02.01.07
Breath of a Wok, meal 1
Recently, my Belovedary and I acquired a raft of new Chinese cookbooks. While we cook Chinese — well, Cantonese anyway — at home pretty frequently and I am proud of the fact that I managed to unravel a lot of the basic mysteries of Cantonese cooking on my own by reverse-engineering things I ate in restaurants, talking to my father-in-law (who is Cantonese-American), and reading a few books, I have been feeling like my Chinese cooking skills wanted polish and virtuosity.
Moreover they wanted variety. China is, as you probably know, an awfully big place, and referring to “Chinese” cooking is a little like referring to “American” cooking: there’s an awful lot of regional variety that gets elided that way. Since the Chinese part of my extended family is Cantonese, that was where I started, and, in all honesty, is where I began tonight too, but more about that in a minute.
This is all by way of preamble to say that we’ve begun a new project here at the Little Purple Rowhouse That Could, namely, teaching ourselves some of the elements of Sichuan and Hunan cooking, as well as learning Cantonese and Shanghai dim sum cooking, and also learning more about wok technique, by cooking our way through a handful of very good Chinese cookbooks… and blogging about it as we go.
We’ve seen an awful lot of Chinese cookbooks in our time and bought only a few, because a lot of them are very dumbed-down and Americanized, which has never pleased us much (although Americanizing things is not always bad, pace the late, great, much-missed Barbara Tropp, who had a knack for “fusioning” around the edges of Chinese cooking so that it was still very Chinese in addition to being more accessible).
So, having sifted through any number of Chinese cookbooks in bookstores, and read bunches of reviews, we finally settled on a clutch of new books to add to our collection and from which to do this round of learning. Fuschia Dunlop’s Land of Plenty (Sichuan) and Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook (Hunan), and Eileen Yin-Fei Lo’s Dim Sum Dumpling Book. To round it out, we got another wonderful one from our wonderful friends Leigh Ann and Joe, Grace Young’s The Breath of a Wok.
I chose The Breath of a Wok (hereafter BoaW) for planning my first few outings. Like a large proportion of Chinese-Americans, indeed like my partner and his family, Young is of Cantonese origins. I’m already pretty familiar with the essential tastes and techniques of Cantonese cooking, particularly the passionate love of ginger (with and without its bosom buddy, garlic) and the emphasis on clean, fresh tastes and an abundance of green and especially leafy vegetables. So this seemed like a good place to start.
Tonight’s dinner was Ray Lee’s Chicken and Choy Sum (BoaW pps. 76-77) and Walter Kei’s Roasted Sesame Spinach (BoaW p. 196). I chose two dishes in keeping with the principle that one should serve as many dishes as there are eaters, plus rice and a light soup, although we did not end up having soup because we pigged out on the other dishes. Both are intended to serve 4 as part of a multicourse meal, but we barely had enough of the chicken dish left over to bother saving, and we ate the entire batch of spinach! (Of course, we are both serious spinach lovers, so the fact that we plowed through the entire pound worth of spinach should come as no surprise to anybody. It wasn’t to us.)
Walter Kei’s Roasted Sesame Spinach is a very simple and lovely preparation. The grammar of the name is a little deceptive: the spinach is blanched, then thoroughly drained/dried, but not roasted. It is the sesame seeds that are dry-roasted in a wok (or small frying pan, your choice), and sprinkled over the spinach along with a very simple sauce of Shao Hsing wine, soy sauce, and sesame oil. It is slightly edgy with Shao Hsing wine, I find, and I think next time I make it I will probably try it with dry sherry instead (a common substitution for Cantonese cooks, and one that is in fact suggested in the recipe itself). I think I might also use black sesame seeds the next time I make it, since I think their depth of flavor would be a nice thing to try, to see which I prefer.
Ray Lee’s Chicken and Choy Sum is likewise pretty simple, although the choy sum is twice-cooked in a manner that may be unfamiliar to Western cooks, briefly blanch/steamed in a small quantity of stock, drained, then briefly stirfried. This is how Cantonese cooks often get vegetables like choi sum, bok choi, and similarly crunchy cabbage-family vegetables cooked well without being overcooked, the intense moist heat of the stock allowing you to avoid the unpleasant stringiness that would ensue if the vegetables had been cooked only in the wok. When done well, it is a technique that gives even the surliest cabbage a sweet and satisfying tenderness without making it the slightest bit mushy. If you’re not familiar with the technique this would be a nice recipe from which to learn it.
I also have to give major thumbs up to the seasoning and sauce. Ray Lee, the chef who came up with the recipe, is absolutely right about this being a place where you want black soy sauce, a sweeter, thicker sauce than the one most Westerners are used to. It has a lingering molasses note that is fantastic here. I’m sure you can make it without the black soy, but frankly, I wouldn’t want to, it elevates this dish in a way that is a little surprising for such a humble ingredient. It made the rice in the bottom of the bowl a real treat, too, even after the chicken and choy sum were gone. My Belovedary and I both polished off all our rice very happily with that lovely sauce on it, I can tell you.
In the future when I make this, however, I will be quadrupling the quantity of choi sum. One of the failings, to me, of many Chinese cookbooks intended for American audiences is that they skew the ratio of meat to vegetables so that the American palate, accustomed to a Big Lump Of Meat on the dinner plate, will feel that it has gotten enough of whatever animal protein is in the offing. Chinese home cooks have rarely had this luxury! Meat is more often used to flavor a dish, in China, and provide protein in small amounts, than it is to actually fill people up — filling people up is what rice and veggies are for.
I tend to prefer this over the more meat-centric mode, and so when I cooked this dish tonight I intentionally doubled the amount of choy sum from 6 ounces to 12 (one entire modest head of choy sum). Even so, it was pretty meaty. The meat was delicious, so this wasn’t a problem. But I did find myself wishing there were some more of that yummy choi sum in the serving bowl when I went back for seconds, and there were only a few lonely pieces left. So for those of you who side with me on the veg-to-meat ratio issue, allow me to recommend two modest heads of choy sum, more on the order of 24 ounces, along with the 12 ounces (I mean, c’mon, almost a pound?!?) of chicken.
Minor quibbles, really, and excellent recipes. The sauce of the chicken dish alone was worth the price of admission. I look forward to cooking from Breath of a Wok again tomorrow night!