Ben Hong
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Posts posted by Ben Hong
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Gee, thanks for rephrasing what hzrt8w, chrisamirault and I posted on the procedure.
Durian, you are one perspicacious dude. 
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You don't have spend almost three hundred dollars for something called a "Patio Wok Burner". Go to any hardware store or Wally World and you should be able to pick up a burner for turkey fryers for about $60. Canadian. The model I have been using for the past 5 years (on my deck) puts out an eyelash singeing 90,000 BTUs.
Be aware though, that cooking on that dragon requires that you have all your sh*t together and that you have your procedures down pat. There is no time for checking recipes or cutting up missing ingredients.
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Wok hei is that ephemeral, elusive will o' the wisp that a lot of cooks strive for (those who can't ever make the achievement say that it's an old wive's tale
) It is achievable on home ranges, providing that the (gas) burner can give you at least 14,000 btus. With an electric range let the large burner get red hot and use a flat bottomed wok, or better still, use a fry or saute' pan . Regardless of stove type, let the pan or wok get to the smoke stage before adding oil and aromatics. The secrets to getting wok hei are:
... to cook enough food to match the size of the pan/wok. The goal here is to
maintain a high heat level. A dish should be no more than 10-12ounces, ie:
Chinese family meal portions. Food must be cut properly.
... Cook ingredients in stages; meat, then veg., then combine and thicken
lightly. Blanch ingredients in oil or water, and use a little more oil than
customary. The oil should be of the highest quality and aromatic, eg:
peanut oil.
...keep moisture to an absolute minimum.
...to enjoy the breath of the wok, eat the food asap out of the wok/pan.
Oh, the heat that you are trying to get and maintain should be a little "scary".
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I agree that the recipes in Young's first opus is somewhat narrowly limited to the Cantonese school, more importantly the Cantonese style of home cooking. But I think that "Wisdom....." is much more than a cookbook, for even though I already know how to make the majority of the dishes in the book, I still enjoyed the book immensely. There is a "feel" for the culture, heritage and family history and family idiosyncrasies that the author conveys which should be, and is, enlightening and edifying, even to the "round eyes". Not your "tsp. this and tbsp. that" type of cookbook, thank gawd.
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In Montreal they speak a lot of Toyshanese too.
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Because I normally did not have time to allow my stomach to acclimatize to the local strains of intestinal flora and fauna, nor time to be sick while travelling Asia on work assignments, I had to keep the rules that jokhm itemized and more...
---never drink the tap water (I even brush my teeth with bottled water)
---never use ice cubes
---always peel your own fruit with your own knife
---Always eat things right out of the pot, ie: hot
---always carry handi-wipes/tissues
---always eat at the busier places
---never eat at the da pai dongs without a good water supply
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And repeat the heating and oiling process....
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Sometimes in desperation, I make cheung fun using rice flour, cornstarch(3/1) and water to make a slurry. Just oil a metal or glass pie plate, ladle in a thin layer of the slurry and steam. The cheung fun comes off the plate quite easily
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Cheung fun is one of those food items best described as "sensual"
oooohhh baby. 
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I am not the person who said it first, but I don't like "China Moon", either.
Speaking of good cookbooks, I was browsing our local bigbox bookstore last night and came upon Grace Young's new cookbook "Breath of the Wok" or some such title. Didn't have time to look too deeply at it. Has anyone read it yet and could you give a short precis?
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TP(m'sia), thy name is Cassandra. Or maybe Pandora. Fie, be off with you and your horror stories.
Regardless of what you say, i am looking forward to eating my share. -
Yeah, but my genes dominated in my half and halfs (Arf and Arf), as they both much prefer the dark meat
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"fan jeu" or noong, with sweet potato mashed into it is truly the food of the village. Dejah, I am really, really, going to enjoy my visit with your family. Just keep talkin' girl.
I'm just countin' the days. -
Jumping jehosephat!! What's with all this blasphemy about Chinese people not eating dark meat. Dejah and hrzt, you two have a long and serious acculturation process ahead of you with your "girls".
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I LOVE all types of mooncakes, but I eat them in moderation, like one at a time
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You guys have reaffirmed my belief that there are some who are not fixated on the authenticity concept. Dejah's point about what she was used to at home probably hits the nail square on the head.
I started this thread as a pointer to all aspiring cooks trying to do Chinese food, recipes are fine but trust your taste and creativity and cook what tastes good. Chengbo2 's idea that if it tastes good eat it, is similar to Deng Shiao Peng's pragmatic admonition "black cat, white cat, what does it matter if it catches mice ".
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In reading this forum over the past year or two, one word that pops up in almost every thread is the word "authentic" or the idea of authenticity. What does it mean? Why is it so much sought after? What does it imply? Does it mean that we must slavishly adhere to the gospel of whoever spouts it, subsuming our own creative instincts? Does it mean that a dish must taste a certain way, ignoring our own palates and judgment? Is authenticity truly the Holy Grail of any cuisine?
For example, if I make mapo tofu and I didn't have szechuan peppercorns (which some people feel makes the dish "authentic"), can I still call my dish mapo tofu? If Dejah makes mouth watering joong shaped longer than my mother's and she uses peanuts instead of chestnuts, is it authentic? If a restaurant chef creates a signature dish, how can the public accept it if it is a new creation and doesn't conform to the orthodoxy? Does the quest for authenticity stifle creativity and versatility?
Is Susur Lee a Chinese food chef and if he is, is he a heretic because his dishes are not "authentically" Chinese?
HHmmmm...questions on a late summer evening.
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All I can say is don't think, don't plan and just EAT. You are one lucky foodie.
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Trillium, I've been doing that for years, porch cuisine with my big honking burner. I love it.
We do everyting on it. if I'm having a big corn boil, I can do 36 ears at a time in a big sock pot, same for lobster. My wife does her preserves on it. It's the only way to achieve "wok hei" outside of a restaurant kitchen. The good part is that these super hot "turkey fryers" only cost about Cda.$60. -
Laksa, great question. I have the "big" burner at my cottage, where I do all my entertaining and it is placed on the deck attached to the kitchen. But you can get a commercial stove or wok burner installed inside your home, providing you have a commercial grade fire suppression system installed too. Of course, the insurance companies have to be appeased
with a sacrifice of substantial money. You have to check out the local regulations. -
For the average home electric range or low btu domestic gas range, a fry pan is what I use. A wok is so inefficient and clumsy in those circumstances. However if I have a crowd to cook for, I'll use a wok over my 80,000 btu burner. Now, that's cooking with gas.
This is a big gripe of mine, when every Tom,Dick and Harry( or Tina, Daisy and Jane) evening community college cooking instructor and all the glossy cooking magazines extol the virtues of using the wok, for with a wok, you get instant and delicious "stir fry" dishes just like the Chinese takeouts. Truth of the matter is, by using a wok over a weak flame you cannot "fry" anything in reasonable time. What you get is a soggy, sodden slew of substance that would not have the remotest of resemblance to Chinese food, in my estimation.
There, that's my rant of the day.
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PO, or POPO, is the name for maternal grandmother, in common child's parlance. It is perfectly OK to use as an honorific when addressing a female senior citizen you don't know or not sure of where in the generational hierarchy you both stand, in which case you'd use "po". The popo's husband is "goong goong".
Yin, or (childishly) yinyin is the title of your paternal grandma. You would not normally use yinyin to address anyone except your own grandmother. Her husband would be "yehyeh" or just "yeh", if you ever feel grown up around him.
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I was always told that if you don't like something, keep it to yourself. Don't spoil it for someone else, let other people try it and enjoy it. "I don't get" this thread on a food site.
OTOH, collectively you would not want to sit at my table, as I wouldn't know how or what to serve.
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Heck, guys. That weren't nuttin', as most Chinese women I know can also fly and leap tall buildings.
Sue On is just another everyday, ho-hum, over achieving, highly charged Chinese mother Not only that, her daughter is a dynamo in training.I AM IN AWE.
So tell me Sue On, are you a Popo or Yinyin?
Cheese & Chinese Cuisine?
in China: Cooking & Baking
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There must be some basis in fact to the adage, "to marry in Soochow, to eat in Kwangchow" is there not?