Ben Hong

About 4 posts upthread you will find my tirade about oyster sauce. Go read some older Chinese cookbooks and you will find oyster sauce hardly ever mentioned. It has become ubiquitous in cooking in recent years because people love "shortcuts".

And that is why I said in another thread, I almost never comment on other people's recipes.

I do not often comment on other people's recipes for this reason. I will comment here that cooking is not a theoretical and academic paper exercise. I know my ingredients well enough to mentally blend them when I read a recipe. To tell the truth, some of the posted recipes do not deserve my comments. (Please excuse the arrogance. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa)

Hey, when I do things like skinning eels of the aquatic kind, I have to get into the down and dirty mood to properly discharge the task. No nice way to approach it.

In a previous thread on the topic of seasong a wok, I and others posted a couple of methods. BTW, don't turn this into an obsession, because even if you don't season a new wok, it will become so after a dozen or so (non-acidic)dishes. As long as you don't scrub it with detergent.

Nail the sucker through the head onto a sturdy plank, cut a circle around the neck only through the skin, separate a couple of inches of skin from the flesh, wrap this free end around the nose of a pair of long nosed pliers, and strip the skin off. Takes some strength. Either coat your hands with salt or wear cloth gloves to hold on to the slimey buggers. It is better to eviscerate the beast first. Eel is never tough, and the bones are soft enough to eat.

Sounds like your wok is not seasoned, but caked with too much burned on oil residue at the bottom of it. Seasoning a wok does NOT mean coating it with baked on layers of oil, like layers of Teflon coating. Re- season it but wipe it clean after each heating.

Actually I have eaten salted shark (dogfish) that was salted whole, like the salt cod. Not mui herng though.

P.E.T.A. = People Eating Tasty Animals

Depends on the regional availability, Grasshopper. China has many distinct regions.

ANY fish can be made into ham yu....

So, mudbug, you are telling us that you get all your meat by hunting?

"...teeny tiny fishies"? Isn't it usually a slice from a larger fish like mackerel? ← No, we were referring to the whole "teeny tiny fishies" that are about 1 inch long. There are several varieties, some are translucent white, some are silver, some are miniatures of a fish. All are delicious done the way I suggested and eaten with a bowl of plain rice.

Hooray for Dejah!! I don't exactly know when we all started to use oyster sauce in every dish, but my Gawd it's a freaking epidemic. I swear there are subliminal messages everywhere put up by Lee Kum Kee to get us hooked. Until she passed away several years ago, I used to eat with my mother at least once a week and enjoyed her cooking. At her house and back in the village we always treated oyster sauce as a luxury item for special occasions like birthdays, New Years, banquets, etc. and ONLY used for dipping poached pork or white cut chicken, etc. NEVER, NEVER used as a flavouring ingredient in cooking. (the only time I remember having oyster sauce in the small restaurants near the old village when I returned in latter years was on gai lan). Indiscriminate usage of oyster sauce would be considered economically profligate, and worse, a muddy obfuscation of the flavour of a dish, making several dishes at the same dinner have the same taste. My Elder Cousin who had about a thousand Chinese, "western", and pastry recipes committed to memory because he was semi-literate, calls oyster sauce over usage "dishonest" and the sign of a poor cook.

Ben Hong, See? My point exactly... Dejah, More tender than the leaves of Ong Choy? ←

Ah Leung, that's the message I have preaching these past 3-4 years, to wean people away from the notion that "it's only stirfry throw everything in it, that's what the Chinese do". The tragedy is that the Chinese do not do this and this way of thinking is constantly perpetuated by the "chinese" restaurants, celebrity chefs, TV producers and magazine writers who have co-opted "our" cuisine by writing bad advice based on what they perceive as good Chinese cooking methods. As long as it looks colourful (carrots and red peppers), taste like what they"think" it should taste like (lots of sugar), and make it close to what the "public" wants (skewed ingredient ratios). Some of these ingredients clash so badly, that they would upset the feng shui balance of the whole continent. Makes for excellent copy, though. Except for dai dup wui, I don't know any other dish where so many ingredients are listed in a typical Chinese "recipe" are thrown in pell-mell as in those typical recipes published or aired in public media. Strive for simplicity, achieve reality.

Whatever I or anyone else makes in a wok, it's got to be simplistic in technique, harmonious in flavourings and minimalist in ingredients. One can do a lot with pantry items like salt, oil, soy sauce, garlic, green onions, and a couple of featured ingredients. I also insist that the taste of featured ingredients predominates.

NO, NO, NO. You must be thinking of something else. Edible amaranth is very tender. If you finely chop it before cooking, it will turn to mush before your eyes. Leave the leaves whole as the stuff "disappears" on meeting heat, ie: loses its water content and shrinks. The ratio of raw to cooked volume is about 20 to 1 .

Use your TASTE, young Skywalker. Know your ingredients and cook to taste and preference. That is the reason why I never post recipes on anything, and admire the people who do.

Edible amaranth is a very delicate, fragile veg. and it is best flash fried with hom ha of fu yu with a bit of garlic in the latter. *drool* slobber*

OOOooooohhhhh yeah!!!! Real hien lu, not periwinkles (a great substitute though)

I have never seen char siew precooked before roasting.

The honeycomb variety is cow tripe, for that use the loo method and "looo" the bejesus out of it.

Most of the time it is pork stomach, or tripe. Once in a long while, you might find "honeycomb" tripe (beef) on the list of jook additions. There is no recipe that needs to be adhered to in preparation of tripe to add to jook. Just boil the living bejezus out of them. Then slice and add to jook.

Please, let that be your swan song.