
eatingwitheddie
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Everything posted by eatingwitheddie
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I've almost never seen a Chinese restaurant or take-out that doesn't make their own eggrolls and dumplings. The price differential is too great and the profit margins are too small.
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I totally believe you. It's just not the classic way. Chinese cooking is famous for its adaptations. I look for and relish them and catalogue them (in my mind). This sounds like another chapter.
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I was there in the last few days and I agree with Steven -- better and worse steaks that's the beast. The worse ones are extremely good and the best -- faboo!
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The 'proper' oil to float on top is sesame oil. Standing by my guns! But of course you should eat it the way you enjoy it.
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I wouldn't flavor the dumpling filling with vinegar or szechuan peppercorns but would suggest you make a soy based dipping sauce using both. Try something like 4T soy, 3T water, 1 T sugar, 1 T vinegar (regular vinegar works well -- but this is a good place to use black Chinese Chengkong rice vinegar if you have some available), 1 clove minced garlic, 1t minced ginger, a little sesame oil, and some (a little) of your Szechuan peppercorn salt. MSG is sold under the brand name 'accent' in the spice section of most grocery stores. If you find it and want to use it, it will add a nice savory and tasty quality to your filling. You can still make the dumplings taste quite good without the MSG. Dumplings and wontons are similar but with different shapes, skins and fillings. By the way, Szechuan pepercorn salt is meant to be used as a condiment for dipping roast and fried foods into. It is usually made quite easily at home and I have never seen it sold prepared already. To use Szechuan peppercorn as a flavoring agent in a dish we usually just use straight peppercorns which have been briefly warmed ('toasted') in a dry wok for a minute and then crushed with a mortar or in a little spice grinder (chop them with a knife if you lack this equipment). Send me some. We can't buy them in the US any longer! Illegal! Stupid!
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About preparing dumplings ahead of time: I sometimes make dumplings but often make wontons. I too am concerned about them holding their shape and sticking. I usually make a batch of 50 wontons at once. Some advice: 1) If you can, do it with a friend or two. Makes the work fun and much less tedious. 2) As I shape my dumplings I lay them out on a clean, flat surface -- usually on a dinner plate -- taking care that they don't touch each other. After the plate is full, say with 10 dumplings, I put it in the freezer unwrapped and let the skins harden. When this is just starting to happen, perhaps after just 10-20 minutes, when they are firm enough to handle without misshaping them, I gently loosen each one from the plate and then return them to the freezer to harden a little more. Ideally I'd like them not to freeze all the way through and then cook them while they are still fresh. However I frequently prepare them a few days ahead of time. Once they have hardened, after about an hour, transfer the dumplings to a zip lock bag. They are extremely easy to access this way. 3) For your filling use plenty of dried black mushrooms that have been well soaked. Save their soaking liquid and add and reduce it into the filling. This reduction will give your filling a more intense flavor. To cook: I would sauté some ginger and garlic in 1T veg oil and then add the cabbage and leeks. Cook them with a little salt until they give up their water. If there is a lot of vegetable liquid pour it off, and if it is just a little, reduce it. After you do this, add all the mushrooms and some of their soaking liquid and sauté over high heat, taking care not to brown anything, and cook until the liquid is almost dried up. Flavor the filling with a little cooking sherry, salt, white pepper, MSG (if you like -- a good idea for a vegetarian filling), a little soy, a teaspoon of sugar, and toss in some chopped scallion right at the end. Finally add a dash of sesame oil. It should be strongly flavored because it will be eaten together with the skin that will make it less intense.
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Your misunderstanding is a commonly held belief. Yes, let me repeat myself, a correctly made Hot & Sour Soup is spicy only from lots of finely ground white pepper. It can be very spicy prepared this way. By the way, in this part of the world I usually see H&S spiced with white pepper not chiles. It may well be different in Canada. That would be an interesting fact if it were really so. If you like chile oil or paste or a different hot sauce, I would suggest adding it after the fact, just the way anyone who likes a hot sauce on their food would add it as a condiment.
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Seriously. I usually don't order it because I know in advance that I'm usually not going to get what I want.
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HOT & SOUR SOUP One of the most well known Szechuan preparations, Hot & Sour Soup’s popularity grew out of America’s introduction to authentic regional Chinese cuisine in the late 60’s and early 70’s. Unfortunately Hot & Sour Soup is frequently not prepared and seasoned properly, and it is so strongly flavored that when you get it wrong it may not be too palatable. You should start with a good chicken stock. I use a homemade one prepared from six pounds of bones, a few slices of ginger and a couple of scallions. I cover the bones with cold water, bring the whole thing to a boil, skim it well, add the ginger and scallion, then lower the heat to a gentle simmer and cook it for 2-3 hours. I pass the finished stock through a very fine strainer and skim off any surface fat. It’s then ready to use. Easy. By the way, a canned broth will work reasonably well. I haven’t worked out the exact proportions for this recipe, but I tried to guess and also give you enough additional information so that you can get a good result. To make the soup bring a quart of stock to the boil and add: 3/4 cup shredded bamboo shoots 1/4 lb finely shredded fresh pork, marinated if you like (a little egg white, sherry, salt, cornstarch) 3/4 cup rehydrated and coarsely chopped tree ear 1/4 cup soaked and trimmed tiger lily buds Bring the soup to a boil again stirring so that the pork shreds separate from one another. Skim away and discard any foam that rises to the top. Next season the soup with soy (enough to make it brown), salt, 1t MSG (if desired), 2T Shaoshing rice wine or dry sherry, and white vinegar to taste. Start with a 1/4-cup of vinegar and add more according to your taste. Sample the soup; it should be savory and have a lot of flavor without being over salted. Next make the soup spicy by adding a considerable amount (1t) of finely ground white pepper. You should now adjust the seasonings checking for salinity, depth of flavor, spiciness and tartness. With the soup at a full boil and stirring constantly, mix in enough (maybe 3-4T) cornstarch slurry (cornstarch dissolved in water) to thicken the soup to the right creamy consistency. Add the slurry a little at a time and then wait for the soup to return to the boil and thicken some more. Keep doing this until you have the right texture. Next add a cake of coarsely shredded firm beancurd and again let the soup return to the boil. Remove and discard any foam that floats to the top. When the soup is boiling briskly again, using a circular motion, pour in 2 beaten eggs (you can add a drop of slurry to them) and stir the pot just once to gently move the eggs around creating large ribbons of egg drop. Taste the soup for seasoning again; adding the cornstarch may have changed the flavor balance a little. When serving, top each portion with 1/4t sesame oil and a little chopped scallion. Note: Properly prepared Hot & Sour Soup never contains chiles or chile oil. Its spiciness is only from white pepper. In a more elaborate variation we might also add some shredded ham and some shredded red beancurd (duck blood cake) to the soup.
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Click on the 'quotes' box in the upper right corner of the post you want to reply to. A new screen will appear with two large boxes. On top is the place for your reply post. Underneath it will be another smaller box with a copy of the post you're replying to. You may edit it if you like.
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Good question. Maybe some eGulleters will now know what to look for and stumble upon it. Otherwise, my house.
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This might be true in some instances but not in most. There is no reason for it. In a Chinese restaurant kitchen the same shredded pork is used for all the shredded pork dishes as well as many other things like spring rolls and hot & sour soup -- either the shredded pork is fresh or not. If their Moo Shu Pork was made from old meat then all their shredded pork dishes would have the same problem. While it is true that leftover rice is used for fried rice, you must understand that the basic recipe for fried rice calls for leftover rice. Freshly cooked rice is too sticky to stir-fry properly. Yes the small bits of meat and vegetable in fried rice may be made of trim (certainly not always), but that on its own doesn't make them less wholesome or good tasting.
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I'm concerned with whether or not I enjoy eating a particular thing, not whether that item is currently in style with American eating habits. For those of us who eat lots of Asian food it's easy to point to many wraps and hand held foods that people regularly have for dinner. By the way when was that Peking duck phase? I think I missed it! Plus in a sequenced Chinese meal we're trying to create a balance of different foods and different flavors, textures and colors. Very often something wrapped up and eaten by hand provides an excellent juxtaposition against other items. You'll be experiencing that in our New Year's banquet next week.
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I just wanted to point this out again. Anyone know why? Anyone care? Yes eddie, please enlighten us tourists... MOO SHU PORK Moo Shu Pork is a northern Chinese egg dish typically wrapped in wheat flour pancakes. In Chinese, the words ‘Moo Shu’ are the name of the yellow cassia flower, a poetic reference to the look of the scrambled eggs in the dish. Moo Shu Pork first became popular in the US during the late 60’s and early 70’s. There were so many exciting things about it! Here was a delicious new dish that was fun and authentic, and you could eat it with your fingers. Classically prepared Moo Shu Pork is a stir-fry of scrambled eggs, pork shreds, tiger lily buds, shredded bamboo shoots, tree ears, and scallions. It does NOT contain: carrots, cabbage, nappa, ginger, garlic, mushrooms, chicken, beef, or shrimp. When properly made it is ‘dry-cooked’. This means that the finished dish should have no visible sauce. There are liquids that flavor it, but they are used in small quantity and then reduced away during stir-frying. The distinctive aroma of an authentic Moo Shu Pork is created by the subtle muskiness of the sautéed lily buds combined with the smell of the just warmed sesame oil. When cooking Moo Shu Pork, the goal is to bring out this subtle musky aroma and combine it with a tasty/savory background of flavor. Today, however, it’s likely that the recipe used by your local Chinese restaurant produces a very different dish, one that has evolved and adapted itself to the perceived demands of the mass marketplace. To start with, probably because the same pancakes are also served with Peking Duck, and because Moo Shu Pork is dry-cooked, and because the not so knowledgeable American customer was used to having ‘sauce’ with their ‘rolls’ and asked ‘what kind of sauce goes with this dish’, some enterprising restaurateur decided to serve hoisin with Moo Shu Pork. To complicate matters, a common mistake was incorporated and many Americans started mistakenly referring to hoisin as plum sauce. Think of this, here you have gone to all of this trouble to create a subtly delicious dish permeated with the exotic fragrance of the lily buds and you obliterate all that effort with a spoonful of tasty but overwhelming hoisin sauce. May taste good, but it’s still catsup on steak. As its popularity soared chefs started to regard Moo Shu Pork as a profit center. Chicken, shrimp, beef and vegetarian versions appeared. To lower production costs bulky and inexpensive vegetables like cabbage and carrots were shredded and added to the recipe. To accommodate American tastes, the proportion of meat and egg was reversed so that instead of 4-6 eggs per order, there were only 2. Pancakes, instead of being homemade, were outsourced and often far from an acceptable quality. Over the coarse of a few decades Moo Shu Pork changed considerably. On many take-out menus it is now a category of its own. I far prefer the traditional musky version sans hoisin, Oftentimes, however, when I order Moo Shu Pork in a restaurant, the flavor that I’m looking for just isn’t there on the plate in front of me. What do I do? Ask for some hoisin of course! Wrapping it up and eating it with your fingers always feels like fun to me, and it tastes better that way!
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You inevitably have to eat it without the pancakes because there are never enough pancakes to go around. So I end up eating some the next day over rice. A trick: order 4 extra. It works. Costs a buck.
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right. Moo Shu Pancakes are for tourists. NOT!! I must be a heathen because I love eating wrapped things.
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Me too. Love good homemade ones, hate everything else!
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Hooray! Good comment. That's exactly right. Moo Shu is an egg dish with a little pork, not a pork dish with a little egg. This is more clearly seen when translating the name from Chinese. That's because 'Moo Shu' is the name of a small yellow flower, the cassia flower, and it's said that the pieces of egg in Moo Shu rather poetically resemble and remind one of those cassia flowers.
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I just wanted to point this out again. Anyone know why? Anyone care?
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During the American Chinese food authenticity revolution of the late 60's and early 70's Mo Shu Pork had the cachet of something delicious, authentic and unusual. Somehow it's gotten sidetracked. Pedestrian and unexciting now seems like more apt descriptions of its usual state of being? How do you feel? What do you expect to see when you order it? What ingredients do you expect in your dish? What do you want in a Moo Shu pancake? Do you want hoisin sauce on your Moo Shu? Did you know that hoisin on Moo Shu is like catsup on steak?
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In our Bklyn neighborhood someone opend a take-out oriented toward the black Muslim community. It seemed to conform to halal dietary laws and named itself 'No Pork-Long Life Restaurant.' Apparently they were astute about the marketplace and a competitor quickly sprung up nearby. Imitation is truly the sincerest form of flattery for they called themselves: 'No Pork-Long Line Restaurant.' Funny thing, 'Long Line' is now out of business - but 'Long Life' lives.
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Oh the things we do for love (and sex)!
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I think baby backs are second-tier ribs. Not as meaty or succulent as those straight bone ribs I grew up with. Plus the restaurants that feature them usually purchase them frozen. After I read his Blue Smoke Q & A, I discovered that Danny Meyer apparently agrees with me, praising the St Louis cut regular ribs as the way to go. Yet marketers have had a field day with those alliterative baby backs. Sounds better, doesn't it? But do they eat as well? What do y'all think?
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OK you wet our appetites....let's hear this one!
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Home delivered Chinese take-out is comfort food. Any memorable stories or comments? Anyone pull a cat out of the bag?