Dead or alive

E has been requesting shrimp for months. Not two or three months. More like ten to twelve. But I, a nearly 5'10"-tall human being, have been afraid of 3"-tall crustaceans...



My problem is that seafood in Hong Kong is very fresh. If you walk through the wet markets, fish fling themselves out of fish mongers' buckets onto the pavement. And in front of every decent seafood restaurant there is a large tank filled with garoupas, sullen lobsters, and shrimp with frantic little legs.

Living in a city like this, I would feel embarrassed -- or even negligent -- buying dead shrimp for my sweetheart. But the thought of personally ending the lives of 20 or more little beings was very daunting. Finally, finally, finally, I plucked up the courage. Actually, first I skulked around the supermarket for a while trying to think of anything we might possibly need that I could buy first. But finally I made my way up to the seafood counter and gave a death sentence to a catty (1.4 lbs) of white-legged Chinese shrimp.

And then...I had a bag of living things. It's weird to carry a grocery basket that has things moving in it. They were kicking intermittently, with some feistiness.

Then I paid for my living creatures and hoping to give them the opportunity to die on their own, I waited for the 56 bus and rode home with them on my lap. Ugh.

By the time they were spilled out on my kitchen counter, there were just flickers of motion. I needed to stir-fry them and I didn't know how to get from a living creature to the raw ingredient for my recipe. "How do I kill them?" I asked the young man at the seafood counter. Apparently you can stick them in the freezer for a while -- not enough to freeze the meat, but enough to effectively put them to sleep.

After 20 minutes in the freezer they weren't moving anymore, but they sure looked vibrant, vital, something. You know when you just have a feeling that something's alive but you can't say why? Ugh.

Anyway, what was I going to do? I didn't want to freeze the shrimp entirely, otherwise what was the point of buying fresh? So...I began to decapitate them. Whack -- off with the head. Whack -- the tail. Then I ran a knife over the little feet, separating them from the body so I could get a grip on the edge of the shell and pull it off. Over and over.

Finally I found myself with a tiny pile of beautiful shrimp meat and an enormous pile of gray shrimp parts. It was an interesting moment. I had gone from living creatures with beady eyes and speedy legs to...well, to food. And the meat had a certain quality, an almost silkiness or slinkiness to the way it moved. If you touched it, it would sort of shimmy back into place.

A while back there was a trend among young hipster foodies in the States to face the bloody reality of eating meat. Maybe this has something to do with Buddhism. I don't know. At my friend K--'s wedding in Oregon, for example, they served a pig roasted on a spit and carved on site, a gory carcass with its side missing displayed for all to witness.


(Don't have a picture of that pig, but this photo captures that witness-the-gruesomeness-of-meat spirit.)

I assure you that this is *not* my motivation for telling you the shrimp story.

The point of my shrimp story was that I witnessed first-hand the connection between life and freshness.

Since coming to HK I've asked a number of people to describe Cantonese cuisine. Invariably, they all talk about freshness. Cantonese like their food very fresh. This was surprising to me because, being a Californian, I always thought that we liked our food very fresh. And yet, Cantonese food and "California cuisine" are very different. 

To me, the freshness in California cuisine often refers to rawness, and specifically to raw vegetables. When I think of California cuisine, I think of an elegant salad of peppery greens I once had at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, that came from their own organic garden.


Cantonese food does not have raw vegetables. What is prized is a quality of freshness in cooked food.

Before coming to HK, I probably thought (unconsciously) about freshness as a spectrum starting from when the vegetable is freshest, still hanging on the vine; becoming less fresh after it's been picked and transported; less fresh still when it's handled and prepared for cooking; and finally becoming pretty dead when you cook it.

Now, I think differently.

After being in HK about six months, I went home to SF and ate at all good restaurants...but my impression was, Jeez, these people can't cook ;-( The food seemed dull and lifeless.

At any decent restaurant in HK, the food comes to the table piping hot, just out of the wok or the steamer. And really, you can forget about any sequencing of dishes. As soon as a dish is ready, they bring it to you. Incidentally, this was a gigantic source of frustration to E, who is very attached to the idea of a meal as a specific sequence of events (appetizer--soup--main--dessert). If a dish came in the wrong order, he would let it sit on the table and get cold until the correct dish in the sequence arrived. A misapplication of engineering instincts, if you ask me!

But if you eat the food as soon as it arrives, it's amazing. It's as if all the ingredients have simultaneously woken up and are opening to you like a rose blooming and releasing a fragrance. And if everything has been cooked perfectly and is in balance, it's like hearing a chord or a harmony in music. It's really lovely.

I don't think that most "Westerners" (or maybe just most Americans) even know to look for this quality of freshness in their cooked food. The Chinese, of course, (or maybe just the Cantonese) not only know to look for this freshness, they actually have a phrase to describe it: wok hay.

To quote Grace Young from The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen:

"Wok hay is not simply hot food; it's that elusive seared taste that only lasts for a minute or two."

"I always imagined wok hay as a special life force that, when consumed, provided us with extra energy, hay. Some readers may be familiar with the Mandarin word for hay, which is qi, as in qigong. Qi (pronounced "chee) is the Chinese concept of vital energy that flows through the body."

"As a child I clearly understood that when dinner was announced there was no excuse for tardiness. It was totally unacceptable to explain that you wanted to see the last five minutes of a television show, finish a phone conversation, or even do a few more minutes of homework. Hot food was serious business, and the idea of missing the wok hay was unthinkable."
(quotes from p. 20-21 of Young's book)

I usually cook dinner four or five nights a week, and most of those meals I cook in my wok. I've been doing this just over a year. And after regularly following recipes that go something like -- put the garlic in and let it sizzle about 15 seconds; add ingredient X and stir fry 30 seconds; add two tablespoons water and cover for 10 seconds, etc. -- I've gotten an intuitive sense of the delicacy and elusiveness of the hay.

Which is why it would drive me absolutely bonkers when -- after I had carefully shredded ingredients into delicate slivers for two hours and then brought the attention of a fighter pilot to hitting them with the perfect amount of heat for just the right amount of time in my wok and then rushed the steaming plate to the table -- E would finish his email, stand up, stretch, go to the bathroom, get a glass of wine, and finally sit down to the beautiful dish of food that had just lost its hay. Argh.

So finally, I did an experiment...

I prepped two identical sets of ingredients for Willow Chicken with Black Bean Sauce from Yan-kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook.


Then I cooked one set and we had dinner (yum!), but I kept a bit of the dish aside. After we ate, I cooked the other set of ingredients and placed the fresh, hot version on the counter next to the leftover version from 30 minutes ago. Then I asked E to come running and taste the two.

Ha! He didn't even want to touch the cool dish he was so transfixed by the fresh one. So, as he stood there eating the hot food, I took a bite of one, and then a bite of the other. And then I tasted the individual elements of one and those of the other. Here is what I found...


Color -- the difference in color was very apparent. Not only was the green of the peppers, chilis, and spring onions brighter in the freshly-cooked dish, but the chicken itself was brighter or lighter and also a bit pinker or yellower. So the dish actually looked more lit up. And it's really interesting...if you think about the way that broccoli or green pepper becomes brighter green when you cook it...it's almost as if it becomes more alive when you cook it. It's like the heat from the wok wakes it up, prompts it to open itself and display its most lovely qualities. A very different idea from thinking of cooking as making food another step more dead. Do you see what I mean?

Warmth and aroma -- when you took a bite of the fresh dish, the steam coming off the fresh food actually brought some warmth up to my face before taking a bite. Then, because the aroma of the different ingredients mingled in the steam, before I even tasted it I had the sense of the dish as a single, integrated experience. Tasting the cool food, there was almost no aroma. And the smell that was there was somehow sharper and oilier, with the garlic and spring onion being more prominent.

Flavors -- it's interesting. Both dishes tasted good. But they tasted different. In the cooler dish the seasoning was more apparent: the spring onion, garlic, and salt were more prominent -- as with the aroma. When I compared the individual ingredients, I was most struck by the difference in the flavor of the pepper. The warm pepper had more of a green or cucumbery flavor to it while the cool pepper tasted distinctively bitter.

Textures -- woha, big time difference in textures. Of course the pepper went from slightly crisp to limp. And the spring onions in the warm dish still had a kind of bounciness to them, like they would rebound to their original form after each bite (like the coils of a mattress rebounding up after you push down on it). The cool spring onions were flacid. When you bit them, they just lay there. But the chicken was the biggest surprise to me. I expected there to be a difference in the elasticity, but that's not actually what I noticed. Actually, the warm chicken was much softer. The cool chicken had a hardness or rigidity to it. Similar to the difference between raw pie dough and cooked pie dough. That difference in texture.

Overall, there was a way in which the warm dish had more of a softness and openness and receptiveness to it, while the cool dish had a kind of harshness and reticence to it.

But I am thrilled, because my experiment was a success. E has tasted wok hay and cannot deny that it exists. I mean it was so apparent that there was life in the one dish and not in the other, that there was absolutely no argument. So if he chooses to finish his soup while a beautiful plate of lamb with scallions loses its wok hay next to him, that's his choice. But now, at least he knows what he is missing!

Towngas delivers

You know how rare it is to be longing for something and then to actually have the experience you've been longing for?

Well, I went to my first Chinese cooking class at Towngas Cooking Centre yesterday, and it was really like someone had answered my prayers. I was feeling all hallelujah afterward.

Towngas is the gas company in Hong Kong. At first I thought it was funny that they have a cooking school there. Funny because what, are they encouraging you to use more gas? But it's really just fantastic community relations, as far as I can tell.

The Cooking Centre is on the lower floor of a big shopping complex in Causeway Bay. There is a nice, round reception space when you walk in filled with all sorts of cooking goodies (enamel-coated woks, fancy blenders, cookbooks...).

The teaching space itself is awesome. It's a big, long room with a U-shaped bar at the center and perfect little workstations distributed throughout the rest of the space. Each workstation has two gas burners, a wok, a counter with cutting board and cleaver, and a seasonings setup (e.g., salt, sugar, soy sauces, oil, etc.). There is also a nice, broad wooden stool and plenty of drawers to store your things.

The teacher had an amplified headset and spoke rapid-fire, alternating between English and Cantonese, with an assistant standing by. She was incredibly fast. There were 20-25 students there on a Tues between 2-4:30pm, six of which were male! (In fact, two were wearing matching necklaces and looked like gangster tough guys.) Everyone else: Chinese tai tais, helpers, a few young couples cooking together. And me, the only cracker in the place. Everyone was interested and enthusiastic and friendly.



In 1.5 hours, the teacher unraveled the mysteries of three basic Chinese dishes:

• Steamed Meat Cake with Dried Squid
• Stir-Fried Chicken with Green Pepper
• Thickened Beef Soup

To a Westerner, these probably don't sound terribly appetizing. What they are is the most basic version of dishes from which you can make endless variations. For me, perfect! These are building blocks.

"Have you noticed that when you eat a meat cake at a restaurant, it's juicy and delicious, but when you cook it at home it's dry and doesn't have much flavor?" Yes, I have. What's the secret? Water. You have to put water in *every* meat marinade. The meat absorbs water. If you add 1/8 tsp baking soda to 250g diced pork, it will make it softer and more absorbent. Those 250g of pork absorbed 5-6 tbls of water during the cooking demo. Also, you don't want to chop the pork too finely, otherwise, when you steam it, all of the juices will come out. The butcher can dice the pork for you. (Wow, really?)

Oh my gosh, so many fabulous tips answering all of these questions that come up when I cook Chinese food from cookbooks. Here are more:

• Ginger wine & cooking wines -- Ginger wine = ginger juice + cooking wine. There are three varieties cooking wine: white, shao hsing, and rose wine. White is for fish, shao hsing is sweeter like sherry and has many uses, rose is for roast meats. Ginger wine is used broadly in Chinese cooking to take the pungency out of things like steamed dried squid or to reduce the "bloody flavor" of bone-in chicken.
• Cleaver technique -- There's one basic knife for Chinese cooking: a monster cleaver. When you're shredding something, like a reconstituted mushroom, you should hold the opposite tip of the cleaver to keep it anchored. It gives you much more control.
  
• Soy sauceS -- Most Americans don't know there are two varieties: dark and light. You use both in Chinese cooking. Light is saltier. I think the "lightness" refers to the appearance. Light is more transparent and dark is opaque and a deeper color. In practice, light soy is the workhorse, goes in marinades, etc. Dark is used for color.
• Buying pork -- For the meat cakes, you want pork with 30% fat or "semi-fat pork." If you go to the butcher, you can ask for pork loin (10% fat) or pork belly (20% fat) or you can try "semi-fat" (never asked for anything like that in my life, but I'll give it a go).
• Sugar vs. salt -- If you have two pots in front of you and wonder which is which, remember that sugar is shinier.
• Triangles -- A common cut you'll see in stir-fries is a triangle. It's visually more interesting than plain old chunks. To make triangles, alternate the angle of your knife back and forth as you chop a strip of something. You can also cut your ginger into triangles too. (My diagrams below.)
  

• Chicken filets -- You can buy different types of chicken filets at frozen food stores in wet markets. One cut in particular has the drumstick and thigh meat removed from the bone in one piece. Much tastier than a chicken breast. But when you cut it, you should even out the thickness of the filet by cutting a flap into the thick part and folding out. It makes things cook more evenly.
• Oil in marinades -- Always add the oil at the very end, after you've let the meat soak in the other seasonings. Why? Otherwise the oil will coat the meat and prevent it from absorbing the other flavors. Aha!
• Sauces for stir-fries -- Stir-fries are quick (speak for yourself!), which is convenient, but the meat usually only marinates for 15-30 mins, which doesn't give it enough flavor. In addition to the marinade, you always make a little sauce to finish the dish that integrates everything. Add this bit by bit at the very end while tossing the wok so that it thickens. But finish quickly!
• Waterchestnut flour -- All these different flours get used in Chinese cooking. The most common are corn flour (the lightest), potato flour (more glutinous), and waterchestnut flour (4x as strong as corn flour). Waterchestnut flour gets used in a lot of thick soups because it is clear. But you must give it some time to dissolve because it has big grains.
• Salt on beef -- Don't do it! If you put salt on beef while cooking, it will make it hard.
• Meat soup -- Put the diced meat in a strainer and blanch briefly in boiling water while stirring with chopsticks, which will draw out the cloudy meat juice. There's enough flavor in the stock you're putting the meat into, so don't worry about losing the cloudy stuff. A thickened soup is ready when the ingredients float evenly rather than sinking to the bottom.

Oh boy, this is way too long. But I want these tips here for my records too.

Anyway, after all of that, we went to our stations and cooked as fast as we could in the remaining 45 mins to produce the stir-fry and the beef cake. Then we ate some samples. I'd never used a wok before, but mine came out beautifully -- but of course, I forgot to take a picture. Argh! Next time...

By the book (Yan-kit So's book)

"Maybe you should relax..." my friend C-- says, her voice trailing off uncertainly.

Perfectionist that I am, I've learned over the years that this is code for "Your intensity is freaking me out, lady."

I've been describing, over a dinner of vegetarian Shanghainese at Kung Tak Lam, how I've been meticulously following recipes from Yan-kit's Classic Chinese Cookbook:



I carefully selected this book after pouring over dozens of others at PageOne bookstore, a statusy megaplex of books in the massive megaplex of retail that is Harbour City shopping mall in TST.

This book stood out from the others because if its detailed instructions on the ingredients, techniques, and traditions that make up Chinese cuisine. With photographs...including one showing a very proper-looking lady balancing a rice bowl on her lower lip.

So, in my efforts to propel myself out of a sink-hole of culture shock, I've been throwing myself at her recipes with the full force of my perfectionism. If I can't learn to speak the d*** language at the very least I will become fluent in the food. And, as with most things, I believe that the fast track to literacy isn't just memorizing by rote (or eating in this case) -- it's constructing my own sentences (cooking the dishes myself).

So...the moment of great intensity. After learning my way around Yan-kit's Kung Pao Chicken and Hoisin Chicken, I've learned that her dainty recipes need to be doubled to feed our American appetites.

Now, I am embarking on Willow Chicken, which is long and skinny, rather than square and chunky. As I stand poised with my rice cooking, greens prepped, everything in bowls in the order they'll be stir-fried, only the garlic left to chop...

I read that I will not be chopping. Instead, I'll be turning 6 (x2 = 12) garlic cloves into "silken threads," which entails carefully slicing into thin chips and then again into miniature matchsticks. I am a slow cook -- defrocking 12 cloves and turning them into silken threads is not a two-minute enterprise. F***.



But I do turn garlic into silk because, while C-- may think I'm nuts I believe that Yan-kit So would appreciate my interest in creating the perfect textures and mouth-feel of a medley of long and slender ingredients rather than a mish-mash of cubes and strips and spheres.

(I hope she will also appreciate that I pulled a measuring tool out of my sewing kit to ensure that my 1/5" strips of chicken were exactly that.)