February, 2007

I’m a fool for pickles.  Always have been.  Pickled anything, pretty much — green beans, carrots, onions, mushrooms, beets, radishes, peppers, peaches, cabbage, cauliflower, garlic, limes — whatever you got.  As long as it’s not mango (all mango tastes roughly like gasoline to me, and not in a pleasant aftertastey way but in an oh my god I’ve just eaten something toxic help help way), I’ll probably try it and like it.

It will thus come as little surprise to anyone that one of my favorite homestyle dishes at a little strip-mall Chinese/Taiwanese restaurant we sometimes go to down near where my Belovedary has been working lately, in Rockville, MD, is pickled cabbage with pork.  (The restaurant is called Chopstix, and despite the horrible name, is really very nice, particularly if you order from the “home style” menu.  Also, you can get the same pickled cabbage dish with chicken if you prefer.  I don’t, though it is also good, the pork is better.)  It is spicy, crisp, tart, salty, savory, and generally just a big ol’ festival of umami.

So I was thrilled to find, in the back of Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cooking, a recipe of sorts (more a set of rough guidelines really) for Hunan-style pickled vegetables.  I made up a batch about 2 weeks ago and have been happily noshing off of it ever since, culminating in two nights in a row, last night and tonight, of stir-frying it with leftover cha siu, with a little bit of garlic, some sesame oil, and some dark soy sauce, making a lovely simple homey dinner for my Belovedary and me.  But of course I could not bring myself to eat up all the remaining pickled cabbage before I had made more.  MUCH more.
So.  Today when we were at the Asian supermarket, I bought a pickle crock.  And just about the biggest Napa-type cabbage I have ever seen.  Voila:

For size comparison, note that the white thing you can barely see the top of behind the crock is my large Brita filter pitcher, and the cheesecloth bundle in the foreground — which contains a variety of flavoring ingredients like scallion, ginger, dried Tien Tsin chiles, Sichuan flower pepper, star anise, fennel seed, cinnamon bark, garlic cloves, and green cardamom pods — is somewhere between the sizes of a baseball and a softball.  That is a big honkin’ cabbage, in other words.

I took a photo of the inside leaves of the cabbage because it was so pretty.

Not all of it fit in my crock… as may be obvious from the photo.  I had to cook up some with dinner tonight, and stash some of the rest back in the fridge, in hope that tomorrow, after the brine has made the cabbage that did make it into the crock a little softer, I’ll be able to pack the rest into the crock.  Here’s what the crock looked like before I put the clay lid on top (a loose-fitting lid that lets the pickles breathe but keeps foreign objects and dust from getting in)… with some of my incredibly disorganized tea collection on the counter behind it.

Packed to the brim with cabbage, the spice bundle from the previous picture, some pickled jalapenos (called for by Dunlop’s recipe, though I imagine not 100% mandatory) and nearly 6 quarts of the appropriate brine.

And, in case you were wondering, yes, I also took a photo of the pickled cabbage and pork dish we had for dinner.  Rice bowls, old tatty stained tablecloth I’ve had for 15 years, and all.

Tell you what, photographing your dinners and blogging the pictures sure does make you realize that you really do need to get off your arse and tidy the kitchen and think about buying a new tablecloth or two.  Heh.

Back to Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cooking tonight, for a fine trifecta.  We decied to revisit the smoked tofu and bacon with chiles, because we had some smoked tofu that wanted using up, and to accompany it I made stir-fried peppers with black beans (p. 201) and spicy coriander salad (p. 59).

Together, the three dishes make a smashing combination.   The heat and unctuousness of the bacon and tofu dish are balanced out by the crisp, clean vegetal and vinegary flavors of the coriander salad, and they are both countered by the sweetness and pungency of the peppers and black beans.  Texture-wise, they also play well together, with the leafy, tender salad, the oily, meaty bacon and tofu, and the just-barely-the-other-side-of-crunchy peppers.

The coriander salad is gorgeous visually as well as being tasty, and, if you are fortunate enough to have a bunch of friends who happily eat quite hot dishes, would make a dynamite summertime contribution to a potluck or dinner party.

What makes it so hot is not just the salted chopped chiles, of which there is only a moderate amount, but also that the light dressing for the greens uses a liberal quantity of hot chili sesame oil.  Less flaming tastebuds might halve the hot chili sesame oil or leave it out altogether, relying on only the salted chopped chiles.

The peppers recipe calls for both red and green bell peppers, but we had only green ones.  Nonetheless, it is an appealing and delicious dish, and I suspect it will reheat nicely too.

And then of course there was the bacon and tofu, which I think I really nailed this time (last time I overcooked the bacon a bit in the wok, this time I was more sparing because I realized it really didn’t want to be treated to quite so much heat for quite as long as I had done before).  The textures were outstanding and the flavor superb.  I used more chiles this time, as well, as I had slightly wimped out on the number requested in the previous iteration out of conservatism occasioned by having just bought a new bag of dried Tientsin chiles and not really knowing how hot they were.  Now that I know, though, we used the full complement and it was perfection itself.  (So much so that  my Belovedary has just scarfed one of the the last remaining bits of bacon out of the bowl… we haven’t quite gotten around to putting the leftovers away yet.)

Happy and Prosperous New Year! It is the year of the Fire Pig, and to celebrate, we made cha siu bao, known to dim sum aficionados far and wide as steamed barbecued pork buns. It’s traditional to make meat dumplings — wor tip (or chiao tzu, or in Cantonese gau ji), what most Westerners know as potstickers — for New Years, but we figured cha siu bao would be a somewhat easier and still meaty and symbolically rich and delicious alternative.

We didn’t have a New Year party of our own, but some friends were having a Zombie Valentine’s Day party (like zombies, true love never dies, right?) and we figured they would go over well there, too, so we prepared the filling last night, and the dough this morning, and took both to the party along with our steamer, and I made and filled the buns, and my Belovedary steamed them fresh for the partygoers right then and there.

My hands, forming the dough into a round ready for filling.

I used Eileen Yin-Fei Lo’s recipe from her 1995 The Dim Sum Dumpling Book, and although I have used Barbara Tropp’s from China Moon Cookbook in the past with pretty good results as well, I think I like Lo’s better: they are more like the oldschool Cantonese versions I have eaten in a lot of Hong Kong style dim sum houses, and I prefer the texture and seasoning of their filling.

Filled bao are placed on the steamer tray, on top of squares of parchment paper to keep them from sticking to the tray.

I did vary my technique a little from the one Lo recommends in forming the buns. I did not pinch them entirely closed, but pleated them almost-shut. It’s a little riskier to shape the buns this way because there is a greater possibility that the buns will open as they steam, and it is also quite likely that the filling may bubble over and stain the outside of the bun pastry a little when you leave them vented like this, but I think that the texture of the pastry is nicer this way, so if I think I can get away with it, I usually leave my bao with a little hole on top when I put them into the steamer.

You can sort of see them in there, steaming away. Howdya like my big shiny stainless steel steamer? It has two tiers, and if I fill both I can cook 16 bao in there at one time! I wanted one big enough to steam whole fish and chickens, and as a bonus I can also cook bao or steamed dumplings for a crowd with ease.

One warning about Yin-Fei Lo’s recipe: there is a numerical discrepancy between the number of buns worth of filling the filling recipe is meant to make (5), and the number of buns worth of dough the dough recipe is supposed to make (8). I recommend simply filling the buns a little less full and making 8. It works fine. Although if you end up with extra dough, you can always just make steamed bread buns (unfilled) and eat them solo. They are quite tasty that way, and I have always found steamed breads to be wholly comforting, with their soft yet slightly chewy quality and the silkiness of the steamed gluten.

Bao! Note the hull breach on the bun at 11 o’clock. I should’ve pinched the pleats together harder. Ideally, they should all look more like the one at 6 o’clock, but I confess I am not exactly in the business of making bao with sufficient frequency to turn them out that way uniformly. (As is patently obvious.) They still taste fabulous, though, no matter the leaks.

Another thing about Yin-Fei Lo’s recipe, or any bao recipe really: make sure you’re making enough. For one thing, people can pack away astonishing quantities of steamed buns. You’d be amazed. They’re addictive. They’re also tasty cold, or reheated (steam them to warm them up and renew their texture) so you need have no fear of leftovers.

Also, the process of making bao is — even for someone like me who is accustomed to spending a fair bit of time in the kitchen — a fairly labor-intensive and time-consuming one. This is true of all dim sum dumplings. Let’s just say there’s a reason that most Chinese cooks don’t cook their own dim sum, but rather go out to eat it in the teahouses whose raison d’etre these dishes are. Because bao doughs will be steamed and a wet dough would simply turn to mush, they can be fussy and require a lot of kneading because they require you to develop a great deal of gluten with only a very small amount of liquid to help you. This is often daunting to Western cooks, particularly if you’re not used to the whole process of working dough to develop its gluten… and even if you are an experienced bread baker, these doughs are a very different animal and you can sometimes knead by hand for 20-30 minutes before you really start getting any elasticity into the dough at all. (A sturdy mixer with a dough hook is a huge help in making bao dough — I think I would refuse to make it if I did not have my big gay lavender KitchenAid to do the heavy kneading for me.) Then there is the forming the dough rounds and the filling and pleating the buns. And the filling is cooked separately, beforehand, as well.

So if you’re going to do it, make enough to make it worth your while! I made 6 batches’ worth of Lo’s recipe, for a total of 48 bao. Tomorrow I plan to cook up another 6 batches’ worth of filling since I still have more cha siu to use up, which I will freeze in 2-batch portions, so that the next time I want cha siu bao I will have that part of the work already done. (The doughs do not freeze well, though the bao themselves, once cooked, will freeze pretty well and can be easily reheated by simply removing them from the freezer and popping them into the steamer until they’re hot all the way through.)

Step One: Love things, and people, and places. Animals, too, they’re very important, and also trees, the sun and moon, the smell of good earth, and art in all its manifestations. Love them hard. Love them even when you want to strangle them or pitch them into the bin or set fire to them.  Love them anyway.

Step Two: Love yourself.  Take care of yourself the way you would take care of a small child in your care, with gentle firmness, providing for your needs and seeing to your own happiness with joy and generosity but without too much coddling, paying attention to the things you need to grow (even when those things might be less than pleasant).  Don’t take any of it too seriously.  It’s much too important to be grave about it.
Step Three:  Love things so much that you are willing to go to the mat for them, and do it.  Love things that make you push yourself to be a better person for their sake.  Love things that take lots of hard work to bring to fruition.  Love things that force you to be honest, and not self-servingly faux-honest either, but genuinely, humbly honest.  Love things so much that you don’t care who knows that you’re busting your butt to live up to that love, or who sees you sweating.  Love things that seem impossible so much that you learn how to make them possible.
Step Four:  When Valentine’s Day rolls around, repeat steps 1-3.  For additional happiness, share.

I have a new wok.  It is my new boyfriend.  My Belovedary bought it for me when he was in San Francisco a few weeks ago, knowing that my old wok — a long-suffering, slow, old, overly-heavy monster I bought when I was in college — was making me crankier and crankier the better I got at Chinese cookery.

It is indeed difficult to cook good stir-fry in the wrong pan.  Seriously.  I can turn out a highly creditable stir-fried dish in a good cast-iron skillet and have done so many times, but to tell you the truth they just don’t get hot enough.  The metal is too heavy and the cooking surface, because it is flat, radiates a lot of heat straight up.  Woks are (duh) hottest in the center, since that’s what’s right over the fire, and good woks are quite thin, so that you don’t lose too much heat to the metal.  Also, with a wok, you never have the unpleasant experience of chasing the food all over the skillet with a spatula, trying to get it to flip, or to pick it up to take it out of the pan.  The curvature of the wok means that this isn’t a problem.  Woks also are less likely to spatter you with hot oil, even when you are deep-frying.  Bonus: you can deep-fry in a wok with far less trepidation than you might with a straightsided pan, because with a wok, you fill only the bottom of the wok with hot oil (about 1-2 cups, as opposed to a quart or more for a lot of conventional Western deep-fat frying vessels) and there is still plenty of wok space left over for the oil to bubble up over the food without any worry that oil might escape the pan.  Did I mention that you can conveniently push mostly-cooked food up to the sides of the pan while you finish the sauce that remains in the bottom center, then incorporate the solids right back in?  Yeah.  Try that in a frying pan.  Pretty sweet.

I will note for the record that I stopped subscribing to Cooks Illustrated after one of their writers — I think it may have been Christopher Kimball himself — asserted that a large frying pan was a better vessel for stir-frying food in than a wok was.  I remember reading that and thinking it was patently insane.  Even with my old crappy too-heavy wok I thought it was insane, and I had had plenty of experience with cooking Chinese food in a Western frying pan by that point when I got fed up with my dissatisfying wok to know full well that really, a Western frying pan was not really any better than a bad wok, and was a whole lot more frustrating to work with in some ways to boot. Now that I have a better wok, I can state wholeheartedly that I am still right and CI is still  wrong wrong wrong like a wrong thing that is wrong.
Here’s the thing about woks and Chinese cookery: the cuisine and the vessel used to cook it evolved in response to one another.  There really isn’t another cooking vessel (except perhaps the Indian karhai/kadai, which is, as you’ll notice if you click, rather like a wok) that does the same job in the same way.  So if you’re going to go in for Chinese cookery in any kind of earnest, do not walk, run (or click) straight to The Wok Shop, in beautiful San Francisco’s Chinatown.  They will be happy to help you figure out what kind of wok will work best with your cooker and heat source, how many people you will be cooking for, etc.  Fabulous customer service, too.  And they’ll ship anywhere… my Belovedary bought my wok (and a new steamer, and a handful of other things) while he was there and simply had them shipped home.

Anyhow.  My new wok has been making me very happy, and I have been doing lots and lots of cooking in it since it arrived last week.  Including developing my first Chinese recipe!  It was originally a happy accident of combining leftovers… a sort of “hey, that might taste good if I added some of this, and put some chicken in it, and what if I did that?” thing that turned out so tasty that I thought I should develop it into an actual recipe.

And so I have, and I present it to you thus:

Stoplight Chicken

I called this Stoplight Chicken because of the green watercress, red chiles, and yellow ginger.

4 chicken thighs, boned and skinned, cut into thin strips
1 Tablespoon dry sherry
1 Tablespoon regular soy sauce
1 teaspoon cornstarch
5 cloves garlic, crushed or minced
2 Tablespoons minced fresh ginger
1 pound watercress or spinach, thoroughly cleaned and trimmed
2 Tablespoons salted chopped chiles (see note at end)
2 Tablespoons chicken stock or water
1 Tablespoon sesame oil (Asian style)
1 teaspoon cornstarch
peanut, soybean, or corn oil for cooking
Have all ingredients ready before you start heating the wok.

Combine sherry, soy sauce, and 1 teaspoon cornstarch in a large shallow bowl and mix thoroughly.  Add garlic and sliced strips of chicken meat and stir so that meat is well-covered.  Cover with plastic wrap or some other sort of covering and set aside to marinate for 10-15 minutes.

In the meantime, mix together the chicken stock, sesame oil, and one teaspoon cornstarch in a small dish and set aside.
Heat wok until it is smoking.  Add small amount of oil (@1 T) in steady stream down the side of the wok.  Swirl hot oil in wok to coat sides a bit.  Add marinated chicken to pan and stir-fry briefly until outside edges are opaque, then add salted chopped chiles.  Allow to cook a few minutes longer, until pieces begin to brown and are mostly cooked through, stirring occasionally.  Remove chicken to a clean bowl and set aside.

Rinse out wok and dry over a hot flame.  Again add a small amount of oil down the side and swirl.  Add ginger and stir-fry until fragrant and beginning to turn golden.  Then add watercress (or spinach) by handfuls, stir-frying with other hand to coat all the vegetables with hot oil and disperse the ginger throughout.  The watercress/spinach will wilt quickly and cook down considerably, exuding a fairly substantial amount of liquid — this is okay.

As soon as the vegetables have cooked down by about 2/3 their original volume, return the chicken to the pan and continue stirfrying as you add the stock/sesame oil mixture.  Keep stirfrying!  The liquid will boil and will thicken somewhat.  As soon as this happens, remove the food to a serving bowl or platter and serve with plenty of nice hot fresh rice.

Serves 4 as part of a multi-dish meal.

Note: To make salted chopped chiles, get a pound (more or less) of a sort of chile you like.  Hotter if you like that, less hot if you don’t, there are plenty of options.  I find that a middle-of-the-road chile is most versatile.  Wash them, dry them, stem them, and chop them into a coarse dice, seeds and all.  Put ‘em in a bowl.  Measure out 1/4 cup salt.  Add 3 T of the salt to the chiles in the bowl and stir it around to mix.  Then put the chiles in a clean dry jar (an empty pickle jar works fabulously) and pour the rest of the salt on top.  Put a lid on the jar and set it in a cool dark place for a week or two, then they are ready to be used.  Refrigerate after opening.  They do keep approximately forever, but they’re so tasty you’ll use them up instead.