Is there anything more wonderful than thick Sanuki udon, noodles so delightfully chubby and squishy, like a baby’s leg? Or milk tea with spring-loaded tapioca pearls that squeak between your teeth as you chew and chew and chew? Or sinewy, rip-curled slices of Chinese charcuterie-style beef tendon that tastes beefier and more delicious with each exerted bite?

In my opinion, food with an intentional, unapologetic chew is the best kind of food. And I’m not talking about chewiness in the way you might be familiar with in western cooking: steak that’s too rare (or too well-done), boiled-to-death octopus, Knox’s intensified gelatin. I’m talking about the particular, highly desirable range of chewiness in East and Southeast Asian food, known as Q in Taiwan, jjolgit jjolgit in Korea, dai in Vietnam, and other not so easily translatable terms. But the best way to understand it is to start with the food itself.

Beginning with the lowest value on the chewy scale, you’ve got your noodles (wheat-based udon, rice noodles of all shapes), sticky rice, jellies (coconut, grass, like in Burmese falooda), and dumpling skins. These have a slippery texture and barely resist as you chew. Then there’s Japanese mochi and Filipino kakanin, a coconutty glutinous rice cake, with a more pliable feel that verges on tacky. Next, there’s the springy, al dente chew, like tteokbokki, Korean rice cakes; pinjaram, dense Malaysian coconut milk pancakes; and banh ja’neuk, Cambodian tapioca dumplings filled with mung beans and cooked in a coconut-ginger syrup. On to more serious chew, we have the bouncy, elastic pearls in Taiwanese milk tea, which require more devoted masticating—as in not just chewing to swallow but chewing...to chew. Then there’s the chewiness that’s like chomping on a fresh pack of tennis balls: plump Japanese chicken heart yakitori, Vietnamese beef balls bursting with aromatics, jiggly fried Filipino-style tripe. Finally, there’s the most extreme category of them all, where all kinds of seafood jerky and those wisps of beef tendon fall. I call it tug-of-war chew: the texture that fights back when you bite, pushing you away as you gnaw, as if it were still alive.

Across East and Southeast Asia, chewy isn’t just a common texture but a powerful tool deployed to make food taste better. Here in the States, first- and second-gen chefs are relying on the texture to recreate the food they grew up with. “Chewy food, if it’s cooked right, has a lot of flavor every time you take a bite,” chef Tatsu Aikawa told me. “It’s another element of taste.” At Kemuri Tatsu-ya in Austin, he makes eihire, a Japanese-style stingray jerky. “You savor it more,” says Christina Nguyen, chef and co-owner of Hai Hai in Minneapolis, where she makes Vietnamese staples like banh beo, sticky rice cakes topped with ground pork, mung beans, and fried shallots. “It’s literally sitting on your palate longer.”