eatingwitheddie

I firmly believe if you start with better ingredients you get better products. Simple as that. The last word as far as I'm concerned. That being said, I think you must also say that whatever you're cooking also needs to be properly prepared. It may be that ethnic cuisines tend to make the most out of the least, but it's the mark of a really fine chef to recognize inherent quality and find a way to let that shine through. To my mind sometimes knowing when to prepare something simply and bring out it's essence is a most high-minded and delicious approach, and something that I always enjoy and am delighted by. From my experience, top-quality ingredients can be found in all sorts of venues. Chino Farms in Sancho Santa Fe, Calif. may have the most unique, delicious and fantastic fruits and vegetables I've ever seen (they supply Chez Panisse 600 miles north), but those white donut peaches that I bought along an Amman roadside were outrageous, as are the fresh shitake 'flower' variety mushrooms from China that are $3/lb retail in Chinatown today. They kick the sh-- out of the $45/lb. fresh porcini that Dean & Deluca was selling on Thursday. Not that I would have thrown the porcini out of bed. Bottom line is that I agree ethnic cuisine may not be driven by 'terroir' quality ingredients but it certainly makes old-fashioned common sense that any chef who integrates great ingredients into their cuisine, no matter their origin, will be taking a logical and appropriate approach to maximizing food quality and experience. 'Terroir' type foods are simply one of the many arenas where interested cooks can find great quality product. You know those disgusting partially rotted gingko nuts that fall to the ground and stink up my block every year can be pretty terrific if you know what to do with them. You just have to speak with the little old Asian women who come each Fall with brooms to harvest the nuts clinging to the lower branches. By the way, they market them under the Park Slope Estates brand! Not!

You got that right

Most Cantonese restaurants in Chinatown standardly use fresh killed chickens, ducks, squabs, and quail. Virtually all those roasted critters hangin' in the windows qualify as fresh killed. In all these restaurants when you order duck, squab, and quail what you getting is fresh killed. When you order chicken, you're getting a fresh killed product if it's an 'on the bone' sort of dish. If you order a saute made from boneless chicken, diced, sliced, or shredded, you're probably eating meat that's been fileted from a large roaster which is often a very good tasting product in its own right. Places to check out the birdies might include: Tai Hung Lau -- 70? Mott - 1/2 price Peking Duck on Monday - Yum Pings - 22 Mott Sweet & Tart - 20 Mott - Crispy Chicken w Garlic Dim Sum GoGo - Chatham Sq. on E. Bway - Crispy Chicken w. Garlic Joe's Shanghai - Baby Chicken w Ginger Sauce Sun Lok Kee - Main St. Flushing - Fried Chicken (formerly @ 13 Mott)

I didn't find the food watered down, on the contrary I found it thoughtful and interesting. Just not fully evolved. When I wrote that JG has spent 25 years cooking French food and maybe 25 days preparing Chinese that was much more to the point. Learning how to create the right flavors in such a sophisticated cuisine is a life-long pursuit and it would be unreasonable and improbable for even a chef of JG's pedigree to master these things overnight. He's doing a very good job, he's just not running on all four engines yet. There's so much to absorb and how can he learn in six months what some of us have been persuing for 30 years? It'll be interesting to see how far he can go. Hell I made a reservation to go back next week.

Clusters of choice ingredients here and there, yes. But who is comprehensively sourcing that list of ingredients and presenting them on the menu available to any customer off the street? If you go down a 150-item menu at even the best Cantonese place in Chinatown, what percentage of the dishes are going to be made with ingredients on that level? I think that your point is well taken to an extent. I would love to see '66' use outrageously good product and I certainly don't want to be an apologist for the NYC Cantonese status quo, but a few more points make sense as well. How much better is the Niman ranch pork than the southern Lundy's which is the brand most often found in NYC Chinese butchers? And how critical is it in order to make a really good quality product? I would argue that the quality of a Cantonese roast meat for instance, is going to be more dependent on the recipe/cooking than the pork, assuming that the product you're starting with is good in the first place. Not that the Niman ranch product doesn't have a more porcine old-fashioned flavor, and not that all things being equal it would taste just that much better, but the Lundy's pork is really quite a good product. Not nearly as different as two very different qualities of beef for instance. This is especially true once it's marinated with soy, sugar, hoisin etc. I have been a big-time supporter of the farmer's market. There's rarely a week when I'm not there shopping for my own consumption. But 1) Artisanally grown isn't necessarily better. I find it necessary to be a discerning consumer at the greenmarket just like I am in my local Korean veg store. 2) There are not too many Chinese food apporpriate vegetables in the greenmarket, and often when there are, they aren't necessarily so good. That being said it's totally true that fresh dug garlic, just picked scallions, etc. make a real difference. But often the Nappa I see is yucky, and the snow peas are often too stringy. Yes, of course I agree with you that it would be great to have a Chinese kitchen that sources and prepares great sought out products and we would expect JG to do just this. But don't forget the price points of '66' are relatively modest. Main dishes were $12-32 with most being at the low and mid points. I suspect that many of the artisanal products will be on the too expensive side. And yes I'm certain that JG will be ordering a better grade of protein and veg. From my single meal there I can tell you that the shrimp they were using may have been fresh or frozen it was hard to tell. They certainly didn't have any off flavors, but their flavor didn't come out and jump at you either. Plus I can guarantee that the shrimp I ate certainly weren't swimming just before dinner. The frog's legs (which I didn't sample) came from a fresh supplier in Florida (JG and I discussed this), but what about all those live bullfrogs available in Chinatown markets, the ones we enjoyed at our Chinese New Years banquet. Wouldn't you think those might be preferable? The point is that these are very sophisticated operators who know that this is a business where one needs to run a good (low) food cost to make money. I'm certain they will use superior products and I'm certain they will have an eye on the bottom line as well, if you get my drift. I'd like to see them use some of the fresh vegetables that are brought in from Asia. Fresh bamboo shoots, shitake 'flower' mushrooms and waterchestnuts were all in the Chinatown market today. For sure I'll be keeping an eye out and report more of what I see. There's a substantial learning curve here. Like you, I have a lot of faith in and expectation of Chef V. It'll keep things interesting.

I'm not sure I agree with you. As far as an uptown neighborhood take out joint you're on the money, but what about an authentic Chinatown Cantonese that regularly uses: Fresh killed Chickens, ducks, squabs, and quail - almost always top quality. Live seafood: lobsters, crabs, clams, oysters, striped bass, spot prawns, frog's legs. Excellent southern fresh pork, young baby pigs, pork belly, meaty ribs etc. Top quality greens and other Chinese vegetables. These are items I find regularly in many of the restaurants I frequent. They may not be found in all of them, but they are widely available and can be excellent products. Don't forget beef is not a part of an authentic Chinese culinary tradition. Aging especially is a concept foreign to Chinese chefs. I wouldn't argue with you for a second when you say that JG is going to seek out top drawer products, but to be so blanketly dismissive is giving short shrift to some of what is really going on.

DINNER AT ‘66’ Five of us had dinner last evening at ’66,’ Jean Georges’ beautiful and important new Chinese restaurant. It was a really fun experience and we couldn’t have received nicer treatment. We were recognized by co-owner Phil Suarez upon entering, and throughout the evening both Phil and Jean Georges paid close attention to our table. Our servers did as well. When we arrived the dining room was empty, but soon filled up with a very happening downtown crowd. Restaurateur Drew Nierporent, movie star Denzel Washington, and the restaurant’s designer, renowned architect Richard Meier, were all seen prancing around. We sampled about 20 different items and overall I would say that the food was good to very good with only one or two items that I would call excellent. To my mind it rated 2 stars on a scale where 4 is the highest. First of all I think that it’s imperative to point out that new restaurants are a work in progress and that it’s unfair to judge them so early on (the restaurant has been open for two weeks). I think that is especially the case here because Chef V is working in a new milieu. He has years of experience in preparing brilliant French/Western food but merely days in running a Chinese kitchen. While the menu is limited, there are a large number of dumpling items and their quality ranged from pretty good to very good – though none of the ones I tried seemed great. I particularly liked the foie gras/shrimp? dumpling with a soy based dipping sauce that contained a subtle hint of grapefruit juice, a lovely idea that also worked especially well. The pork soup dumplings were good (B/B+), though not as good as they get when they’re really good, and the pot stickers (fried dumplings) were good also, though less so (B-). The skins were thick and not crisp enough, and the filling under seasoned. That in fact was my main complaint about many of the appetizers I tasted: they all tasted quite clean and fresh but lacked a depth of flavor that I’m always looking for. Jean Georges is cooking without MSG and to do this successfully, in addition to starting with great product, one must compensate by using enough salt/soy plus make sure there is a strong herbaceous profile to the flavor. This type of very careful seasoning is the difference between pretty good and great. We also sampled the steamed mushroom dumplings, shrimp dumplings and scallop dumplings. Their skins were all good, not great, and their fillings again were fresh and clean but lacked a savory quality – though the mushroom dumplings seemed to have the best flavor. Just some more salt would have helped a lot. Spring rolls also were clean, fresh, beautifully fried, and a little light on flavor. By far the best starters we tried, the best dishes of the night in fact, were the meaty and delicious ribs (back ribs) and the glazed squab appetizer that was terrific. It got my vote for the best/most memorable dish of the meal. The two-flavor shrimp appetizer, fried shrimp in spicy red sauce and mayonnaise-coated white colored fried shrimp, were good. But just go to Sweet & Tart at 20 Mott Street and try an almond covered shrimp, it blows Jean George’s shrimp app out of the water! Main dishes were all interesting and nicely prepared. Everything was beautifully presented. Shrimp with fresh lily bulbs (nice to see them serving this vegetable) and candied walnuts in a light spicy sauce was well executed, interesting, and not a dish I would ever crave, and I love shrimp dishes. Peking Duck was fresh and accessible at $25 (about 1/2 a duck) but the skin was flaccid. Crispy skin is the whole point of the dish, though the duck tasted good and I loved the excellent mini pancakes that accompanied it. Braised short ribs were rich and tasty and beautifully glazed with a buttered? deeply charcoal-colored sweet sauce. The unusual fried miniature pastries that accompanied the short ribs were dramatic looking but seemed a little superfluous. They were too small (1”) to use as a sandwich covering with the beef that was cut into very large chunks (3”). A plate of e-fu noodles with lobster had nice large pieces of beautifully fresh tail meat, but again the sauce lacked a certain savory quality. This is a dish that I know well and love. Chef V should try Pings (22 Mott St.) version of this dish when Ping cooks it himself. It is a tour de force and not a dish that is easy to get right. It will open his eyes. A moist and fresh sweet and sour black bass had a crispy coating on one side only, a great idea, and a lovely sweet and sour sauce beneath that was tart and light at the same time. To my sensibility it lacked a garnish that would have married the sauce to the fish. Thoughts turned to shredded pickled vegetables or sweet peppers or shredded sweet young ginger. The pine nuts hiding under the fish were ok but didn’t do it for me. Cold sesame noodles were made from cellophane noodles, a very nice touch, but I found the sauce too sweet and again not savory or spicy enough. A side dish of room temperature eggplant was well flavored and one of the tastiest and most successful dishes of the evening. The desserts were fun and interesting with 66’s riff on bubble tea by far the most popular item on our table. The Chinese food world has been far too stagnant when it comes to growth and innovation. It is exciting and of great consequence that an influential and important master chef like Jean George, and his partners, have created a restaurant like this. I look forward to seeing it mature and plan to go there regularly. For the moment it won’t keep me away from my regular haunts. But I’d love to return and try more soon. I’m sure that it will be a tremendous success. I hope JG’s perfectionist qualities run wild. All things considered this is a very well put together package. By the way I loved the tabletop appointments: great tables, great spoons. Good job!

Plum sauce is one of those terms that has a different meaning depending upon location and usage. I try to avoid it. In my experience many people say that Peking Duck is served with plum sauce -- of course they mean hoisin. CONFUSION!

Black Chengkong vinegar and sugar can make a terrific tasting sauce. I sometimes like to use a touch of fresh garlic as well. I find the Worchestershirish flavor of the vinegar adds a really interesting flavor component. I often use black vinegar when I'm making a catsup based sweet and sour sauce. I feel that most Chinese restaurants don't take enough time preparing Sweet & Sour dishes. One of the things that I especially object to, and find to be quite common, is the pre-cooking of the pork or chicken. Freshly cooked, fried chicken or pork can be wonderful when it's correctly sauced.

The temperature of the rice makes the difference in the sizzle -- the hotter the more Ssssss. It all has to be popped at the same temp -- just how much cooling takes place before it is moistened.

This is an important and interesting observation. The differences that have developed in Chinese dishes served in different parts of the country/world. For example: Chow Mein is a white sauced dish in some local variations and brown sauced (soy added) item in others. Duck sauce is a different color/flavor in different parts of the country And as Fat Guy has pointed out Sweet & Sour is a different color on the east and west coasts. Probably varies in different countries. Any comments?

I like sweet & sour. It's real Chinese cooking and can be delicious. It's gotten a bad reputation. It's been abused. What do you think?

One of my favorite shops is a hole-in-the-wall on the west side of Mott St (NYC) just south of Grand. It sells only dried fish. Must be more than 100 different types. Everytime I walk by I marvel at the variety and wonder what they're all used for. I know I'm supposed to be the expert here, but hell my Jewish grandmother never taught me about this stuff. Neither did my professional chef mentors. Any toughts/experiences/recipes?

While I use it in NYC, I actually bought my wok in a cookware shop in Vancouver's Chinatown. Some thoughts on what to look for: 1) If you cook on a domestic gas stove I strongly suggest a flat-bottomed wok with a long handle. I feel that a 14" diameter is the best all-purpose size. When you use a wok with a traditional curved bottom and a ring I don't like the way the heat is directed inside the ring while leaving the rest of the wok quite cool. 2) A hand-hammered wok. Over the years I've seen woks that have circular hammer marks around the upper 2 inches of the interior edge of the wok. While I never really understood the significance of this aspect I've come to believe, through entirely empirical means, that the type metal that lends itself to this hand hammering also happens to heat up very quickly. 3) I often use an electric wok, not for stir-frying but for steaming. I set it on my kitchen counter and top it with 12" bamboo steamer baskets. It works perfectly for steaming a fish or some dumplings. 4) I like the idea of non-stick woks and usually keep a cheap one around. I just replace it as its surface deteriorates. In NYC there are 2 pretty good stores that specialize in Chinese cooking equipment. I don't know their names, but one is located on the south side of Grand St just west of Allen Street. The other is on the west side of The Bowery at Chatham Square just across from the HSBC bank. I don't know whether either carries hand-hammered woks.

Eddie - Could you be more specific. What did you like about it. I have a very small home stove with one burner that is oversized. When I put my wok on the stove I have room for little else. Frequently I serve multi-course Chinese dinners and go to great care to think them through ahead of time so that I'm not constantly cooking and I can enjoy the company of my guests. With this in mind I try to limit the number of items cooked in my wok to 2 courses. I often include a cold dish, a steamed dish, a braised dish, a soup and/or a boiled dish. This is how I get the variety I want without being governed by the limitations of my stove One of the most significant factors in keeping my cooking moving is how long it takes to reheat my wok, and how long it takes to get it extremely hot. I'm constantly cooking something, then cleaning out the wok and reheating it. With my old steel wok which wasn't very thick, but thicker than my new one, it would take 2-3 minutes to get quite hot, maybe even longer. My new wok gets quite hot in 30 seconds, and after a minute it's smoking like crazy. I don't even know whether the heat is uneven or not because when you stir-fry the constant and random movement of the food in the pan mitigates the problems caused by hot spots. In fact in many instances the hot spots are good, enabling me to color something more quickly than usual. This is the case when making pan-fried noodles for instance. The ability to retain and evenly distribute heat which we want in a Western saute or saucepan just isn't what we need in this instance.

For almost 30 years I used the same 14" flat-bottomed steel wok. Even when the handle loosened i wouldn't give it up. Last November everything changed. I bought a new wok, still flat-bottomed and still 14" and still made out of steel. But it was a thinner gauge metal, a highly conductive metal that heated more quickly and didn't retain the heat very long. It worked better! Could've knocked me over with a feather. It was hand-hammered and made in Hong Kong. I LOVE it. Haven't used that old wok even once since then. What kind of wok do you use, and why, and for what?

No wrist (or any place else) slapping. Just noticed a lot of discussion over a long period of time and I thought that a clear statement of the classical technique would be helpful. Clarification! By frying the bottoms before you add the water you promote an extra crisp crust during the second frying. Try it, it's a fun trick that works well.

CLARIFYING THE TECHNIQUE FOR PAN-FRYING DUMPLINGS 1) Use a well seasoned pan. I like to use a black cast iron skillet that is extremely well seasoned, but a non stick pan works perfectly (better). 2) Pre-heat the pan and add a couple of tablespoons of vegetable oil. Put the dumplings in flat side down, and cook for about a minute until the bottoms just start to color lightly. 3) Next add about 1/2 cup of water, raise the heat and cover the pan. Continue cooking, covered the whole time, until most of the water is absorbed and the dumpling filling is almost cooked through. This should take 3-4 minutes if the meat is at room temperature when you start, or a couple of minutes longer if it is frozen. 4) Uncover the pan, let all the water evaporate, add another tablespoon of oil (if necessary) and cook for an additional 2-3 minutes until the dumpling bottoms are well crusted. Serve. *If the filling is overcooked then you have let them cook covered for too long. *Conversely if the filling undercooked that they haven't been covered long enough. *You are really steaming (not boiling) the dumplings, then frying their bottoms crisp. * If the water doesn't evaporate quickly enough you have used too much.

I love beancurd skin knots. I really like them Shanghai style, braised in a rich brown sauce with fresh bacon (pork belly).

No, why - and where? But they gotta be to bok gwai. Lobster Rolls at New York's Bill Hong's on E. 56th Street sell for close to $50/order. Regular Egg Roll skins filled with fresh lobster meat and vegetables.

Good quality egg rolls have traditionally had both small shrimps (not dried ones just small ones) and roast pork. As money/marketing/variety/eating habit considerations crept into the marketplace we began seeing shrimp rolls and egg rolls. The difference was simply that the shrimp rolls had shrimp and no pork and usually cost a little more, and the egg rolls often had pork and no shrimp. My local take-out, Szechuan Delight on Park Slopes' 7th Avenue, has both shrimp and pork in theirs. When freshly prepared they can be quite good. One change that I have noticed is that rather than using chopped roast pork many restaurants now use flavored coarsely ground pork that has been colored to resemble roast pork. This can taste quite good but it is a a lttle less sophisticated and tasty than using real roast pork.

Indeed King Yum stills exist and thrives from what I understand. It is really a great example of the Chinese-American restaurant that has survived from another era. I think it would be great fun to check out their food, not just their egg rolls. I know they were recently running a Chinese New Year's menu - heard it advertised on the radio.

In neither Japan nor Hong Kong have I seen what I grew up with as an egg roll. The ones over here are the thin very crispy ones referred to as spring rolls or harumaki in Japanese. Haru=spring maki=roll Every now and then I get a craving for one of those big thick ones with unidentifiable fillings dipped into that gloppy sweet and sour sauce. I had such a craving for these while I was pregnant with #3 that I tried on numerous attempts to imatate that red glop and to no avail. Where did you grow up? The red glop recipe is different in different parts of the country/world.

FYI This is typically not Chinese cabbage but regular cabbage. It's really an essential part of the 'egg roll' filling flavor.

I lust after Wonton. Never order Hot & Sour though I enjoy it. And get Sizzling Rice Soup every time I run across it. Do you have a favorite Chinese soup or know of a restaurant that serves particularly great soup?