Review: Hohomei pineapple bun & Taiwanese street food in Shinkuchan

Still on Day 2, guys..... This post is dedicated to our "snack" between Lunch & Dinner.  LOL.  

After we returned back to the city by Ferry, we grabbed the subway back to our neighbourhood.   As noted in my previous blog post, our Airbnb was located right in the middle of the Shinkuchan shopping district.   We got off the subway at Central Park, and as we were walking along, we spotted some pineapple buns.   Looks like Hohomei is actually a Hongkong style pineapple bun, but they are well known at the Shida Night Market in Taipei.  

I also cannot find the location in Kaohsiung via Google map.  So for those of you who are planning to try this in Kaohsiung, it's located on the 1st floor of this shopping center, about 2 minute walk from the Central Park subway station.  You will smell the buns when you're walking outside that shopping center so hopefully you'll find the shop.  

I've had pineapple buns before and there are pretty good ones in Vancouver (Lido in Richmond, as reviewed here).  But after trying these ones from Hohomei, they are better than Lido IMO.  The bun itself is fluffier and softer; the top layer is really thick, crunchy, and has a great balance of sweet and savoury.  Plus, they also have options for different kinds of butter (one of which called the Presidential butter, which more expensive than the other ones and apparently has a nutty top note).  

They have a few other snacks & drinks on their menu.  But since we were there for the buns, we didn't really get anything else.  

a slab of butter ;) 

 

Up next:  we continued walking towards the Shinkuchan shopping district and was greeted by this interesting snack.  It's a sausage inside sticky rice intestine... So basically, they stuff rice inside intestine casing (which is the same casing that's used for the sausage) and cook the sticky rice so it expands into the intestine casing to look like a rice-sausage.   They then stuff a traditional Taiwanese sausage inside that rice-sausage.  The literal translation is "small intestine in big intestine" (大腸包小腸)

You eat it just like a hotdog, and you can pick your condiments too.  There's some kind of thick sweet soy sauce (which is delicious), you can ask for fresh garlic slices, crushed peanuts, and you can also get some fresh sliced chilies! 

It was surprisingly very delicious!  I thought it was going to be a simple boring dish (I mean... sausage + rice...).  The sauce and the fresh garlic slices makes the difference!  and for a relatively cheap snack, it was easy to eat and extremely fulfilling.  

Of course, just like with any other meals, a "meal" isn't complete without a dessert.  So we decided to end our afternoon snack saga with a dessert.  We tried this souffle pancake that comes with pearls.  It looks so good on the picture, and we also saw someone walking by with this in their hands.  

We were initially going to try some other flavour (matcha or chocolate) but ended up getting the original / plain flavour instead.   It was alright.  Didn't blow our minds.   The pearls were a bit tougher/chewier than we'd like to accompany such a soft pancake.   

And it was definitely a lot of sugar.  We regretted it a little bit after we ate this.  Oh well. YOLO!  And we also walked a lot that day between our morning walk through the neighbourhood and also in Qijin District.  So we believed that we deserved this extra bit of sugar :D

That marked the end of our afternoon snack.  It was around 6pm. We headed back to our Airbnb which was literally just up the stairs from these these food stalls were.  We're quiet impressed that we couldn't really hear all the bustling noises from the market as much.  Yes we can hear a little bit, but not enough to disturb our sleep.  In fact, we had really good night sleeps throughout our stay here! 

We lounged around the room, chilled for a bit, watched some TV (they had cable TV), and caught up on some work emails.   

My next post will cover our dinner to finally close Day 2.  (Don't roll your eyes!  I already prepared you!  Day 2 WAS the longest eating-day of our trip).