Adventures with Kake

Just a quick heads-up that sung, a.k.a. Mr Noodles, is running a Cantonese season on his blog for the next month or so.

Judging by what I've seen from him in the past, this should be a good read regardless of whether you're already familiar with proper Cantonese food but still love reading about it, or you've only had Westernised Cantonese food and are curious about the real thing, or you're just generally interested in regional Chinese cuisines.

As of around now, you can even follow him right here on Dreamwidth at mr_noodles_feed (and I can confirm personally that Dreamwidth OpenID works fine for commenting over at his blog).

[Image: A map of China with Sichuan province shown in red. This is a public-domain image from Wikimedia Commons, originally created by Joowwww.]

Like Fujian food, which I discussed earlier this month, Sichuan food is one of the Eight Great Schools of Chinese food. Aside from Cantonese cuisine, it's probably the most commonly-available regional Chinese cuisine here in London, possibly even in the entire UK. You may also see it referred to as "Szechuan" or "Szechwan" food — these are older transliterations of its Chinese name, 四川 (Sìchuān in pinyin).

I've already posted about several Sichuan dishes individually (see the end of this post for a list), but haven't yet given an overview of the province and its cuisine, so today I hope to remedy that lack.

The province of Sichuan is a landlocked one, and so seafood is less commonly used than in the provinces along the coast. However, its warm climate and abundant supply of river (and rain) water provide ideal conditions for agriculture. Indeed, the name 四川 literally means "four rivers"[see footnote].

Note also that as I mentioned in last Friday's post on 辣子雞/là zi jī/chicken with chillies, the direct-controlled municipality of Chóngqìng (重慶) is adjacent to Sichuan province, and used to be part of it until fairly recently (1997), and so there are multiple similarities between the cuisines of the two areas. See Fuchsia Dunlop on Time Out Beijing for more on this.

The most famous ingredients of Sichuan cuisine are probably chillies (辣椒/là jiāo or 辣子/là zi) and Sichuan pepper (花椒/huā jiāo), which together create the characteristic 麻辣 (má là/"numbing-spicy") flavour. Chilli is used in multiple forms — fresh, dried, pickled, as chilli oil (紅油/hóng yóu/"red oil"), and as chilli bean paste (豆瓣醬/dòu bàn jiàng).

Sichuan peppercorns are the "numbing" (麻/má) component of Sichuan's numbing-spicy ma-la flavour. They can be used whole or ground, and they're also usually included when making chilli oil. Sichuan pepper can be quite astonishing to people who've never tried it before — it really does make your mouth and lips tingle in a numbing, almost pins-and-needles kind of way. This isn't by any means an unpleasant sensation, though, and the flavour is also good; woodsy and citrussy and complex.

However, as Fuchsia Dunlop explains in her excellent book Sichuan Cookery, "the most salient characteristic of Sichuan cuisine is its audacious combinations of several different flavours in a single dish". One such combination of flavours is 怪味 (guài wèi), translated literally into English as "strange-flavour"; this type of flavouring is commonly used to dress a cold dish of chicken or rabbit. A similar flavour combination is exemplified by 口水雞 (kǒu shuǐ jī), or "mouthwatering chicken", the main difference between the two being that 怪味雞 includes Chinese sesame paste while 口水雞 doesn't.

Another characteristic Sichuan flavour combination is 魚香 (yú xiāng), literally "fish-fragrance", named due to its basis in the seasonings traditionally used in fish cookery. Many different base ingredients can be "fish-fragranced", though the ones I've seen most often are aubergine/eggplant (魚香茄子/yú xiāng qié zi) and pork (魚香肉絲/yú xiāng ròu sī).

For much more information on Sichuan province and its cuisine, see the Fuchsia Dunlop book mentioned above. I recommend it very highly.

One thing to note is that true Sichuan food bears little resemblance to the "Szechuan style sauce" that you might see in the "X in Y sauce" section on a standard Anglicised "Chinese" menu. Similarly, there are a few Sichuan dishes, most notably fish-fragrant aubergine and mapo tofu, that tend to show up on these Westernised menus in versions that are almost unrecognisable in comparison to the way they should be. If you've only ever had "Sichuan" food from the type of restaurant that specialises in sweet and sour pork balls and advertises itself as serving "Cantonese, Peking, Szechwan cuisine", then I do urge you to try the real thing.

Speaking of which, something I've noticed recently in London is a tendency for restaurants to use "Sichuan food" as a shorthand for "regional Chinese food"; for example, a menu that looked much more Hunan to me was described as "our Sichuan menu" (as opposed to "our Cantonese menu", which contained not Cantonese food but Westernised Chinese food). I suspect this is because the idea of Sichuan food has now entered the mainstream among London's dining public, whereas Hunan food is still seen as somewhat more obscure. It's worth keeping an eye out for this sort of thing, if you're interested in the distinctions between different Chinese cuisines, though if you're only interested in obtaining some kind of regional food, it probably doesn't matter!

One way to identify a true Sichuan restaurant is to look for the word 川菜 (Chuān cài) somewhere on the frontage. Another clue might be the use of "Shu" and/or "Ba" in the name (example), since Sichuan province lies in the area of China previously occupied by the ancient kingdoms of 蜀 (Shǔ) and 巴 (Bā).

Incidentally, ewan asked me when we met for tea the other day whether I'll be posting about each of the Eight Schools (Anhui, Cantonese, Fujian, Hunan, Jiangsu, Shandong, Sichuan, and Zhejiang). I would like to! Though I'm going to have to do a bit of digging around to find restaurants within reach of London that will serve me Anhui, Jiangsu, Shandong, or Zhejiang food. If you know of any, please let me know! I don't currently have a passport (I need to sort out various paperwork and such before I can get another one) but will happily travel anywhere within the UK.

Here are the Sichuan dishes I've posted about:

• 擔擔麵/dān dān miàn (dan dan noodles)
• 夫妻肺片/fū qī fèi piàn (married couple's lung slices)
• 乾煸四季豆/gān biān sì jī dòu (dry-fried green beans)
• 火爆腰花/huǒ bào yāo huā (fire-exploded kidney flowers)
• 口水雞/kǒu shuǐ jī (mouthwatering chicken)
• 麻婆豆腐/má pó dòu fu (mapo tofu)
• 螞蟻上樹/mǎ yǐ shàng shù (ants climbing a tree)
• 飄香辣子雞/piāo xiāng là zi jī (drifting-fragrance chicken with chillies)
• 水煮牛肉/shuǐ zhǔ niú ròu (water-cooked beef)
• 酸辣豆花/suān là dòu huā (hot-and-sour "flower" beancurd)
• 蒜泥白肉/suàn ní bái ròu (pork with mashed garlic)
• 魚香茄子/yú xiāng qié zi (fish-fragrant aubergine)

Footnote: [0] According to Wikipedia, 四川 is an abbreviation for 川峡四路 (chuān xiá sì lù), or "four circuits of rivers and gorges".

I mentioned 香 (xiāng) in one of my very first posts here, on 魚香茄子 (yú xiāng qié zi). The primary meaning of 香 is "fragrant", and indeed 魚香茄子 is often translated as "fish-fragrant aubergine".

According to Gong Dan's Food & Drink in China, fragrance in Chinese cooking implies more than that which the nose can detect directly; it includes the freshness of the raw ingredients used, the blend of seasonings, and the proximity of a dish in terms of seconds from the cooking pot.

香 forms part of several words used on Chinese menus, such as 香菇 (xiāng gū/shiitake mushrooms), 香油 (xiāng yóu/sesame oil) and 五香 (wǔ xiāng/five-spice). Note that sesame oil has other, more literal names too, such as 麻油 (má yóu) and 芝麻油 (zhī ma yóu).

Here are some dishes with 香 in the name:

[Image: A pile of heavily browned pieces of fritter-like omelette, almost blackened in places. The high proportion of starch to egg gives it a very stiff texture. Sliced spring onions are visible in the batter.]

Oyster omelette (蠔煎/háo jiān) is a Fujian dish consisting of a starch-fortified omelette studded with fresh baby oysters. Like many other Fujian dishes, it's also popular in nearby Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore, among other places; and partly due to this geographical spread, it has many variations and also many different names.

As I mentioned on Wednesday, 蠔 (háo) is only one of several names for the oyster; the others include 海蠣 (hǎi lì), 牡蠣 (mǔ lì), and 蚵 (hé). Similarly, the omelette part of the dish may be referred to as 餅 (bǐng/cake), 煎 (jiān/pan-fried), 烙 (láo/seared), or a combination of these. In addition, the oysters used to make this should really be small rather than large, and so you might also see the character 仔 (zǎi/child) used after the 蠔/海蠣/蚵 to indicate this.

New Aroma, the (Fujian) restaurant where I ate the dish pictured above, uses 海蠣煎 (hǎi lì jiān) for oyster omelette, while Leong's Legend, the (Taiwanese) restaurant where I ate the version pictured below, uses 蚵仔煎 (hé zǎi jiān). Wikipedia has a non-exhaustive list of some other possible names.

When I had a go at replicating this at home, I followed the recipe from Jacqueline M Newman's Cooking From China's Fujian Province. This uses sweet potato starch as the thickener and milk as the additional liquid. It also includes pork mince, shiitake mushrooms, and water chestnuts as well as the oysters, and flavours the mixture with spring onions, oyster sauce, and a little salt. (Dr Newman has very kindly agreed to let me reproduce this recipe here — it follows at the end of the post.)

Other versions differ; for example, CNNGo describes a version eaten in Chaoshan, Guangdong province which uses cornstarch rather than sweet potato starch. Lily Ng has a version which includes garlic, soy sauce, and Chinese wine. Finally, Chez Pei describes a Taiwanese variant which includes a green vegetable, attempts to keep the starch and eggs somewhat separate, and is served with a sweetish reddish-brown ketchup-based sauce on top; this is the type pictured below.

[Image: A well-browned omelette laid out flat on a white plate. A light reddish-brown sauce covers the top of it. A metal spoon is being used to turn over one edge of the omelette, showing the underside in which some leafy greens are visible. Lumps here and there betray the presence of the oysters within the omelette.]

( Jacqueline M Newman's oyster omelet recipe under the cut )

When I made this, I replaced half of the milk with liquid saved from the oysters, reducing the added salt to compensate. My execution was not entirely successful — it stuck to the bottom of the pan and ended up more like loosely scrambled eggs — but then I've never been any good at omelettes, and my greatest fear when cooking eggs is overcooking, so it's likely that it would have been fine if I'd just left it alone a bit longer before starting to scrape at it. Problems of execution aside, it was pretty tasty even if I did end up eating it from a bowl with a spoon!

[Image: A map of China with Fujian province shown in red. This is a public-domain image from Wikimedia Commons, originally created by Joowwww.]

Here in the UK, probably the most well-known Chinese cuisines are Cantonese, Sichuan, and more recently Hunan. However, these are only three of the cuisines included in the Eight Schools classification of Chinese food (Anhui, Cantonese, Fujian, Hunan, Jiangsu, Shandong, Sichuan, and Zhejiang).

A little-known fact I recently learned from the ever-informative sung is that many of the kitchen staff at Chinese restaurants in the UK originally come from Fujian, a province which lies on the southeast coast of China, across the Taiwan Strait from Taiwan itself. The peculiar thing is that despite this, restaurants offering Fujianese food can be quite hard to find here. I only know of two in London — New Aroma on Gerrard Street and Fu Zhou on Lisle Street — and both of them have their Fujian dishes hidden away on Chinese-only menus.

Fujian borders on Guangdong, the home of Cantonese cuisine, and hence the food bears some resemblance, though it is by no means identical. The province's location on the coast has a strong influence on its cuisine; clams, oysters, jellyfish, sea cucumbers, and other seafood are commonly used, as is nori (a seaweed more often associated with Japanese cuisine).

Fujian cuisine often uses fish and seafood in combination with meat, perhaps most famously in the form of Fujianese fish balls (魚丸/yú wán); springy, chewy spheres of minced fish stuffed with pork mince and served in soup (photo; not mine). Another example is oyster omelette (蠔煎/háo jiān), which often includes a little pork mince for extra flavour.

An additional effect of location is the adoption of ingredients from other coastal areas outside China. One example of this is the sweet potato, which according to Jacqueline M Newman's Cooking From China's Fujian Province was originally imported from the Philippines during a famine in the province around 400 years ago. Sweet potatoes are used in Fujian cuisine both in their original form, for example as sweet potato balls (蕃薯丸/fān shǔ wán) stuffed with pork and nori (photo), and in the form of sweet potato starch.

However, by no means all the ingredients associated with Fujian cuisine are related to the sea. Lychee (litchi) fruits are used in both fish and meat dishes, and give their name to one of the province's characteristic meat dishes, lychee pork (荔枝肉/lì zhī ròu; photo). The pork in this is cut in such a way as to curl up and resemble lychee fruit after cooking; some versions include actual lychees as well, while others don't.

Another unusual ingredient is red wine lees. Fujian red wine is made from glutinous rice and red yeast rice, the latter getting its colour from being cultured with a reddish mould, Monascus purpureus. After fermentation is complete, the rice residue is removed and the wine is bottled. This residue, known as lees, is not discarded, but saved and used in dishes such as eel in red wine lees (photo). For more info on how this wine is made, see posts by Going With My Gut and Greg & Nee.

Like most Chinese cuisines, Fujian cuisine includes various dumplings. Perhaps the most intriguing of these are the dumplings known in Chinese as 燕丸 (yàn wán), literally "swallow balls" ("swallow" as in the bird)[see footnote] These are wonton-style dumplings with a minced pork filling — hardly unusual so far, but the interesting thing about them is the wrappers, which are made from pounded pork along with some kind of starch. Some sources say that the starch component is tapioca flour and glutinous rice, while others have it down as sweet potato flour, and others still say that it's yam. They're usually served in a light soup (photo).

Finally, no discussion of Fujian food would be complete without a mention of the dish known as "Buddha jumps over the wall" (佛跳牆/fó tiào qiáng). This is essentially a casserole of many delicious ingredients, which is said to smell so tantalising that it would tempt any Buddhist monk to set their vegetarianism aside and climb out over the wall of the monastery for a taste. I've never had it, partly because it's quite expensive. At New Aroma it costs £32.50, while Kai, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Mayfair, currently prices its version at £108 and notes that five days' notice is required; the ingredients listed on the menu (PDF) include abalone, dried scallops, sea cucumber, corn-fed chicken, and gold.

For more photos of Fujian food, see my Flickr photoset, and for further reading on Fujian cuisine see encyclopedia.com or Wikipedia.

Footnote: [0] 燕丸 may also be called 燕皮 (yàn pí), though some sources say that 燕皮 refers only to the meat paste wrapper. They may also be called 扁肉 (biǎn ròu), though I'm really not sure about this one — it could be something different.

As I mentioned on Monday, the Chinese character for "bun" is 包 (bāo).

Although some types of 包, such as the Shanghai 小籠包 (xiǎo lóng bāo) mentioned below, are translated into English using the term "dumpling", this is something of a misnomer, as 包 aren't really considered to be dumplings in Chinese cuisine. The generic Chinese term for "dumpling" is 餃子 (jiǎo zi), while the generic term for "bun" is 包子 (bāo zi). There's a long and somewhat confusing thread on this subject on Chowhound.

As far as I can make out, the essential difference between 包子 and 餃子 lies in the method of wrapping, though both types of wrapper start out as a flat circle of some kind of dough. 包子 are sealed by pulling up the edges of the circle evenly around and then twisting and pinching at the top, leaving a sort of characteristic "topknot". Conversely, 餃子 wrappers are folded by bringing one half of the circle to meet the other (sort of like folding it in half) and then either pleated along one side or simply sealed flat.

There is quite some variation within the 包子 type (as well as within the 餃子 type, though that's a subject for another post).

One type of 包 that you might see on a dim sum menu is the 上海小籠包 (Shànghǎi xiāo lóng bāo), often translated into English as "soup dumpling". Shanghai-style 小籠包 are sealed in the 包子 style, but have unleavened wheat dough wrappers; this type of wrapper is more commonly associated with 餃子, hence the linguistic confusion mentioned above. The best examples include a few small cubes of jellied stock along with the minced pork filling, which melt on steaming and fill the mouth with a gush of delicious hot soup on eating — this is where the English term "soup dumpling" comes from (photo [not mine] of Shanghai 小籠包).

Sichuan-style 小籠包, on the other hand, have breadier, leavened wrappers and are filled with shredded pork seasoned with soy sauce — no soup (photo of Sichuan 小籠包). These are not dim sum items as the term is generally understood in the UK, but rather snacks or 小吃 (xiǎo chī, literally "small eats").

I'm pretty sure that the first type of 包 I ever learned about was 叉燒包 (chā shāo bāo), or cha siu bao in the more common Cantonese pronunciation. These are soft, fluffy, slightly sweet buns filled with barbecued pork; many people consider them a must-have item on dim sum outings. 叉 (chā) means "fork" or "prong", and 燒 means "cook" or "roast", so the name is a reference to the traditional method of skewering the pork on a long fork before roasting it.

包 on a menu doesn't always mean "bun"; sometimes its other meaning of "package" or "bundle" is the intended one. An example of this is 海鮮生菜包 (hǎi xiān shēng cài bāo), or lettuce-wrapped seafood; a savoury mixture of chopped seafood served with lettuce leaves to wrap it up in.

Here are some other dishes with 包 in the name:

Note that occasionally you might see 飽 (bǎo) used on menus in place of 包 (bāo), though as pne points out in comments, this is a somewhat inaccurate "spelling".

[Image: Thick batons of peeled winter melon (a white/pale green vegetable) piled on a plate, coated with a light brown sauce in which a few tiny dried prawns are visible.]

Today I'm posting about a fairly simple but quite tasty vegetable dish — winter melon with dried prawns (海米冬瓜/hǎi mǐ dōng guā). As I mentioned on Wednesday, dried prawns are referred to in Chinese as both 海米 (hǎi mǐ) and 蝦米 (xiā mǐ), so you might also see this dish listed on menus as 蝦米冬瓜 (xiā mǐ dōng guā).

冬瓜 (dōng guā) is a type of gourd with a green skin and crisp white flesh. They tend to be very large. In the UK at least, you won't normally buy a whole one, but even the pieces on sale in supermarkets are quite big; when I went to buy some the other week, the smallest piece I could get weighed just over 1.2kg! Whole ones are sometimes used, hollowed out and carved on the outside with decorative designs, to hold soups at banquets (here's a photo).

The literal translation of 冬瓜 is "winter melon", and this is also a common name for it in English, though it's also known as white gourd or wax gourd. According to Wikipedia, although it requires very warm weather to grow, it can be stored for a year once it's grown, so the name may refer to its being available throughout the winter. Alternatively, according to a poster on eGullet, winter melons are usually harvested in winter, which may be another reason for the name.

There are a number of types of dried prawn available, with perhaps the most common being the curled-up pink type, around a centimetre or so across. However, I was intrigued by the ones in the dish pictured above (from Royal Palace) — tiny ones, with heads and shells still on — so when I saw a packet in Loon Fung I picked it up to give them a go in this dish. (Here's a side-by-side photo of the two types.)

I roughly followed the 海米冬瓜 recipe on Travel China Guide. The recipe as written is a bit confusing, since first it tells you to drain the soaked dried prawns and then a photo appears to show the soaking water being added into the wok as well. It's also not clear whether they intend you to add stock powder or actual stock at the end.

So here's what I did: heated oil in a wok, added chopped spring onion and ginger, stirfried them for 20 seconds, added the (soaked, drained) dried prawns and winter melon, stirfried for 2 minutes, added a pinch of salt and a fair bit of home-made chicken/pork stock, and then continued to cook it until the liquid had mostly evaporated and the winter melon had softened. It turned out pretty good!

Just a quick post today, following up on last week's concept post in which I mentioned a few reasons why knowing some Chinese menu vocabulary is worthwhile, despite the very welcome trend in restaurants towards providing English translations. Here are some more!

Cookery programmes.

I am a huge fan of 天天飲食, a daily 10-minute cookery programme shown on China Central Television (and uploaded by other fans to YouTube, where I watch it). It's subtitled in simplified Chinese. I can't understand most of the dialogue, but I can understand the names of ingredients, which often helps when I'm trying to figure out exactly what they're doing.

Recipes not in English.

Sometimes, the only recipes I can find for a given dish are in Chinese. Happily, my Chinese vocabulary is generally sufficient to fill in the gaps left by Google Translate. Not to mention that my knowledge of Chinese dish names is the only way I managed to find these recipes in the first place.

Chinese menus in non-Anglophone countries.

marshtide recently posted about a vegan Chinese restaurant in Stockholm. To my surprise, even though I don't speak Swedish, clicking through to the restaurant's website, I could understand the menu because it was in pinyin as well as Swedish.

Finding ingredients in Chinese supermarkets.

Being able to read the labels is always handy. Also, last week, I was shopping in Loon Fung and couldn't find the fermented black beans. I asked an employee, who couldn't work out what I wanted; he asked a colleague, who was similarly baffled. I decided to be brave, and said "豆豉" — they understood me immediately! And led me directly to the product I wanted!

Finally, although I wouldn't exactly say this is necessarily useful, I have found that I've acquired an unexpected fluency in Chinglish.

Since it's my Chinese menu blog anniversary this week, I'm letting myself off the constraint of having a theme. So today's character is simply my favourite character that I've not posted about yet: 椒 (jiāo), the Chinese character for "pepper".

I am quite keen on all kinds of pepper, including chillies (辣椒/là jiāo), bell peppers (菜椒/cài jiāo), pickled chillies (泡椒/pào jiāo), black pepper (黑椒/hēi jiāo), and Sichuan pepper (花椒/huā jiāo).

I'm not actually sure, though, how you tell if 椒 alone on a menu refers to chillies or bell peppers. For example, I'm not sure whether 雙椒茄條 (shuāng jiāo qié tiáo)[see footnote] is aubergine with red and green chillies, or aubergine with red and green bell peppers. I've even eaten it! I just can't remember whether they were relatively thick-walled mild chillies or relatively thin-walled bell peppers. (Perhaps the difference between these two isn't a hugely important one, given that they're all capsicums anyway.)

Anyway, here are some dishes with 椒 in the name:

Edit: There's a great comment from sunflower on another of my posts listing various words with 椒 in.

Footnote: [0] 雙 (shuāng) means "pair" or "double", so 雙椒 means two kinds of peppers, usually red and green. 條 (tiáo) means "long narrow piece" or "strip", so 茄條 is aubergine sliced into strips.

Today's dish rather breaks the mould of what British people (at least) might expect from a "stirfry". 蕃茄炒蛋 (fān qié chǎo dàn) translates directly as "stirfried [炒] eggs [蛋] with tomatoes [蕃茄]", and this is pretty much exactly what it is.

It's a fairly simple dish, really, and though I've seen it on quite a few restaurant menus, it's also easy enough to cook at home — I often have it for a quick lunch on a weekday, served over plain rice. iLearn Culture says that it's probably the most common dish seen on family dinner tables in China.

I've also seen it listed on menus as 蕃茄炒雞蛋 (fān qié chǎo jī dàn), which is the same thing but emphasising the fact that it's a chicken (雞) egg, and as 蕃茄蛋飯 (fān qié dàn fàn), which is the same thing but served with rice. Remember also that 蕃茄 and 番茄 (both pinyinised as fān qié) are used interchangeably on menus, and you may also see a different word used for tomato: 西紅柿 (xī hóng shì).

The recipe I use is Rasa Malaysia's tomato eggs (though I like to cook the tomatoes a bit longer than she does, and I also peel them first unless I'm feeling lazy). Food Mayhem's tomato fried eggs recipe omits the spring onions, while Beijing Made Easy's version also omits the spring onions but adds garlic. Finally, the eGullet thread on tomato eggs has some discussion of the different ways to make the dish.

(The photo at the top of this post is of the version served at Royal Palace; it has a rather higher proportion of tomato than I usually use.)

Edit: and checking my RSS reader now, I see that Sunflower and Appetite For China both posted about tomato eggs at around the same time I did — now there's a coincidence!

Recipes linked in this post:

• iLearn Culture: Scrambled eggs with tomato
• Rasa Malaysia: Tomato eggs (蕃茄炒蛋/西红柿炒蛋)
• Food Mayhem: Tomato fried eggs
• Beijing Made Easy: Egg and tomato
• Sunflower Food Galore: Scrambled egg with tomato 西紅柿炒雞蛋 (番茄炒蛋)
• Appetite For China: Stir-fried tomato and eggs