{"text":[[{"start":7.3,"text":"It’s Sunday morning in Beijing, a few paces from the Temple of Heaven, where the emperor used to pray for good harvests and people nowadays gather to stroll and practise tai chi. But the ancient monuments haven’t drawn me here. Instead, I’ve come for an old-fashioned Beijing breakfast of one of the city’s most notorious specialities: douzhi, or fermented mung bean juice, served with crunchy golden fritters and strands of salty pickle."}],[{"start":32.24,"text":"The restaurant, Yin San Douzhi, is little more than a shack in a narrow hutong, where dozens of people are already queueing for their food. My breakfast comes, eventually, in plastic bowls and dishes on a plastic tray. The steaming bean juice itself has the pale green tint of old celadon glaze and a funky, unsettling aroma. It is smooth and creamy on my tongue, like soy milk or kefir, with a faintly sour taste. I alternate sips from my bowl with bites of jiaoquan’er (shattercrisp rings of deep-fried dough) and shreds of pickled mustard stem flavoured with soy sauce and spices."}],[{"start":68.52,"text":"Douzhi is the Marmite of local eating: people either love or — mostly — loathe it, and they used to say only native Beijingers could handle its offputting smell (it took me years of dutiful sipping to begin to enjoy its creamy comfort). Across China, mung beans themselves are found in sweets and dumplings, while mung bean sprouts are eaten as a vegetable, and their starch is made into transparent “beanthread” noodles and medicinal pills. According to traditional Chinese medicine, mung beans have cooling properties, so they are often brewed into medicinal soups. But only in these parts are the beans fermented."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":102,"text":"Originally, douzhi was a byproduct of the manufacture of bean starch. Dried mung beans were soaked and ground with water, and the liquid was left until the starch had settled in a layer at the bottom and could be extracted. The rest was thrown away or used as pigswill. Then some bright spark, presumably, left the residual liquid lying around until it stank to high heaven, decided to have a taste and found it pleasing. These days, specialist workshops — which are normally situated outside the city limits because of the stinky fermentation — use their own signature microbiotic cultures to ferment vats of the stuff for a couple of days in summer or as long as a week in winter."}],[{"start":142.48,"text":"Fans of douzhi swear by its health benefits. One of them is the eponymous Yin San (“Third Brother Yin”), who I met by chance one day while queueing for breakfast at his hutong shop. A 60-something man with a warm smile and close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, he’s a former tobacco merchant who turned to the douzhi business in 1997, having lapped up the stuff since childhood. “It nourishes the stomach,” he said. “In winter, it dispels cold and in summer it relieves heat. It’s particularly good if you’ve eaten too much meat or greasy food or have a hangover. Drinking it just makes you feel shufu [comfortable and well].” Yin San told me he drinks a bowl of bean juice and a bowl of millet porridge every morning and has never been to hospital. His sales slogan is “Yin San Douzhi, healthy and stomach-nourishing”."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":192.36,"text":"Douzhi, in turn, has its own obscure byproduct, which is one of my favourite Beijing foods. Ma doufu, or “coarse tofu” (not to be confused with the Sichuanese dish mapo tofu), is made from the sludgy solids that form when leftover bean juice is boiled. These greyish dregs are stir-fried, ideally in sheep fat, with ginger, Chinese leek, pickled greens and soyabeans. Mounded on a plate, they are then crowned with chopped garlic chives and dried chillies sizzled in oil. Unlikely though this may sound, the dish is utterly delicious. It has a hint of sourness, a prick of heat and a cheesy umami savouriness that strongly reminds me of Welsh rarebit."}],[{"start":235.72,"text":"Until recently, it looked as though bean juice and ma doufu might be dying specialities, frugal oddities whose appeal had faded in a new, consumerist age. But the post-pandemic boom in domestic gastro-tourism and an interest in weird local delicacies fuelled by social media has made douzhi a must-try for more adventurous Chinese visitors to Beijing. The city’s inaugural Michelin Guide gave Yin San a Bib Gourmand in 2020; he now has three branches, several franchise outlets and a packaged bean juice line. He has even diversified into an extraordinary douzhi soft-serve ice cream, which is sold by the cornet in kiosks: greenish and faintly putrid, it is topped with fried mung beans and served with the traditional fritter on the side (sans the salty pickles)."}],[{"start":284.8,"text":"For most foreigners, bean juice used to be a firm no-no. While many would take to stir-fried ma doufu at first bite, most found the funky bean juice revolting. Recently, however, I’ve noticed that foreign visitors rather like its odd whiffiness. Perhaps we are all more open to the possibilities of edgy flavours and unfamiliar ferments in an era when shrimpy kimchi, artisanal kombuchas, kefirs and natural wines are all the rage among the fooderati. And douzhi, as a plant-based “milk” drink, sits nicely in the modern vegan pantry."}],[{"start":317.44,"text":"Bean juice has the extra allure, in an age of manic globalisation, that one can eat it nowhere but Beijing. When I was growing up in 1970s and 1980s Britain, the range of foods available was infinitesimal compared with what is sold in even a basic supermarket today. Back then, there was a special, exquisite thrill to going camping in Provence in the summer and rediscovering the pleasures of uncanned olives marinated in garlic and herbs, rustic goats’ cheeses, crunchy baguettes and a cool jus d’abricot in a café. Every year, my family delighted in the rare panettone sent by my grandfather’s business partner in Milan. Now I can find all these delicacies within a few paces of my London home."}],[{"start":359.48,"text":"In the cosmopolitan cities of the modern west, we can lay our greedy paws on the world’s spoils: chilli bean paste from Pixian in Sichuan, Palestinian zaatar, buffalo burrata, Moroccan harissa, Hunan stinky tofu. Even better, we can find chefs from almost any far-flung place, diligently cooking up their native cuisines for our delectation. With such an embarrassment of riches at home, there’s an extra frisson to foods that remain obstinately, obscurely local to their places of origin."}],[{"start":389.36,"text":"Keen to capture the joys of ma doufu in London, I have experimented with making douzhi at home. For a few hot summer days, my kitchen reeked, the souring juice attracting flies. The final product tasted authentic and I was overjoyed to be able to stir-fry a little spoonful of my own ma doufu — but I realised I’d have to ferment vatfuls of the juice to obtain a full portion of its cheesy glory. So until some brave Londoner takes up the bean juice gauntlet, reckoning on its appeal to the community of vegan-friendly fermentation geeks, I’ll be beating a path to Yin San’s door every time I visit Beijing."}],[{"start":426.6,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram"}],[{"start":437.25,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1792777617_4148.mp3"}