Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking (4 page)

BASIC PREPARATION

SOAKING

Some Chinese ingredients, such as dried mushrooms, dried tofu skin and dried shrimp, must be soaked in hot water from the kettle for 30 minutes or more before cooking.

SALTING

Vegetable ingredients that contain a lot of water, such as cucumber and kohlrabi, are often mixed with a little salt and set aside for 15–30 minutes to draw out some of the liquid, especially when they are to be used in cold dishes. They need to be drained well before use.

MARINATING

There are two main purposes to Chinese marinades. The first is to purify the flavors of meat, fish and poultry by using ingredients such as salt, Shaoxing wine, ginger and spring onion to dispel what the Chinese call “off tastes” (
yi wei
), or “fishy tastes” (
xing wei
). The second purpose is to enhance the flavor of ingredients before cooking: this kind of marinade usually includes salt or soy sauce, Shaoxing wine and a little starch-and-water if a silky texture is required. When the ingredients are cut into small pieces for stir-frying, this kind of marinade is usually added shortly before cooking. A small amount of oil is sometimes mixed into the marinade so the pieces of food won’t stick together.

BLANCHING

Vegetables may be blanched in boiling water before stir-frying to “break their rawness” (
duan sheng
). With leafy vegetables, this wilts them and reduces their volume, which makes stir-frying much easier. With crisp-fleshed vegetables, blanching speeds up the stir-frying and makes them easier to handle in the wok. Some vegetables, such as Asian white radish, may be blanched to dispel bitter or peppery tastes. Take care not to over-blanch vegetables so they retain their crispness.

Meat and poultry are sometimes blanched before cooking, for clearer stocks or stews. For stews and cold, cooked meats, you may save time by just rinsing them under the hot tap, or omitting the blanching altogether and simply skimming the liquid very carefully after you have added your meat to the pot and brought it to a boil. For a clear stock or soup and a really professional finish, it’s essential to blanch your meats: bring them to a boil in a pot of water and boil for a few minutes to allow impurities to rise to the surface. Throw away the blanching water, rinse the meat carefully under the tap, then cover with fresh water to cook.

USING A WHETSTONE

It is vital to keep your knives extremely sharp. To use a whetstone, wet it and rub with a drop of detergent. Lay it on a damp cloth, at right angles to the edge of a work surface. Lay the knife on its side, diagonally across the whetstone. Raise the top of the blade about a finger’s width from the surface. Draw the blade from the bottom right corner of the stone to the top left, so its entire cutting edge, from one end to the other, is drawn across the stone (
see photo
). Repeat 10 times. Turn the knife over, raise the top by a finger’s width again, and draw the blade from the top left corner of the stone to the bottom right, allowing the entire edge to be drawn across the surface. Repeat 10 times. If your knife is fairly blunt at the beginning, begin by using the coarser side of the stone, then repeat with the finer side.

For best results, sharpen knives little and often. Rinse the blade, and dry well. If you are using a carbon steel, use paper towels to rub it with oil after washing or sharpening, to prevent rust.

BASIC COOKING TECHNIQUES

STIR-FRYING

Stir-frying is the mainstay of Chinese home cooking. Quick and efficient, it preserves the crispness and nutritional richness of vegetables, as well as the tender succulence of meat and poultry.

The basic process

1
|
Prepare all your ingredients before you begin.

The main ingredient should be cut and marinated; ingredients chopped; sauces mixed; and any other seasonings you need laid out close to the wok. Make sure you have a serving dish on hand.

2
|
Season your wok.

Add a little oil to your wok, swirl around, heat until smoking, then pour off into a heatproof container. This essential step seals the cooking surface so ingredients do not stick and leave a sediment that will burn before the dish is ready.

3
|
Add your cooking oil and swirl it around, then immediately add aromatic seasonings such as chillies, ginger and garlic.

Stir-fry these until fragrant, which will take seconds. Trust your nose to tell you when they are ready. Do take care not to let the oil overheat before you add your seasonings, or they may burn.

4
|
Add your main ingredient and stir-fry briskly.

If the main ingredient is meat or poultry, separate the pieces.

5
|
Add any other ingredients.

Add a sauce if there is one. If you are adding spring onion greens or vinegar, which only require a moment’s cooking, add them at the end when the other ingredients are ready. Off the heat, stir in a tiny amount of sesame oil, if using, and turn the food on to a serving dish.

With some stir-fries, one or more ingredients may first be blanched or separately stir-fried before the main dish is cooked. For example, if you are cooking fine slivers of meat with a robust, crunchy vegetable that takes longer to cook than the meat, the vegetable may be blanched or stir-fried separately to “break its rawness,” then returned to the wok after the meat slivers have been separated in the hot oil. This way, the meat will not be overcooked by the time the vegetable is ready.

With other stir-fries, all the ingredients are just added in sequence to the wok: this is known in Sichuan as a “small stir-fry” (
xiao chao
), which means a simple, basic stir-fry.

Do not overload your wok, or you won’t have enough heat to cook the ingredients properly.

STEAMING

Steaming has been used in Chinese cooking since the Stone Age and remains one of the most important cooking methods. It is a wonderful way to preserve the gentle succulence of fish, poultry and seafood, and the essential taste of any ingredient.

A bamboo steamer is the perfect piece of equipment, but it is not essential: you can also use a stainless steel or aluminium steamer-saucepan of the kind used in Western cooking, or you can steam food in your wok without a bamboo steamer (tap
here
).

Make sure your wok is stable before you use it for steaming: a wok stand is essential when using a round-bottomed wok.

Using a bamboo steamer

Choose one that will fit in your wok, with the appropriate lid. To hold your ingredients, select a heatproof dish that will sit nicely inside the steamer, with ⅜ in (1cm) or more around the edge to allow steam to circulate. Make sure it’s deep enough to hold the juices that will emerge.

Place the steamer in the wok, then put in your dish of ingredients. Fill the wok with boiling water to just above the base of the steamer and bring to a boil over high heat.

Cover the steamer with its lid and steam. Make sure the wok does not boil dry: top up with hot water from the kettle if necessary.

Re-season the surface of a carbon steel wok after steaming, to prevent rusting.

Using a wok without a bamboo steamer

Lay a metal trivet in the base of your wok. Make sure it is stable. Add boiling water from the kettle, filling to within ⅜ in (1cm) of the trivet. Cover with a wok lid and bring to a boil over a high flame. Lay your dishful of ingredients on the trivet, cover with the hot wok lid and steam.

If you don’t have a trivet, you can improvise: one of my Hong Kong friends recommends using an empty tuna can, with top and base removed, instead! Another suggests using three wooden or bamboo chopsticks, their ends meeting in the base of a wok, as a stand for the dish.

In Hunan, where steaming is widely used, they often steam a small stack of bowls in a tall pressure cooker, with a trivet at the bottom and chopsticks separating the bowls.

Using a steel or aluminum steamer-saucepan

Fill the base of the pan with water, cover and bring to a boil. When the lid is hot, raise it, lay your dishful of food in the steamer layer, cover and steam.

Steaming without a steamer or wok

Any broad saucepan with a lid can be used. Place a trivet in the base, add water, lay on a dish of food, cover and steam.

DEEP-FRYING

Deep-frying is not an everyday method in Chinese home cooking and very few recipes in this book demand it. It is, however, ideal for some foods, including eggplant.

To use a wok for deep-frying, make sure it is completely stable (use a wok stand with a round-bottomed wok). A two-handled wok is more stable than a one-handled wok.

Ideally, use an oil or sugar thermometer: if you don’t have one, it’s useful to know that a stale cube of bread will brown in 60 seconds at 350°F, ideal for deep-frying.

You need less oil to deep-fry in a round-bottomed wok than in a saucepan. If you cook in small batches, you can use as little as 1-1½ cups (300–400ml) oil.

Long-handled cooking chopsticks are handy for moving ingredients around in the oil. Remove food from the oil with a bamboo strainer or perforated spoon.

OIL-SIZZLING

I wanted to make separate mention of this method (
you lin
), used very widely in Cantonese cooking, because it is so simple and quick and produces such devastatingly delicious results. It works like this: you blanch or steam your main ingredients (perhaps a whole fish or some leafy green vegetables), and lay them out neatly on a serving plate. You scatter them with slivered spring onions and ginger.

You heat a little oil until it emits a thin smoke, then pour it over the onions and ginger, which sizzle and smell wonderful. You then pour over soy sauce, usually diluted with hot water.

This sounds ridiculously easy—which it is—but it’s one of the finest Chinese cooking methods. It adds a sublime edge of flavor to good-quality ingredients, while allowing their natural flavors to shine through. Blanched Choy Sum with Sizzling Oil, and Steamed Sea Bass with Ginger and Spring Onion, are two classic examples in this book.

SLOW-COOKING

There are many different ways of slow-cooking in the Chinese kitchen: one that features prominently in this book is “red-braising” (
hong shao
), in which ingredients are slow-cooked with soy sauce and/or other deeply colored flavorings.

Traditionally, Chinese kitchens lacked ovens, so all cooking was done over a stove (people went to specialist food shops to buy roasted or baked goods). For this reason, most Chinese stews and soups are cooked on the stovetop, on a very low flame. A slow oven achieves much the same result with greater convenience and, since most Western kitchens have ovens, I’ve given instructions for using them where appropriate.

PLANNING A CHINESE MEAL

A Chinese meal consists at its simplest of rice, noodles, bread or other grain foods (known as
fan
or, literally, “cooked rice”), served with shared accompanying dishes (known as
cai
, which literally means “vegetables” or “greens”). At their simplest, these other dishes might be pickled vegetables or fermented tofu; at their most extravagant they might include dozens of concoctions made with rare and expensive ingredients. A typical home-cooked meal for most people, however, consists of a few simple dishes made mainly with vegetables, with relatively small amounts of fish, meat or poultry.

Cold dishes are normally laid on the table at the start of the meal, and hot dishes added as they emerge from the stove. A soup may be served alongside other dishes, or at the end of the meal; at home, it will normally be drunk from the same rice bowl used for the other food. Dessert is absent as a concept in Chinese culinary culture. Some sweet dishes may be served alongside savory dishes at main meals, particularly in places like Suzhou in the east, while sweet snacks are eaten from time to time across China and sugar is used here and there as a seasoning in savory dishes. Most meals end with fruit rather than sweetmeats.

When I’m cooking Chinese food for friends at home, I never make a dessert, but serve fresh fruit and Chinese tea after the meal, with dishes of chocolates or Middle Eastern sweetmeats on the table for those who crave something sweet.

Some of the dishes in the rice, noodle and dumpling chapters can serve as entire meals on their own, with perhaps just a salady cold dish as an accompaniment. Otherwise, the dishes in this book are intended to be served with bowls of rice or noodles, as part of a fuller Chinese meal.

When deciding what to cook, try to ensure that you have a variety of colors, flavors and textures on the table, because much of the pleasure of a Chinese meal lies in dipping back and forth between contrasting dishes. A spicy stir-fry can be balanced by a gentle soup; a ruddy, full-flavored Sichuanese braise with a fresh green vegetable; a dry dish with something sauced. If you have several lightly flavored dishes on offer, try to include one that is either salty or spicy or soy-rich (strongly flavored dishes go particularly well with plain steamed rice).

Do try to avoid constructing a meal consisting entirely of stir-fries that you will have to cook at the very last minute, which can be exhausting. When feeding a party of six, for example, try to include a slow-cooked dish that you can prepare well in advance and warm up slowly on a backburner, as well as one or two delectable cold dishes to serve as appetizers, so there is less for you to do at the last minute. Chinese people also like to serve a soup with every meal, which may be as simple as some good-quality stock with a few vegetable leaves and a little tofu, but Westerners don’t regard it as essential, so only include it if you want to.

A great advantage of the Chinese meal is that different dietary requirements can easily be accommodated with grace and ease. I often find myself cooking for diverse groups of people in which, for example, one person is vegetarian, one doesn’t eat any pork and so on, and it’s simple to keep everyone happy, because individuals just help themselves to those dishes that agree with them and avoid those that don’t. And, of course, dairy products are entirely absent from the vast majority of Chinese dishes. If you use tamari soy sauce, most dishes won’t contain any wheat either, so catering for friends who have these common food avoidances is no problem at all.