eatingwitheddie

I spent years thinking that Cantonese Roast Duck was the high point of Chinese poultry cookery. Then I visited Hong Kong and discovered that all those ducks hanging in the window were not ducks but geese. Was I shocked to discover this goose cult. Going out to a goose restaurant is one of the famous things to do when you're chasing good Chinese cooking in HK. In NYC though, no one seems to make BBQ Goose just Duck. We raise geese, but they rarely make it to market. Why do you think? Whatsup? What's the situation in your community? Which do you prefer? Why?

pjs writes: "One of my favorite Chinese recipes. Shrimp with Lobster Sauce, or Shrimp with Black Bean Sauce, or the new one, Shrimp with Egg Sauce."

This morning at 8 AM I had a too-hot-to-handle very good baked bun at 146 Hester (SE corner at Elizabeth). Noticed many customers also buy wintermelon cakes at that hour. Locally very popular (for a long time). In Flushing try Fay Da Bakery, 3 blocks south of Roosevelt on the west side of Main St. Haven't had them myself, but they have recently expanded and I have heard very good things from my Chinese friends.

Try the small baked buns at The Golden Unicorn, 18 E. Bway at Chathan Sq in Chinatown. Haven't had them in a while but I remember them to be excellent and delicate.

I've never heard of 'heavy' soy. My guess is that it may be dark soy and that the person sending you may have been mistaken. If so, you might want to try Amoy Golden Label dark. It has just a touch of molasses flavor, but nothing remotely like the thick soy. How are you intending to use it?

Don't use a deep fryer, use your wok, and make sure you have an oil pot with a colander suspended over it right next to it before starting. The reason you shouldn't use your fryer is that when you velvet egg white and cornstarch marinated food, the pieces tend to stick together, especially if the oil a is a little bit too hot. One of the essential parts of the process is to swirl or stir the food in the oil immediately after putting it there. Your goal is to separate the pieces from one another quickly so that they cook evenly. The deep fryer complicates this needlessly. The wok is made for it and it seems a simple and natural thing to do. As far as extra calories go I don't think so. Why? Well both techniques call for cooking the protein in oil. When you velvet food you remove it from the wok and clean out the pan before saucing. You will need to add about 1T of oil back into the pan in order to sauce the food. If you were to stir-fry that same protein you'd need about 2-3 tablespoons of oil in the wok and that would most likely be incorporated into the sauce. There is typically more oil in the final product of a stir-fried dish than in a velveted one.

So, how are we doing with our velveting?

Thanks for your excellent post. Hope we see more soon!

Is it wine rice or rice wine? I was just reading over the posts and noticed the two different names wriiten above. I have always thought of this item as rice, fermented wine rice. Not as wine, though obviously the liquid part is a form of rice wine.

About the cake: I unfortunately don't know anything. Sounds really interesting and I'd love to hear more about it, hope someone knows. One thought I have is that wine rice has such a broken-down soft texture, that I find it hard to believe that it could be shaped into anything. So my thought and/or question is: perhaps the wine rice was mixed with something else, like some regular white or sticky rice. About fermented wine rice: It's a very long time (30 years ago) since I have made fermented wine rice. And then I only made it once. It came out great. But ever since then I have been buying it. That's because it's sold aleady prepared. Often I find it near the fresh noodles in an open dairy case in one of the better stocked Chinese groceries. It's cheap and it's good. I love cooking with wine rice. It gives great character to some of the great classic Szechuan recipes. I particularly enjoy it in Braised Fish in Hot Bean Sauce (do ban yu), and Jumbo Shrimp with Chile Sauce (gan sau min sha). To make it at home I believe you crush the yeast ball to a smooth powder and then mix it with the raw sweet rice. The rice is then steamed, cooled and alllowed to rest for a day or more. I'm a little fuzzy on the details. As I remember it there was a special effect involved. Once left out at room temperature, the rice with its yeast activated, takes off. It turns the normal looking steamed rice into a large soupy affair, with the liquid in it seeming to magically materialize from thin air.

Usually translated as bird's nest, this ingredient is an excretion of a particular variety of swallow that lives on cliffs in the vicinity of the South China Sea. It is actually used as a type of gum to hold the nest's twigs together. The nests are gathered and processed to remove the substance which is most often used as the eponymous ingredient in a chicken stock based bird's nest soup. It is rare and because it is so difficult to obtain very expensive. Many healthful benefits are attributed to consuming it. Use of it in a sweet would be considered unusual.

A whole category of Chinese food. Temple street in Hong Kong, Snake Alley in Taipei are some of the exciting places I've enjoyed Chinese street food, even Canal Street in Manhattan. What street foods have you encountered in your travels or communities? Any experiences you can tell us about?

With regard to using peanut oil for your cooking, unlike regular vegetable oils which are flavorless, peanut oil has a distinct taste. Depending upon what you're doing, it may or may not be a complimentary flavor. Planters, the main American peanut oil is quite mildly flavored, but the Hong Kong peanut oils such as Lion & Globe brand have MUCH more flavor. I find them particularly delicious but would prefer to see them used for a spicy Szechuan dish. Whereas a subtle Cantonese seafood item might, in my opinion, be overwhelmed by that sort of nuttiness. Anyway freshly rendered lard really tastes better than anything else! Cantonese chefs even use chicken fat as a flavoring. If only Grandma Goldie knew!!

RECYCLING OIL WHEN VELVETING FOOD When you velvet food a great deal of moisture is released into the oil. Usually you're working with a colander/strainer suspended over a pot to catch the velveting oil. The technique for recycling the oil is to let the oil sit undisturbed for a short time; the moisture will sink to the bottom and then the oil on the top is reused. If the oil hasn't been heated to a very high temperature, let's say that it's been kept under 350 degrees F., you can reuse it 5-10 times though you may want to add some fresh oil as you go along. That is what takes place in a restaurant setting where it's being used time after time during one evening. Most chefs feel that oil that has been used already has a better flavor. What is essential however is that when you store oil that has already been used you must get the moisture out of it first or it will turn bad. To do this pour the oil out of the oil pot into your wok taking care not to use the oil from the bottom of the pot which is full of mositure and should be discarded. Now heat the oil in your wok and it will start to make cracking noises. You need to be careful about not getting too much moisture in the oil or it will splatter and can become dangerous. When the cracking subsides the moisture has been evaporated and you can now let it cool and then cover and store it until you want to use it again. I would suggest refrigerating this oil in case there still is a bit of residual moisture. Theoretically it will stay fresh for a couple of months, but I would suggest using it up more quickly than that. An interesting detail is that recycled oil is more appropriate for stir-fry dishes with dark colored sauces. When I make a white sauce I always start with fresh oil to maximize the lightness/ clear white color of the finished product. Recycled oil tends to produce a less clean looking result which is masked by a dark sauce.

I was in the Philadelphia outdoor Italian market this past weekend and went into the famous butcher there (don't recollect the name) that specializes in game. A pretty amazing place. In any event he regularly makes turduckens. He was selling freshly made ones for $4.95/lb. They averaged 12-14 lbs. each. The inner birds had their skin removed.

10. sashimi soy sauce, mix of marudaizu soy, mirin and dashi specially made for dipping sashimi

What do YOU think? I have found it silly myself, but truth is that it's been a while, a long while since I've been there.

How good is the food? That is the most important question.

The think that had the partner huffing and puffing (for the most part he hates it when CI does "Asian" stuff) is that they tested their soyas by putting them plain on rice!!! Yikes. I have a vague memory of La Choy winning something, but it wasn't the soya testing. regards, trillium La Choy wins the booby prize! Perfect for canned chow mein left over from the 60's.

Any flavorless or flavor complimentary oil. Soy is most typical. Corn, canola, cottonseed, peanut, lard, all work well. No olive oil please (unless it is flavorless), wrong set of tastes.

Is it made from toasted black sesame? How can you tell? Smell it! What should toasted black sesame smell like? Like regular toasted sesame oil

I think that this question brings up a category of restaurant that we haven't spoken about. Sometimes small family-run type restaurants can be the brightest jewels. There may only be a couple of chefs in the kitchen. When mom or pop is a terrific chef and cooks almost all of the food themselves or keeps an especially close eye on the kitchen, one can come across some of the most exciting and delicious experiences. J & J Wonton House in Victoria BC comes to mind. And even though it's not Chinese but Thai, Sripraphrai in Queens falls into this category.

That's exactly right! Plus it always looks better on the other side of the tracks.

Typically I don't think it's about discrimination at all. Rather I think that it's about provinciality. It's good business to please your customer and the restaurateur is just trying to provide their customer with what THEY THINK THE CUSTOMER WANTS. It is about stereotyping and misjudgement: all non-Chinese eat sweet & sour or don't like offal, something like that. From time to time there may be discrimination involved, but I think it is mostly secondary to just not making the right call.

This is true to an extent, but the banquet is a broad -based integral part of Chinese culture. It is the most common way people entertain friends. The degustacion is something one might experience by seeking it out at a top restaurant. I don't believe it is nearly as pervasive in western food as a banquet service is in the Chinese community. I believe this is of great significance. From my experience, attitude plays a big role. A young goal oriented French/western chef who fantasizes about having a starred Michelin restaurant someday, is of a very different mind-set than the typical Chinese chef who is more concerned with production than art. I know there will be many exceptions to this kind of blanket statement, but by and large this has been my experience. If one were to compare the gap between the a la carte food quality in a starred Michelin restaurant and the food served at that same restaurant's degustacion, vs. the gap between Shun Lee's off the menu food vs. Shun Lee's banquet food, I think the differences might be striking.