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6 Min
09/04/2026
Sample the mouthwatering Taiwanese foods across any local market, and you will be faced with an indescribable texture. Be it fish balls, oyster omelettes, or tapioca balls suspended in sugary drinks, the dishes tend to be chewy but still soft, exhibiting a mouthfeel that remains indescribable in the English dictionary. The Taiwanese refer to this texture as ‘Q’. It is a letter to describe foods that are soft, elastic, springy, and something that even locals might get tongue-tied about.
The letters ‘QQ’ are found embroidered and stamped on many packaged foods and shop signs in Taiwan, describing a texture that is a signature of Taiwanese food. What gives the local food this texture is the use of starch. The second ‘Q’ is used for foods with an extra bouncy and chewy texture. But both the single and double letters are used interchangeably. So, here are some beloved Taiwanese foods that have this delightful texture.
Taiwanese night markets sell fishcakes and meatballs on a skewer labelled as ‘Q on a stick’. These give off the feeling of the Japanese oden, but vary in taste and ingredients. Perhaps the highest in the Q rating are the pork meatballs, which are borderline rubbery but quite addictive. Then there are frozen fish balls, which also have a good Q texture.
The QQ quality in fish paste products develops through technique as much as ingredients. The fish paste must be kneaded and repeatedly thrown against a surface to develop a stickiness that allows it to be shaped and hold its form.
You can buy this Taiwanese food in bulk, store it in the freezer, boil it, and eat it with a dipping sauce. You can also enjoy the fish balls in soups. Cuttlefish balls will have the highest QQ texture among all the other fish.
The QQ texture in wheat noodles comes from the addition of kansui (lye water), an alkaline solution that builds a tighter, more elastic gluten network in the dough. These lye noodles, called jian mian in Mandarin, are notably springier than standard wheat noodles, with a slight yellow tinge and a more satisfying stretchiness.
Taiwanese cold noodles (liang mian) are one type of noodle with a QQ texture. Made with thin wheat noodles dressed in sesame, the noodles retain their QQ quality even after cooling. To maintain the texture, cold noodle stalls cool their noodles rapidly after boiling by fanning them vigorously or plunging them in ice water.
In Taiwan, the Kuan Miao region is particularly famous for its sun-dried noodles, which are prized for their chewiness and considered among the country's finest. Enjoy Taiwanese cold noodles with sesame dressing at room temperature, or in noodle soups.
Boba tea, also called bubble tea, pearl milk tea, and QQ in some parts of the world, is the dish that has introduced the Q texture to more people globally than any other Taiwanese food. The drink originated in Taiwan in the 1980s, when tea shops in Taichung and Tainan began adding chewy tapioca balls to iced milk tea.
The tapioca pearls (or boba) at the bottom of the drink are made from cassava root starch, sometimes mixed with sweet potato starch for firmer results, rolled into balls, boiled in water until translucent, and soaked in brown sugar syrup. A perfectly prepared tapioca pearl should offer a springy resistance before softening, which is the marker of the QQ quality.
Because freshly prepared boba hold their texture for only a day or two, most commercial boba tea shops prepare pearls in batches and serve them within hours of cooking. The texture degrades as the pearls cool and harden. Fresh boba in brown sugar milk tea is the classic way to enjoy tapioca pearls. For a more adventurous version, try taro milk teas or matcha lattes.
Anything made with glutinous rice flour has a springy and chewy texture, and East Asia has numerous foods that fall in this category. There’s the Japanese mochi that is hand-pounded with multiple fillings, the Korean rice cakes simmered in a sweet and spicy sauce called tteobboki and even Chinese rice cakes called nian gao.
Most rice cakes, apart from mochi that are rolled into ovals, spheres or logs, can be dropped into boiling water for a few minutes for the bouncy result. They are used in soups, stews with eggs and spring onions, or baked items. You can also add sliced rice cakes to stir-fries with vegetables and oyster sauce.
Mushrooms are loved for their bounce and chewiness, and in Taiwan, particularly, there is one mushroom variety that is loved for its ‘Q’ texture. These mushrooms are called wood ear mushrooms, and in Taiwanese culture, they are eaten as a cold appetiser, marinated in sesame oil and vinegar.
Unlike button mushrooms and shiitake mushrooms, these have no inherent flavour and take on the taste of whatever they are dressed or marinated with. Beech mushrooms also share a similar trait, so you can go for those in case wood ear mushrooms are not available.
There is a particular Taiwanese food called crystal dumplings, locally known as bawan, which translates literally as ‘meat circle’. It is one of Taiwan's most beloved street foods and is considered by many a national dish, found at night markets across the island and available in most Taiwanese towns in some variation.
The defining quality of bawan is its wrapper: a gelatinous, semi-translucent dough made from a combination of corn starch, sweet potato starch, and rice flour. When steamed, the dough turns from opaque white to a greyish translucence, attaining the ‘crystal’ quality in its name. The texture is exactly QQ, the dumplings being chewy, sticky, and gelatinous, with a resistance that yields to the bite without falling apart.
The filling of these dumplings is typically pork, bamboo shoots, dried mushrooms, and sometimes shrimp, and the whole dumpling is served with a sweet-savoury dipping sauce made from miso paste, ketchup, and sweet chilli. Bawan can be steamed, deep-fried for a crisp outer skin, or poached in oil to warm them without drying out.
The Q texture across all these foods comes from one underlying phenomenon: the behaviour of starch and protein under heat and moisture. In starch-based foods like tapioca pearls, bawan, and rice cakes, heat causes starch granules to absorb water, swell, and gelatinise into a smooth, cohesive gel. That is the logic that the human sense delights in and continues to love, not for the nutrients but the sensations.
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