02.02.07
Breath of a Wok, meal 2
I cooked again from Breath of a Wok tonight, a Shanghainese-style dish and a Cantonese one. Both were excellent, and they paired together very nicely too, the ginger and vinegar of the Cantonese cabbage providing a bright contrast to the narrower range of flavors in the meat-centric pork and bean sprout dish.
The Shanghainese-style dish was Walter Kei’s Shanghai-Style Pork and Bean Sprouts (BoaW p. 87), a stir-fried dish that is very simple indeed, but quite sophisticated in that simplicity. In contrast to the chicken dish I made last night, I found that the proportions of bean sprouts to pork were spot on, eight ounces of pork to a pound of bean sprouts… a pound of bean sprouts, even with the heads and tails removed (a picky and time-consuming task made much more pleasant by having the audiobook of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything to entertain me), is a large pile of bean sprouts. I confess that I did bump up the quantity of garlic by a little bit, because that’s the way the cookie crumbled with regard to the number of cloves I peeled, but it was by no means overwhelmingly garlicky even so. It’s a very suave dish, just (black) peppery and garlicky enough to be interesting, with a lovely textural play between the matchstick cut of the pork, toothsome and yielding, and the brief instants of crunch of the bean sprouts.
The second recipe was a Sweet and Sour Cabbage (BoaW p. 146-147), Cantonese in style, a gingered stir-fry with a light Chinkiang vinegar sauce sweetened with plain sugar. I omitted the carrots, since my Belovedary is allergic, and increased the quantity of Napa cabbage instead. I also altered the cut of the cabbage somewhat, as I have a dislike for cooked cabbage that is too soft and the recommended 1/4-inch shred seemed highly likely to get softer than I wanted it to if it had to stand for more than a minute or two before it was served… residual heat is my particular bugbear when it comes to cooking and serving most vegetables, because it can really play hob with things if you’re sensitive to texture. So instead I chopped it into inch-wide strips, and it worked out beautifully.
One criticism I must make, having now cooked from Breath of a Wok twice, is that author Young has inexplicably chosen not to do what most Chinese cooks I know do, namely, to describe the preparation of the sauces and marinades for a given dish at the outset of a recipe. Instead they are described in the course of things, at the time that they are put into use. This is thoroughly unhelpful in a cuisine where the success or failure of a dish often depends on the speed with which it can be cooked over a very high heat — and perhaps doubly unhelpful in a book devoted to wok hay, the “wok chi” that imparts that particular and ineffably Chinese almost-too-hot sensibility to wok cooking, since really, that is all about the high high temperatures and fast, expert cooking.
Typically, traditionally, and most of all practically, Chinese cooks do not begin cooking until all their ingredients are prepared. Mise-en-place is a critical element of wok cooking, and close to critical in other modes of Chinese cooking like steaming. You simply cannot do it when the ingredients are not all prepared in advance. It will not work. Trust me, I know from having tried to outsmart 5000 years of Chinese cooks… it really truly does not work. Experienced Chinese cooks already know this, and will know to go through a recipe and prepare marinades and sauces as part of the mise-en-place.
An inexperienced cook will not. The way these recipes are written, it would be terribly easy for inexperienced cooks to ruin them with overcooking because of the need to stop in midstream to measure ingredients for sauces, mix cornstarch into liquids, and so on, so that flavoring mixtures could be added to dishes.
So: if you’re going to cook from this book, do not just read through the recipe to see what generally has to happen when. Parse out what goes into each marinade and sauce, and mix your marinades and sauces before you ever go near the stove.
Typically my pattern, when cooking Chinese cuisine, is to prep the spices, marinades, and sauces first, then prep the meat(s) since these are frequently marinated prior to cooking, and having them sit in the marinade a little longer than a recipe calls for isn’t going to hurt anything. Lastly I prep the vegetables. Then, and only then, am I ready to put fire under the wok. 80% of the time you spend on any Chinese dish has nothing to do with cooking it. It is largely prep work. But the beauty of doing it properly, and getting the prep done right, is that when you do step up to the wok, it goes like clockwork and you never end up wasting precious seconds trying to grind a spice or mix a sauce when you need to be focusing on what’s happening in your wok.
Bear that in mind as you read (or write, ahem!) recipes, and it all goes much more smoothly.