02.02.07
Posted in Breath of a Wok, Chinese cookbooks, cooking, culture, domesticity, kitchen learning at 9:21 pm by Hanne Blank
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.
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Posted in cooking, culture, geek, ingredients, kitchen learning at 8:10 am by Hanne Blank
Somebody asked me, in relation to the previous post, whether “dark” soy sauce was the same as “black” soy sauce.
This is a good question, and one that I had to wrestle with quite a bit when I was first learning Chinese cooking. After all, to us round-eyed folks there are usually only two varieties of soy sauce — maybe three. Regular soy sauce, “lite” sodium-reduced soy sauce, and possibly tamari, if one has encountered it.
(In truth there’s also the really awful stuff they put in packets and hand out in the cheapest of cheap Asian restaurants, which is more or less salt water darkened with caramel color, with no soybean or wheat flavor at all.)
I note that only two of these, regular soy sauce and tamari, are types traditionally used in Asia.
Soy sauce is a bit of a universe of its own, really. Japanese and Chinese approaches to the stuff are different. Other soy-sauce-using nations, like Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia (whose kecap manis is sweetened with palm sugar, yum!) or the Phillipines, also have national preferences in their soy sauce formulations, but Japanese and Chinese are the ones I use and thus the ones I will talk about here. I’ll start with what I know about the Japanese types because they are fewer in number and simpler to describe.
Soy sauce originated (so I read) in China, but the leading brands sold in North America are Japanese, with Kikkoman brewing sauce on American soil (quite heavy on the wheat, the American made Kikkoman, by the by). There are three basic types of Japanese soy sauces, and they differ based on the ratio of their ingredients, which are soybeans, roasted wheat, and salt. The soybeans and wheat are then fermented using an Aspergillus mold of which there are a couple of types, although loosely speaking they are all referred to in Japanese as koji.
Tamari is technically 100% soybeans, with no wheat. Or at least it should be, although I have seen several brands that contained wheat; it will in any event have the highest soybean-to-wheat ratio of all soy sauces. Originally this was the liquid produced as a byproduct of miso fermentation. It is very dark, very savory, and thicker and more opaque than what most people think of when they think of soy sauce. It has a very intense taste and is usually used in braising, stews, and other long-cooking dishes with other intense flavors. (It also rocks on popcorn if you use a spray bottle, just noting.)
Dark soy sauce (shoyu, koikuchi) is the “normal” Japanese soy sauce. It has a vibrant reddish-brown color and nutty and meaty notes along with the saltiness.
Light soy sauce (usukuchi) has a higher ratio of wheat to soy sauce, a paler more caramel color, and a significantly different taste. The salt presents itself more straightforwardly, so it may sometimes seem saltier on the tongue at first. But it also has a certain amount of sweetness from the wheat. This is apparently popular in some of the northern provinces in Japan. Also, some usukuchi types have amazake, sweet rice wine, added to them.
There are also apparently two other Japanese types, shiro shoyu or “white” soy sauce, and saishikomi or “twice brewed” soy sauce, but I have never seen or used either one. Shiro is supposed to be almost clear in color, composed primarily of wheat and salt, and employed in dishes where a brown or reddish color isn’t desired. Saishikomi uses koikuchi (regular soy sauce) instead of brine in the process of making new soy sauce, and is supposed to be very strongly flavored indeed, as a result.
Those are the basics. Most of the soy sauce sold in the USA is plain old koikuchi of one sort or another — some of it with reduced salt, the American “lite” soy sauce, but the same basic soybean-to-wheat ratios. Don’t let “lite” and “light” confuse you! If the color is the same as regular soy sauce, it’s just “lite,” with less salt; if the color is different, it’s actual light soy sauce, which has just as much salt if not more.
Now on to Chinese soy sauces. The Chinese prefer a robust soy sauce with plenty of soybeans involved. 醬油 is the Chinese generic term for what we call “soy sauce” if you are looking for it on bottles, by the way. Pronunciation will vary by dialect, but Mandarin is roughly “jiang you” and Cantonese, “see yau.”
Regular soy sauce, in China, is “sheng chow,” 生抽, (or jiangyou in Taiwan) characterized as “fresh” or “light.” It is roughly analogous to the Japanese koikuchi although typically more opaque.
Dark or “old” soy sauce is “lao chow,” 老抽, which is aged. In addition to the usual soybeans, wheat, and salt, it also contains molasses, which gives it a thicker (and sometimes viscous) texture and a distinctive taste. The sweet note of the molasses is very useful in certain recipes, but is a really good reason that it cannot be substituted for regular soy sauce, as well as an excellent reason that you wouldn’t want to substitute Japanese “dark” soy sauce for Chinese ones.
Thick soy sauce (醬油膏) is a whole different ball game. It comes in jars, not bottles, because it is too viscous to pour easily. It is not really a soy sauce type but instead a separate preparation that is made of regular soy sauce thickened with molasses and some sort of starch. Occasionally they also contain MSG, so read labels carefully if you want to avoid that. Thick soy sauce is used in dipping sauces and such where its texture is useful, I also have several recipes that call for it in sauces that will be used on cold noodles, where again the thicker texture helps the sauce cling to the food.
Flavored soy sauces: Chinese also use a variety of flavored soy sauces, of which the most popular is mushroom flavored, made with lots and lots of black mushroom and imparting a dense shiitake-fungal kick (brilliant, by the way, in the filling for stuffed eggplant). It is somewhat thicker than regular Chinese soy sauce and also contains some sugar that seems to potentiate the mushroom flavors.
The Japanese also use flavored soy sauces, of which the one I have seen and eaten most frequently is flavored with ponzu, a citrus sauce, used often with tataki and nabemono dishes.
And now you know everything I know about soy sauce!
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02.01.07
Posted in Breath of a Wok, Chinese cookbooks, cooking, culture, domesticity, geek, housekeeping, kitchen learning at 8:54 pm by Hanne Blank
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!
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