kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)

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!

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.
kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)

菇 (gū) is the Chinese character for mushroom. It doesn't cover all types of fungi — for example, wood ears/tree ears/black fungus would be 木耳 (mù ěr, literally "wood ear") — but it does cover a number of species that are commonly used in Chinese food.

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

香菇xiāng gūChinese black mushrooms (shiitake mushrooms, literally "fragrant mushrooms")
冬菇dōng gūanother name for the above (literally "winter mushrooms")
huā gūhigh-quality shiitake mushrooms (literally "flower mushrooms", referring to the crackled top pattern that appears on the good quality ones — photo)
北菇běi gūdried shiitake mushrooms
金菇jīn gūenoki mushrooms (literally "golden mushrooms")
金針菇jīn zhēn gūanother name for the above (針/zhēn, which means "needle/pin", refers to their shape)
樹菇chá shù gūtea tree mushrooms

And here are some dishes with 菇 in the name:

茶樹菇炒臘肉chá shù gū chǎo là ròustirfried tea tree mushrooms with Chinese ham
茶樹菇炒豬舌chá shù gū chǎo zhū shéstirfried tea tree mushrooms with pig's tongue
香菇雞飽仔xiāng gū jī bǎo zisteamed buns stuffed with chicken and shiitake mushrooms
臘味冬菇雞飯là wèi dōng gū jī fànrice with preserved meat, chicken, and shiitake mushrooms
香菇帶子腸粉xiāng gū dài zi cháng fěncheung fun with scallops and shiitake mushrooms
香菇雞絲粥xiāng gū jī sī zhǒucongee with shiitake mushrooms and shredded chicken
蠔油三菇háo yóu sān gūthree types of mushroom in oyster sauce

NB: this week's dish post will be up tomorrow rather than Friday, since I'm off to Glasgow for a long weekend and won't be taking my laptop.

菇: radical 140 (艸/艹) Cantodict MandarinTools YellowBridge Zhongwen

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.
kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)

I'm back from my month off, and have lots of interesting things to post about — but for today, I'm just going to put up this index of all the dishes I've posted about so far, to go with the subject index I posted a month or so ago. Please do let me know if you think there's a better way to organise it.

I'll be keeping this up to date as I write about more dishes, and it's also linked in the sidebar.

Skip to: dishes by main ingredient | dishes by other interesting ingredients | cold dishes | dim sum | vegan and veganisable dishes | specific cooking techniques | dishes not otherwise categorised.

Dishes by main ingredient

Dishes using other interesting ingredients

Cold dishes (涼菜/liáng cài)

Dim sum (點心/diǎn xīn)

Vegan and veganisable dishes

Note that I've only included here dishes that I think are just as good in the vegan versions as they are in the meaty ones. For example, I don't feel that 擔擔麵 actually needs the pork mince, but 乾煸四季豆 wouldn't be the same without it. Obviously, this is subjective. Another point worth noting is that you will need a good (preferably home-made) vegetable stock to use in place of the chicken/pork stock that flavours many of these dishes, and you may find that the texture is more watery than it should be due to lack of gelatin — this latter point also applies to the meaty versions, if you're using e.g. stock cubes instead of proper stock.

Posts which mention specific cooking techniques

Dish posts not otherwise categorised


If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.
kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)
A white ceramic mortar with ridged, sloping sides and a brown border around the top.  The bowl is half-filled with a puree of steamed peeled aubergine, in which rests a smooth wooden pestle.  A few large slices of grilled green pepper are also visible.

As I mentioned yesterday in my post on 茄子 (qié zi), aubergine/eggplant is my favourite vegetable. I love it baked, fried, barbecued, steamed, stewed, curried, puréed, whatever. I particularly love it in the form of baba ganoush, a Middle-Eastern dish where the aubergine is roasted until the skin blackens, then peeled and mashed with tahini, garlic, lemon juice, and salt.

Given this, I was highly intrigued by the dish pictured above, which I ate at Golden Day in London's Chinatown. It's roughly-speaking a Chinese version of the same thing — 擂蒸茄子 (lēi zhēng qié zi), or steamed, peeled aubergine mashed up with various flavourings in a large pestle and mortar. 擂 (lēi) is the only character here that I haven't posted about before; it means "grind" or "pound". 蒸 (zhēng) means "steamed", while 茄子 (qié zi) means "aubergine".

I don't have a recipe for the specific dish we tried at Golden Day, but I can recommend Viet World Kitchen's recipe for spicy Hmong eggplant, which is reasonably similar and very tasty. Moreover, it's not only vegetarian but also vegan, which fits in nicely with the fact that today is World Vegetarian Day.


And with that, I sign off for a month. As I said previously, I'll still be around reading and commenting on other people's blogs, and I'm always available at kake@earth.li if you have any questions, comments, dinner invitations, or desire to hang out with me in the pub — but my next post here will be on 1 November.

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.
kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)

According to my vocab lists, 茄 (qié) was one of the very earliest Chinese characters I ever learned; this doesn't really surprise me, since it's the character for my favourite vegetable — the aubergine, or eggplant.

There are a few other characters that 茄 often appears on menus in company with: 子 (zǐ), 條 (tiáo), and 蕃/番 (fān). I wondered if perhaps 茄子 was an emphasis of the egg-like nature of the aubergine, since one of the meanings of 子 is "seed" or "egg", but [personal profile] pne has commented with a more informed view — he says the 子 is probably being used as a mostly-meaningless suffix to disambiguate it from similarly-pronounced characters and/or to make the one character into a proper "word" (which often have two characters). 茄條 usually means that the aubergines are cut into strips — 條 refers to a long, narrow piece of something.

番茄/蕃茄, on the other hand, doesn't mean "aubergine", but "tomato". I don't know the etymology of this, but [personal profile] pne proposes in the same comment that it might be "barbarian's eggplant", since one of the older meanings of 番 is "barbarian", i.e. someone not Chinese (perhaps a politer translation might be "foreigner's eggplant"). Note that 蕃 is just 番 with a grass radical (艹) on top — I've seen both spellings in roughly equal proportions.

Here are some dishes with 茄 in the name:

魚香茄子yú xiāng qié zifish-fragrant aubergine
紅燒茄子hóng shāo qié zired-cooked aubergine
雙椒茄子shuāng jiāo qié ziaubergine with green and red chillies (雙椒 is literally "double peppers")
老干媽茄子Lǎo Gān Mā qié ziaubergine with Lao Gan Ma chilli sauce
家常茄子jiā cháng qié zi"home-style" aubergine
蕃茄炒蛋fān qié chǎo dànstirfried egg with tomato

Another term for aubergine is 矮瓜 (ǎi guā), which literally translates as "short gourd". As mentioned in the comments on that post, though, I've only ever seen 矮瓜 on one menu — 茄子 is much more common.

[identity profile] sung also points out in comments that the northern Chinese term for tomato is 西紅柿 (xī hóng shì), which translates literally as "western red persimmon". 蕃茄/番茄 is a more southern term.

茄: qié radical 140 (艸/艹) Cantodict MandarinTools YellowBridge Zhongwen

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.
kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)

Since I'm taking October off for research purposes, I thought now would be a good time to have a go at making a subject index of all my Chinese menu posts so far, to make it easier for people (including me) to find things. I'd welcome any comments and suggestions regarding ways of making this easier to use. Update, April 2011: I now have a dish index and a character index as well.

Meta (posts about these posts)

Subtypes of Chinese food

Regions of China

Specific ingredients

In the restaurant

Mandarin Chinese basics

Chinese culture

Looking things up

Practising

Computer-related stuff

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.
kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)

I think I may have mentioned this before, but one very useful type of resource in learning to read Chinese menus is the English-language Chinese food blog, particularly those which include the Chinese names of dishes and ingredients.

Here are a few examples of the kind of blogs I find useful — I would love to hear of any others that people can recommend.

I'm mainly looking for sources that I can trust to know what they're talking about (and are willing to admit when they aren't sure about something), and that discuss the history and context of the food rather than just posting recipes. Have you got any good suggestions for me?

I'd also like to mention some blogs written by friends of mine; these have a wider focus than the ones listed above, but their authors know plenty about Chinese food and often post about it (usually, like me, in a London context): bellaphon, Eat Noodles Love Noodles, and Tamarind and Thyme.

Somewhat relatedly, here's advance notice that I won't be posting during October 2010 (except on the 1st, which is this Friday). I'm taking a month-long blog sabbatical and will be using the time to research new topics, take more photos, and seek out even more exciting Chinese food. I'll still be reading and commenting on other people's blogs, though, and I'm always available at kake@earth.li if you feel like inviting me out for an adventure!

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.
kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)
A small bowl of rice porridge with a few pieces of century egg visible — both the amber-coloured albumen and the dark-coloured yolk.

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!)

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.

kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)

First things first — happy Mid-Autumn Festival!

This week's character isn't related to the Mid-Autumn Festival, but it is tangentially related to one of last week's characters, 蛋/dàn/egg. 粥 (zhǒu) is the Chinese character for congee (rice porridge), and one of the most popular ways of serving it is with pork and century egg — 皮蛋瘦肉粥 (pí dàn shòu ròu zhǒu). Note the 瘦 (shòu) character here — this indicates that the pork (肉/ròu) is of the lean variety, rather than the fattier cuts that are used in many other Chinese dishes.

Here are some other flavours of congee I've seen listed on menus:

生魚片粥shēng yú piàn zhǒucongee with sliced fish (生/shēng usually means "fresh" or "raw" in the context of a menu — here, it most likely means that the fish is added in at the last minute so it doesn't get overcooked)
滑牛肉粥huá niú ròu zhǒubeef congee (滑/huá means "smooth/slippery", and I'm not sure what it indicates in this context)
滑雞粥huá jī zhǒuchicken congee
豬紅粥zhū hóng zhǒupig's blood congee (literally "pig's red congee") — the translation on the menu was the rather euphemistic "Chinese red pudding congee"
蠔仔肉碎粥háo zǐ ròu suì zhǒubaby oyster and minced pork congee

Finally, while rice congee is the most common type of congee in Chinese cuisines, it's sometimes made from other grains, particularly in the north of China where rice is less of a staple food than in other regions. For example, Baozi Inn, a small Northern Chinese restaurant in London's Chinatown, offers 小米粥 (xiǎo mǐ zhǒu) — literally "small [小] grain [] porridge [粥]" — which is made from millet.

粥: zhǒu radical 119 (米) Cantodict MandarinTools YellowBridge Zhongwen

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.
kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)
A round, golden-brown, raised-pastry pie with fluted edges and the Chinese characters 翡翠/蛋黃 embossed on top.

Next Wednesday is the fifteenth day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar, which is the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival. So even though it doesn't generally appear on actual Chinese menus, there's only one food item I could possibly pick for today's post — the mooncake (月餅/yuè bǐng).

As noted earlier this week, 餅 (bǐng) refers to a (usually) disc-shaped cake, biscuit, or pastry, and may appear on menus in a number of contexts. 月 (yuè) means "moon" or "month", and I've never seen it on a menu.

Mooncakes are pretty much the heaviest kind of cake/pastry that I've ever encountered — I don't think I've ever seen anyone eat a whole one, not even [personal profile] bob. Wikipedia states that they're "usually eaten in small wedges", while Carl Chu at When In Roam jokes that mooncakes given as gifts are then swiftly regifted over and over again "like a game of musical chairs [...] until the day of the festival", at which point the person who gets caught with the mooncakes "has the misfortune of having to eat them". I think this is a little unfair; they're really quite tasty as long as you don't overdo it.

Essentially, a mooncake consists of a smooth sweet filling (usually based on lotus seeds) encased in a soft golden-brown pastry. Embedded in the filling, you may also find one or more salted duck egg yolks (鹹蛋黃/xián dàn huáng) — the more yolks, the more expensive the mooncake (the one below has a single yolk, and cost just under £5). I personally find the yolks delicious, but others disagree!

By the way, I apologise for the brevity of this post, but my internet connection has been acting up all week, so it's been quite hard to get anything written at all. I have something special to post on Monday, though, so I hope that will make up for it!

The same pastry as pictured at the top of this post, but sliced into to reveal a dark green paste filling with a bright yellow egg yolk embedded in it.
If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.
kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)

Here's the second of this week's two character posts (and some people may now be able to guess what Friday's post will be about).

餅 (bǐng) doesn't really have a precise equivalent in English. As far as I can tell, it basically refers to some kind of cake, pastry, or pancake. While it often implies that the item is disc-shaped, this isn't a cast-iron rule. Similarly, while in my experience 餅 as listed on menus are usually (a) savoury and (b) stuffed with some kind of filling, this isn't always the case.

Here are some dishes that use 餅 in the name. I'm using paragraphs here rather than my usual tabular format, to give me room to discuss their characteristics at greater length.

蘿蔔絲酥餅 (luó bo sī sū bǐng). These are often translated as something along the lines of "deep-fried shredded turnip puffs"; they're basically a puff pastry shell stuffed with shredded daikon/mooli. My post on 蘿蔔絲酥餅 has a photo, recipe links, and more info.

蔥油餅 (cōng yóu bǐng). While a common translation for these is "scallion pancakes" or "spring onion pancakes", this may be a little misleading for those familiar with Western pancakes/crepes. 蔥油餅 aren't made from a batter, but from a wheatflour dough; the chopped spring onions are layered into the dough by a process of rolling and coiling, before it's formed into a disc and fried in oil. Family Styles has a good recipe for 蔥油餅, including photos.

北京煎餅 (Běijīng jiān bǐng). This, on the other hand, is based on a very crepe-like kind of pancake, which is stuffed with egg, fresh coriander, spring onions, various sauces and flavourings, and a deep-fried wonton skin for crunch. I've never eaten one of these; it's a typical Beijing street food, and the only Beijing-style restaurant I know of in London closed down a few weeks before I got around to trying to go there. Quirky Beijing has an informative post on 北京煎餅, though.

炸墨魚餅 (zhà mò yú bǐng). These are deep-fried cuttlefish cakes; I don't have a photo of my own, but here's one I found on Flickr. This illustrates the "cake" meaning of 餅 — it's not cake as in sponge cake (you'd use 糕/gāo for that — see my post on 馬來糕/mǎ lái gāo).

百花腐皮餅 (bǎi huā fǔ pí bǐng). The literal translation of these is "hundred flowers beancurd skin cakes", while a more useful one might be "beancurd skin cakes stuffed with minced prawn". 百花 seems to be a fairly common way to refer to minced prawns — I've seen it on lots of dim sum menus. 腐皮 is actually made from soya milk rather than beancurd; it starts life as the skin which forms on top of warm soya milk when left to sit. I think a more common English term for it comes from the Japanese one, yuba. I'm not sure this is a particularly common way to use 餅, though, since the vast majority of the references on the web seem to be to the restaurant where I took this photo.

餅: bǐng radical 184 (食/飠) Cantodict MandarinTools YellowBridge Zhongwen

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.
kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)

No, I haven't lost track of what day it is — I know I usually do concept posts on Mondays, but this week I'm doing two character posts instead. There will be an extra-special concept post next Monday though!

蛋 (dàn) is the Chinese character for egg; you may see this on a menu simply as 蛋, or you may see additional specification in the form of 雞蛋 (jī dàn). 雞 is chicken, and I did wonder the first time I saw it whether the eggs were specified as being chicken eggs because 蛋 on its own implied e.g. a duck egg — however, [personal profile] pulchritude set me straight, explaining that 雞蛋 is used rather than 蛋 for reasons of euphony, in situations where 蛋 on its own would sound lopsided or awkward.

There are a couple of situations where 蛋 generally refers to the egg of a duck, however; specifically, 皮蛋 (pí dàn) and 鹹蛋 (xián dàn).

皮蛋 are usually called "century eggs" or "thousand-year-old eggs" in English. The literal translation is "skin egg", which refers to the traditional method of making them by covering raw duck eggs in a high-pH paste based on lime and wood ash, then leaving them to cure. When the process is over, the yolks will have become creamy and sulphorous, while the whites will have set and changed colour to a beautiful dark amber colour — see Helen Yuet Ling Pang's post on 皮蛋 for photos.

Helen also mentions a couple of ways to eat these eggs. One is 皮蛋豆腐 (pí dàn dòu fu), which is a cold dish of century eggs combined with tofu/beancurd (豆腐). Another is 皮蛋瘦肉粥 (pí dàn shòu ròu zhǒu), which is congee/rice porridge (粥/zhǒu) with century eggs and lean pork (瘦肉).

鹹蛋 are salted eggs. You can make these yourself at home, by soaking raw eggs in brine for a few weeks (here's a recipe for the Filipino version and here's one for the Chinese version). Unlike 皮蛋, 鹹蛋 must be cooked before you eat them; in Chinese cuisines, this is usually accomplished by steaming.

I've mentioned 鹹蛋 before, in my post on 鹹蛋黃玉米粉 (xián dàn huáng yù mǐ fěn) — sweetcorn with salted egg yolk. 黃 (huáng) means "yellow", and 蛋黃 ("egg yellow") means egg yolk, so 鹹蛋黃 are the yolks of salted duck eggs — it's not uncommon for the yolks to be the only part of the 鹹蛋 used in a dish, and you can actually buy the yolks separately if that's all you need.

Here are some other dishes that use 蛋 in the name:

番茄蛋花湯fān qié dàn huā tāngtomato and egg drop ("egg flower") soup
韭菜蝦仁炒雞蛋jiǔ cài xiā rén chǎo jī dànstir-fried (scrambled) eggs with Chinese chives and peeled prawns
雞蛋炒飯jī dàn chǎo fànegg fried rice
酥皮蛋撻sū pí dàn tàegg tarts — note that the 皮 here is attached to the 酥 rather than the 蛋, since 酥皮 refers to the "crispy skin" (pastry) of the tart
蕃茄炒蛋fān qié chǎo dànstirfried eggs with tomatoes

As well as these, [identity profile] sung points out in comments another use of the character 蛋, which he actually told me about before and I forgot about — the Cantonese term for fish balls (魚丸 or yú wán to non-Cantonese) is 魚蛋, literally "fish eggs", due to their being roughly egg-shaped.

蛋: dàn radical 142 (虫) Cantodict MandarinTools YellowBridge Zhongwen

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.
kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)
Thin slices of cooked pork intermingled with equally-thin slices of cucumber, piled on a white plate and drizzled with finely-minced garlic in chilli oil.  White sesame seeds are scattered over to finish.

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.

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.
kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)

I'm a little surprised it took me this long to post about 蒜 (suàn), the Chinese character for garlic. Garlic is one of my favourite seasonings, and I can't think of many dishes that aren't improved by its presence. Judging by my vocab lists, though, I actually learned around 50 or 60 other characters before I got around to 蒜! I think this is perhaps because it doesn't appear nearly as often on Chinese menus as it does in Chinese dishes — it's pretty much taken for granted that a savoury dish is likely to have some garlic in.

This is good news for garlic lovers, though; if you see 蒜 in the name of a dish, you can be pretty sure that the garlic is a significant component. One example of this (or, rather, a family of examples) is provided by the mix-and-match green vegetable options I've posted about before — look out for 蒜泥 (suàn ní), 蒜茸 (suàn róng), or 蒜蓉 (suàn róng), all of which basically mean "mashed/minced garlic".

Here are some other examples:

蒜泥黃瓜suàn ní huáng guācucumber with mashed garlic
蒜蓉蝦春卷suàn róng xiā chūn juǎnminced garlic and prawn spring rolls
蒜燒肚條suàn shāo dǔ tiáotripe strips cooked with garlic
清蒸蒜蓉带子qīng zhēng suàn róng dài zisteamed scallops with minced garlic
蒜香鴨舌suàn xiāng yā shéduck tongues with garlic

Another interesting dish I spotted while compiling this post is one from the Dōngběi (東北/northeastern Chinese) section of the menu at Le Wei Xiang in Lewisham, southeast London: 蒜苔炒肉 (suàn tái chǎo ròu), which is translated as "fried pork with garlic sprouts". Presumably these are the stems of the garlic plant — I found a photo on Flickr which seems to bear this out. Sung, in comments, points out another name for garlic shoots/garlic sprouts: 蒜心 (suàn xīn), which translates literally as "garlic hearts".

蒜: suàn radical 140 (艸/艹) Cantodict MandarinTools YellowBridge Zhongwen

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.
kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)
Coarsely-chopped spring onions, red chillies, and green chillies are piled on a plate, intermixed with stems of fresh green coriander.  A few other vegetable dishes are just visible in the background.

I've mentioned Chinese cold dishes (涼菜/liáng cài) before, in my post on 涼拌黃瓜/liáng bàn huáng guā/cucumber salads, but since I love them so much I wanted to talk more about them.

As noted in the post mentioned above, most of the Chinese-language menus I've seen here in London have separate cold dish sections. These might be listed simply under the heading of 涼菜, which translates very literally as "cold dishes", or as 涼菜類 (liáng cài lèi), which means something along the lines of "cold dish category". Sometimes they're also labelled in English as "starters", which I feel is a bit misleading — it's by no means mandatory to have them strictly at the beginning of your meal, and as is usual in Chinese dining, they're shared between the party rather than being ordered individually.

There are quite a few vegetable salads in the Chinese cold dish repertoire — as well as the cucumber salads linked above, I also rather like 老虎菜 (lǎo hǔ cài), or tiger salad, which is a very spicy mixture of shredded chillies, fresh coriander, spring onions, and sometimes other things like green bell peppers, cucumber, dry tofu strips, and so on. A rather chunky (albeit nice and colourful) version of this is pictured above. EatingAsia has a good post on the subject of raw vegetables in Chinese cuisine, including details of a really intriguing-sounding fresh mint salad from Yunnan province. Another good one is three-shred salad, which I've seen listed as 紅油三絲 (hóng yóu sān sī) — the three shredded things are usually something like carrot, kelp, and bean thread noodles.

涼菜 aren't restricted to vegetarian options, though. Finely-sliced pig's ear in chilli oil (紅油豬耳/hóng yóu zhū ěr), sliced pork with mashed garlic (蒜泥白肉/suàn ní bái ròu), and man-and-wife offal slices (夫妻肺片/fū qī fèi piàn) are some of my favourites. Jellyfish (海蜇/hǎi zhé) is a common ingredient, often combined with other ingredients such as shredded chicken (海蜇拌雞絲/hǎi zhé bàn jī sī) or cucumber (海蜇黃瓜/hǎi zhé huáng guā), or simply dressed with Chinese vinegar (老醋海蜇/lǎo cù hǎi zhé).

Here's a list of the cold dishes I've posted about. And here are some photos of cold dish menus, all from restaurants in London: Golden Day, Le Wei Xiang, and Sanxia Renjia. If you want to see some more photos of the actual food, check out my 涼菜 tag on Flickr!

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.
kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)
A whole steamed seabass lying on a white platter in a pool of reddish-orangeish liquid.  Coarsely-chopped lightly fermented red chillies are scattered generously on top of the fish, and the whole thing is topped off with a single sprig of fresh green coriander.

As I mentioned on Wednesday, steaming is a very common way of cooking fish in Chinese cuisines — a whole steamed fish can look pretty spectacular as the centrepiece of a banquet. However, the head is not left on simply because it looks good; there's plenty of flesh in there for eating, and in fact the cheeks are considered to be the most delicious part of the entire fish (I have no personal opinion on this, since I still haven't mastered the art of extracting flesh from cheek). Indeed, the restaurant (Golden Day) where I took the photo in this post actually offers steamed fish head (魚頭/yú tóu) as a dish in itself, and fish head dishes are popular in other Asian cuisines too (e.g. fish head curry in Malaysian cuisine).

In Cantonese (Guangdong) cuisine, a steamed fish might be flavoured quite simply and subtly with ginger and spring onions; this is the 清蒸 (qīng zhēng) or "clear steamed" style that Sung quite rightly berated me for not mentioning in my last post. Red Cook has a recipe for clear-steamed seabass (清蒸鱸魚/qīng zhēng lú yú) that exemplifies this technique (see also Ah Leung's comment on eGullet, Steamy Kitchen's Chinese steamed fish recipe, and Helen Yuet Ling Pang's post about her mother's steamed fish recipe).

Other regions have their own preferred styles too. Teochew-style steamed fish might be flavoured with sour plum, mushroom, tomato, and preserved vegetable as well as the usual ginger and spring onion — see Lily's Teochew-style steamed pomfret or Tepee's version on eGullet. I also recently read about a specialty of Yangzhou (a city in Jiangsu province, located on the bank of the Yangtze River) — steamed mandarin fish in vinegar sauce (though sadly I am yet to find a recipe for it).

For this post, though, I'm focusing on Hunan-style steamed fish, which is more likely to come with chopped salted chillies (剁椒/duò jiāo or 剁辣椒/duò là jiāo — 剁 is chopped/minced, 椒 is chilli/pepper, and 辣 is spicy) and perhaps a generous serving of minced garlic too. According to Henry Chung in his Hunan Style Chinese Cookbook, steaming is the second most popular way of cooking Hunan food (regrettably I seem to have failed to note down what he counts as the most popular).

Fuchsia Dunlop's book on Hunan cuisine, Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, describes 剁辣椒 as a hot, sour, salty preserve which is "brilliantly, beautifully red in colour" and "one of the most distinctive Hunan seasonings". You can buy it ready-made in jars, but it's simple to make — coarsely chop some fresh red chillies (include the seeds too), mix them with salt, pack them into a clean jar, screw the lid on, and let them sit at room temperature for a couple of weeks. Ms Dunlop's suggested proportions are 500g chillies mixed with 60g salt, and another 15g salt sprinkled on top before sealing the jar (see the Tigers And Strawberries post on 剁椒 for volume measurements and additional commentary).

To steam your fish, you'll first need to make sure you have suitable equipment — specifically, something big enough to fit a whole fish in! The usual way to do this is in a wok — put a rack/stand in the bottom, add water, put the fish on a large plate on top of the rack, and put the domed lid of the wok on top of all that. If you don't have all those things, check out Helen Rennie's suggestions for an improvised fish steamer. Helen also gives timings: 8 minutes per inch of thickness for whole fish (measure the thickness at the thickest part).

The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook mentioned above offers a specific recipe for steamed fish with chopped salted chillies; I won't reproduce it here, but will give the gist. Before placing the fish in the steamer, make several diagonal slashes in the thickest part so the flavours can penetrate, then rub it with 1 Tbsp Shaoxing wine. Now stirfry 1/2 tsp fermented black beans and 1 1/2 tsp finely chopped ginger in 2 Tbsp oil, until fragrant; set aside and clean the wok ready for steaming. Place 20g unpeeled smashed ginger root and 1 smashed spring onion on the steaming plate, then put the fish on top. Cover the fish evenly with 60g chopped salted chillies, then scatter the black bean/ginger mixture on top. Steam until done.

Edit, October 2010: If you want a specific recipe to follow, TravelChinaGuide has one, though note that they don't specify that the chopped red chillies should be salted ones, and they omit the black beans.

kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)

Now my dim sum month is over, I'm going back to posting about characters on Wednesdays. I'm easing back into it by starting with a character that turns up a lot on dim sum menus — 蒸 (zhēng), which means "to cook by steaming".

蒸 confused me a little when I first saw it, since it seems to have both the grass radical (艹) and the fire radical (灬), at the top and bottom respectively, which is where these two radicals are normally placed. We've discussed the issue of multiple radicals here before, though I prefer to stick to the strict definition of a radical: the component of a character under which it's listed in a dictionary, rather than just a component which appears somewhere in a character. However, like 瓣/bàn/petal, 蒸 does appear to have two radicals; it appears in my paper dictionary under both 艹 and 灬 (though CantoDict lists it under 艹 only, and Mandarin Tools concurs).

As well as being a common character on dim sum menus, 蒸 appears in other Chinese menu contexts too. Steaming is actually a pretty common Chinese cooking method, particularly for fish — the steaming process is quite a gentle one, mechanically-speaking, so the delicate flesh is protected. I'll be posting more about steamed fish on Friday!

Here are some dishes that use 蒸 in their names (a couple of which I've mentioned before):

豉汁蒸排骨chǐ zhī zhēng pái gǔsteamed spare ribs (排骨) in black bean sauce (豉汁)
剁椒蒸鱸魚duò jiāo zhēng lú yústeamed sea bass () with minced chillies ()
清蒸鱸魚qīng zhēng lú yú"clear-steamed" sea bass (Cantonese-style, flavoured with ginger and spring onions)
醬椒蒸魚頭jiàng jiāo zhēng yú tóusteamed fish head () with chilli paste ()
粉蒸牛肉fěn zhēng niú ròusteamed beef () with coarsely-ground roasted rice (粉)
蟹黃蒸燒賣xiè huáng zhēng shāo màisteamed siu mai (燒賣) topped with crab roe (蟹黃)

蒸: zhēng radical 140 (艸/艹) Cantodict MandarinTools YellowBridge Zhongwen

Characters mentioned in this post:
kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)
A checkbox-style dim sum menu offering around 60 options.  Written in black marker at the bottom is: Dim sum until 4:45pm only.

So, that's the end of August and the end of my dim sum extravaganza. I hope you all enjoyed it! Especially those of you who came and ate dim sum with me in real life :)

Here's a list of all the dim sum posts, in case anyone missed some:

I think I will do this again next year! So please let me know which of your favourite dim sum items I didn't cover this time, and I'll do my very best to fit them in.

And I mean that — I want to hear from you! Yes, you! Even you lurkers thinking "nah, she doesn't mean me!" If you have trouble leaving a comment, just email me and let me know.

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.
kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)
A bamboo steamer basket with a large piece of steamed sponge cake rising up out of it.  The cake is a light brown colour due to the use of a small amount of soy sauce in the batter.  The very open crumb of the cake shows how well-risen and light it is.

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.

1 吉士 is a transliteration of "cheese", and so since cheese and custard both involve milk, 吉士粉 ended up being used for custard powder (I've posted about 粉/fěn before; one of its meanings is "powder"). According to CantoDict, 吉士 is also used in Cantonese to mean "courage".

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.
kake: The word "菜單" (Chinese for "menu") in various shades of purple. (菜單)
A neat, square, lotus leaf wrapped parcel sits on a plate waiting to be unwrapped.

Today's dim sum item is a little more substantial than the ones I've posted about previously: 糯米雞 (nuò mǐ jī). This literally means "chicken with glutinous rice" — 糯米 is glutinous rice, and 雞 is chicken. Usually left implicit in the name is the fact that this chicken/rice mixture is wrapped up in a lotus leaf before being steamed, though you may sometimes see the lotus leaf explicitly mentioned, as 荷葉糯米雞 (hé yè nuò mǐ jī). 荷 means "lotus", and 葉 means "leaf" [see footnote].

The most common Cantonese transliteration I've seen for this is "lo mai gai", while English translations include "steamed mini glutinous rice wrapped in lotus leaf", "glutinous rice with meat in lotus leaves", "mini glutinous rice in lotus leaves", and other variations on the same theme. As well as the chicken and rice, the ingredients include Chinese sausage (臘腸/là cháng) and Chinese mushrooms; these savoury items are seasoned with soy sauce, ginger, etc, and then buried in the centre of the rice parcel, to be revealed when you open it up and dig in (illustrated below).

The glutinous rice used in this dish is not the same as the rice used to make, for example, fried rice or plain steamed/boiled rice. It's also known as "sticky rice", and is a different variety from jasmine and other long-grained rices. As well as its culinary uses, it's also been used historically to make masonry mortar for walls and buildings.

As mentioned above, 糯米雞 can be quite filling, so you may not want to eat an entire parcel on your own, at least if you want to try lots of the other dim sum dishes! Though this does depend on the size of the parcel — some places just give you one big one, others give you two or even three smaller ones.

If you'd like to try making this at home, check out Sunflower's 糯米雞 recipe. I like it with the chicken on the bone, but you can always use boneless chicken if you find the bones too fiddly.

The parcel from above has now been unwrapped, revealing a quantity of steamed glutinous rice with a number of small chunks of bone-in chicken gathered together in its centre.  Some of the sauce from the chicken has soaked into the rice.

Footnote: [0] Regular readers may recognise 荷/hé/lotus from my post on 豆/dòu/bean, since it appears in one of the names for mangetout — 荷蘭豆 (Hélán dòu, literally "Dutch bean", as 荷蘭 is a phonetic representation of "Holland"). Similarly, 葉/yè/leaf has also appeared here before, as 牛柏葉 (niú bǎi yè), or leaf tripe.

If you have any questions or corrections, please leave a comment (here's how) and let me know (or email me at kake@earth.li). See my introductory post to the Chinese menu project for what these posts are all about.

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