sheetz

Thanks for the recipe, Apicio. One question, though, are you saying that this recipe you provided is used for custard tarts as well as for other pastries like Cha Siu pastry, loh po beng (wife cakes), etc.? It seems to me that the two doughs would be different.

I once made a beggars chicken that used a yeast dough for the outer shell. After the chicken was baked you could eat the crust along with it.

The strange thing is that, there really aren't! It's just like I said in the first post, there are recipes like Chefcyn's for the shortbread type crust, and there are others which just use a normal pie crust. I and some others suspect that the restaurant recipes are closely guarded secrets. I'm currently experimenting with blitz puff pastry and I think the results come pretty close to what we're looking for.

Popcorn, everything hzrt8w said is right on. The more I think about this, the more I think you should go for a more casual affair. If you are doing this in your home, then probably the best bet would be to arrange it buffet style, including some Chinese dishes along with some non-Chinese that you do well and which can be prepared well in advance. Good luck, and please keep us informed of your decision!

I've tried the recipe mentioned by RheaS and it was good but I still had problems with it being "too puffy". I've found another technique, called blitz or rough puff pastry that yields results very close to what we're looking for, imo. The pastry doesn't puff nearly as much as regular puff pastry does and, most importantly, there isn't any distortion around the edges. It also is more tender than puff pastry. I hope you all try it and tell me if you agree.

Maybe we can have a cook-off featuring banquet style dishes. There are some dishes that can be prepared relatively easily at home. ← Like what? I can't picture jai gee gai being easily prepared at home... ← Actually, I've made jah gee gai at home, albeit only a half one. It wasn't bad. Other banquet style dishes one could prepare at home include: roast or braised duck, gold coin jade tree chicken, beggars chicken, 5 spice beef. Eileen Lo's cookbook has lots of recipes for banquet dishes.

Maybe we can have a cook-off featuring banquet style dishes. There are some dishes that can be prepared relatively easily at home.

Definitely agree with Ben's suggestion. If you live in a major city with a large Chinese population, you should be able to put together a fine Chinese meal as long as you as you are able to convince the restaurant managers that you want REAL Chinese food! I'm sure he'll be plenty impressed if you are able to pull that off. OTOH, if you are adamant about fixing this yourself, there's an excellent book, The Chinese Kitchen, by Eileen Yin Fei Lo, which contains a lot of recipes for special occasion dishes, some of which are actually doable for a person without lots of Chinese cooking experience! Plenty of things can be done ahead of time and you do have a few months to practice. Cantonese formal dinners normally revolve around animal proteins: fish, chicken, duck, pork, and shellfish, with not a whole lot of vegetables. I don't know if this kind of menu would be appropriate for your guest.

I'll definitely try this! Thanks for the recipe.

I wish you would try it. I certainly couldn't make it turn out how I wanted, and I'm quite certain the restaurants don't use puff pastry, either. Chinese pastry methods are very different than French ones and the two really aren't interchangeable.

Hi everyone. The Chinese Cooking forum is currently having a Dan Tart (Chinese Custart Tart) cook-off but we've hit a dead end as far as being able to produce a tart similar to ones found in the best dim sum restaurants. The custard filling isn't the problem, it's the crust--nearly all the recipes we've found use either a shortbread type crust or a basic pie dough crust. Yet the ones in the restaurants are made with a beautifully layered pastry and usually look something like this: http://www.yanksing.com/our-desserts-egg-custard-tart.htm We've also found recipes for the Portuguese version, but that's really a whole different animal altogether. Thus, in desperation we've turned to the pastry gurus of this forum for help. Is there anyone here that knows how to make a tart just like the one in the picture, or at least have any suggestions about how one go about doing it? Thanks.

It can't be. It didn't exist in Chinese cooking more than a couple hundred years ago. Since (I heard) it is imported from the Portugese via Macau to Hong Kong, the Portugese gotta be the master of these Custard Tarts. I learned through another forum the following recipe of Pastéis de Nata (Cream Custard Tarts) Looks about right. ← The Portuguese versions are similar but they don't appear to be the same. Traditionally, the Portuguese ones use a puff pastry that's been rolled and coiled into a snail before being pressed into the tart molds. So they don't have the same layered crust as the type some of us want. And actually, the recipe you linked isn't even the puff pastry version, but rather uses a basic pie crust recipe for the tart shell. Anyways, I'll ask the experts at the pastry forum and see if anyone there has answers. Portuguese version: Chinese version:

If nobody objects, I think I'm going to toss this question over to the pros in the baking forum. There's got to be someone over there who knows how to make these. It can't be an ancient Chinese secret!! lol

Chinese Dessert, Dim Sum & Snack Cookbook, Winona Chang (1986) I know Eileen Yin Fei Lo has an out of print dim sum cookbook. Her book The Chinese Kitchen has a fair number of dim sum recipes, too.

From my experience, Ameri-Chinese egg rolls are bigger than Chinese spring rolls and are usually stuffed with chopped cabbage and some sort of meat. Egg rolls wrappers are usually made of the same type of dough as wonton skins. Spring rolls have lots of different fillings. I like ones filled with pork, mushrooms, and bamboo shoots. Here's a picture of one from the Yank Sing restaurant in San Francisco: Notice the different type of wrapper on the spring roll.

I'm making Dan Tart my own holy grail of recipes, right above those incredibly lacy deep fried taro puffs. When you look at it, it shouldn't be that tough, but it looks like I'm going to have to experiment a lot and develop my own recipe.

Tepee, your pics your soooo yummy!

Actually, Chinese people eat spring rolls. The fried things filled with cabbage called egg rolls are Ameri-Chinese, too.

Actually, nowadays in the era of Semi-Homemade cuisine, many people consider boxed mixes to be made "from scratch."

I'm not sure what's being debated here. Taste preferences? Authenticity? In general, the Chinese food on the West Coast is less Americanized than the stuff in the East, and that rule applies here, too. Plum sauce is what Cantonese people typically use on their roast ducks, apricot sauce is "Ameri-Chinese." Which one tastes better if up to you.

I don't know if there is large demand, but there certainly aren't enough books dealing with Chinese pastries, which are largely unknown in the West. Not only things like char siu bao, but things like wife cakes, moon cakes, and curry beef pastries. Right now we in the Chinese Cooking forum are having a helluva time trying to develop a good restaurant quality custard tart because there just aren't any good recipes.

This is starting to get frustrating. I'm beginning to think custard tart recipes are a closely guarded secret among the dim sum chefs. Unlike many dim sum items, no two restaurants seem to use the same recipe, and none of the recipes I've seen in cookbooks or online result in anything remotely similar to the tarts I've eaten in restaurants.

I just wanted to confirm Dejah's results, and say that you should NOT use puff pastry for this! I made up a batch of homemade puff pastry just to see what would happen and tried blind baking it in the muffin tins. The results were horrible. If you've ever bought those frozen puff pastry shells it was like that, where the inside gets all chewy while the outside is crisp. Fortunately since they were blind baked the filling didn't go to waste and is now sitting in the fridge until I make up another batch of tart dough. Next time I'm going to go with the traditional 2 layer dough, maybe with a little extra fat added.

I made the glutinous rice shu mai from Martin Yan's recipe. First off, I don't have pics cause I don't own a digital camera (sorry ) but they weren't half bad at all. I copped out and used premade gyoza wrappers instead of homemade ones. The wrappers didn't seem very big, but my shu mai turned out huge! The recipe is supposed to make 60, but I only ended up with two dozen. Maybe it's because of my wrapping technique. Anyways, with a few substitutions these would be good for vegetarians. Now, onto those dreaded dan tarts!

The story I heard is that they are based on the Portuguese custard tarts and were first introduced to HK via Macao. Can you tell us what the end result was? I'm guessing that a puff pastry-like dough must be used in order to get a flaky layered result but that the pastry must be blind baked before the filling is added.