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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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.
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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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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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