07.21.08
Posted in american, cooking, desserts, food, fruit, how to, ingredients, kitchen learning, original recipes at 8:08 am by Hanne Blank
I can’t be the first person who has wondered why the “forbidden fruit” of the Garden of Eden has always been assumed to have been an apple. I mean, apples aren’t exactly native to the Fertile Crescent. But more to the point, I think that if one takes as writ that the no-no-berry was an apple, it may mean that one has never properly reveled in the seductive virtues of cherries. Not that apples aren’t wondrous things. They are (and believe you me you’ll hear about them plenty when apple season rolls around). But really good fresh cherries, well… they’re just a whole different mouthgasm.
It may be that I inherited my love of cherries from my maternal grandmother. She is, in fact, the reason I started canning cherries every summer. She loves cherries, and especially sour or “pie” cherries, enormously, and eats them with huge enthusiasm in virtually any form: fresh, frozen, dried, canned, in syrup, as jam, as ice cream, whatever she can get her paws on. When she was younger and I was quite a bit younger still, she always seemed to have home-canned cherries on hand because she put some up every summer during the brief window when they were at their best. But by and by we both got older, and she eventually stopped canning as her house got emptier and her kids’ and grandkids’ lives got busier, and, I suspect, as she got to feeling less willing and able to haul around big pots of bubbling fruit and spend hours ministering to huge steaming cauldrons, glass jars, and a thousand and one jar lids.
Knowing how much she loved cherries, my mother and I would always try to remember to take her a big jar of Greek cherry preserves when we visited her — the Greeks use tart enough cherries, and not too much sugar, the way my grandmother prefers her cherries. But really, boughten is never quite the same as home-canned, and you can’t get the people at the factory to tailor the amount of sugar in the syrup to be precisely the way you like it. So I took it upon myself to become my grandmother’s canned pie cherry connection. Every summer but one since then, a year when the cherry harvest was very poor due to drought, I have canned cherries and given about half of what I can to her.
A few years ago, she acknowledged my cherry-canning role in her life by giving me her old, well-used cherry pitter, a 1950s-era piece of German engineering that does an admirable if not completely comprehensive job of knocking the stones out of pound upon pound of cherries. It’s a lot quicker than stoning them with a hairpin, which is what I do when I’m pitting only a pie’s worth of cherries, and having a pitter saves me untold repetitive stress injury when I’m stoning more than the five cups required for a pie. As it did this weekend, when my Belovedary and I went out to Larriland Farm, our favorite of the regional you-pick farms, and picked close to 35 pounds of pie cherries for the annual cherry jubilee.
This, I should note, is not even the whole of it. This plastic container will house an entire bundt cake with room to spare, but it’ll only hold about 25 pounds of pitted cherries and their juice. We had to put the rest in a separate container.
The first thing I did with my cherries, however, was not to can them. Instead I heeded nature’s call and made a pie.
It was very very hot and humid, near a hundred degrees, and so of course my pie crust refused categorically to behave despite having been chilled in the refrigerator for a bit. It kept going to pieces the instant I tried to move it to put it in the pan, so I decided to fall back to the eternal piemaker’s default position: slapping the broken pieces of rolled out crust into the pan as it was possible, pressing the overlapping edges together so it wouldn’t leak too much, and generally doing a yeomanly job of working with what you have to work with. I have had to learn to call the results of such pie crust shenanigans “rustic,” you see, for despite the inherent untruth in claiming that any farmwife worth her salt wouldn’t laugh her nipples off at the idea that she’d ever lower herself to serving (let alone photographing and putting on the internet!) a pie whose crust looked like it had had an interaction with the business end of an outboard motor, lots of people seem to have been decieved into thinking that “rustic” necessarily means that things are a bit unfinished, rough around the edges, or downright ragged, and furthermore that this represents an added bonus of “authenticity” and “realness.” I have in point of fact been in bakeries where a “rustic” apple galette cost twice what the presumably urban apple pie did, despite the fact that they were basically the same damn dessert and the “rustic” version took less skill and expertise to create, what with not having to trim or crimp the piecrust and all.
I have, as may be obvious, some issues with this. On the other hand it lets me smile when I serve a pie that is rather less pretty than I would ideally prefer, and have my guests ooh and ah over it, so I suck it up and claim rusticity.
If you would also like to claim rusticity — although honest, it usually doesn’t behave so badly, and won’t if your kitchen is cooler and less humid than mine was — my basic recipe for a slightly sweet double-crust pie crust (for a 9 or 10 inch pie plate), which I use for fruit pies where the fruit is slightly tart, is as follows:
Sweet Pie Crust (double crust for 9-10 inch pie)
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
4 Tablespoons sugar
10 Tablespoons butter or vegan margarine (I like Earth Balance, do not use tub margarines, though, as they have too high a liquid content), diced and very cold
10 Tablespoons solid vegetable shortening (e.g. Crisco), diced and very cold
5 Tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons ice water
Stir the dry ingredients together. Cut in the two fats with two knives (if you are seriously old-school, which I am not), or a pastry blender until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal. Add the water a tablespoon at a time, incorporating it with a fork and using a folding motion. Since the water content of flour varies, it may come together before you have added all the water. When it comes together, keep working the dough with your fork to incorporate as much of the rest of the dryish mixture as you can that way without using your hands (the heat from your hands liquifies the butter, which impairs the texture). Only if you absolutely have to should you use your hands to press/knead in the remaining bits of fat/flour mixture.
Cut it in slightly uneven halves (one “half” should be a little bigger than the other), shape into discs about 5 inches diameter, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 20 minutes or so to let the dough hydrate evenly and to re-chill the butter. When you go to roll it out, the bigger half is for the bottom crust and the smaller is for the top crust. If you have left it in the fridge for more than about a half an hour you will need to let it warm up for 5-10 minutes before you roll it or it will just crumble and you will be sad.
Of course, now that you’ve got the crust made, you might as well fill the pie, right? Fortunately fresh fruit fillings go together quickly, assuming you’ve already prepped the fruit. Since we’d already done our pitting, making the filling was (if you’ll pardon my saying this) easy as pie. There are plenty of ways to make cherry pie filling, but this is mine, a slight variation on my grandmother’s version.
Filling for Cherry Pie
5 slightly heaped cups fresh pitted tart cherries, juice drained off
1 cup sugar
5 Tablespoons Minute Tapioca
1/4 teaspoon almond extract
1/4 teaspoon (or so) nutmeg, freshly ground preferred
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Toss fruit with sugar, tapioca, and flavorings/spices. Let stand about 10 minutes before filling pie crust. Stir again to thoroughly distribute sugar etc. before filling the pie crust.
Note: if you do not have Minute Tapioca, but do have regular pearl tapioca, just put 6 T of pearls in your blender jar or (clean!) coffee grinder and whiz until it is mostly powder with only a small percentage of tiny pieces. That’s all Minute Tapioca is anyway, really, is tinier pieces of regular tapioca.
I know that some people like to thicken their pies with flour or cornstarch, but I have never found them as reliable or as clear-tasting as tapioca. Do be aware that tapioca thickens, in part, as it cools, so pies will still bubble over sometimes, and will also still be runnier/juicier when they are warm than when they are cool. If you like a firmer pie filling, then by all means wait until the pie is completely cool.
Because we’d also gotten blueberries at the farm, and I was heating up the oven for cherry pie anyway, I decided also to make a blueberry pie. It was a little rustic, too.
My blueberry pie filling is slightly different to my cherry pie filling.
Filling for Blueberry Pie
6 cups fresh blueberries, washed, cleaned, and dried
1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar, depending on sweetness of the blueberries
5 Tablespoons MInute Tapioca
1 teaspoon ground dried lemon peel or the zest of 1/2 fresh lemon, minced fine
1 teapoon ground cinnamon
juice of 1/2 fresh lemon, strained
Toss berries with sugar, tapioca, and spices/zest. Add lemon juice and toss again. Pour directly into pie crust (does not need to stand).
These pies, with tall glasses of iced tea, served as a truly decadent lunch for us and for our friends who came over in the afternoon to share in some canning. They’d made a sour cherry compote that they wanted to put up, and we, of course, had a fairly large quantity of cherries to process. (And for anyone clucking their tongues at the thought of people eating pie for lunch, I’m just sorry for you that you’ve evidently never had the chance to eat fresh warm homemade fresh fruit pie as a meal, because if you had, you wouldn’t be making that face. Which you should probably stop doing before it freezes that way and you have to go through the entire rest of your life looking like someone just took a shit on your carpet. I’m just sayin’.)
And so we did. The large jars are quarts, the small jars with the white caps are twelve-ounce jars, and the small jars with the gold caps are pint jars. My grandmother gets all the small jars of cherries. The darker jars at the right end of the counter are the cherry compote jars. Plus there were almost three quarts of cherry juice left over, but I didn’t bother canning that, just poured it into refrigerator jars… and into me, and my Belovedary, and our guests, over ice.
Come February or so, when I am going a little insane because there just isn’t any fresh fruit in the market worth eating that hasn’t been shipped 10,000 miles (and I’m sorry but I just have problems eating supposedly “fresh” food that is better-traveled than I am), I will be able to head down to the cellar and come up with a couple of jars of cherries and, if I so choose, make myself a pie in the middle of the winter. Or possibly I will do exactly the same thing that my grandmother does with the jars I give to her, and just sit down, pop off the lid, and eat them with a spoon.
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07.08.08
Posted in cooking, food, how to, kitchen learning at 5:22 pm by Hanne Blank
Tonight I am going to be giving a wok lesson to my friend and wonderful houseguest, A. She is a brilliant and inventive cook in her own right, experienced and adventurous and technically adept, the kind of person who, walking through a fish market with you, will point to some particularly nice-looking whole fish and comment that she’s always wanted to make “that dish where you make a whole steamed salmon and replace the scales with scales made of cucumber.”
This makes her both a perfect person to whom to give a wok cooking lesson, and a very daunting person to whom to give a wok cooking lesson… because you know she’ll actually be trying to use the information you impart, which means you’d better get it right and present it in a way that is useful.
Thus I am writing down a few notes, so that hopefully the salient things I wish to impart to her about using the wok will be at the forefront of my mind in an hour or so when we meet up in the kitchen. On the theory that these notes might be useful to some of you (or that those of you more experienced and knowledgeable than I might have things to add or clarifications to make).
Notes On The Wok Itself
- The wok is concave for a reason. It concentrates heat and makes it easy to keep food moving. One may stir-fry in a flat-bottomed pan, and indeed some people prefer to, but it is considerably more difficult because the food simply does not move around in the vessel as gracefully or easily.
- Woks have three basic zones when in use. The very bottom of the wok, the portions where the flame actually kisses the metal, is hottest and is where you do 90% of your cooking. The next 2-3 inches up the sides of the wok are hot, but not as much so as the bottom center. They are a good place to let tougher foods, or larger pieces of foods, sit for a bit if they need longer cooking times. Finally the upper edges of the wok are the coolest part of the wok. They are a good place for things to rest if you don’t really want them to cook too much more but you do want them to stay hot, for instance, while you prepare a sauce in the bottom of the pan. Pay attention to these three zones of the wok while you cook and you can take good advantage of the temperature differentials. (I am particularly fond of finishing/thickening sauces in the bottom of the wok while the cooked solids stay hot on the wok walls, ready to be combined back into the sauce as soon as the sauce is ready.)
- Because the bottom center is where the heat is best, you want to pay attention to how much food is in the wok at any given time so that there is only so much food in the wok as will effectively be cookable in this bottom center portion of the wok. The right volume of food can be tricky to gauge, at first, with vegetables whose volumes reduce greatly during cooking, particularly mushrooms and leafy greens.
- Try not to use soap on your wok. A very stiff-bristled brush plus boiling water will get most things off of an even moderately well seasoned wok. After using your wok, clean it, then put it back on the heat to dry it. After the water has cooked off the surface, rub the wok all over (inside and out) with a few drops of vegetable oil (not nut or olive oil, the smoke points are too low) using a paper towel, then heat it until it just smokes, then turn off the heat and let it cool.
- To season a new wok, first wash the hell out of it with dish soap and very hot water to get rid of machine oil. Then roughly chop a large bunch of chives and stir-fry them in ample hot vegetable oil or lard until they are very well cooked. Discard the chives, and wipe the wok clean with a paper towel, wiping off all but the faintest trace of oil, but making sure that you wipe that sheen of oil over the entire wok, inside and out.
- Try not to let a wok sit for a lengthy period with liquids in it, and particularly not acidic liquids. As with cast iron pans, this can harm the season on the pan and may lead to rusting. If you do end up cooking highly acid liquids in your wok or letting it sit for a while with liquid in it, be sure that when you clean it, you dry it and oil it as above to protect the metal and restore the season.
Preparing Ingredients for Wok Cooking
- Prepare all ingredients and all sauces prior to beginning wok cooking. Wok cooking goes quickly. You don’t have time to wash and pare and chop and marinate and such while you are cooking. (No, really. I mean it.) Mise en place is not just a good idea, it’s the law.
- Ingredients, when chopped, should be of pieces of roughly the same size so that the cooking time for any given piece is approximately the same.
- Irregularly shaped pieces of chopped ingredients are often easier to stir-fry than uniform slices, as uniform slices often stick together along their cut sides.
- Strategize your mise en place according to cooking times. For instance, bok choy stems take longer to cook than the leaves, so if you cut the bok choy so that you have chunks of stem and pieces of leaf, put the leaves in the bottom of the bowl of uncooked bok choy, and the stem chunks on top, so that you can easily add the stems first so they can have extra cooking time. And so on.
- Place ingredients near the wok in the order in which they are to be cooked, if at all possible. Mushrooms take longer to cook than spinach leaves, for example, so if you are using them both in one dish, put the mushrooms closer to the wok because you’ll be adding them to the wok first.
- A cup or bowl containing broth or water, and a second cup/bowl containing a thin paste of cold water and either cornstarch or potato starch are invaluable, both for adding liquid to dishes that require it for optimal cooking and for creating or thickening sauces.
Wok Cooking Method Tips
- Always add cold or room temperature oil to a hot (just at the point of smoking) wok. Don’t add oil or food to a cold wok — it will spatter and it will stick. Heat the wok and then pour the oil in a circle around the walls of the wok about halfway up.
- Bring the oil up to heat before adding the food. How to tell how hot your oil is? Simple, stick an unvarnished bamboo chopstick tip in it. You can gauge the hotness of the oil by how rapidly bubbles form around the tip of the chopstick. The more bubbles, and the faster they appear, the hotter the oil. Alternately you can drop in a single small piece of minced ginger (not garlic, garlic burns too easily) or green onion and gauge from the intensity and rapidity of the bubbles that form around that.
- Aromatics are almost always added to the oil first, before any other food. In Chinese cooking this most often means ginger and/or garlic. Add the aromatics and stir them around in the oil briskly. Many cookbooks will tell you to cook the aromatics just until the scent blooms; I feel that this is a little conservative and prefer to cook the aromatics a few seconds more, until they begin to color. If you are not yet adept with the wok, stick with the scent cue, but eventually I encourage you to experiment with the color cue to see which you prefer. I find that the flavors develop more with the additional few seconds of heat.
- The stirring is just as crucial as the frying when you are stir-frying. Particularly when you have just added food to a wok, keep it moving in order to coat all the pieces as evenly as possible with the hot oil that will cook them. This is particularly crucial with things that soak up oil like mushrooms and eggplant, but is nearly as important with other ingredients, because the hot oil starts the cooking process and you want the individual pieces of food to all be cooked as simultaneously as possible.
- Stir-frying, dry-frying, and deep-fat frying in woks are all optimally done at very high temperature, the hotter the better without burning oil or food. This can be difficult to achieve on Western stoves, which lack the BTUs or the burner shape to optimally heat most woks. Two things that help keep the heat high are to be unafraid of getting the belly of the wok into the actual flame (don’t worry, it won’t hurt it) and to keep the amounts of food in the wok on the small side. Cooking in multiple smaller batches, if necessary, helps a lot, particularly with deep-fat frying.
- Do not be afraid to let residual heat finish cooking a dish for you. Particularly with delicate leafy vegetables, fish, and shellfish, all of which suffer badly with overcooking, it is almost always wisest to cook them until they are almost, but not quite, done, trusting that the carryover heat from that hot hot wok will finish the job for you as you put the food into a serving dish and get it to the table. It will. Thickened sauces, or particularly oily ones (some Chinese dishes are sauced solely with the highly-flavored oils/fats generated by their cooking process) will trap more heat, and keep it on the surface of foods, than more watery pan juices, whether they are rendered by the heat (like the liquid that renders from most vegetables when they are cooked) or added, like soy sauce, vinegar, etc. It is worth bearing in mind when considering how effective the residual heat will be and how much further it will likely cook the food.
Those are the basics. Some of it I learned by trial and error, some by reading, some by talking to Chinese cooks. I am really not that much more than a toddler in the grand scheme of Chinese cookery, given the intense, involved, detailed realm of expertise and knowledge that is the gastronomy of China, so there is quite a lot that I freely admit I really don’t know (yet!). But I do know that armed with the above information, a wok, and a bit of willingness to experiment, you can learn to cook pretty darned creditable, if not necessarily fancy, Chinese dishes at home.
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07.02.08
Posted in cooking, food, kitchen learning at 9:33 pm by Hanne Blank
The first time I encountered fried rice outside the confines of a Chinese restaurant, it was when my friend C. destroyed my wok with it.
We were undergraduates, and thus you may take it as writ that we were callow and just a bit reckless. This very much included an attitude toward cookery that was equal parts ignorance, ineptitude, and an unshakable faith that just about anything could be considered edible if one put enough soy sauce, ketchup, or cheese on it.
Thus did my friend C. attempt to make fried rice in the wok I had only recently bought for myself in Boston Chinatown, in the kitchen of an apartment I was renting in a neighborhood that still had a long time to wait for its first brush with gentrification, during a weekend when he was apartment-sitting for me while I was away. When I returned home, my wok was crusted with lumps of carbon black in spots, shining steely-grey in others. C. apologized, and said he’d had to take a break from scouring the burned stuff off, but he’d give it another scrub in a bit.
C. had, he explained, been making fried rice. For some reason, it hadn’t worked. He’d put oil into the wok, and then dry, uncooked rice. He heated it until the oil smoked, but it didn’t seem to be working. He turned down the heat, added a liberal quantity of soy sauce, and continued cooking, sure that if he just cooked it long enough, the rice and oil would somehow magically transform into something fragrant and savory.
I suppose “fragrant” is one word you could use to describe the scent of carbonized grain. But no vat at the Kikkoman factory could have contained enough soy sauce to render it savory.
My wok never did recover completely. No matter how C. scrubbed it, or how I did, it never heated evenly afterward. The black burned patches thickened as other foods I tried cooking in the wok clung to the speckles of char I hadn’t been able to get off, burned faster than I could scrape them away, then liberated themselves into my dinner in gritty black flakes like the Devil’s dandruff. Eventually I threw the wok away.
New woks solved the problem of uneven heating and charcoal specks. It took quite a bit longer, however, for me to become brave enough to attempt cooking my own fried rice. For years I read recipes for various versions, all of which seemed simple enough, and educated me amply on just where my friend C. had gone wrong (namely, right at the beginning: fried rice is made with rice that has already been cooked). I learned to cook dozens of other Chinese dishes with success, from simple stir-fried greens to homemade har gao (translucent shrimp dumplings), ji gai bao (paper wrapped chicken), and tea-smoked duck. I learned to make my own Sichuan-style pickles, Cantonese master sauces, and make enough jiao zi (potstickers) to feed a houseful of guests. Yet somewhere in the back of my brain I felt certain that fried rice had to be some sort of trick culinary question, that the instant I attempted it, some cosmic force of culinary retribution — the souls of a thousand Ming Dynasty epicures rising up to smite my round-eyed white bone demon kind for the mere existence of chop suey — would incinerate my wok on the spot, leaving me scraping away yet again at clots of carbohydrate as thoroughly carbonized as Han Solo.
In the end I wound up making fried rice by accident. I suspect that this may well have been how the dish began. In Chinese cooking, fried rice is not something one sets out to make, after all. It is the Chinese equivalent of making hash, a thing one does not merely with leftovers, but with the kinds of odds and sods of food that aren’t enough for even a full small serving, but are still sufficiently more than a mouthful that you’d feel wasteful throwing them away. It’s the thing you do when you have half an onion, and three tablespoons of peas, a handful of cooked asparagus stalks from the other night, two handfuls of spinach leaves, a third of a cup of leftover stirfried bok choy, the wings left over from that roasted chicken, and the leftover rice from two nights ago. Which was more or less what I had on hand when it dawned on me that if I threw it all into a hot wok with some garlic and ginger and a little oil, and seasoned it with a dribble of oyster sauce and a slosh of soy sauce and a liberal drizzle of sesame oil, it’d probably taste pretty good.
What it tasted like, in point of fact, was fried rice. Because it was. Really good fried rice, in fact, with a distinctly more varied and vegetal tone than any fried rice I’d ever eaten in a restaurant. The various seasonings I’d used on the components when I cooked them the first time — a hit of lemon pepper on the asparagus, a bit of sage and celery seed in the chicken — flirted with the garlic and onion and ginger, and mingled surprisingly smoothly with the oyster sauce and soy and sesame. Thrilled, I devoured the whole dish, and would’ve eaten more had there been any.
Since then fried rice has entered regular rotation in my kitchen. Any time I become aware that I have completely run out of empty plastic food storage containers in the smallest sizes because they are all in a ziggurat in the fridge, full of dribs and drabs of things, there is sure to be fried rice for supper. Fried rice is pretty much endlessly forgiving. I have yet to meet the savory leftover it could not accomodate — although it is true that I do not (due to casein allergy) eat dairy products, so I haven’t attempted to add anything silly, like scalloped potatoes or macaroni and cheese. I have made fried rice with cabbage, with corned beef, and with cauliflower, although not, it must be admitted, simultaneously. I’ve made it with freshly shelled peas (I only had a handful to work with). I’ve made it with the tail end of a bag of frozen okra. Some have been better than others, I grant you. But they’ve all been pretty good.
There isn’t much to the process of making fried rice. As with all Chinese cooking, you have to prepare all your ingredients in advance of heating the wok, chopping what needs chopping, mincing what needs mincing, right down to mincing your ginger and garlic, scrambling and shredding your egg(s) if you’re using them, sauteeing your half an onion or your three elderly mushrooms or whatever raw vegetables you’re trying to use up, and mixing your preferred blend of oyster sauce and soy sauce and sesame oil with a little bit of water or broth in a small bowl or cup so it is ready to add when the time comes. (Don’t ask me how much of whatever you are supposed to use. You’re supposed to use enough. Not too much. As much as you like. Do I look like a mind reader? They’re your leftovers and it’s your tastebuds. You figure it out.] Break up your leftover rice so that it isn’t stuck together in chunks. If you want to and you have one, slice up a green onion so you can sprinkle it over the top when it’s all done cooking.
To put it all together, heat the wok until it is very hot indeed, and add a healthy skosh of oil, coating the inside of the wok as well as you can. Add your ginger and garlic and stir, and as soon as the fragrance blooms, add the rice and toss it well, distributing the oil, ginger, and garlic thoroughly. Cook, stirring frequently, until the rice begins to color a little in a few places — then start adding your other ingredients, combining each one into the rice as you stir-fry. At the end, pour in your sauce, stir to combine, and let it all stand for a minute before you serve.
Okay, so maybe fried rice takes a little practice. Most of the alchemical cookery that turns scraps into meals does. After all, any fool with a decent cookbook and the willingness to follow directions can turn an ample supply of raw ingredients into a passable dinner. It takes a different approach entirely, and a whole lot more fluency in the kitchen, to take whatever scraps fall to hand and turn them into something tasty, nourishing, and satisfying. It’s worth the effort.
Just please, cook the rice first.
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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.)
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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.)
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