Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

149. Chicken Long Rice p.247


The recipe

The Book is at it again. I’m beginning to understand that when the blurb before the recipe mentions comfort food, I’m in for a boring dinner. This time it’s comfort food, Hawaiian style.

I’ve just started to get to know Hawaiian food through a few of the recipes in The Book. I don’t have a good sense of it, I’m not clear on what they’re going for, or trying to be. They’re all a little bit odd, using unexpected ingredients, in initially strange combinations. I get the sense that there’s an underlying culinary theory that just hasn’t been explained to me, and if I could tune into it, all these dishes would just come together. I visited my aunt in Hawaii several years ago, but we mostly ate Korean barbecue, and Japanese soups. I missed out on the luau experience, without even trying the cheesy pupu platters and grass skirts kind. I’d dearly love to be invited to someone’s back yard for the real deal. Maybe thinking of this luau classic as fortification for a night of hard partying gets me a bit closer to groking it.

The recipe is really straightforward. You start by simmering chicken thighs with ginger and salt, then let it cool. You then remove the skin and bones, and shred the meat. The broth gets strained, and brought to a boil with water, bouillon cubes (not stock), onion, and dried shiitakes. You then add bean thread noodles, cook for a few minutes, then allow the dish to sit for half an hour while the noodles absorb the broth. You then add the chicken, reheat the soup, and stir in scallions just before serving.

The preparation went easily, except for cutting up the bean thread noodles into 3 inch lengths. Those things are incredibly tough. I’ve never used them before, and I was expecting that they’d break apart like rice noodles, but I practically had to get the power tools out to get the job done. Kitchen scissors were an abject failure, my chef’s knife just turned on the noodles and tried to cut me, and hitting them with a cast iron frying pan made me feel better, but inflicted very little damage. In the end my bread knife did the job, but sent little bits of adamantium noodle all over the kitchen. Next time I think I’ll get out the pruning sheers.

After all that noodle cutting effort, I was hoping for a tasty dish, unfortunately this was as bland as it gets. You’d think that ginger and mushrooms would bolster the chicken and make a satisfying soup, but all that flavour just disappeared. It tasted like a weak broth, with a hint of ginger, and some washed out watery chicken chunks. I liked the noodles quite a bit, they had a fun texture, and they seemed to concentrate what little flavour there was in this dish. This recipe makes a whole lot of very bland soup, so I had to get creative with the leftovers. Stirring in some sriracha chile sauce, and swirling in a beaten egg improved things considerably.

Another lesson I’m learning about Hawaiian food is that the name of a dish is a pretty poor clue as to what you’ll be served. Chicken long rice is indeed made with chicken, but the rest of the name is a mystery. Maybe I’m just missing the point of this dish, but as it stands the only way I’d make it again is if I was serving someone on their deathbed and even the slightest titillation or elevation of their heart rate could push them into the great beyond. Those of us with many good years ahead can spend our dinners more wisely.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

70. Chow Fun with Chinese Barbecued Pork and Snow Peas p.249


The recipe.

This is the stir fry I mentioned a while back. It called for leftover Char Siu as an ingredient. The stir fry alone is competent, but not exceptional. The char siu is what makes the dish. The stir fry is very restrained in it’s selection of vegetables, just snow peats, scallions, and bean sprouts. This is cooked up with rice noodles, and the char siu. The flavourings are a fairly standard combination of chicken stock, oyster sauce, soy, sake, sugar, garlic, ginger, and sesame oil. All good stuff, nothing hard to find, and quite well balanced. This stir fry is the closest to Chinese take-out I’ve ever made at home. I’ve made stir fries I’ve liked better, but this was the most authentic if you’ll permit me to stretch that word to it’s breaking point.

The cooking directions seem a bit backwards to me. The recipe fries the noodles in the wok first, then adds the vegetables and aromatics and sauces. One of my favourite things about stir fry is the way the vegetables get seared on the outside, but remain crisp inside. In this method the noodles prevent the veg from ever really making contact with the bottom of the wok, so they end up steamed. That’s not so bad, but I missed the caramelization.

Once the frying is done the stock, oyster sauce, soy, sake, sugar mixture is added, boiled and thickened with corn starch. This did a great job of producing that take-out style slick glossy texture, and made them more fun to eat.

I was a bit surprised to see that the recipe called for a wok. Home wokery seems to have fallen out of favour in the last decade or so (Cook’s illustrated would have us throw them out). The objection is that wok cooking is an extremely high heat cooking method, and that our ranges (even top of the line gas burners) can’t pump out the BTUs necessary to do the technique justice. I’ve seen Alton Brown get around this by setting a round bottomed wok on the industrial sized burner of a turkey deep-fryer, or over a charcoal chimney starter. I have a large round-bottomed stain-prone steel wok that I enjoy cooking with on my electric burner, even if it doesn’t have the benediction of Chris Kimball. I like the size and shape more than its heat distribution properties. I enjoy having room to move the food around without slopping things over the sides. I’m a fan of my wok, but I’ve felt like it was my dirty little secret. It’s nice to see The Book validate my cooking lifestyle choice.

If you have Char Siu in the freezer this recipe takes 20 minutes, and tastes great. I’d like to have a control condition stir fry though. I feel like the Char Siu recipe was so good it could make any stir fry delicious. However, if you’re feeling like DIY take-out food this dish is the way to go.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

59. Fresh Fettuccine p.210


Sorry, no recipe

I made this fettuccine using the Basic Pasta Dough recipe. It’s kind of a silly recipe as it could be replaced with the words “follow the instructions that came with your pasta machine”. Basically it involves dividing the dough into 8, and working each piece through the widest setting of the rollers a few times, then progressively narrowing the rollers until the pasta is pretty much translucent. Then the pasta is allowed to dry for half an hour, before being run through the fettuccine slicing attachment.

This process worked fairly well. I was using a roller that attaches to the drive shaft of my mixer, and it took a bit of playing around to get the mixer speed vs resistance to offer it right. I had pasta bunching up on one side, or getting too thick in sections, for the first few pieces I put through. Once I got the hang of it it was easy and fun though.

As I mentioned before the taste of the pasta wasn’t that different from dried packaged stuff. In an application like this I would probably stick with the dried unless I was having foodie friends over. It’s nicer to say that you made your own pasta, but I honestly don’t taste that much of a difference. I’ve read that the difference comes in the way the past interacts with a sauce, but I’m not clear on which way it’s different. I couldn’t tell you which one is superior either. I’d say in it’s basic form this fettuccine is probably more effort than it’s worth (which is in no way a comment on the worth of making your own pasta, just fettuccine). However, getting the technique down is certainly worth it. I can imagine all sorts of fun additions you could make to the dough and integrate into the pasta. Maybe some flavourings? perhaps substituting some fancy flour for standard AP? how about some colouring agents? a little beet juice and you’d have a delightfully purple dish.

This was a good launching pad, and fun to make. I’d suggest everyone get around to making fettuccine at least once in their lives, but it’s absolutely not worth the effort for a Tuesday night supper.