I don't cook Chinese-inspired food at home much. One reason is that there is an abundance of good, cheap Chinese restaurants in the Bay Area, most of which can turn out dishes as good or better than I could cook them for less than I would pay for the ingredients at the market. Okay, I can buy organic long beans and bean sprouts and pork that wasn't raised and exterminated at some piggy Dachau in Iowa. But somehow Legendary Palace in downtown Oakland can serve up a decent-sized Dungeness crab in black bean sauce at one o'clock in the morning for $10 when the same creature, still very much in need of boiling, would set me back as much from the tanks out at 99 Ranch. Maybe they start with dead crabs, but I haven't died from eating them--at least not yet--so who can complain? Another reason is that the dishes that I like from the Chinese culinary idiom, for the most part, need enormous amounts of heat and thin steel woks to turn out right. Hence, the Chinese wok range:
My first real restaurant job was at a long-defunct place in Portland, OR, called Earl Restaurant.
I was all of maybe twenty years old, and I had been working at a strange little tea room in Northwest Portland (the British Tea House, as if anyone remembers it) as a kind of cook-and-bottle washer, mixing up shepherd's pie and jam tarts for the two or three dowagers who would come in for lunch. The proprietress, a deranged Welshwoman, and I didn't really see eye to eye. So, after a new guy she hired, a recently repatriated American expat from Paris named Bwuce (for the Welshwoman had an terrible lisp)...wait, wait! This is getting out of hand! And what does it have to do with the Chinese wok range? I'll leave Bwuce aside for the moment
(I'll tell the story some other time. As a teaser, you just need to picture a man in his mid-forties who looks something like a low-rent Jim Morrison, stripped to the waist, digging rocks in the restaurant's back yard and preening his flowing tresses with a hair pick. Then imagine this same fellow, wearing a shirt and apron this time, diving at me in a fit of rage through a kitchen pass-through no bigger than a television set whilst I hack at his head with a butcher knife. Picture his flailing person smashing a half dozen Royal Doulton teapots as the deranged Welshwoman shrieks, "Sthop it! Sthop it, bohf of you!" Oh, the calamity!)
Anyway, suffice it to say that the gig at the tea house was not the best. When my good friend Paul, who waited tables at the tea house, took a job at Earl, he got me signed on in the kitchen. Earl was an interesting place to work for about a year--which is also another story. But the building it occupied (which is still, I think, a restaurant called Cozze, which sits at the corner of SE 12th and Morrison) had at one time been a Chinese restaurant. And it still had the wok ranges on the line.
Woo hoo! If you've never had the chance to cook over a wok range, you haven't lived. Now, I have a really powerful stove at home. My DCS has six burners, each capable of throwing out 17,500 btu's of pure fire. By contrast, most good-quality gas ranges made for home use have burners with maximum heat outputs between 5,000 and 12,000 btu's. So the DCS runs hot, and this makes sauteeing on the thing a real treat. But the standard output on a wok range is an infernal 110,000 btu's! Three concentric rings of open burners ignite with the pull of a huge steel valve lever, and a column of blue flame erupts from the steel collar that serves as a stand for the wok. A half-wok of water will boil in a minute. Oil in the pan will burn before you can say, "A 14, a 7, and 9 with lychees." Yet the wok range is also amazingly responsive, capable of being reduced to the barest simmer. Like a memorable lover, the wok range can coo and scream and do everything in between.
Add to this the fact that the woks used on wok ranges are thin steel affairs that heat very quickly and are light enough to make tossing food in the pan the best option for keeping things moving. You can poke at the food with a paddle or chopsticks, but throwing the food into the air with a gentle, rocking motion make the most sense--and it keeps you from mashing delicate ingredients with utensils.
Trying to get the same results on a flat range with a five-pound All-Clad chef's pan is a HUGE pain in the ass. So that, in a most round-about way, is why I don't often cook Chinese food at home. But tonight was a different story, as we shall see.
Fried Bamboo Rice with Shrimp and Chinese Sausage
4 C. day-old rice, very dry, preferably left uncovered in the fridge
2 eggs
2 T. dark soy sauce
1/2 t. sunflower oil
3 cloves garlic, chopped fine
1/2 white onion, chopped fine
2 T. grated fresh ginger
1 or more fresh serrano chillies, sliced thin in rings
2 carrots, peeled and cut in brunoise
1/2 C. fresh English peas (or frozen petit pois, rinsed to thaw)
1/2 C. small shrimp, peeled, deveined, and tailed; whole if really small or chopped coarse
1 Chinese sausage, cut into small rounds.
2 T. sunflower oil
1/4 C. sunflower oil
Start by breaking up clumps of rice by rubbing them between your fingers. The grains need to be free like beautiful wild horses. If your rice is very damp, you can spread it on a baking sheet and allow to dry--or even force the issue in a warm oven, although that seems like a lot of effort to go to for fried rice. I used that groovy bamboo-scented rice that I wrote about last night. The bamboo flavor persisted. Otherwise, it was the same as any other leftover rice.
Beat the eggs in a small bowl with soy sauce. In a small pan, heat 1/2 t. sunflower oil and scramble eggs until they are firm. You can do this however you're used to scrambling eggs, of course. I didn't as a matter of fact, use sunflower oil, since I scramble eggs in an 8" nonstick pan. I just use a shot of canola-oil pan spray. It's scrambling eggs, for Christ's sake. Do what works.
Heat your wok-like device (I use a chef's pan, which is wok-shaped with a flat bottom. A skillet will work, as would a sautée pan. I would think twice about doing this in a saucepan, though.) Heat 2 T. of oil over high heat until it begins to shimmer. Toss in garlic, onion, ginger, chilli, and carrots and toss vigorously. (You can leave out the chillies if you don't want the spice.) Keep everything moving, lest the garlic and ginger burn. When the mixture is fragrant and the onion starts to look clear, throw in the peas, shrimp, and sausage. (Cubes of fried or smoked tofu would be good here, too, as might leftover meat like chicken or pork. Throw in some hamburger if you long to get back to your double-wide roots.) Toss for a few minutes more, and then add the soy. Toss for a few more moments and then taste a carrot. If it's soft enough, turn the lot out into a bowl and set aside. If your carrots are still too firm, add a splash of water and cover for a minute or two. This will have some adverse affect on the rest of the ingredients, but you're really playing to the carrots here. If they're too firm, your rice will be most unpleasant in the mouth. Of course, you can dispense with this by blanching your carrots or leaving them out entirely.
CLEAN YOUR PAN! Take it to the sink and wash out anything that is stuck to the bottom. You need to fry your rice in an absolutely clean and dry pan. Heat 1/4 C. of oil until it shimmers:
A word about oil: This shimmering business--learn to recognize it. Most of the time, your frying and sauteeing will fail because you didn't let the oil get hot enough to caramelize your food when it hits the pan. But, of course, black and scorched oil taste foul, will ruin a dish, and purportedly causes cancer. Finding the sweet spot where oil is very hot yet not burnt is the trick to frying and sauteeing well. Shimmering oil looks a little like heat rising off hot asphalt, wavy and psychedelic. The shimmer is a more reliable indicator than the first curls of smoke, which appear when the oil is a little too hot for my liking and which vary significantly by oil (the higher the smoke point, the longer it takes for the haze to appear.) All cooking oils seem to shimmer at about the same temperature.
When your oil is hot, sift in your rice. Don't overcrowd the pan. Ideally, each grain will have a little oil bath that will cook the starch on the outside, heating through the rice and keeping the grains free-flowing. Toss the pan vigorously, and keep things moving.
When the rice is heated through and had taken on a little color, remove from the heat and toss in the scrambled egg, Check the stir fry to make sure it's not swimming in liquid. If you did things right, it shouldn't be--but if it is, pour off the liquid before adding the melange to the rice pot. Toss well tocombine. Taste your creation. If it's bland, you can add more soy or salt. (I read that soy sauce isn't traditionally added to fried rice, but I like it--so there.)
Turn out the mix into a serving dish and scatter with scallions.
Dry-Cooked Long Beans with Shitake Mushrooms and Black Bean Sauce
1/3 C. sunflower oil
1 lb. long beans
1/2 lb. fresh shitake mushrooms, stemmed and sliced
1 1/2 white onions, cut into chunks the size of a postage stamp
2 cloves garlic, chopped fine
1 T. fresh ginger, grated
1 serrano chilli, sliced thin in rings
2 T. soy sauce
2 T. black bean paste or whole fermented black beans
Heat oil until it shimmers--or even a little longer, which goes against what I just wrote but which works better with mushrooms. Add mushrooms gradually, making sure that they fry vigorously and start taking on color right away. If you add mushrooms to oil that isn't hot enough, they turn into unpleasant little grease sponges, adding senseless calories to you're already unpleasant dinner. Note that you want your mushrooms to be Atacama-dry when they hit the pan--or as close to dry as nature allows. This is easy with cultivate mushrooms, which are always fairly dry unless your local market has those goddamned misters pointed at the mushrooms. (This is normally not the case, since decent markets with good produce turnover don't need misters, and even the ones that have them generally have good sense to keep the mushroom on the other side of the room. But maybe you ate a baby in a past life and, perforce, must shop for "food" at a Safeway or Lucky, where the produce is maintained by non-union mental defectives. For God's sake! Move already!) If you're cooking wild mushrooms (and you are to be commended for doing so), do what you can to dry them off and keep them that way. It goes without saying that you should never wash a mushroom. If you need to clean them, dab at them with a dry towel.
When your mushrooms have colored, toss in the long beans. Toss--what's that word? Yes! Vigorously. Chinese cooking will keep your arms toned and shapely. When the beans start to look blistered and wrinkly, add the onion, garlic, ginger and chilli. Toss, toss, toss.
Did I mention that this is a lot nicer, both for you and for those with whom you cohabit if you have good ventilation? If you rent, you get what you pay for. Best of luck to you. But if you own and you actually cook with any regularity, go out and get a massive exhaust fan that vents to the outside. Rebuild your walls if you have to. You won't believe the difference it makes. 1200 cfm suction and direct outdoor venting will change your life, I promise.
You're ready to sauce it up when your onions are toothsome. Eat one. It should be sweet and without sting, but still have a little kick and crunch. This preparation treats onions like a table vegetable, so proceed accordingly.
When the onions are to your liking, make a little well in the center of the pan. Dump in the soy and black bean paste and stir to smooth out the black bean. If you need to, add a splash of water. When the sauce becomes free-flowing, toss with the rest to combine. Serve instanter! (With the aforementioned fried rice, of course.)
So, what about the farce? Well, I really didn't want to turn this thing into a political vehicle, but what can you do? I read the idiotic tale of the kangaroo court that tried and convicted Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a poor fool with a fourth-grade education who had the misfortune of taking a job driving Osama bin Laden around the back roads of Afghanistan sometime in the distant past and who has languished in the US's own little Cuban concentration camp for five or so years, waiting for his day in court. I'm not actually prepared here to launch a well-reasoned attack against the whole Gitmo thing. Of course it's an outrage, and I have not the slightest doubt that history will brand George Bush the Younger for it's invention and perpetuation, one of his countless crimes against God and man. But in flipping through the AP slide show about the sham trial, landed on two photos of interest to a food blog.
One depicts Hamdan at what appears to be a celebration, a wedding or some such. He's in a white top, sitting on some pillows in Arabian Nights splendor, with some sort of cake in front of him. He has that dumb, satisfied look on his face that any of us might wear at a party. "Mmm, cake," he seems to say. Now, this, I'm sure, will be another post at some point, but what the fuck is up with cake? I've confessed to not having a sweet tooth, but it seems to me that the very existence of cake flies in the face of what we know about life--namely, that it's brutal, ugly, and short. Who in the hell are we kidding by confecting a thing that is icky sweet, angelic white, soft and fluffy like a cloud? We eat it to mark happy time as if to say, "Look how happy I am? Everything in life is sunshine and puppy dogs." I think we should take shots of Campari to celebrate happy events, or even down the hideous Fernet Branca--I mean, even the kids. Let 'em drink. The more bitter the better. That way, we could affirm, "Today I might be happy, but life leave a bitter taste in my mouth, no as always. You won't fool me, life!"
The other photo that got my dander up depicts--wait for it!--the McDonald's at Guantanamo. That's right, along with maintaining a military base on the island that we, as a country, have been strangling for more than forty years, we've imported the most despicable of the fast foods there and ornamented it with the faggy effigy of Ronald McDonald. You can see for yourself; just Google it. The fiberglass clown is right there, waving at the senselessly detained "unlawful combatants" who languish in the hot sun behind chain link and razor wire. He raises his gloved fist, welcoming our service people to enjoy cardboard patties of mysterious, organy meat between vapid, sugary buns. Or perhaps it's a diabetes-provoking tun of the newly promoted Sweet Tea.
Either way, a farce. And with that, I'll finish up.
1 comment:
This is fun, love that there are actual recipes. How about that clam dish, with the bacon.
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