C J Phillips

I agree, this is a really interesting topic, and I have enjoyed (admittedly) lurking behind the scenes here. So many excellent points and good insights into Chinese cuisine. As Will correctly noted, different thickeners have been - and still are used - in the different cultural regions of China. Sichuan, for example, uses pea starch (yes, as in carrots and peas), where it's called wandou qianfen or quanqing doufen. Most traditional Chinese cookbooks I refer to call for "starch" (qianfen or dianfen), which is as general a term in Chinese as it is in English. Others include the ones already mentioned, as well as potato starch, sweet potato starch (really popular in Taiwan and Chaozhou cooking), lily bulb powder (as for Jiangxi's crystal meatballs), and mung bean starch. Lots of this seems to be due to local tradition and availability more than anything else, although sweet potato starch does give fried coatings a nice chewiness. I liked Chris Amirault's initial post here, where he went with his gut and made Kung Pao chicken without a final thickener. That was spot-on correct, at least according to my go-to source for Sichuan cuisine, Chuancai pengren shidian (Encyclopedia of Sichuan cooking). Volume 2, page 108 has the following recipe for Kung Pao chicken, which shows where the starch is added, and to me at least this makes a lot more sense: the starch is dissolved in water and tossed with the raw chicken and flavorings before the chicken is fried, which allows the starchy flavor to get fried away. Later, though, when seasonings (i.e., vinegar, soy sauce) are added, this moisture combines with the fried starch and gives the chicken that nice sheen: "Select tender rooster meat and cut into cubes 1.5 cm square. Toss it with flavorings and a starch slurry (shuiqian). Remove the stem ends from dried chilies and cut into short sections. Cut ginger and garlic into slices, and green onions into small rounds. Place the wok over high heat, add oil and heat it up. Add the dried chilies and Sichuan peppercorns and fry until they change color. Add the chicken cubes and break up clumps while stir-frying them. Add seasonings and reduce the sauce. Quickly toss and shake the ingredients; add fried peanuts and distribute them evenly before removing the wok from the fire and serving." Anyway, food for thought. And I love those photos...

"Mr. Thingy"! I have a drawer with a bunch of things I can't figure out what they're supposed to be for. Torture equipment? Medieval dentistry tools? Who knows. I was wondering whether the preserved lemons you're talking about are at all like Hakka salted limes. I talked about them on my blog earlier this year and have a recipe there, and would be fascinated to know if they are in any way similar in taste and texture. The Hakka recipe calls for calamondins instead of lemons, so they cure pretty quickly and don't need to be sunned. However, they do turn a dark brown and taste delicious. Thanks! (So envious of that trip to Nanning...) http://carolynjphillips.blogspot.com/2011/01/hakka-salted-limes.html

My little old lady friends have told me that this allows the jiaozi to fully cook through to the center while keeping the dough from turning to mush. It might also have to do with timing; the bowls of water are added to the pot three times, with the water brought to a boil each time before the next bowlful is added. It always has worked for me, at least, even with fillings that have to be fully cooked this way, such as pork. As for fresh noodles, the main directions I've seen have been to bring the pot to a boil, add the noodles, bring to a boil again, and then remove them as soon as they float.

Oops, hit the "post" button too fast. I haven't seen any recipes for pickling wosun, but I imagine that if you blanched the peeled stems and tossed them with some vinegar, salt, sugar, and chili oil, they would be mighty tasty, but this would be more like a salad dressing rather than a true pickle.

First, sorry it's taken me so long to answer you! Wosun is sometimes called "stem lettuce" or "Chinese lettuce," and both the stems and leaves are delicious, but cooked in different ways, sort of like beets and beet greens are always given different treatment. Nowadays the leaves are most often cut off of the tops of the stems, washed, and then cut into 2-inch (or so) lengths before being stir-fried with salt and garlic. That, at least, is the most common preparation I've seen. The stems are totally different from the leaves. They are always peeled, since the skin is tough and inedible. Last autumn I had some friends over for dinner, and they fell completely in love with wosun stems! I cut them into 2-inch sticks and blanched them in salted water just until the rawness was cooked away. Then they were plunged into ice water to stop the cooking, as they turn soft very quickly. Then I made a sauce of roasted sesame paste, light soy, vinegar, and sugar, and napped the drained wosun stems with it to serve cold as an appetizer. Wosun stems are great in stir-fries, too, like the classic Daqian Chicken of Sichuan, which has pieces of the stem cut on the bias, fried with the chicken and peppers, and given a sweet-sour-spicy sauce. Delicious! Let me know if you need the recipes...

I don't know about gourmet, but when we still were carnivores, we often ate happily at Taiwan Restaurant on University in Berkeley. They had great oyster rolls and oyster pancakes and some terrific fish. They have a problem with consistency -- sometimes it's stellar, other times you wonder whether the regular cook didn't show up and the bus boy took over. But it's cheap and worth a look if you're in the area. There's lots more Taiwanese people in the South Bay area, so there's lots more Taiwanese restaurants there, too. Check out the ones in Milpitas Square (880 at 237) in Milpitas whenever you come down this way. All of the Taiwanese restaurants there serve home-style dishes rather than fancy stuff.

That's an excellent question. There's not been a whole lot of books on all of the eight major Chinese cuisines, which certainly is a pity. I'm not really familiar with So's books, but I do know that you can get a pretty good basic grasp of many of the cuisines in Vol. III of Pei Mei's Chinese Cookbook (published in 1979; out of print, but you can sometimes find it online). It's a Chinese-English printing, and it has (along with lots of misspellings and mistranslations) chapters on traditional Jiangsu/Zhejiang, Guangdong, Sichuan, Beijing (i.e., Shandong cuisine, more or less), Hunan, Fujian, Taiwanese, and vegetarian cuisine. This includes a basic introduction to each type of cuisine, as well as recipes and photos. The book is of course pretty outdated by now, but the old girl really was a trailblazer for her time. If you want a book in English on just the individual cuisines, like you noted, only the last three have gotten much attention over the years. There's only a couple other English-language books I can think of: One is "The Northern Chinese Cookbook" by Chang and Kutscher (out of print; 1979); this is very dated and not very reader friendly, but it has lots of recipes from Beijing, as well as, for some strange reason, Shanghai and Sichuan. (Do you wonder whether they ever consulted a map? That's like saying France and Germany are part of Scandinavia.) Kenneth Lo's "Chinese Regional Cooking" (out of print; 1979) has sections on "Peking and North-China Cooking," "Canton and South-China Cooking" (incl. "Four Fukien Specialties"), "Shanghai and East-China Cooking," and "Szechuan and West-China Cooking (incl. "Three Yunnan Specialities"). It's desperately in need of an update, and it's quite a grab bag, but it's better than nothing. Do you read Chinese? If you do, I could recommend some other books. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than me could suggest other English titles. As for the word "cuisine" in re Chinese cooking, Wikipedia has an excellent (imho) introduction to the various cuisines, with links to more detailed info on what the major cuisines consist of (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_cuisine). Hope all of this helps!

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That is fabulous! Thanks for the recipe and all that delectable information! What are you going to use those lemons for? Any good ideas?

Cindy's is wonderful! We have been there at least 10 times and have never been disappointed. The prices are also pretty reasonable. Martini House in St. Helena is great, and if you're a veggie, they have a delicious mushroom tasting menu that should blow your socks off. And Dean & Deluca nearby has great sandwiches and cheeses and wines so that you can picnic somewhere lovely. We went to Ubuntu this last February for our anniversary dinner. Maybe we got an off night or the chef was out of town, but while the apps were nice, the entrees were so boring I don't even remember what we had. For apps, though, we had some Jerusalem artichokes that were so light and delicious that we couldn't stop scarfing them down. The decor is lovely there, too. If you go to Oxbow Market, be sure and try Three Twins ice cream. Simply incredible.

I know that you're supposed to do that, but I didn't yesterday, and the cake turned out just fine. I'm just a rebel, I guess.

Okay, today I made SuzySushi's recipe, and it really turned out well. Great flavor, great texture. I baked it in an 11x17" pan (couldn't find any 9x9's around, and I was under the gun, so it had to bake fast and I wanted to make sure it was thoroughly cooked before I shot out of the house). The top, sides, and bottom were evenly brown, the cake moist and eggy and tasting marvelously of honey. I'd definitely make this again! A couple things I did that were different from SuzySushi's recipe but seemed to work out well: First, I put a cookie sheet both under and on top of the pan; this really helped the cake to cook quickly and evenly. Warning: lightly grease the top pan so that the cake doesn't stick to it! Don't ask me how I know this. Second, I used a Korean all-purpose white wheat flour that is a lot lighter than American all-purpose, since I've found that it's closer to what's used in Chinese noodle recipes. It has a polar bear logo and green printing; since I don't read Korean, that's all I can tell you about what I used! However, if you can't find it in spite of this excellent and detailed description, a close approximation is 6 parts pastry flour to 1 part all-purpose. Next up: Kuma's recipe and a visit to the local muumuu shop.

I too have been trying to make the perfect castella cake, but so far have been stymied. The flavor is good, but they just don't look right or have the right texture. The ones I used to adore in Taipei were dense in crumb but light in texture, about three inches high, slightly eggy, and with a lovely honey flavor. I can't wait to try the above recipes and suggestions; thanks!

That's an excellent idea. And you're right, they're actually daylily flower buds. I don't know of any organic suppliers. Look for flowers that are still rather orange in color and pliable, which means that they're pretty fresh; if they're brown and hard, they're old and will taste sour rather than fresh. I like to soak them and then tie them into a simple knot to both keep them from falling apart and also to add a bit of texture. And, I just bought some frozen ones that come from Taiwan (Weichuan brand, I think); they're green rather than orange, so they must be buds that haven't opened yet. I'm going to try stir-frying them and see what happens.

What a gorgeous cake! Can't believe it rated only a 4. I am clueless as to what you should do to make it perfect, but remain fascinated by the search and can't wait to try the final recipe.