Adventures with Kake

As I've said before, when I'm ordering for a group in a Chinese restaurant I always try to include at least one green vegetable dish. One of my favourite vegetables in this context is morning glory, also known as water spinach, water convolvulus, tong choy, ong choy, and no doubt many other names. In Mandarin, it's usually called 通菜 (tōng cài) or 空心菜 (kōng xīn cài), the latter of which, as I mentioned on Wednesday, has the splendidly gothic literal translation of "hollow-hearted vegetable". This is a pretty good description of it; it essentially consists of long, crunchy, hollow stems topped with long, thin, arrow-shaped leaves.

Depending on the other dishes in the meal, I might order it plainly stirfried (清炒/qīng chǎo), or perhaps with garlic (蒜茸/suàn róng) or ginger (姜汁/jiāng zhī); but if I'm after a more complex flavour I'll order it stirfried with fermented beancurd (腐乳/fǔ rǔ).

Fermented beancurd is basically AMAZING. I really wish I'd known about it when I was vegan. It's often described as "Chinese cheese", and the flavour is definitely reminiscent of cheese — in fact, I used some earlier this week as a lactose-free substitute for cheese in an egg dish. I've also been known to spread it on crackers for a snack with a glass of wine; its texture is a little like cream cheese, though its taste is much more assertive.

Water spinach with fermented beancurd is easy to make at home — I follow Helen Yuet Ling Pang's adaptation of a recipe by Ken Hom (edit, May 2011: though next time I think I'll try Carolyn J Phillips' suggestion of adding some sesame oil). But if you're not sure you'll like fermented beancurd, give it a go in a restaurant some time — you may be pleasantly surprised!

I briefly mentioned jellyfish in my post earlier this week on 海 (hǎi/ocean/sea). The Mandarin Chinese word for jellyfish is 海蜇 (hǎi zhé), literally "sea sting", referring to one of their more notorious characteristics. According to Wikipedia, the journey of a jellyfish from the sea to the table is quite an extended one, with processing taking up to 40 days. Happily, the jellyfish on sale in Chinese supermarkets has already undergone this processing. It's worth noting, though, that there are two kinds; one is ready to eat, but the other needs to be soaked in water overnight to remove the salt. I don't think there's any great advantage to the kind that needs to be soaked, so it's worth looking out for the ready-to-eat type.

Jellyfish has no flavour of its own, but it's great at soaking up other flavours and providing interesting texture to a dish. I find the texture is fairly similar to the cartilage in chicken feet, which I quite enjoy crunching on at dim sum outings.

On Chinese menus, jellyfish generally appears as a cold dish, shredded and mixed with a savoury dressing based on soy sauce, vinegar, and sesame oil. Sometimes the dish also includes chicken (雞/jī) and/or cucumber (黃瓜/huáng guā or 青瓜/qīng guā).

The chicken may be listed as hand-torn (手撕/shǒu sī), and the character 絲 (sī/shredded) may also appear in the name somewhere; all of the main ingredients are basically shredded, but sometimes this is left implicit. Other ingredients, such as sesame oil (麻油/má yóu or 香油/xiāng yóu), may or may not be listed specifically. Finally, the character 皮 (pí/skin) may also be appended to 海蜇, perhaps in reference to the thinness of the edible part. Hence, there's quite a lot of variation in the name of this dish; I've seen it variously as 海蜇手撕雞, 海蜇拌雞絲, 青瓜海蜇絲, 海蜇黃瓜, and 香油海蜇皮, among other names, including simply 涼拌海蜇 (liáng bàn hǎi zhé), literally "cold mixed jellyfish", usually translated as "jellyfish salad".

Sunflower's recipe for the dish includes both chicken and cucumber, and spices it up with fresh chillies and chilli oil. Ken Hom's Chinese Recipes has a plainer, simpler recipe, which simply involves dressing 225g jellyfish with 2 tsp soy sauce, 3 Tbsp sesame oil, 2 tsp white rice vinegar, and 2 tsp sugar, marinating for 30 minutes, then scattering over 3 Tbsp toasted sesame seeds. I can personally vouch for Sunflower's recipe, though I prefer it without too much chicken in.

Hand-torn cabbage (手撕包菜/shǒu sī bāo cài) is, as far as I know a Hunan dish (please correct me in comments if I'm wrong). I've seen it on the menu of two Chinese restaurants in London, both of which specialise in Hunan food (Golden Day in Chinatown and Local Friends in Golders Green), and there's a recipe for it in Fuchsia Dunlop's Hunan cookbook, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook.

As I mentioned on Wednesday, 手 (shǒu) means "hand". 撕 (sī) means to rip or to tear, so 手撕 is translated as "hand-torn". 包菜 translates as "wrapped vegetable"; it's similar to the white cabbage that people from the UK might be more familiar with, though according to the abovementioned Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, its leaves are wrapped slightly more loosely. (I actually wonder if pointed cabbage/hispi might be a better analog than white cabbage.)

TravelChinaGuide has a plausible-looking recipe for 手撕包菜, in which the cabbage is first blanched in boiling water and then stirfried with garlic, spring onion, fresh red chillies, chicken stock, vinegar, and soy sauce, before being finished with a little cornflour thickener. Fuchsia Dunlop's recipe is somewhat simpler; she skips the initial blanching, uses dried red chillies instead of fresh ones, omits the garlic, spring onion, stock, soy sauce, and cornstarch, and triples the quantity of vinegar.

TravelChinaGuide explains that one reason for tearing the cabbage instead of cutting it is that this is believed to better preserve the vitamin C in the vegetable; and also states that the dish is usually served late in a meal, after the meat dishes.

口水雞 (kǒu shuǐ jī) is a Sichuan cold dish of poached chicken pieces in a spicy sauce. I've already covered all the characters here; 口 (kǒu) means "mouth", and I posted about it earlier this week, 水 (shuǐ) means "water", and 雞 (jī) means "chicken".

口水雞 is often "amusingly" translated as "saliva chicken" (口水 does in fact mean "saliva"), but a better translation would be "mouthwatering chicken", referring to how delicious it is. Other translations I've seen include "poached chicken with chilli sauce", "Szechuan savoury hot spicy chicken", "tender boneless corn-fed chicken in an aromatic spicy herbal sauce", and "chicken on bone with black bean in chilli oil".

As made clear by the last two of these, there doesn't seem to be any consensus on whether the chicken should be served on the bone or not. I've tried 口水雞 both ways, and haven't noticed much of a flavour difference. I think the chicken is always steamed or poached whole, before being cut up and mixed with the sauce, so it just depends on personal preference. The version pictured above, which I ate at Red & Hot restaurant in London, was served boneless.

When I made this, I used the directions for poaching a whole chicken from Maki at Just Hungry. With this method, you put the chicken in a large pot with aromatics of your choice (I used ginger and spring onion), cover with water, bring to the boil, simmer gently for 15 minutes, skimming the scum occasionally, then cover the pan, turn off the heat, and leave the chicken to cook in the residual heat of the water for 60–90 minutes.

One important thing to remember here is that there is quite a lot of water involved, and so it will take some time initially to heat up to boiling point! On my (underpowered) stove, it took nearly an hour. You'll also want to make sure to leave plenty of time for the chicken pieces to marinade in the sauce after poaching, so realistically it's probably best to start heating the water at least three or four hours before you want to serve the dish.

After poaching and cooling briefly, I removed and discarded the chicken skin (chicken skin is delicious when browned and crisp, but less delicious when poached and soggy) and used my fingers to remove the chicken from the bones in fairly large pieces. I didn't use it all in my 口水雞, but saved around two-thirds of the breast meat to use in sandwiches. I did this because (a) I was only feeding two people, and I didn't want a ridiculous quantity of leftovers, and (b) I prefer the texture and flavour of the darker meat that's found on the legs.

The sauce used in this dish really is very tasty. The first few times I tried it from restaurants, I actually wondered if there was MSG in it, but after making it myself I realised that it's simply a combination of ingredients that go very well together. I used 3 Tbsp soy sauce, 2 Tbsp Chinese black vinegar, 2 Tbsp water, 1 Tbsp sugar, 1 Tbsp minced garlic, 1/2 Tbsp minced ginger, 2 Tbsp sesame oil, 2 Tbsp home-made chilli oil, plenty of ground Sichuan pepper, and 1-2 Tbsp minced fresh coriander. All of this was mixed with the cooked chicken pieces and left to marinate in the fridge for 2 hours, except for the coriander, which I added just before serving.

Other people's recipes vary; Cooking With Mun adds rice wine to the sauce, while Kitchen Tigress includes century eggs and mung bean sheets along with the chicken. Joshiboshi uses chicken thighs instead of a whole chicken, and, like a poster on the China Travel Guide forum, fries the Sichuan pepper and some of the chill-based sauce ingredients before using. Common features include a sprinkling of sesame seeds to garnish.

Photo © Charmaine Mok, used by permission.

One dish commonly eaten on the first day of Chinese New Year celebrations is 羅漢齋 (luó hàn zhāi). This is a vegetarian dish, often translated into English as "Buddha's delight" or "monk's vegetables". Many people prefer to stick to vegetarian food on this day, and 羅漢齋 is a delicious way to do this. It's a savoury stew of fresh and dried ingredients, flavoured with red fermented beancurd.

Finding a good version of 羅漢齋 on a restaurant menu can be a little tricky. I have eaten many, many fairly pedestrian dishes listed as "Buddha's delight" or "monk's vegetables", ordered from restaurants and takeaways that serve Westernised Chinese food rather than the real thing — often a sad selection of tinned vegetables (water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, baby sweetcorn, mushrooms) in a gloopy brown sauce, maybe with some fresh carrots and mangetout if you're lucky.

Ordering from a Chinese-only menu is probably safer, particularly if the name mentions specific ingredients that are usually omitted from the Westernised version, such as 粉絲 (fěn sī/glass noodles) and 南乳 (nán rǔ/red fermented beancurd). I had a rather nice version the other week from Joy King Lau in London, which was listed as 粉絲南乳羅漢齋煲 (fěn sī nán rǔ luó hàn zhāi bào) — the 煲 (bào) here refers to its being served in a claypot.

To make luó hàn zhāi at home, check out Sunflower's 羅漢齋 recipe. Note that the ingredients for the dish may vary between chefs and between families; see the Wikipedia article on Buddha's delight for a listing of other ingredients commonly and less commonly used.

As Sunflower mentions, an essential ingredient when serving 羅漢齋 as a New Year dish is 髮菜 (fà cài), known in English as "black moss", "hair moss", "hair weed", and variations thereon. According to Wikipedia, it's actually a type of bacterium. It's sold dried, in which form it resembles long, fine hair, hence the name. This ingredient is prominently visible in the photograph above.

The reason for 髮菜's importance here is that its name sounds similar to the phrase 發財 (fā cái), which means "becoming rich" — note that the tones are the only difference in pronunciation (in Mandarin, both tones differ, while in Cantonese, 髮 has the same tone as 發). 發財 forms part of the traditional New Year greeting 恭喜發財 (gōng xǐ fā cái), which translates loosely as "wishing you prosperity".

Do note, however, that according to Professor Wayne Armstrong of Palomar College, harvesting of 髮菜 contributes to desertification, and is now restricted in China. Relatedly, an article in the Hong Kong Standard notes that there is counterfeit 髮菜 on the market, at least in some countries, and it can be hard to tell apart from the real thing.

Other common 羅漢齋 ingredients are also considered by some people to have auspicious associations; see this article from a Hawaiian newspaper, which lists a number of such associations.

The dish I'm posting about today comes from Xinjiang, the region of northwest China that I posted about on Monday.

大盤雞 (dà pán jī) is a Xinjiang dish which translates literally as "a big plate of chicken". This is a pretty good name for it, really — a single order of 大盤雞 (pictured above) feeds at least four people. Some restaurants may offer a smaller portion, 中盤雞 (zhōng pán jī/middle-plate chicken).

I posted an example on Monday of a menu in Xinjiang written in Chinese, English, and Uighur. One of the dishes on this menu is in fact 大盤雞, the Uyghur version of which pne has kindly transcribed for me as داپه‌نجى (he also points out that this is just a transcription of the Chinese name).

I haven't managed to find a single authoritative-looking recipe for 大盤雞 (either in books or online), so please don't rely on the notes below being exactly accurate. The eGullet thread on big-plate chicken has some useful discussion, though.

I found two videos online showing 大盤雞 being prepared. The first was shot in a restaurant in Xinjiang. A whole chicken is cut into chunks on the bone with a cleaver, potatoes are peeled, leeks are prepared, and then various ingredients are shown in bowls, including the chicken, the sliced potatoes, sliced onions, chopped tomatoes, and chopped green chillies (I think). The chicken is initially fried along with a dark red paste from a tub which has a term on it that I can't quite make out, but it's four characters with the middle two being 油 and 豆. The stewing liquid added appears to be water.

The second video is one from 天天飲食, a daily cookery show from China Central Television. The ingredient list given is incomplete, but includes 三黃雞 (sān huáng jī/a type of chicken), 土豆 (tǔ dòu/potatoes), 青紅椒 (qīng hóng jiāo/green and red peppers), 麵粉 (miàn fěn/wheatflour), 朝天椒 (cháo tiān jiāo/"facing heaven" chillies), 乾線椒 (gān xiàn jiāo/some kind of chilli), 花椒粒 (huā jiāo lì/Sichuan peppercorns), 花椒麵 (huā jiāo miàn/ground Sichuan pepper), 紅油 (hóng yóu/chilli oil), 味精 (wèi jīng/MSG), and 鹽 (yán/salt). The chopped-up chicken is blanched in water, some sugar is caramelised, then whole peeled garlic cloves, sliced peeled ginger, and the white parts of spring onions are stirfried in oil. Sichuan peppercorns, star anise, and cassia/cinnamon bark are added and stirfried for a bit longer, then the chicken is returned to the pan along with the caramelised sugar, the two types of chillies, and some salt. Water is added, the chicken is simmered for a while, and then the sliced peeled potatoes are added. The chilli oil and red and green peppers go in later along with a brown powder and what I think is more garlic, chopped this time. The accompanying noodles are made from a simple flour/salt/water dough.

It's worth noting that when I tried making this according to the methods in these videos (and Sunflower's recipe mentioned below), my chicken ended up terribly overcooked. I may have over-fried it in the initial stages, but I do think next time I might give it some time out of the pan while the potatoes are cooking.

Given the large Muslim population in Xinjiang, I was initially confused by the inclusion of beer or Chinese wine in a number of the recipes for 大盤雞 I found online — for example Sunflower's 大盤雞, which uses beer for the stewing liquid. However, sashajwolf points out in comments that beer is not explicitly forbidden in Islam, and arguably neither is wine made from things other than grapes (and the type of Chinese wine used in traditional Chinese cooking is made from rice). pandarus adds in the same comment thread that it's actually intoxication which is forbidden.

The potatoes should be either sliced thickly or cut into chunks. The chicken should be cut into chunks still on the bone — just get the butcher to do this, unless you really love hacking carcasses about with a cleaver. (The chicken pieces should be small enough to be picked up with chopsticks, so you do want it chopped up, not just jointed.)

Garlic, onions, and fresh chillies are commonly mentioned in recipes. Some sources say that tomatoes or tomato purée should go in too, and possibly also some vinegar. Sugar appears in many recipes as well, with Yummy By Scratch even going so far as to caramelise the sugar first. Spices I've seen suggested include cinnamon, cassia, star anise, cumin, Sichuan peppercorns, and dried chillies; Sunflower also adds chilli bean paste (豆瓣醬/dòu bàn jiàng).

As mentioned above, if you're going to order 大盤雞 in a restaurant then you'll need at least four people to do it justice. One good way to eat the dish is to first eat all the chicken and potatoes, then to order some belt noodles (see Sunflower's recipe for how to make the noodles) which are placed in the remainder of the sauce to soak all up. Alternatively, you can soak up the sauce as you go along with the Xinjiang flatbread known as nan. This is similar to the Indian naan (it's leavened, and baked in a tandoor) but is circular rather than teardrop-shaped, and the centre is stamped flat before baking and often impressed with a decorative design (photo of stamped nan).

One particularly tasty type of Chinese mushroom is 茶樹菇 (chá shù gū), also known as tea tree mushroom or Agrocybe aegerita. I posted about 菇 (gū/mushroom) earlier this week, and have also previously posted about 茶 (chá/tea). 樹 (shù/tree) frequently appears on menus in the form of 螞蟻上樹 (mǎ yǐ shàng shù), or "ants climbing a tree".

Although tea tree mushrooms are available fresh in some parts of the world, I've only ever seen them dried in London (at New Loon Moon in Chinatown). The dried ones are still tasty, though the stems of the larger ones can be a bit hard even after soaking — one tip I've heard for using up the tougher stems is to pop them in a bag in the freezer and throw them in next time you make stock, for a bit of extra flavour.

茶樹菇 are good in soup, in stir-fried dishes, and in 火鍋 (huǒ guō/hotpot/steamboat) (photo of some prepared for hotpot). Pictured above is a rather good stirfry of 茶樹菇 and 臘肉 (là ròu/Chinese ham) that I ate at Chilli Cool in Bloomsbury and later tried to recreate at home.

I based my attempt on a recipe from Beijing Haochi, though I left out the greens as I was doing a separate leafy greens dish in the same meal. There was plenty of flavour from the mushrooms and ham alone, but I did also add a bit of Shaoxing wine and soy sauce.

I didn't use an expensive ham — I've tried finding Yunnan ham in London, but as yet have had no success, so I just used some cheap 臘肉 that I found at Loon Fung in Silvertown. If you feel adventurous, you could also try making your own!

As I mentioned on Wednesday, 粥 is the Chinese character for congee, or rice porridge, and one of the most popular styles of congee is congee with lean pork and preserved egg — 皮蛋瘦肉粥 (pí dàn shòu ròu zhǒu).

I discussed preserved egg (皮蛋/pí dàn) in my post on 蛋/dàn/egg last week. Otherwise known as "century eggs" or "thousand-year-old eggs", 皮蛋 can be something of an acquired taste; Fuchsia Dunlop suggests thinking of them as the Chinese equivalent of blue cheese (though I would say that fermented tofu/腐乳/fǔ rǔ is perhaps a better claimant to that title).

The basic idea of congee is simple; rice is cooked for a long time in a large quantity of water until it breaks down and forms a thick porridge. Possible flavourings include pork/chicken stock, soy sauce, meat, eggs, herbs, and so on. It's a savoury dish, often eaten for breakfast, and commonly found on old-school dim sum menus. It's also a very comforting thing to eat if you're ill (or hungover).

To make the congee shown above, I adapted Helen Yuet Ling Pang's congee recipe. I cooked 100g jasmine rice in 1 litre of vegetable stock along with a splash of soy sauce. After it had been simmering for around 45 minutes, I added two chopped 皮蛋 along with 100g pork which I'd earlier cut into 1cm pieces and marinaded with cornflour, soy sauce, black vinegar, and white pepper; that got another 15 minutes' cooking and then it was ready to eat.

(Purists will complain about my use of vegetable stock and soy sauce in the above. I'll admit that they made it harder to get a decent colour balance in the photograph!)

While some Chinese pork dishes, such as 紅燒肉 (hóng shāo ròu/red-cooked pork), require long cooking in a flavourful liquid to get the meat tender and tasty, others are based on the very straightforward procedure of simply boiling the pork in plain water. The result of this is 白肉 (bái ròu) — 白 means plain/white/pure, and 肉 is meat (remember, in the absence of a qualifier, this means pork).

This might not sound overly exciting, but it's actually not too dissimilar to the idea of Western cold cuts — plainly-cooked meat enlivened with some good, strong flavourings. Indeed, the particular dish I'm posting about today is a really tasty one that if done properly will leave you stinking of garlic for some time afterwards.

蒜泥白肉 (suàn ní bái ròu) is a cold dish (涼菜/liáng cài) of sliced pork slathered in a sauce based on mashed/minced garlic (蒜/suàn). There are many, many ways to make this sauce. Eating Club Vancouver has two versions of 蒜泥白肉, one of which grinds the garlic in the blender for a thicker, more homogeneous sauce. Soy sauce is a common ingredient; conversely, the version pictured above was flavoured very simply with chopped garlic in chilli oil.

The sauce I use is adapted from a book I found on Google Books (although it's bilingual inside, it doesn't appear to have an English title — the Chinese title is given as 培梅名菜精選: 川浙菜專輯). It's based on a sweetened soy sauce, which you can make by gently simmering 200ml soy sauce with 150g sugar, 4 Tbsp Shaoxing wine, 1 sliced spring onion, 1 slice of ginger, 1 piece of star anise, and a small piece of cinnamon bark, for 15 minutes. To make enough 蒜泥 sauce for 500g pork, mix 4 Tbsp sweetened soy sauce, 2 Tbsp garlic, 1 Tbsp chicken stock, and 2 Tbsp chilli oil (I use Sunflower's recipe for the chilli oil).

Pork belly is a good cut to use for this, or perhaps shoulder. You want a boneless chunk with the skin left on (and unscored) and a good layer of fat. Don't worry if your piece of pork looks a bit flat before you boil it. The skin will contract very quickly as it starts to cook, changing the aspect ratio — the piece I cooked earlier this week nearly doubled in height after boiling!

For a 500g slab of pork belly, you'll want to gently boil it for around 30-40 minutes in total. If you like, you can blanch, drain, and rinse the meat first and then save the boiling liquid to make stock with. This liquid won't be particularly strongly flavoured on its own, but would work fine in e.g. a soup where you might normally use water, or as the base liquid for a proper stock.

When the pork is cooked, leave it to cool and then slice it as thinly as possible before dressing it with the sauce. Getting nice thin slices is probably the hardest part — some people suggest that running the meat under the cold tap as soon as it's cooked will tighten it up and make this easier.

Just as there are many ways to make the sauce, there are also many ways to serve the final dish. One is to lay the pork slices out on a plate and drizzle the sauce over them. You could also toss the pork with the sauce and arrange it in an artful heap, as pictured above. More elaborate presentations involve rolling the pork slices around slivers of cucumber before topping with the sauce (photo), or draping both pork and cucumber over a wooden frame (photo, corroborating photo). Finally, some people prefer to have the sauce served on the side as a dipping sauce.

Incidentally, Joshua at Cooking The Books suggests another good thing to do with boiled pork belly — pork belly with black vinegar and ginger. I'm not sure what this would be in Chinese, but I'll be keeping an eye out for plausible candidates on menus. Joshua also points out the relevance of the short cooking time — the meat stays relatively firm, which not only helps you cut it into the thin slices required, but also gives a very nice texture when you eat it.

Fittingly, the final dim sum dish I'm posting about this month is a dessert — 馬來糕, which is a steamed sponge cake. The pinyin is mǎ lái gāo, the Cantonese is ma lai goh, and the English translations I've seen include "sweet sponge cake", "Malaysian sponge cake", and simply "sponge cake". On dim sum menus, this sometimes appears in the steamed section and sometimes in the dessert section.

The literal translation of 馬來糕 is "Malaysian cake" — 馬來 (mǎ lái) is the "Malaysian" part, and as mentioned in my post on 蘿蔔糕/luó bo gāo/loh bak goh/radish cake, 糕 (gāo) refers to some kind of cake. I'm not really sure what the Malaysian connection is, but this is what it's called!

You may see different spellings — 馬拉糕 (mǎ lā gāo) seems to be quite common on the menus I've seen. I'm not sure whether this is best described as a spelling mistake or a spelling variant though. I've also seen it on menus as 牛油馬來糕 (niú yóu mǎ lái gāo), which I think refers to the use of butter as the fat in the cake (牛油 literally means "cow oil"). Another one I've seen is 吉士馬來糕 (jí shì mǎ lái gāo), which I have no idea of the meaning of Carolyn J Phillips tells me refers to the custard powder (吉士粉/jí shì fěn)^[1] that forms part of the recipe.

To make this at home, check out Sunflower's ma lai goh recipe. I must admit that I haven't quite got this recipe to work yet. The first time I tried it, I made the full recipe and it never set properly, even when I steamed it for half as long again as the recipe said to. The second time I made half-quantities, which worked better, though it could still have done with a little more steaming and it was nowhere near as light as the one pictured at the top of this post.

I had the one in the picture at Harbour City in London Chinatown, where it was listed on the menu as 牛油馬來糕 — perhaps the use of butter instead of oil had something to do with the lightness, though I would have thought this would affect the flavour more than the texture. Perhaps I simply didn't whisk mine enough.

Edit, June 2011: It's worth also checking out Carolyn J Phillips' 馬來糕 recipe.