02.19.07
Posted in Chinese cookbooks, Hunan cuisine, Revolutionary Chinese Cooking, cooking, culture, kitchen learning at 9:42 pm by Hanne Blank
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.)
Permalink
02.17.07
Posted in Cantonese cuisine, Chinese cookbooks, cooking, kitchen learning at 8:46 pm by Hanne Blank
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.)
Permalink
02.08.07
Posted in Chinese cookbooks, Hunan cuisine, Revolutionary Chinese Cooking, cooking, culture at 9:31 pm by Hanne Blank
Another resoundingly successful meal derived primarily from Revolutionary Chinese Cooking. We are fortunate to have a very good local smokery near us, Barbara Lahnstein’s Neopol Savory Smokery, and since we can get our hands on smoked tofu and some of the best and most lovingly smoked bacon it has ever been my pleasure to eat, the choice to try the bacon and smoked tofu dish was a no-brainer.
It is an intensely winter-appropriate dish, consisting as it does of bacon, smoked tofu, chiles (see ‘em all in there?), and green onion; it is also a dish that you really must not try to eat without rice or it is easily too rich to be pleasant. Because the bacon is steamed first, then stir-fried, it has a lovely texture and is not greasy in that unpleasant mouth-coating way that bacon can sometimes have. No element of the recipe is optional: the chiles give it body and important top notes that balance an otherwise bass-drum dish, and the green onions clarify the flavors beautifully and brighten the sweetness of the pork and the misty-smoky notes of the smoked tofu.
The smashed cucumbers are a marinated dish, also from Revolutionary Chinese Cooking. They use a judicious dose of the chopped salted chiles that I made a week ago when this:
Was transformed into this:
And tonight they lent a lovely fruity-sour spiciness to this:
Lastly, I made a simple dish not in any of the cookbooks I am using these days, of spinach stirfried briefly with a goodly amount of garlic and ginger, and a simple 1:1:1 mix of dry sherry, sesame oil, and soy sauce. I had been thinking of a different hot vegetable dish but then I spied the spinach and realized that it needed to be used up sooner than some of the other veggies I had been contemplating. Fragility won over Chefly Idealism, in other words. I think that by preference, next time I make the bacon and tofu dish, I will make a spicy or vinegary cabbage or other brassica dish to balance out the unctuousness of the bacon/tofu. But the spinach worked too and it is always very tasty cooked this way, one of our favorite ways to eat spinach in this household — who cares if it’s mostly a vehicle for lots of ginger and garlic?
Permalink
02.05.07
Posted in Breath of a Wok, Cantonese cuisine, Chinese cookbooks, Hunan cuisine, Revolutionary Chinese Cooking, cooking, kitchen learning at 10:10 pm by Hanne Blank
Wow, that makes a really satisfying dinner.
Tonight I used two cookbooks, Breath of a Wok and Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province (hereafter RCC). The pattern we’ve been using, of two dishes to a meal for two people, with one of them being a meat-inclusive dish and the other being a vegetable-only dish, has been working out very well for us and even for our needs in terms of leftovers for lunches and so on. I knew I wanted to try the pork dish, since both my belovedary and I adore black beans, and since Dunlop characterizes the dish in question, Farmhouse Pork and Green Peppers (RCC p. 85) as being one of the homestyle classics of Hunan cuisine. Hard to go wrong with something so beloved, I figure.
I needed a strong, stand-alone vegetable dish to stand up to the pork and peppers. Gai lan, sometimes called “Chinese broccoli” but really a lot closer to rapini — eaten primarily for its stems and leaves, rather than the buds or flowers as with regular broccoli — seemed like the perfect thing, and since I had the Hong Kong style gai lan recipe (BoaW p. 140) in the list of recipes I’d shopped for over the weekend, I fired it up, with (I confess) a little extra ginger for the joy that’s in it.
It was a good pairing, the astringency and mild bitterness of the greens cutting the unctuousness of the pork perfectly. Watercress with garlic would’ve been another nice option for the same reason. The pork and peppers is deservedly well-loved. It’s rich, but not overly so, with the small quantity of pork belly providing moments of melting savory fattiness (with just a hint of bacony crunch) among the languid, sweet just-cooked-enough peppers and the nice lean pork loin I used for the main portion of the meat for the recipe. And oh, man, the black beans! The preparation was a far cry from the usual Cantonese mode of using them mashed into a paste for sauce, and it is really out of this world if you like black beans (but might, I caution, be a little offputting if you weren’t prepared for them or didn’t like them).
We’ll definitely be making this one again. Chances are good I will also try it with other meats. I think it’d be swell with turkey. And, in another direction, with shrimp.
Permalink
02.03.07
Posted in Breath of a Wok, Chinese cookbooks, cooking, culture, domesticity, kitchen learning at 9:53 pm by Hanne Blank
Tonight’s dinner was Uncle Sherman’s Home-Style Chicken and Vegetables (BoaW p. 69) and Virginia Yee’s Dry-Fried Sichuan String Beans (BoaW pp. 160-161).
My comment about homestyle Chinese dishes having very different meat-to-veg ratios than banquet or restaurant (and especially American restaurant) cooking? Well, I meant what I said, and if you want proof, look no further than Uncle Sherman’s chicken recipe, which produces a really mainstream, really tasty, really just textbook Cantonese dish. Ginger and garlic are both present in sizeable quantity, the meat is small in quantity and marinated in ginger and garlic and very little else, and a variety of fresh green veggies (plus the suave velvety meatiness of mushrooms for contrast) are put into play to carry the chicken along.
It’s pretty much the sort of dish that is comfort food for a lot of Cantonese: a simple stir-fry, lots and lots of green veg, plenty of ginger, plenty of garlic, nothing fancy at all. The bean sauce grounds it, a gentle, well-rounded bass to the treble of ginger and garlic and the great green chorus of broccoli, bok choy, mushrooms, and so on. Also, thanks to the high vegetable-to-meat ratio, it makes quite a lot of food. It was the first dish I’ve made from this book where I thought “gee, I hope it’s good, ’cause we sure do have plenty of it!” And it is.
Virginia Yee’s recipe for Sichuan-style string beans was a little weird. The title of the recipe actually calls it “Sichuan,” but I have to insist on adding the “-style” part, because the recipe calls for no fiery or numbing spice at all, and one or the other (if not both) are traditional in this dish in every Sichuanese recipe I’ve ever encountered. I confess I read the recipe three or four times trying to figure out where the chiles or Sichuan pepper came in, and only when I had gotten over my disbelief at not seeing them anywhere did I finally decide that no matter how well-meaning Ms. Yee may be, I could not bring myself to eat a dish of Sichuan-style green beans without any fire at all to them… I had been looking forward to it all day.
So, Ms. Yee, I apologize: I added a liberal quantity of crushed dried Aleppo pepper and a bit of another sort of Mystery Chile I had sitting dried in a jar in the cabinet, as well as substituting red chile oil for half of the sesame oil, and it was delicious. I am grateful to know that the green beans for Sichuan style beans need not be deep-fried for their first cooking. Dry-frying them (I used a heavy, huge cast-iron pan) is genius. I also concur that the splash of Chiankiang vinegar at the end is a great idea.
And speaking of Sichuan…
In preparation for the excursions we’ll be making into Sichuan and Hunanese cooking around these parts, one of my jobs today was to start the process of making salted chiles, which are used in a number of different ways. They need to sit for at least several days, and preferably longer, before you use them, so that the salt has the time to do its magic with the water in the peppers. My Belovedary took some pictures of the process and I will put them up eventually, but right now I am having trouble getting that to happen so it’ll have to wait. Suffice to say that it involved chopping a pound and a half of wicked, but gorgeous, long hot red chiles! Things are gonna be getting nice and hot here at the Little Purple Rowhouse That Could, just in time for a predicted cold snap. Excellent.
Permalink
« Previous entries