Ladies and gentlemen, ... It arrived!
I ended my last post reflecting on all the effort it took to find this book. I acknowledged that in all likelihood, this book would not be worth the work. I'm happy to say I was wrong. This book is a wonderful find, and I hope all of you get the chance to enjoy it one day.
The most interesting part of all is this the recipe layout. I've never seen such cleanly outlined recipes. For the sake of an example, here's the Mapo Tofu recipe from the book. As the colloquial Sichuan dish in the West, it should be a good point of reference for many that read this post.
Here's a transcription -
Ingredients
300g tofu, 60g stir-fried beef mince, 20g baby leeks (chopped into sections), 80g
cooking oil
Seasonings A
25g Pixian chili bean paste, 10g ground chilies, 6g fermented soy beans
Seasonings B
3g salt, 5g soy sauce, 1g MSG
Seasonings C
1g ground roasted Sichuan pepper, 200g everyday stock, 30g cornstarch-water
mixture
Preparation
1, Cut the tofu into 1.8cm3 cubes, blanch in salty water, remove and soak in water.
2. Heat oil in a wok to 120°C, add Seasonings A and stir-fry to bring out the aroma. Add
the stock, fried beef mince, season with Seasoning B, and simmer for 2 to 3 minutes;
add the leeks and thicken with cornstarch-water mixture; Transfer to a serving
bowl and sprinkle with Seasoning C.
So a lot to go through here. I'm going to split up my comments and critiques into two categories. One that critiques the recipe and one that critiques the recipe layout/choices.
Comments on the recipe
Beef
Everything about the beef was a little strange in this dish. They called for the beef pre-cooked and didn't go over the cooking step at all. While this would normally be fine all though a little strange, in mapo tofu, it's bad. The whole point of the beef is to use the fried beef oil as the base for the dish. The mince itself is tertiary. Because the recipe never outlined cooking the beef, the average home cook would most likely not realize that they needed to save the oil for cooking the Pixian bean paste.
Aromatics
The first thing I noticed when I read this recipe was that it had no aromatics besides the Sichuan pepper powder if you count that. No garlic. Not even the white portion of the green onion. This struck me as strange till I looked a little deeper at what the hell "baby leeks" are in this context.
Welcome to the wacky world of obscure vegetables and aromatics. Where scientific names are never listed, and regional names differ wildly.
- Were they calling for Dacong, aka welsh onion (Allium Fistolum)? It's very often used across Northern China
- Is it talking about actual leeks (Allium ampeloprasum)?
- Or perhaps it meant Chinese chives, aka garlic chives (Allium tuberosum). No, this has nothing to do with garlic, garlic scapes, or green garlic besides the fact that its an allium.
- Speaking of garlic, it could be green garlic; immature garlic pulled before the bulb has matured (Allium sativum). It looks quite like a large scallion.
- Possibly it's garlic scapes, the immature flower stalks of garlic (Allium sativum). They're often removed by farmers to focus all the garlic's energy into bulb growth. Because of this, they're plentiful and cheap across China.
- I can come up with at least five more, but I think you get the point
The characters listed for it are "蒜苗节20克". From my limited google skills, I've come to the conclusion that they're suanmiao, aka green garlic. A good sub if you can't find any in your area is... well... garlic. I'd add it right after you finish frying seasonings A but before you add the stock. 10-15 seconds should be enough time for it to cook. While you'll miss a lot of the pleasent textural aspects, and the garlic flavor will be more homogeneous in the dish, it should work pretty well as far as subs go.
If you take anything away from this, know that dacong are not leeks, no matter how often they're translated as leeks in the West. They both taste similar, but dacong is tender and soft while leek can be tough and crunchy. Dacong closer to a scallion than an onion in flavor, unlike leek. Also, Chinese leek can refer to dacong, leeks, and Chinese Chives - so be careful with that term.
This is why sources like liuzhou's Chinese Vegetables Illustrated thread are so important.
So after that detour, back to the recipe.
Critiques of the recipe layout and recipe choices
Seasoning categories
The seasonings categories are a brilliant idea. It's the linchpin of what makes these recipes so concise and neat. It makes perfect sense when you think of most wok cooking. A basic fried rice or stir-fry are cooked very fast. The timing between adding different types of ingredients is crucial and can be a surprisingly narrow range. Take a look at this basic gailan stir-fry.
I've listed estimated cooking times for each step.
- Quick fry of the beef and remove ~45 seconds
- Fry the garlic and ginger~ 10seconds
- Throw in onion and chili ~30 seconds
- Splash of Shaoxing wine
- Toss in the (mostly) cooked beef ~15 seconds
- Add soy sauce
- Quick mix ~10 seconds
- Add cornstarch slurry
- Quick mix ~10 seconds
- Add blanched gailan
- Quick mix ~10 seconds
- Drizzle with some toasted sesame oil
You can see that once you start, it's a very fast process. This leaves the cook with very little time to fiddle with their recipe books and even less time to deliberate over what to do. Compare that to this version of the recipe, which consolidates each ingredient type into categories.
Ingredients - Beef slivers, blanched gailan
Seasonings A - ginger, garlic
seasonings B - onion, chili
Seasonings C - soy sauce, cornstarch slurry
- Quick fry of the beef and remove ~45 seconds
- Fry the seasonings A ~10seconds
- Throw in seasonings B ~30 seconds
- Splash of Shaoxing wine
- Toss in the (mostly) cooked beef ~15 seconds
- Add Seasoning C
- Quick mix ~10 seconds
- Add blanched gailan
- Quick mix ~10 seconds
- Drizzle with some toasted sesame oil
While it may arguable be a longer recipe, it feels neater. It takes steps away from the frantic parts of the cooking process and places them at the start, where you have all the time in the world. It forces the cook to create a form of mise en place. Of course, a good cook can use both recipes perfectly well and make great food. But to someone like me, who does not prepare well enough ahead of time while cooking, the second recipe is inarguable better.
While the idea may be brilliant, the execution is less than perfect. For example, 2 out of three of the ingredients in seasonings C are used before seasonings C is called for. There is no need for a whole category when you're just going to list for the ingredients individually anyway.
Measurements
As you can see, the measurements are all given in grams. I can't count how many cups vs. grams arguments I've read on forums, but I can tell you this is the first truly grams only cookbook I own. Instead of a teaspoon, it calls for things down to a single gram's worth.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. I greatly prefer grams to cups, but for sums smaller than 5 grams~ volume just seems better. I'm willing to be wrong, though, and I'm excited to try this book out. I might need to get a scale with better resolution.
Conclusion
I'm very excited to use this book more. I showed the mapo tofu recipe as a point of refrenece for everyone, but this book has much more to it than just mapo tofu. There are so many interesting recipes that I'm excited to try. I'll update this thread if I make anything else fro the book.
