, this combination of garnish is used liberally on all kinds of food in Taiwan, from sauteed greens to soups to the iconic steamed pork belly buns, gua bao.
I’m not alone in fetishizing this intoxicating combo with ice cream. In New York City, two notable Taiwanese American restaurants have won over crowds with their homage to the ice cream dessert. At the pioneering Win Son, the lone dessert is a vanilla ice cream sandwich between a fried milk-dough bun which is drizzled with butter-fried peanuts, a sweet cilantro syrup, sweetened condensed milk and fresh cilantro sprigs. At the critically-acclaimed WenWen, the lone dessert features sticky rice dumplings or tangyuan and vanilla ice cream showered with peanut butter powder and cilantro.
These loving interpretations veer from the original while keeping its signature flavor combo intact. The original ice cream dessert features a thin, wheat-based spring roll pastry, or popiah. It’s the same stuff used to wrap run bing, a savory Taiwanese night market classic with sauteed cabbage, carrots, and roast pork. The same pastry skin might be used to wrap and deep-fry lumpia and Vietnamese spring rolls, or roll up a fried egg à la dan bing, a popular breakfast snack in Taiwan. And instead of just crushed peanut powder, the ice cream burrito is typically made by street vendors who shave from a block of maltose syrup-based peanut candy, or brittle. This makes the resulting dust a little chewy, and sweet.
When looked at within the context of all these dishes in Taiwan, this ice cream roll’s creation sounds fairly self-evident—it’s a sweet version of a successful formula (rolling up stuff in popiah), featuring classic condiments (peanuts and cilantro). And it’s emblematic of Taiwan’s dynamic food culture as a whole, which incorporates new with old to make something all its own. For example, taro root have been cultivated by Taiwanese indigenous peoples for thousands of years; peanuts, which are native to the Americas, arrived by way of Portuguese traders in the 17th century.
“It’s similar to Taiwanese identity, which has a little bit of many different cultures,” says Jung. I was just beginning to learn all this over my semester abroad in Taipei, taking classes in English and Chinese during the day, gorging on street food at night, connecting the dots between this and that with my mother’s home cooking. It was perhaps the most impactful few months of my college education; it was the beginning of my sense of a Taiwanese identity. And a lot of it was learned through food.
While I clearly don’t have as close of a relationship with the Yilan ice cream roll as those who grew up with it, its distinctive flavors take me back to that milestone time in my life. You don’t even need to recreate it faithfully—as the aforementioned chefs have demonstrated—to experience that intoxicating combination of sweet ice cream, peanut and cilantro. But with an recipe for taro ba pu, thanks to the YouTube creator DarLing, a pack of spring roll pastry sheets and Chinese peanut candy, it’s simple. Start making memories with it all on your own.
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