Adventures with Kake

I've previously discussed Chinese keyboard input via pinyin, but I've recently also been playing with handwriting input.

For reasons I'll describe below, I bought a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet about a month ago. Sadly, my (OS X) laptop has no native support for inputting Chinese characters via handwriting — apparently only MacBooks with multitouch trackpads can do that, regardless of peripherals. (Note: iPhone owners might want to check out Finger, though I haven't tried it.) The tablet does come with its own input software, but it's a bit clunky — you can only enter one character at a time, and if you hesitate for a moment in the middle of writing it, it will make a (usually wrong) guess at what you intended and you'll have to start over. So I'm sticking with pinyin for now.

The reason I bought the tablet, though, was Skritter. This is an online tool that lets you practise writing Chinese (and Japanese) characters. It does cost money (just under US$10/month at the time of writing), but they offer a two-week free trial [see footnote].

The idea behind Skritter is pretty simple — to make character-writing practice easy and enjoyable. And it works! I knew within half an hour of starting to play with it that I'd be keeping up my subscription at the end of the free trial, and by the end of the next day I'd ordered my graphics tablet because I found it so frustrating to have to stop "playing" when my hand was aching from using the trackpad to write the characters.

The Skritter site supplies a number of character/word lists that you can learn from, but it also gives you the facility to make your own lists, which is very useful for someone like me who only wants to learn characters from a specific context. Like Anki, it uses spaced repetition algorithms to choose sensible intervals for retesting you on each word or character. Another very nice feature is one mentioned by a comment on a CNET post — [...] it draws beautiful characters, which makes me feel good everytime, much better than when I try to write on a piece of paper. — a post on the Plot Hatching Factory blog goes into this issue in more detail.

Learning to write may seem like a sidetrack from my goal of learning to read Chinese menus, but I've found that it's very helpful in terms of remembering the characters, learning to differentiate between similar-looking characters, and reading characters that are printed in a blurry or unusual font.

Finally, a note on ergonomics. When I first started using the Bamboo tablet, it made my hand ache/feel numb after a few minutes of use, but I figured out that this was due to my tendency to steady my hand by sticking out my little finger and resting it on the tablet. I stopped doing this, and the problem went away.

Footnote: [0] You need to supply credit/debit card details for the free Skritter trial, and will need to explicitly cancel if you decide not to continue after the two weeks. They do send a couple of reminders though. If you're thinking of giving it a go, you can use my referral link, which will give you two extra free weeks if/when you make your first payment (I also get two free weeks if you do this, but if that bothers you then I can always buy you a pint in return, or something).

I've mentioned cheung fun (腸粉/cháng fěn) before, in my post on 粉/fěn. These white, floppy, slippery noodles are considered to resemble intestines, particularly when rolled up to serve, and hence are literally named "intestine (腸) noodles (粉)".

Cheung fun are generally served in portions of three, rolled around fillings such as char siu pork (叉燒腸粉/chā shāo cháng fěn), beef (牛肉腸粉/niú ròu cháng fěn), fresh prawns (鮮蝦腸粉/xiān xiā cháng fěn — pictured above), or scallops (帶子腸粉/dài zi cháng fěn). Many places will also offer "three treasures" cheung fun (三寶腸粉/sān bǎo cháng fěn), which includes three of the above fillings, one in each roll. You don't get to choose the fillings here, and the menu doesn't usually specify which ones you'll get, but beef+pork+prawns is not an uncommon combination.

Vegetarian cheung fun options are actually surprisingly common, given how tricky it can sometimes be to find vegetarian dim sum — the noodles themselves are vegetarian by default, which helps. The most ubiquitous vegetarian 腸粉 filling is probably fried doughsticks (油條/yóu tiáo, literally "oil sticks"). On most if not all of the dim sum menus I've seen in London, fried dough cheung fun are listed as something along the lines of 炸兩腸粉 (zhà liǎng cháng fěn). I'm not entirely sure how to translate this — 炸 is deep-fried, and 兩 means something like "pair" or "couple", so perhaps it's a reference to the carb-in-carb nature of the dish, or maybe to the fact that you usually get two 油條 per roll?

Sometimes 腸粉 will arrive already cut into pieces (photo), while other times they arrive whole (as shown above) and you have to cut them up yourself. The doughstick-stuffed variant usually comes pre-cut, since it's not too easy to cut through the doughstick filling.

Cheung fun are usually served with a slightly sweetened soy sauce. Often they arrive with the sauce already underneath, as pictured above, but sometimes they'll come with the sauce on the side (photo). Sauce on the side is considered preferable by some people, since it stops the cheung fun skins from absorbing too much of it while they sit.

You can, I am informed, make cheung fun at home. I've never done this, but if you're interested in trying it, it's worth looking at the eGullet thread on the subject, as well as these recipes by Lily Ng, by Alison Foo, and by Feast To The World; and here's a video (which is in Cantonese, with English captions for the important bits). Note however that both recipes and video include extra flavourings (spring onions and dried prawns) in the batter — if you're making filled cheung fun like you get in restaurants, you'll want to leave these out and make plain noodles. The spring-onion-dried-prawn variant is usually served unfilled.

A final note for Londoners: Lo's Noodle Factory and See Woo in Chinatown both sell fresh cheung fun to take away and reheat at home, but they only stock the spring-onion-dried-prawn version as a rule. Lo's will do the plain ones if you order in advance, but you'll need to buy at least five or six packets, which is rather too much for a single household — they don't keep well. The best way I've found to reheat purchased cheung fun at home is in the microwave (steaming works too, but is slower and no better than microwaving).

This photo is a CC-licensed derivative work of a photo by cshan.

Next in my dim sum series — crispy roast pork belly. Although strictly speaking this is not a dim sum dish, it's been part of so many of my dim sum lunches that I sort of had to include it. Like dim sum, it's (as far as I know) a Cantonese speciality, and (at least in London) is often available at restaurants offering dim sum.

I've seen a number of transliterations for this — siu yuk, siu youk, siew yoke. The Chinese characters are 燒肉 (shāo ròu in Mandarin), which simply means "roast meat" — remember, the default meat in most Chinese cuisines is pork, so wherever you see 肉 without further qualification, it almost certainly means pork. Don't confuse 燒肉 with 紅燒肉/hóng shāo ròu! It's completely different.

On a menu, this might also appear as 脆皮燒肉 (cuì pí shāo ròu) — the 脆皮 part means "crispy skin". This makes a lot of sense, since perhaps the most important aspect of siu yuk is the crispy, savoury crackling. If you're making this at home, you really do need to make sure that the skin of the pork is cooked thoroughly all the way through to the meat, or your crackling will be chewy. I can personally recommend Charmaine Mok's method for this, which involves actually letting the crackling go far enough to burn, and then scraping off the charred parts with a serrated knife. It's also worth checking out Sunflower's hints on choosing the best piece of meat for the job.

When I made this, I used Charmaine's recipe and it worked out pretty well (though note that I think the 45 minutes cooking time is meant to be 45 minutes total, not 20 minutes in the oven plus 45 minutes under the grill — I took mine out in time to avoid the house filling with black smoke).

There's also extensive discussion on the eGullet thread about making 燒肉, including an interesting experiment on the best way to treat the skin to get a good crackling — the surprise winner was vodka. I haven't tried this yet, but I certainly will next time.

A few months ago I posted about Chinese keyboard input via pinyin, mostly focusing on OS X (since that's the platform I use). Here's an update on things I've found out since then.

Firstly, I came across a couple of comprehensive websites on the subject: Pinyin Joe covers MS Windows, Ubuntu Linux, and smartphones, while [chinese mac] unsurprisingly covers OS X and other Mac operating systems.

There are also a few specific things that I've found particularly useful on OS X (10.6, though some of this applies to older versions too). One of these is that if you switch to pinyin input and then bring up the input methods menu again (by clicking on the little flag in the menu bar), it will have various extra pinyin-specific options including a Preferences dialogue. Under the General section in this, you can increase the font size in the "candidate window" (character dropdown) — very handy if you don't have brilliant eyesight.

Another Preferences option is "show input keys", which if ticked will show the pinyin and tones as you scroll down the candidate list. This does seem to slow things down a bit, but it can be useful on occasion if you're feeling the need to review your tones.

Something else I didn't realise before is that in pinyin input mode I can type "yu2" instead of just "yu", and it won't bother showing me things like 芋 (yù/yu4/taro).

Finally, in the comments on my previous post, pne asked about typing words rather than individual characters in OS X pinyin input. My reply was that while I'd noticed this was possible, I hadn't yet figured out how to add new words to the "dictionary" that OS X uses to decide which combinations of characters are plausible words. I have now! All you need to do is this:

• Switch to pinyin input mode (see instructions on my previous post).
• Type your word (e.g. type "niurou" for 牛肉/beef).
• Press SPACE to get the dropdown — if your word appears, just choose it. Otherwise, there are a couple of possibilities:
  • It may offer a word that isn't actually the one you want, for example suppose you type "huangjiang", aiming for 黃姜 (turmeric), but it only offers you 黃醬 (yellow bean paste). If this happens, just press BACKSPACE and it will jump back to the first component it recognises (which may be a single character or a multi-character word), and offer you a dropdown for this.
    • If the correct character(s) are shown in this dropdown, just select them by pressing ENTER, and it will set these down and then move on to offer you a dropdown for the next recognised component (again, maybe a single character or maybe a multi-character word).
    • If this component is a multi-character one, and the correct characters aren't shown in the dropdown, press BACKSPACE again to break the component down even further.
  • It may not have any matching words at all — in this case, when you initially press SPACE it will just jump back to the first component it recognises, and offer you a dropdown for that one, then proceed as above.
• The clever part is that it will now add this word to its dictionary, so the next time you type it, it will be there as an option in the dropdown.

Note that the above is more complicated to describe than it is to do — just have a play around with it and it should soon make sense. I also made a slightly clunky diagram, which may help.

What better dish than tripe to start off my month of dim sum? Tripe may have a reputation for being smelly and rubbery, but when properly prepared it is neither of these things. The tripe pictured above (from Gerrard's Corner in London Chinatown) was perfectly textured, with a bit of a bite to it yet yielding easily to chewing, and with no hint of any unpleasant smell or taste.

The generic name for tripe is 肚 (dǔ) [see footnote]. However, the type of tripe used in this dish also has a couple of more poetic names, as mentioned in my post on 白/bái — 牛柏葉 and 牛百葉. Both of these are pronounced in Mandarin as niú bǎi yè; the first literally translates as "cow's cypress leaves" and the second as "cow's hundred leaves". Like the English names "leaf tripe", "book tripe", and "bible tripe", they refer to the appearance of the tripe slices, each with a long, firm "spine" from which softer, thinner "leaves" spread out. This kind of tripe comes from the omasum, the third chamber of the cow's stomach.

When served as dim sum, 牛柏葉 is generally flavoured with ginger and spring onions, often with a few sliced red chillies thrown in too. You might see this listed on the menu as 姜蔥牛柏葉 (jiāng cōng niú bǎi yè) or as 蔥椒牛柏葉 (cōng jiāo niú bǎi yè) — 姜 is ginger, 蔥 is spring onions, and 椒 is peppers/chillies. Some menus use the alternate character for ginger, 薑 (also pronounced jiāng). Other preparations include tripe in black bean sauce (豉汁牛柏葉/chǐ zhī niú bǎi yè) and plain poached tripe (白灼牛柏葉/bái zhuó niú bái yè).

To make this at home, make sure you get the right kind of tripe. As mentioned above, you want beef tripe (not pig tripe), and you want the third-chamber tripe, not the honeycomb stuff. I found it frozen at See Woo in Chinatown, amusingly labelled in English as "beef manifold".

When served in restaurants, the dish is usually cooked in advance, reheated by steaming, and presented as pictured above in a small dish nestled inside a steamer basket. The initial cooking takes rather longer than the reheating. Some tripe is pre-cooked, but if yours isn't, you may need to boil it for a couple of hours in order to get it soft enough.

English-language recipes for this dish seem to be few and far between. Foodblogger Nooschi has a recipe which involves stirfrying as a final step. (The FoodiePrints blog has an amusing pictorial of making Nooschi's recipe, first the wrong way, and then the right way.) Nooschi also suggests doing the initial boiling in chicken stock if you want a little more flavour, a suggestion seconded by the Gourmet magazine version (though Gourmet use the wrong tripe, and their suggestions of using low-sodium chicken broth and sherry look to me like house style sub-editing decisions rather than decisions made for the sake of flavour).

As an aside, you may also see stewed tripe on the menu (often as stewed tripe with daikon). I think this is usually honeycomb tripe, which comes from the reticulum (second chamber of the stomach).

Footnote: [0] I read on the ChinesePod forums (in a post that appears to have since been deleted) that 肚 is pronounced with a different tone depending on whether it's stomach-the-organ (dù) or tripe-the-edible-thing (dǔ), but I don't know how general a practice that is.

Photo © Ewan-M, used under cc-by-sa.

As mentioned last week, I've declared August to be dim sum month! I'll be posting two of my favourite dim sum dishes each week this month, so today I thought I'd give a quick overview of what dim sum is all about. (Update, August 2011: here's a list of all the dim sum dishes I've ever posted about.)

Essentially, a dim sum meal consists of a number of small dishes of mostly savoury, mostly snack-like food, accompanied by large quantities of Chinese tea. In the UK, the term "dim sum" is used both for the type of food served, and for the occasion itself. Elsewhere, "yum cha" (literally "drinking tea") is a more common term for the act of going out to eat dim sum. A dim sum meal may last less than an hour — a good few of my dim sum outings have been on weekdays with the London Perl Mongers, so people need to get back to work — or it may be slow and leisurely. I think my longest dim sum lunch ever lasted just over three hours.

The Chinese characters for "dim sum" are 點心, which in Mandarin is diǎn xīn. However, dim sum is a solidly Cantonese tradition, and so the names of dim sum dishes, as well as the overall term "dim sum", are almost always transliterated with Cantonese spellings and pronunciations. (Note: I'll still be giving the Mandarin/pinyin for the dishes I post about this month, since many of the characters also appear on non-dim-sum menus.)

Dim sum is a breakfast/brunch/lunch meal, not only out of tradition, but also because it involves plentiful tea-drinking — evening drinks like wine and beer don't really go with this sort of food, and you probably wouldn't want all the caffeine from the tea in the evening. Like 火鍋/huǒ guō/hotpot, it's a highly social occasion, and the more people you have along the better. All dishes are shared, and there's no concept of starters or mains — it all arrives as and when it's ready, and it's fair game for whoever wants it. Some items (e.g. dumplings, pastries) come in multiples of three or four, and others (e.g. rice, chicken feet, tripe) come in a single bowl which you can serve yourself from as required.

Generally when I go out for dim sum, I find things go smoothest when one person puts themselves in charge of the ordering. Having one person in charge means you're more likely to get a nice spread of dishes — ideally, you'd have a mix of steamed, fried, and baked dishes, with a variety of ingredients. Often, instead of ordering by telling a member of staff what you want, you'll be given a paper menu with tickyboxes on which you check off the required items (photo). Some restaurants even still have dim sum carts, which can be fun — these are heated trollies filled with steamer baskets of dim sum, pushed around the dining room by various waitstaff (photo). As they pass, their proprietors will show you what they have, and you just tell them which items you want. This works nicely in terms of getting food on your table without any waiting, but the quality of the food can suffer as it sits around in the trolley. (Londoners: trolley dim sum is available at Chuen Cheng Ku and the New World.)

The most important thing to bear in mind when trying to find good dim sum is that while some restaurants will have a dedicated dim sum chef (or team of chefs) to make the dishes from scratch, other places just buy the items pre-made and frozen. If you see a Chinese menu that includes ten or fewer dim sum dishes, it's a pretty good bet that these aren't being made in-house [see footnote]. For proper dim sum, you want to look for places that have entirely separate dim sum menus with dozens of items — and bear in mind that it's usually different chefs in charge of dim sum and in charge of the regular menu, so a restaurant with indifferent à la carte may well do good dim sum, and vice versa. Take a look at Mr Noodles' post on old school dim sum for some more hints. Dim sum is normally only served until late afternoon; common hours in London are 11am-5pm.

One aspect of interest in the UK at the moment is the rise of the "dim sum chain" (example). Unlike the traditional dim sum places, these chains feature cocktails, snazzy decor, cool music, dim sum served right through to the end of the evening, and polite (even obsequious) service. Prices tend to be higher than in the old-school dim sum joints, and the menus can occasionally be frustrating if you're already familiar with the usual terms and would like to know exactly what something advertised as a "pork dumpling" actually is. Having said that, they're not all bad, and they can work well both as an accessible introduction to dim sum and as an occasional diversion for those tempted by the terribly aberrant practice of eating dim sum in the evening rather than at lunchtime :)

Speaking of aberrant practices, going out for dim sum on one's own can be frustrating, since it's hard to get a nice spread of dishes without being forced to over-order. If you're lucky, you'll find a place that offers a dim sum taster platter and does dim sum that's actually good. One such place is Pearl Liang, near Paddington Station in London; their nine-piece dim sum platter is shown below.

Footnote: [0] There are two exceptions to the "short dim sum menus are a bad sign" rule.

The first is if they mention hand-made dumplings. Chinese dumplings per se are not purely a dim sum item, though the non-dim-sum version is more rustic and less delicate. On most menus these are listed with the rice etc, but sometimes they're set aside in a "dim sum" section, presumably for marketing reasons. They aren't really dim sum, but they can be good, particularly if you see the character 手/shǒu/hand in the name, for example as 手工水餃/shǒu gōng shǔi jiǎo/"handmade boiled dumplings". Dumplings that are offered in large quantities (≥10) at cheap prices are likely to be hand-made in-house. Some menus may list both the pre-made frozen items and those made in-house (example — note the relatively expensive steamed items, in contrast to the 30p-per-piece pork/chicken "Chinese Dumplings").

The other exception is one mentioned in comments by Sung a.k.a. Mr Noodles — ultra-posh places (see his comment for more).

茶 (chá) is the Chinese character for tea. As well as being used for tea itself, it also appears on menus as 茶樹菇 (chá shù gū) and 沙茶醬 (shā chá jiàng).

The English name for 茶樹菇 is a direct translation of the Chinese — "tea tree mushrooms". I've mentioned these previously, and asked if anyone knew where to get them in London. I finally found the dried version on the first floor of New Loon Moon in Chinatown, but I'm still looking for the fresh ones...

The English name for 沙茶醬 is basically a transliteration — "shacha sauce" or "sa cha sauce". I’ve also seen it translated as "barbecue sauce", but in my opinion this is so vague as to be useless. Shacha sauce is an oily, slightly granular sauce made from ingredients including garlic, shallots, spices, chillies, and dried fish — see its Wikipedia entry or PigPig's post on the joys of 沙茶醬 for more information.

Note that 沙茶 is also sometimes used to mean "satay", though in my experience (remember, my experience is mostly of menus in London), 沙爹 (shā diē) is more common. A post on the CantoDict forums suggests that 沙茶 is the Mandarin term for satay, whereas 沙爹 is more of a Hong Kong thing. I'm not sure if there's an easy way to tell whether 沙茶 on a menu refers to shacha sauce or to satay.

Here are some types of tea that you might see on a menu:

Many, many more teas can be seen on, for example, the tea menu of the Royal China Club on Baker Street.

Some of the characters used here appear on menus in other contexts — I've already discussed 花 (huā/flower), and 龍 (lóng/dragon) is often used in an alternate spelling of 小籠包 (xiǎo lóng bāo/soup dumplings), as well as being part of the name of my recommended brand (龍口/Lóngkǒu) of 粉絲 (fěn sī/bean thread noodles). Others generally only appear on tea menus.

I don't recall ever having seen a Chinese-only tea menu here in London, but obviously the situation may be different elsewhere. In addition, knowing the Chinese name of your favourite tea may help you locate it on bilingual menus where the English translation is nonstandard or erroneous.

As pointed out in comments, when no tea menu is apparent, the way you find out which teas are available is simply to ask. If (like me) you don't speak a Chinese language, they may need a little persuading that you really do want something other than the default jasmine, and depending on the staff member they may not know the names of the teas in English.

上湯豆苗 (shàng tāng dòu miáo) is a basically very simple dish of mangetout leaves moistened with a rich stock, though it can be jazzed up with garnishes such as century egg or peeled prawns (as in the version pictured above, which I ate at Red & Hot in London). English translations I've seen include "pea shoots in rich broth" or simply "pea shoots in soup" [see footnote].

Wikipedia tells me that 上湯 is a "dark tan broth made from Jinhua ham and chicken", while the Red Cook blog states that it's made by adding more fresh meat to an already-made clear stock, and simmering further. The eGullet forums have a nice discussion of Chinese stocks, including a recipe for 上湯. As that recipe points out, it's worth blanching the meat before you begin (I've discussed this before — see the comments too).

The eGullet recipe also mentions that you should choose an old chicken rather than a young one, for better flavour, and simmer the stock for 6-8 hours. I can thoroughly endorse this suggestion. I bought a "fresh Scottish hen" from the Chinese butcher (he described it as 老雞/lǎo jī/"old chicken") and let the stock simmer at a very low temperature for 8 hours, and it was the chickeniest chicken stock I've ever made. The fact that the neck and feet were also included probably didn't hurt either. The meat itself won't really be worth eating after such a long time — you can eat it if you like (I nibbled a few bits), but the flavour will mostly be gone.

Note that the low temperature is important — if you let the stock boil while you're making it, it will be a creamy/cloudy colour rather than nice and clear. This isn't something specific to Chinese cuisine; in the River Cottage Meat Book, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall insists that a stock should never go above "a very gentle simmer, whereby a few bubbles just tremble the surface every few seconds or so".

A word on the dried scallops — these are a very expensive ingredient, and not all that easy to get hold of in the UK. I'm not entirely sure what the situation is regarding these — they're certainly not illegal to sell, since I found them at See Woo in London's Chinatown (at £40 for a 200g gift package of around 25 scallops, and no, that isn't a typo) — but as Helen Yuet Ling Pang points out, they're not often available in the shops. One suggestion given in the eGullet thread linked above is to try substituting them with a bit of dried squid — or you could just leave them out.

Jinhua ham is also not very easy to find — I asked in three Chinatown supermarkets, and none of them had any. Serrano ham or some other dried non-smoked ham might work as a substitute.

Anyway, my stock turned out well, but I shot myself in the foot when it came to making the dish. I couldn't find any pea shoots, so I thought I'd try spinach instead, but accidentally picked up a bag of something that turned out to be labelled "kai choi" — mustard greens (芥菜/jiè cài). Their flavour totally overwhelmed the flavour of the stock, which was a bit disappointing given how long it had taken to make! I'd say this dish is definitely best made with milder-flavoured greens.

The method I used was fairly simple (cribbed from a blend of two recipes, one from Noob Cook and the other from Portion Perfect) — heat oil in a wok over medium heat, add some chopped garlic and stir it around briefly, add the washed leaves and continue to stirfry until they've wilted, pour in some 上湯, season with a drizzle of Shaoxing wine and a small pinch of salt, let it get hot, and serve.

Footnote: [0] I don't actually know why 豆苗 is usually translated as "pea shoots", since to my mind pea shoots look more like this.

While I've previously had a gentle dig at mix-and-match meat-in-sauce Chinese takeaway dishes, the presence of mix-and-match green vegetable dishes on a Chinese menu is actually a good sign. Generic Anglo-Chinese food often neglects the vegetable side of things, aside from items like "mixed seasonal vegetables" (rarely actually seasonal) and "stirfried beansprouts", but a good Chinese restaurant will offer several green vegetable options, cooked in a number of styles. The Red Cook blog has a nice post on this subject.

Here are some leafy (and other) greens you might see listed on a menu:

You might also see 時菜 (shí cài), which means "seasonal vegetables" — and for completeness' sake, I should also mention 白菜 (bái cài), though given how thoroughly I've already covered this term, I expect regular readers already know more about it than they ever wanted to.

Here are some styles you might see these vegetables offered in:

A few notes on some of these:

• The 汁 (zhī) in 豉汁 and 姜汁 literally means "juice" or "gravy"; the alternative names use the characters 豆 (dòu/bean) and 絲 (sī/shredded).
• The literal translation of 上湯 (shàng tāng) is "superior soup". 上 also appears in 螞蟻上樹 (mǎ yǐ shàng shù/ants climbing a tree) and 上海 (Shànghǎi, literally "above the ocean").
• While XO sauce is named after XO cognac, it doesn't actually contain any. It's a spicy, savoury, slightly oily sauce made with Chinese ham, dried scallops, dried prawns, and other such delicious ingredients. See Helen Yuet Ling Pang's post on XO sauce for more info.

Interestingly, the menu pictured at the top of this post offers both 清炒 and 嗆炒 as options, translating the former as "plain fried" and the latter as "stir fried". According to mandarintools.com, 嗆 means "pungent", so I'm not entirely sure what 嗆炒 actually does mean. Update, August 2010: I tried asking about this in the restaurant the menu belongs to, but had a lot of trouble making myself understood. After going around in a few conversational circles I gave up and just ordered some 嗆炒空心菜 — it turned out to be stirfried with dried red chillies and Sichuan peppercorns. Update II, August 2010: I've just noticed I was writing that character wrong — it's 熗, not 嗆. mandarintools.com says 熗 means "to cook in soy". So now I am even more baffled.

白 (bái) has a number of related meanings, with the most relevant to the menu context being "white", "pure", and "plain".

Here are some common menu terms that include 白:

白肉 (bái ròu) is often served as 蒜泥白肉 (suàn ní bái ròu), a pungently garlicky cold dish. Other names I've seen used for this dish are 蒜茸白肉 and 蒜蓉白肉, both of which pinyin-ise as suàn róng bái ròu. 蒜泥白肉 is more common though, in my experience. This really is a tasty dish — thin slices of tender pork coated in a light sauce with an abundance of mashed/minced raw garlic — though you'll stink of garlic for hours afterwards.

白灼 (bái zhuó) confuses me slightly. I've seen it variously translated as "plain braised", "quick boiled" or "quick boiled in soy sauce", "scalded", and "boiled". A thread on the CantoDict forums sheds a little more light — apparently the main characteristic of the 白灼 cooking method is that the items are cooked in water or stock at high rather than low heat (boil rather than simmer). This is perhaps a minor quibble, though — the important thing as far as the diner/menu-reader is concerned is that the item is cooked in liquid rather than fried, baked, etc.

白 is its own radical — Kangxi radical 106, which isn't a particularly common one. The only other character with this radical that you're likely to see on a menu is 百 (bǎi/hundred), which as superpitching recently informed me appears in the rather poetic name 牛百葉 (niú bǎi yè, literally "cow's hundred leaves") for third-stomach/omasum beef tripe, also known as leaf or book tripe, a common dim sum dish. I've also seen 百 in the name of another dim sum dish — 百花腐皮卷 (bǎi huā fǔ pí juǎn), which is literally "hundred-flowers beancurd skin rolls" (and is actually stuffed with minced prawns, rather than flowers).