TutupListen to Life
We would try to make
everything right –
we are more focused
on the details.
LiWen and Jeff Chang provide "Gua Bao",
typical Taiwanese street food, to keep their tradition going.
We want to spread our culture through typical street food.
Happiness would be the most important thing in our daily life. So every day, we take one step towards that. Every small thing, we try to make it happy. My wife is more focused on the details – what needs to be done today to build on our goals.
She started cooking for me a lot at home because we couldn't find any Taiwanese food around that actually tasted like home. We tried to recreate that. And then we thought, it's really a good idea to have a business, since there's not much Taiwanese food here. That's how we started this business. "Gua Bao" is the most traditional food in Taiwan, like street food.
We go to Farmer's Market, buy them fresh and mostly organic.
We go to Farmer's Market a lot. We have been buying every vegetable we use from them and have a really good relationship. So anything that's in season, we'll purchase. They will tell us how they grow – every different vegetable – how it should taste, how it should be cooked, and we incorporate that into our buns.
Then we explain to our customers why it tastes the way it does, and where we get them. They will always go back to the farmers and buy from them. Fresh. Mostly organic, no pesticides – very healthy. They always harvest before the market – early in the morning – and bring to the market.
That's why our stuff tastes a lot better because the ingredients we use are higher quality.
Everything at the market, we pretty much trade.
We will introduce our customers for exchanging information. Why this tastes spicy, where we get them. And they will always go back to the farmers and buy from the farmers.
A lot of way the Farmer's Market works is trading. We'll trade our buns for ingredients or for flowers or Honey. That is how the economy works at the Farmer's Market between vendors. Many of us like to just share it with each other what we have.
The secret of our recipes is the sauce…
It's the spice that we always get from Asia and the technique was more Taiwanese – the memories of what we had when we were young. We still go back to Taiwan every year just to remember how everything should be.
We travel to seek the best of our taste.
We get a good idea on what others think Gua-Bao should taste like. We went to famous restaurants and ate something that's kind of similar, that maybe can inspire us. His Gua-Bao has a seared pork belly whereas ours is braised, and that can change the flavor of something – the way you cook it.
My wife searches everyone who sells Gua-Bao in the world, looks at their website, follows them on SNS to see people's reactions to certain flavours they created. She also went to culinary school before we started this business, to learn American and French techniques, and the flavour to consider when trying to make Asian, yet connected to our customers.
