Tag: sake

Categories
The Book Vegetables

156. Dry-Cooked String Beans p.523


I couldn’t find a recipe for this one online.

I was in a frying mood the night I made these beans and the onion rings. The combination of a fried appetizer, and a fried main course was just a little too much. This stir fry was more than greasy enough all by itself.

In this dish trimmed green beans are deep fried in a wok for 30 seconds, then drained. You then drain off most of the oil, and build a stir fry starting with garlic, red pepper flakes, and ginger, then add ground pork. Once the pork is browned the beans go back in to reheat. A mixture of sugar, salt, soy sauce, sake, and sesame oil is then poured over top along with a handful of scallion greens and stirred to coat. Put this on a bed of sticky rice and you’ve got dinner.

The stir fry itself was totally delicious, it was an excellent balance of ingredients, just spicy enough, and wonderfully complex and arromatic. However, the stir fried beans were a bit weird and greasy. I trimmed the ends of the beans, so there was an open tube down the middle of them. Some of those tubes filled with oil during frying, and made the dish much greasier than I would have liked. It’s possible that my oil temperature dropped too far, and the pressure of escaping steam wasn’t enough to keep the oil out. If so, more oil, or smaller batches of beans would have taken care of the problem. The recipe says that the point of the deep frying is to lock in the coulour of the beans, but blanching, and shocking them would have done the same thing. The exterior of the beans took on a funny wrinkled texture, but they remained firm and crisp, and nicely green.

I’d happily make an adapted version of this recipe, but I think the deep fried green beans are better left behind. There are lots of recipes for dry-cooked beans out there, so I’ll presume it’s a well respected technique, and suggesting that they kind of suck is probably insulting someone’s Grandmother’s cooking, but they just weren’t my bag. The rest of the dish was excellent, and simply replacing the frying for a blanching would probably solve my only criticism of the recipe. If it had been less oily, it would have earned 4.5 mushrooms, but as it is, I can’t give it more than three.

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
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

62. Char Siu p.478

The recipe

This recipe was a bit of effort, but boy was it worth it. The ingredients are simple and readily available, and they come together in the most delightful way with the judicious application of heat. The recipe calls for a 1 pound boneless pork butt or shoulder. I bought a whole picnic ham (from the shoulder, but with bones and skin left on), and had to figure out how to butcher it myself. I tried leaving the skin on to see if it would end up edible, it didn’t, but no big loss. Score one for the scientific method.

In this recipe strips of pork are marinated in hoisin, soy, sake, honey, ginger, and garlic. The pork is then roasted on a rack in the oven over a pan of water. The marinade is cooked down, and used to baste the pork strips regularly throughout the cooking. It’s really like painting on layers of flavour. The water keeps things moist, and the marinade caramelizes into sticky gold. As the layers of marinade build up the caramel colour deepens it starts to get really difficult to wait for it to be done.

Because so much effort is put into getting as much of the marinade as possible to stick to the pork it ends up being quite intensely flavored. Sweet, salty, and perfumed with garlic and ginger. It’s meant to be one of many small dishes in a Chinese meal, and it’s powerful enough that you can’t eat too much of it. I absolutely loved it, but after about four slices I was finished. The recipe mentions that once made and frozen this pork becomes a valuable commodity, excellent for adding just a bit to a stir fry, or rice. I absolutely have to agree. I ended up with a good bit of leftovers, and I used it to full advantage. It was excellent in a cold sandwich, stirred into scrambled eggs, and as an ingredient in a stir fry from The Book.

Better than the dish itself was the thinking behind it. It’s loaded with the innovation and creativity of limited resources. It takes an inexpensive and unloved part of the pig, and brings out it’s best with some tenderizing and flavorful marinade. Then it goes to great lengths to use that marinade to best advantage. Better yet, the final dish makes a little meat go a long way. In a more reasonable food economy where meat is a valuable and limited resource a little bit of this pork could bring a lot of flavour to other dishes. You can probably get as much meat enjoyment from a little bit of this, as you would from eating a big steak.

Moving this dish in and out of the oven to baste it every few minutes was sticky and somewhat irritating work. I had to jurry rig a rack over pan system, and I came close to sending the pork for a swim in the water bath more than once. I didn’t enjoy cleaning up the little dribbles of marinade that seemed to get cooked onto every available surface, but I absolutely enjoyed the dish. Since is freezes so well I’d suggest doubling the recipe and keeping more of this stuff on hand than you think you’ll need.