It only really hit me yesterday. I made a last-minute panic run for dried mushrooms and chilis and then just enjoyed a little wander through Wanchai Market.
Leaving Hong Kong is bittersweet for me. I will always remember this place for sort of *exploding* my palate. To me, Chinese cuisine is not a set of flavors or dishes that I crave (like with Indian or Middle Eastern cuisines). There are no *it* dishes for me. It's more like discovering how much of the world is actually edible -- and how many textures and mouth-feels and flavors exist. To me, growing up with a Western palate, Chinese cuisine is like gastronomic outer space. It is endlessly delightful, shocking, comical, and *fascinating.* I hope that I will carry this sense of food as a much broader sensual universe with me throughout the rest of my life.
I was thinking of writing a post titled "Greatest hits from 20 months in HK." But I realized that the foods that left a lasting imprint on my memory are not Michelin *'d destination dishes. In some cases they are very every-day kinds of things. And actually, everyday foods are very much what I love about eating. Holed up in the house packing, I have been eating every last little thing in our cupboards and found myself munching on a sandwich made of Garden "Better Sandwich Bread," Al Fresco Country Chicken Sausage with sage and thyme, and Maille mustard -- and spontaneously thought to myself, "Everything is delicious!" It's true -- everything is delicious. You don't have to wait til you're seated in a fancy, well-reviewed restaurant eating an award-winning dish in order to enjoy eating. Everyday life is filled with delicious things.
In any case, here are some of the everyday (and not so everyday) food experiences I will miss once we've surrendered our suitcases to Airport Express and set off across the ocean...
Wife cakes. People come to Hong Kong and eat egg tarts. Egg tarts are good. But they're good in a way that a lot of other pastries are good: sweet, mellow filling, salty-buttery-crunchy crust. For me, it's a bit, "Yeah, and...?" Wife cakes, however, are totally weird. And oddly addictive. I have become a texture junky since moving to HK. And wife cakes do it for me, man. Imagine a disk of pastry about the size of the bottom of a coffee cup. The whole cake is probably about 1/2" thick and it's filled with sweetened winter melon, which has almost no flavor. It's just sweet. There is a little more to the flavor, but it's hard to describe. But the star of the show here is the crust. It must be made with lard... You bite in and it's impossibly flaky and also has a bit of wetness or tooth to it. Then you have a layer of the gooey-sticky winter melon and then another layer of the awesome crust. I just really dig these and will miss them a lot. One day, after doing battle with IKEA at Times Square, I grabbed a bag of four or five of them at the local Welcome and ate the entire thing waiting in the taxi line ;-)
Candied taro. I'm including this one because it has a really similar quality to the wife cakes... I had these with my friend J-- at Lippo Chiu Chow. (Incidentally, I just learned that the Lippo family apparently own 2/3 of Indonesia...but that's another story.) Candied taro are also this trippy texture experience with some temperature thrown in too...there's a crust of quite thick plain sugar that's rather hard. And you bite through to warm, mushy, very subtly flavored taro. It's hot, crunchy, mushy, incredibly sweet, then mild. Just awesome. There's a kind of restraint about a dish like this that you just don't experience in Western cooking. In Western cooking, someone would want to round out or balance the flavors... In a way, this kind of dish is more abstract. You have to really love eating and sensual experience to like this. And you also have to think about the entirety of your eating experience as the whole meal, not just the dish itself. Is the meal balanced? Is your body balanced afterward? (Not just is this dish balanced.)
Baby abalone. Standing in flip-flops at the communal sink with a toothbrush at Shek O Beach, our friend F-- and I brushed the sea scum off these little round creatures, that kind of undulated back in response. F-- smiled and said "cute!" Meanwhile I was praying that reincarnation as an animal won't happen to me. We later grilled these precious things by setting the shells directly on a barbecue grate and adding just a drop of soy sauce. Again, the experience was all about texture. Abalone has this kind of amazing solidness to it...in a weird way almost like a hard cheese. But it also has a little elasticity. It's awesome. A big thank you to A-- and F-- for this experience.
Fried rice. There are some dishes I always thought were American -- cha siu bau (pork buns), sweet and sour pork, and fried rice -- that are actually totally Chinese! I never, ever, ever order fried rice. But one day, when my friend C-- still lived in Mid-Levels, we rendez-vous'ed at Wah Fung roast house on Wellington for lunch. And by accident the lunch set came with fried rice. Holey moley. Yum. First off, the rice was so fluffy and fresh. And then it had just great wok flavor, and little bits of this green vegetable (can't remember what it's called) that have a little bit of crunchiness, probably some shrimp for richness and flavor, and egg white, but the kicker on top is the salty-powdery dried meat. To me, this kind of food is sooo sexy. I don't just want to eat it, I want to jump into it naked. Interestingly, my sweetheart E doesn't get this kind of food at all. Eating together all of the time, we've realized that I have a much, much more sensitive snout than he does. I smell and taste waaaay more subtle things than he does (for better or worse!). Man, I am a sucker for subtle, mellow rice dishes like this. To him they taste like nothing.
"So good" crystal noodles. Mmm, mmm, mmm. In the same family as the fried rice, Fu Sing's "so good" crystal noodles are delicate vermicelli noodles, baby shrimp, egg, crab roe (?), coriander, and lots of other good stuff dry-fried (?) and served in a hot clay pot. The tricky thing is...if you are eating their char siu at the same time, your taste buds get all keyed up by those intense sweet-porky-salty flavors, so when you take a mouthful of the noodles, they taste kind of bland. But once you adjust, it's just like mouth after mouth of amazing delicate textures and flavor bursts. In a funny way like little sparkles of flavor in your mouth. Just dreamy. Ooh, which also reminds me of the phenomenal bamboo noodles I had in Macau...bamboo noodles are the thickness of embroidery thread, impossibly chewy, and then dry or grainy with shrimp roe, and just a little bit of soy-ish sauce. But again, it's these awesome dry, savory noodles.
Pork chop buns. Ok-la, it's got to be said, pork is on another level in Hong Kong and Macau than anywhere else I've been in the world. In the US, pork producers actually started an ad campaign to try to persuade people to eat more pork (instead of beef or chicken I guess). This is *not* a problem here. I have never tasted pork as good as what we get here. I've blogged about this before, but on one level it's the meat itself. The variety of pork they use here just tastes porkier. But it's also the incredible sophistication and knowledge about how to make every single cut of pork taste like heaven. I'm thinking of roasty-sweet-chewy cha siu, delicate thin sheets of pork belly, thick, buttery chunks of pork belly, snappy-chewy pig intestines, tender pig kidney...it goes on and on. Pork is a high art here. Seriously. You have to come and eat (a lot of) pork in Hong Kong ;-)
But ok, the pork chop buns aren't even in Hong Kong. They're a Macau specialty. There's a ton of talk about whether the thickness of the chop is 1/8" or 1/4" (or 1/2"?). People are serious (and technical!) about food here. So there's a rather large place in Taipa called Tai Lei Loi Kei that only does pork chop buns. And it's usually jam-packed with people munching and photographing their sandwiches. The chop itself is brined and then deep-fried I guess, yielding a piece of hot, juicy, crusty, amazingly flavorful meat *with* the bone still attached. Slap that puppy inside a perfectly fresh, soft Portuguese roll and you're done. It is so f** good. I recently told the good people of London that Mrs. King's pork pies were not making the most of the meat. They protested. But I'll bet they'd feel differently after they ate one of these pork chop buns. It's just on another level over here. I'm serious.
Vegetarian goose. I'm not just saying this for contrast. There is a whole universe of fascinating, varied, and delicious vegetarian Chinese dishes that are so much more sophisticated than what we get in the West. We've had some really wonderful vegetarian cold small plates at Hang Zhou restaurant in Wanchai. They have a crunchy-crispy bean almost like a fava bean that is tossed with salt and seaweed. Mmm. (Wu Kong Shanghainese also does nice roasted peanuts with seaweed). Then there's this incredibly dense, gooey, sweet lotus root stuffed with glutinous rice. Mmm. Oh, and great pungent, chewy fermented stinky tofu with hoisin and chili sauces (sort of in another category). And then there's this weird thing called "vegetarian goose," which is kind of a vegetarian staple here. It's this flat bean curd sheet thing that's been marinated in something sweet and a little salty and savory. It's really tender with a nice, balanced flavor. Very, in my opinion, elegant.
Braised dried mushrooms. One of my regrets about leaving Hong Kong is not learning everything I could about dried foods. Before moving here I just thought that people dried foods in order to preserve them. So naive! Drying foods ads complexity to flavor and texture. The world of Chinese dried foods is vast. In Western cooking you have specialties like fois gras, caviar, oysters. In Chinese cuisine you also have these things ;-), but the real delicacies are dried sea food like shark fin, abalone, scallop, squid...incredibly complex flavors, aromas, textures. But honestly, that's like Chinese food 301 and I'm still trying to pass 101. In the more everyday universe of dried foods there are red dates, tangerine peel, wood ear mushrooms, red peppers, bok choy, baby shrimp, golden needle mushrooms, and on and on...it's amazing. And then there are a thousand grades of shitake mushrooms. At home I regularly cooked a very simple recipe using dried shitakes out of Grace Young's Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen book. Here's my simplified short-hand:
- Rinse and soak 8-10 dried Chinese mushrooms in cold water for 2-4 hours (they should feel like a firm texture you'd want to bite into, but not too soft).
- Cut out the stems and reserve the soaking juice.
- Quickly stir-fry three medium-thick slices of ginger until it's aromatic. Toss in the soaked mushrooms and stir-fry a minute or so to pick up some wok flavor.
- Add 1/4 cup clear stock and 1/4 cup mushroom soaking liquid. Bring to a simmer and cover.
- Set a kitchen timer for 25 minutes and periodically check the mushrooms, adding equal parts of braising liquid so they are always juicy.
- When the timer goes off, set the mushrooms aside, quickly stir-fry some greens (baby bok choy is nice), set them on a plate, toss the mushrooms back into the walk and finish with a couple of teaspoons of oyster sauce and arrange on top of the greens.
Oh boy, there's so much more to say. I'm going to have to write a part 2 later.
