02.10.07
Posted in cooking, domesticity, geek, good things, original recipes at 9:02 pm by Hanne Blank
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.
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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.
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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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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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01.17.07
Posted in cats, cooking, domesticity at 7:31 am by Hanne Blank
Much of my night last night was spent frozen in one position by three opportunistic cats. One was sleeping on top of my hip, one was curled behind my knees, and the third was curled up under my chin and against my chest. While I am pleased that Kitty Detente has proceeded, after less than a week of them all being together in a currently-at-war Feline States can agree to put aside their differences long enough to live up to their reputation as body-heat leeches, one of these days I am going to be deeply enough asleep that I don’t know they’re there and I will roll over, whereupon I will be exsanguinated when my semiconscious carcass becomes the site of triple-threat kitty warfare caused by the undesired instantaneous collision of hostile forces due to shifting ground.
And now that I have done the needful and bolstered the Internet’s daily quota of cat-related content, I will fulfill the other of the Two True Purposes of the Internet by providing you a gratuitious bit of kitty porn in the form of Inspector Qiao’s spotty, stripey little sleepy belly:
Several tweaks to a basically standard molasses spice cookie last night have yielded a truly superior item. Try it, you’ll like it. If you like molasses spice cookies, that is.
Nearly Platonic Molasses Spice Cookies
4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons ground Ceylon cinnamon
3 1/2 teaspoons ground dried ginger
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cloves
1 teaspoon ground allspice
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/2 pound butter, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups molasses sugar (muscovado sugar would also work)
2 cups white sugar
generous 1/2 cup blackstrap molasses
2 large eggs
extra white sugar for rolling
Prepare pans by lining them with parchment paper or silicone baking sheets. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.
Sift together dry ingredients, set aside.
Cream butter and sugars until fluffy and uniform in color. Add molasses slowly while beating to incorporate evenly. Add eggs one at a time, beating after each addition.
Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients in 6 roughly equal portions, mixing thoroughly after each addition. Finished dough will be stiff but workable.
Roll dough into large-walnut-sized balls, roll balls in sugar, and place on pans, leaving ample space between them for spreading. Bake 18 minutes at 325, then remove promptly from oven and let cool completely on a cooling rack (about 10 minutes). Cookies will be exceedingly soft when removed from the pan, use of a thinbladed metal spatula is advised; they harden as they cool.
Make these at least 24 hours ahead of when you plan to serve them, and preferably even longer. Like many spice cookies their flavor improves given a few days’ time to bloom. The texture (crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside) should remain uncompromised for up to a week if they are stored in a dry box or tin with a little air circulation.
Makes about 4 dozen.
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