Sanyuan Meiyuan is an old Beijing brand of palace-style dairy sweets, part of Sanyuan Foods, built on a century-old technique for making palace milk dishes that is listed as intangible cultural heritage. It sells traditional Beijing milk curd, milk rolls and almond jelly, made with clean ingredients and a strong dairy flavour. It has become a stop visitors seek out, and the shops now reach well beyond Beijing.
What to order
- Red bean single milk roll
- The most popular item. The milk skin is made by filtering whole milk for a long time, so it is dense and thick with a faint graininess. It is barely sweet on its own, and the red bean paste in the middle balances the weight of it.
- Plain milk curd
- The traditional Beijing version: milk fermented with rice wine through several stages. There is a light fermented-rice aroma, the texture is as smooth as set cream, and it is clean rather than rich. The best first thing to try.
- Sugar-free milk cake
- The solid version of the sugar-free curd, with a very deep dairy flavour. Because there is no sugar it eats dry, so take it slowly. Anyone who loves dairy will keep coming back; anyone avoiding sugar can order it without worry.
- Almond jelly
- Soft and springy like tofu, with the faint bitterness that real almond has, and a sweet osmanthus syrup poured over it. Best when it is freshly made.
- Double milk roll
- The upgraded roll, with a sesame filling added. It has more layers of flavour, though the sesame can partly mask the milk itself — a matter of preference.
Where the shops are
- In Beijing
- There are many shops across shopping districts, sights and neighbourhoods. The ones people seek out are the Qianmen Dajie branch — convenient after the Forbidden City and Tiananmen — the Taijichang branch, an old shop that still makes its goods behind the counter, and the Ditan Park branch.
- Elsewhere
- In recent years the brand has opened themed shops aimed at visitors, in Shanghai's Yu Garden, at Orange Isle in Changsha and near Lu Xun's former residence in Ningbo.
What to watch for
- Very short shelf life
- Because the ingredients are clean and there are no heavy preservatives, everything — the rolls and the curd especially — keeps only briefly in the fridge. Do not buy more than you will eat the same day; by the next day the flavour has fallen off badly.
- The taste divides people
- The shop keeps to the old method and adds no industrial syrup, so everything is light and not sweet. If you are used to heavy, sugary desserts it may taste of nothing, or too dry; if you want the milk itself and less sugar, it is striking.
- How to eat it
- Old Beijing hands eat the single milk roll with the plain curd: the moisture of the curd softens the dryness of the roll and the dairy flavour opens up.
- On the price
- Most items run from the mid-teens to the mid-twenties, about the price of a milk tea. At the sight-side branches, check the portion against the price and buy only what you will eat.