sheetz

Are all "gok" dishes either fried or baked? The most common "gok" are hom sui gok, ga lei (curry) gok, and woo gok. Is there such thing as a steamed "gok"?

These are one of the dim sum that I haven't mastered yet, primarily because they're not my absolute favorites--I can take them or leave them. Based on my few attempts at making them I think your recipe sounds ok. You do need to have wheat starch in the dough to make the dough firm up, however. Without it the dough becomes too elastic and will burst while frying. I'm not sure about the sugar, but I think if you were to add some you might have to reduce the wheat starch. (Sugar also helps keep the dough from bursting.)

I don't have experience with those types of pans, but it would seem to me that the easiest solution isn't to try and make the bottoms brown faster, but to make the tops brown slower. To do that you can just cover the top edges with foil, which should prevent the top from getting too dark while while you are waiting for the bottom to brown.

I think I read moon cakes, old woman (wife) cakes, and wedding cakes.

Using that method and the egg white coating I've never had a soggy pumpkin pie crust. The trick is that the filling sets up so quickly there's no time for the crust to get soggy. I can't remember the exact number of minutes it takes to bake, but it's usually just about done in the time it takes to wash the dishes.

Dianabanana is spot on about freezing the apple pie first before baking. You can also try putting on a lower baking rack. For pumpkin pie I first blind bake the crust until it's completely cooked through. Then I remove it from the oven, let it cool for a few minutes, and brush the inside with half of an egg white. While the crust is baking, I heat up the pumpkin filling (except for the eggs) until boiling, and then slowly incorporate that into the beaten eggs so that the eggs are tempered. (The filling will thicken and be partially cooked.) Finally, I pour the filling into the crust and bake at 300F until set, which should only take a few minutes because it's already halfway there.

Maybe Ah Leung can ask the hotel concierge where to find the best egg flower soup.

To me, Thanksgiving leftovers are just as much a holiday tradition as the original meal itself. That said, I never make leftover recipes that can't stand on their own merits.

That's exactly the problem! Everyone would first speak to me in Cantonese and it would be nice to not have to keep switching to English.

How excellent! I'd like to make it out to HK one day. After I've brought my Cantonese up to an acceptable level...

Yes, baking soda.

You might be able to use grape leaves for small, appetizer sized nor mai gai. It would taste different, of course, yet at the same time it'd be a totally Chinese thing to do as you could actually eat the entire thing. No waste!

My grandmother says the same thing about rubbing the skin with soda to make it crisper.

How about something like a vegetarian "Beef" Wellington? Either you could use fake meat or make a veggie meatloaf and then wrap it in puff pastry.

White Lily isn't quite as low protein as cake flour, so you could use it for quick breads and pie crusts.

I think all the Chinese places around me use a commercial chicken stock so it doesn't taste so great. It CAN be good if you use a high quality stock, but then no restaurant would use it for something like egg drop soup. That type of stock would be reserved for special occasion soups. If you go to Cantonese seafood restaurants on the menu you will often see West Lake Beef soup, which is a close cousin to Egg Drop soup. It's got your thickened broth and eggs (usually just the white), but also marinated bits of beef and chopped cilantro. My parents love it.

The popularity of egg drop soup doesn't surprise me at all. It's a simple and "safe" choice for people new to the cuisine. And I'm sure it has a high profit margin for the restaurants, too. What does surprise me, however, is the popularity of hot and sour soup. At least where I live, the restaurants add a lot of ingredients into their H&S soup that most Americans wouldn't even recognize, including bean curd sheets, various Chinese fungus, and even sichuan pickles. Yet H&S soup is still incredibly popular. I guess people don't care to ask what's in the soup as long as it tastes good.

But I do think the situation is a bit different here, in that it became widespread practice for many restaurants to offer separate menus to their Chinese patrons. The dishes offered on those menus weren't strictly "authentic" in that the cooks would often resort to using nontraditional ingredients out of necessity. But at the same time they were prepared under the Chinese guiding philosophy of cooking. What should we call the cuisine served on the Chinese menu in those restaurants?

I think pasta substituting for rice noodle is a bit off. After all, rice noodles and wheat noodles are fundamentally different. You would think so, but I buy these fresh "rice noodle" sheets that the local Chinese grocer gets from somewhere in Chicago, and the ingredients label clearly lists wheat flour instead of rice flour as the primary ingredient. You can tell the difference, of course, but when prepared as you would with chow fun it's not that big a difference. And as I've mentioned before, there are many recipes which use cake flour to similulate rice flour.

I've never tried steaming those before, but I have deep fried refrigerator dough to simulate fried crullers back when I didn't know how to make them from scratch. I should try the jicama for water chestnuts, since I don't often get good, fresh water chestnuts where I am, and it seems like I lose half their weight after peeling them. Re: spaghetti for noodles, I've always wondered if it was possible to substitute overcooked fettuccine for steamed rice noodles in a dish like chow fun.

Wow, that's interesting. I don't supposed you could obtain the recipe, could you? I know a lady who uses Bisquick to make dough for steamed bao. Oh, and was it someone here who said they knew of a restaurant that served whole fried chicken with Pringles potato chips instead of the more common prawn crackers?

Dejah's Chop Suey thread got me thinking about ways in which Chinese cooks have used local ingredients in their cooking in place of more traditional ones. This is a topic rarely discussed and I thought it would be interesting if we could come up with some examples. Here are a few that I have come across growing up in the US: 1. American style cake flour in dumpling recipes. Commonly used in steamed "tay" like turnip cakes, taro cakes, and "jee cheong fun" noodle rolls. It's pretty amazing that in the US there are countless elderly Chinese women who can't speak a word of English yet can spot a box of Swans Down cake flour from a mile away. 2. Peanut butter as a dumpling filling in place of sweet bean paste. This substitution may actually be due to cost considerations rather than scarcity of ingredients, however. I've seen peanut butter stuffed into, among other things, deep fried sesame balls (jin dui) and glutinous rice balls. 3. Frozen bread dough for baked buns. I didn't believe this when I first heard it, but after experimenting with frozen bread dough myself I can indeed confirm that many Chinese bakeries (and even some finer dim sum restaurants) use ordinary frozen bread dough for their baked goods. It's almost impossible to get their characteristic soft crusts otherwise. Anybody else know of similar examples?

Regardless, in the end it doesn't really matter as long as people are on the same wave length and understand what is being discussed. But i guess that's primarily because most people actually know very little about Chinese food in general. Hopefully that will change in the future.

If you look back at my earlier posts, my concern has never been about authenticity. It's been about clarity. My contention is that Chinese and Chinese American cuisines should be considered separate cuisines, much the way that Mexican and Tex-Mex are considered different styles of cuisine.

I don't think pizza is a particularly good example, because nowadays it's become a purely American food. As for Tex-Mex, considering that the Southwest US used to actually be part of Mexico, you definitely could argue that it was just a type of regional Mexican cuisine. But it's really different with Chinese American food served in restaurants. In many cases it is very far removed from what Chinese themselves consider Chinese food. And it's not due to a scarcity of ingredients because many have separate menus for their Chinese patrons that do contain more typically Chinese dishes. In fact, when I look at photos taken by some other EG members from around the world, some of their home cooked dishes prepared halfway around the world more closely resemble what I cook in my own Chinese American household here in Indiana than what is served in the Chinese restaurant down the street.