The Chinese revere textures and sensations in the mouth just as much as they do flavour. This is not highbrow stuff; it is simply a part of the eating experience. By extension, hau gum (literally, ‘mouthfeel’) is a part of our everyday language, peppering our dinner conversations with appreciative murmurs of how satisfyingly faa, lum and so on certain dishes are. Because there isn’t always an equivalent English term for the various categories of mouthfeel, we have tried our best to describe our favourite textures and sensations below. Our list is not exhaustive, but these mouthfeels are among the most common. Draw from them the next time you eat something with a particularly enjoyable or surprising texture and soon you too will be dropping the terms during meals with friends and family.
Faa foods are usually rich and ‘melt in the mouth’. They are sometimes even delicate enough to collapse at the slightest touch of your tongue. Think chocolate mousse, fluffy, buttery mash and crumbly shortbread. Try the potatoes in our Potato and Chicken Curry (here) and the pastry in our Pineapple Tarts (here) for some serious faa action.
The onomatopoeic name of this one gives it away: cheow is anything with great crunch, and adding the prefix bok bok means that something is super-cheow. For example, roast pork crackling and filo pastry are at their finest when they are cheow. The same goes for Crispy Noodle Nests (here), Golden Spring Rolls (here) and Peanut and Sesame Brittle (here).
Food is song when it has a refreshingly crisp bite, like coming across a piece of cucumber in a leafy salad. Other song foods include tender calamari, the flesh of lychees and fresh watermelon. Some of our favourite song recipes include our Stir-fried Cucumber (here), Spicy Squid Stir-fry (here) and Prawn Claw Dumplings (here).
These foods readily crumble or flake when you bite into them because they have a loose and airy structure. Puff pastry and deep-fried prawn crackers are delicious examples, as are Sweet and Salty Walnut Cookies (here), Custard Egg Tarts (here) and Flaky Red Bean Pastries (here).
As one of the most sought-after mouthfeels in Chinese cooking, waat foods are silky, slippery and smooth. They also tend to be moist; think fruit jelly, mangoes and perfectly ripe avocados. In Cantonese cooking, marinating meat with bicarbonate of soda and cornflour helps to make it more waat. Achieving the waat texture makes or breaks dishes like Whole Steamed Fish (here), Silky Steamed Eggs (here) and Ginger Milk Pudding (here).
This means ‘springy teeth’, so foods with this quality bounce against your bite as you sink your teeth into them. Turkish delight does the trick, as do the Aromatic Steamed Beef Meatballs (here) and springy fish balls in Hokkien Noodles (here).
These foods are satisfyingly chewy. It takes a bit more work to eat them, but this doesn’t mean that yee un foods are unpleasant or tough. For example, al dente pasta and chewy buttermilk crumpets are immensely satisfying to chomp through, as are the Spring Onion Pancakes (here), Sweet Sticky-filled Pancakes (here) and kansui (alkaline water) wonton noodles in Fried Sauce Noodles (here).
In Cantonese, meen means pillowy and soft. For example, meen toi is a duvet inner and meen fa tong are fluffy marshmallows. The cloud-like bun wrapper of Steamed Pork Buns (here) and the fine spongy crumb of Mum and Dad’s Vibrant Pandan Cake (here) demonstrate the meen mouthfeel.
Lum means soft and velvety, like what you would expect from a brilliant bread and butter pudding or an ultra-moist self-saucing chocolate cake. It also describes meat that ‘falls off the bone’, such as slow-cooked pulled pork and lamb shanks. The carrot logs in Watercress Soup (here) become incredibly lum after many hours in the pot, as does the meat in Chicken and Parsnip Soup (here).
Although this one is not usually associated with Cantonese cooking, it is one of our favourites and also one of the most interesting sensations to experience for the first time. Maa laat means ‘numbing spiciness’. It is achieved through the use of Sichuan peppercorns, making this mouthfeel one of the hallmarks of Sichuanese cooking. Mapo Tofu (here) is the most popular maa laat dish worldwide, while lesser-known dishes like Spicy Blistered Beans (here) and ‘Fish Fragrant’ Aubergine (here) also deliver a uniquely maa laat punch.
