Ben Hong

Hey, would it help if I posted my mailing address here? Just trolling....trolling..... Dejah, your Mother is an amazing woman, please pass along my best wishes.

sui-mai literally means "cook and sell", ie. fast food. originally it referred to a small pastry.

Ditto. Lamma Island is a great place to gear down after a week of pressure doing so-called "international trade work".

Normally when I make or order a full dish, it would be called "see jup pai gwat", but at yum cha, almost everyone I know just calls it "pai gwat" and the servers know. But, if there is continuous cart service, no words need to be uttered . If the dish is part of a meal, see jup pai gwat gets the full treatment, with a few slivers of red and green peppers, green onion garnish. Why, some even add a few slivers of onion and celery , but as long as it has lots of black beans and garlic, cool. However as a dimsum dish, no veggies please, except a sliver of red pepper as garnish and use a very light hand with the garlic and black beans, dimsum is mostly about taste and one never wants to overpower the central ingredient. The best pai gwat I hve had at yumcha was very light in colour, ie: you may see a few bits of black beans only and a small hint of garlic. As for making the stuff, I first marinade using light soy sauce, black beans and garlic, a few chili flakes, a pinch of sugar, a bit of minced chin pei and a touch of bicarb., then I will lightly coat the ribs with cornstarch. Steam. GO LIGHTLY ON THE FLAVOURINGS PLEASE!! BTW, most of the finer places use ribs from very young pigs, slightly older than suckling pigs. If you can access this type of meat, no need for bicarb.

TO TASTE If you are indeed a scientist then you would be familiar with the term "experiment?" No?

Guk fa cha was the equivalent of "Coca Cola" to us kids back in the old village. I still make it from time to time, when I think that I deserve a sugar shot. SIMPLE, like Dejah says, it's like making tea....ya boils de water...ya pours da water over blossoms...ya add sugar...ya drink...no??

Both! Mea culpa! Mea culpa! Mea maxima culpa! I am one of the guilty ones who perpetrated this kind of slop shock on our naive, innocent, and unsuspecting gweilo clientele. I did irreparable damage to their taste buds and their perceptions of what is reality in "Chinese" food. May heaven forgive me. I am not worthy. "Our client, who doth have gelt, Here be thine Chow mein.... (Proffer me no questions, But the veggies did not wilt), Thou hast the money And I have the wok In the name of the celery, the cabbage and the holy sprout. Allllll Right!!"

OMG!!

I use Malaysian Curry that comes in vacuum sealed pouches. A lot of Chinese restaurants make curry in a wok with lots of moisture. I like to make mine stew style in big batches for "day after" tastiness.

Some manufacturers coat the woks with a hard waxy coating out of the factory and mere washiong with a cloth and soap won't touch it. Two ways of dealing with it, a)use a steel wool scrubbing pad and lots and lots of elbow grease to remove the stuff, b) burn it off outdoors over a hot flame. If you have a big exhaust system inside, no problem.

Trillium, good post, resonates with good common sense. Wok hei is that je ne sais quoi quality that a lot of cooks strive for, but seldom achieve consistently. I think that it is over rated, although I am appreciative when it is done. But we should not obsess about it. Besides, that quality start to dissipate as soon as the food leaves the wok and by the time it is presented especially in a restaurant, *poof* it is gone. Who the hell wants to eat next to a wok?

Go to a "western" style supermarket or a Japanese type emporium for picked crab meat. Or just ask around. It seems that my prediction up thread about the size and simplicity of the Chinese kitchen was right. Good luck.

Indoor gas kitchen ranges are more and more coming with at least one burner which is rated at 15K Btu. I have the KitchenAid model which does a great job for "normal" Chinese portions, for empty nesters like my wife and I. My outdoor burner ($49.Cdn) is rated at almost 100K Btu, I think, and it is way too hot at full blow so I almost never turn it past half way. I wish to say again, these super high Btu monsters are not intended for non-commercial indoor use. Make sure your insurance is OK with it and paid up. Also install a commercial exhaust in your kitchen if you really must have one inside.

Wok hei is not a function of a seasoned wok alone. That in conjunction with extreme high heat, timing, harmonious seasonings, and perfect technique "may" produce that ephemeral quality in a well turned Chinese dish.

Well, truth be known a few Chinese restauranteurs have made a million bucks "serving" gweilo food and "not" publishing recipes. As for "exchanging " recipes, I supposed that during the hard times of the "Exclusion" days, there were some interchange, but taken in context of how the Chinese retaurants got started, ie: mining camps, lumber camps, railway gangs, and the cultural ignorance of the gweilo who populated this demographic subset, I believe that the Chinese camp cooks essentially threw what little supplies they had together and called it any name they wanted. In recent years, by my standards around 40 years ago, fancy names like gu loh yuk, Gen. Tso, kung pao, etc. crept into the Chinese menu lexicon to match the increasingly sophistication and the "uptown" aspects of the North American Chinese restaurants. Also to match the increasing "sophistication" of the clientele of that era. However, nowadays there are more and more people, gweilo, who have really and truly embraced Chinese cuisine as legitimate and are demanding authenticity in style and ingredients. THANK GAWD.

Ah Leung. My "turkey cooker" cast iron burner itself is about 8 inches in diameter with 3 concenrtic (not individually controlled though) rings of holes. This sucker is rated at 85,000 BTU. The larger units go up to 150,000BTU. Hello for "wok hei". PS. The burners you showed upthread are "replacement " burners for commercial wok ranges, I believe.

Ah Leung, I think that you said that you will be using your wok burner outside of the house. In that case, the sky's the limit as far as BTU count is concerned. I don't like the "looks" of the burners you have shown as they are meant to be installed in a built-in fireproof cabinet or stand. A better solution would be to go to Walmart, Dick's Sporting Goods, any hardware chain and get what they call a corn boiler or a turkey fryer burner. These are "finished" in appearance and function, as they have legs, and they go all the way up from 15k BTUs to 150k BTUs. I am a frequent shopper at Cabela's, a huge catalogue/retail chain dedicated to hunters, campers, fishermen, etc. They have all kinds of burners that appear to be more "finished" looking and probably a lot safer. Google Cabela's and look at their catalogue. Go to Cabela's click on camping/food prep. click on cooking equipment click on camp/blind stoves (beautiful 1 0r 2 burner cast iron unit here) OR click on turkey cookers.

You have a lot to learn about concierges and senior lobby staff in Asian hotels .They are miracle workers, Mr. Fix-it-alls, go-betweens, supreme diplomats, and above all, your wish is their command. Your requests will be acted on with aplomb, professionalism and good nature. Go ahead, try them.

Travel in almost all the major cities in China changes from month to month, due to the tremendous and accelerated growth of these cities. Some restaurants that were great 6 months ago may have been surpassed by many others. My best advice is not to have any preconceived plans as plans only tie you down. When you check into your hotel, ask the concierge, the travel advisor, business contacts, local tourism offices, read local reports, and generally listen to the "buzz". I have found in travelling abroad that the locals almost always know better, as far as good food and restaurants are concerned, than some tourist writer or a foreign reviewer trying to relate the local food to his own "foreign" preferences.

Right you are, Sapidas. Induction is electrical influences (+/-) between two components, hence, the further you separate them, the less strong the electrical induction and you would get a stoppage of the effect, ie: heating. Induction heating as it is right now will NEVER take the place of a high BTU heat source for wok cooking because the stir fry method "as we know it" means moving and flipping the wok around. You can use a stationary wok, but that means the fixed or the "bed" of one part of the unit would have to be curved to form to the wok shape. Somewhat impractical. But why fix what ain't broke, especially if it has proved successful over thousands of years??

Ah Leung, just a couple of things to consider, if you are thinking of buying a super hot burner for inside use at home...insurance and exhaust system.

When my brother, uncle, cousins and I opened our place (largest in the province at the time), we wanted to go first class so we bought 200 real sterling silver casseroles with the glass inserts to be used as individual serving dishes. Damned things cost us a fortune, about $30/ea. in 1963 dollars. In 18 months we had only 100 sets left, all due to theft. I once caught 2 "ladies who lunch," wives of doctors, trying to leave with one each in shopping bags. I should have let them go as neither lady and their families ever came back. They were good customers only trying to build their own "collection". After 2 years, we switched to the SS pedestal dishes, no liners. Horrible things