The Shun Lee Cookbook - Michael Tong [13]
Other Cooking Methods
While American cooks may associate stir-frying, deep-frying, and steaming almost exclusively with Chinese food, the Chinese use a wide range of cooking techniques, including smoking, blanching, pickling, braising, and roasting. Because the latter techniques are a bit more familiar in American kitchens, I won’t detail them quite as thoroughly as the others.
Smoking does require a bit of additional explanation, because in these recipes, it will be accomplished indoors in a wok on the stove and not on an outdoor grill. Instead of wood chips, a moist mixture of rice, tea, and spices smolders in a covered, aluminum foil-lined wok (the foil keeps the smoking materials from staining the wok). As the food cooks at a moderate pace, the aromatic smoke deeply infuses the food with incredible flavor. Have a round rack that will fit the wok to hold the food above the smoking mixture. Some woks have such a rack, or use a round cake rack. Adjust the heat so you see just a wisp of smoke—it should not be billowing. Be sure to have the stove exhaust on full to remove the smoke from the kitchen.
Braising, especially the famous red-cooked food of Shanghai, is one of the easiest and most delicious ways to create a meal, yet the end result is a symphony of deep, complex tastes. In braising, the food is slowly simmered in liquid, making for an exchange of flavors and succulent meat. In red-cooking, which seems to be the most popular cooking technique in Chinese homes, the liquid always includes soy sauce, sugar, and spices, which impart a reddish tinge to the food. Usually this liquid is boiled down at the end of cooking to make an intensely flavored, syrupy sauce. Some cooks refrigerate their braising liquid to use over and over again, but for safe storage reasons, it is a better idea to discard the leftovers. Braising is best accomplished in a heavy flameproof casserole, such as an enameled cast-iron Dutch oven, but any sturdy pot with a tight-fitting lid will do. Keep the flame low so the food cooks at a steady simmer, and keep an eye on the pot, as the sugar in the sauce loves to caramelize (which is a short step away from burning).
When a Chinese cook talks about pickling, it isn’t always the technique of storing food for a long time in salt or vinegar. And this pickling will not involve glass jars immersed in a hot water bath. Pickled vegetables in the Chinese fashion are often more marinated than pickled. The salt and vinegar are used for their texture-changing and seasoning properties, and long preservation is not always the goal. The Chinese may not be fond of raw vegetable salads, but they love pickled vegetables.
In many of these recipes, we recommend blanching vegetables in homemade or canned chicken broth, then discarding the broth. Blanching both partially cooks the vegetables, while heightening their color. The Shun Lee chefs prefer blanching in broth to plain water because the former adds flavor to the process. However, if you find discarding the broth wasteful, consider storing the broth to use as a soup base. You can also substitute water, or a mixture of water and broth, for the broth alone.
Roasting is not used much in Chinese homes because the vast majority of kitchens do not have ovens. Roasted dishes, such as Beijing duck, are reserved for very special occasions and prepared by chefs at oven-equipped banquet halls. In fact, there are precious few roasted dishes in this book.
Hot Appetizers
AS FIRST COURSES before the main meal, traditional Chinese appetizers are usually cold dishes, like Drunken Chicken. As enticing and appetite-arousing as they may be, small hot dishes like spring rolls and dumplings are considered