Hunan Style Cauliflower Pork

Two days before Chinese New Year is not the time to go to the local large Asian grocery store hoping to find holiday ingredients still on the shelves. It was exceptionally hard to find fermented black beans, which is weird, because it's an ingredient for specific dishes. Though, it is winter and these salted, fermented black soybeans are typically paired with chili oil, garlic, and ginger. It brings a level of umami (savoriness) to a dish that you can't easily replicate just by adding more salt. Anyhow, I had to go there to get fresh pork belly because I didn't want an enormous package of pork belly that one could get from Costco. The only way to do that in this metro area is to go to an Asian store with a fresh meat counter.

I first tasted this dish at a restaurant in southern California called Dong Ting Spring which features Hunan cuisine. It took some web searches to find a recipe ratio that looked comparable to what I ate, having only "Hunan" and "cauliflower" as keywords to go on. Sometimes this dish is called "Hunan Spicy Cauliflower" but the restaurant named it "Big Wok Cauliflower".

Another first? Yeah, first time buying cauliflower. Anyhow. Onto the recipe.

The Foodening Blog - white cauliflower and you should probably cut these smaller

Also, if your pork belly comes with the "skin" part still attached, slice that chewier part off before frying.

Ingredients

1 cauliflower head, florets cut into half or quarters
1 lb pork belly, cubed and/or sliced thin
2 tbsp olive oil, for frying
2 dried chili peppers, seeds removed if you don't want it spicy
2 tbsp fresh ginger, peeled and thinly sliced
3 garlic cloves, chopped
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp rice wine
1 tbsp fermented soybean paste
1 tsp sugar, optional

Directions

0. In a large pot of boiling water, blanch the cauliflower florets for 1-2 minutes, then set aside in a colander to drain.

1. In a wok or large frying pan, heat olive oil and add garlic, ginger, and dried chili peppers. Fry for a few seconds. Add pork and fry until slightly browned and no pink remains. You can remove one of the chili peppers at this point if you want. I removed one, but only because it was starting to burn.

2. Add soy sauce, rice wine, and fermented soybean paste. Stir fry until the pork is coated in the sauce.

3. Add the cauliflower and fry until the cauliflower is tender.

4. Remove from heat and serve hot.

The Foodening Blog - Hunan Cauliflower Pork

Five Spice Roast Duck

It's been a while since I last made this dish and I ended up adjusting it because I roasted the duck in a pan that was too large for the duck and a lot of the tasty sauce boiled off during baking. When I took the duck out of the oven to baste it a second time, I had to deglaze the pan with some red wine and added another cup of water to the pan for the final hour of baking. I think my dad uses a 2-quart oblong casserole dish with a 3/4" rack inside.

Total cook time should be roughly 1.5 hours, but with taking the duck out to baste and pour off the oil, the cooking/prep time can easily be 3 hours. Plan ahead if you are using the oven to make other things.

This spice ratio is a family recipe; which, in our family means that my dad created it out of experimentation and someone bothered to write it down. No one has the time to grind a custom five-spice powder anymore; any store-bought mixture of Chinese five-spice powder will do.

Ingredients

1 whole duck, giblets removed
2 tbsp organic granulated sugar
3/4 tsp kosher salt
3/4 tbsp five spice powder
6 tbsp light soy sauce
3 tbsp Chinese rice cooking wine
+ 1 cup of water (for 2nd basting)
+ 1/4 c to 1/2 c wine (for deglazing the roasting pan)

Directions

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.

Tear out a sheet of aluminum foil that is long enough to cover the entire duck. Poke holes in it with the tines of a fork.

1. If using a frozen duck, thaw completely before roasting. If using fresh duck, wash the duck inside and out with water and remove all the giblets from inside. If you intend to trim the excess fat, do not discard it. Place the excess fat and giblets on the bottom of the roasting pan under the rack. The fat will melt during baking and can be used in any lard-based recipe. Place in baking dish.

2. Combine spices and wine in a bowl. Using a spoon, pour the sauce over the duck. Flip the duck and baste the other side of the duck. It shouldn't matter which side is up for the first or second bastings, it should just be the opposite side... ehh if that makes any sense.

3. For example, if the duck goes in breast-side up then for the second basting, the duck should be turned so that it is breast-side down. The goal here is to get both sides of the duck roasted to a gorgeous golden brown.

Roast for:

20 mins, breast side up
45 mins, remove duck from oven, baste with pan juices, breast side down
60 mins, remove duck from oven, baste, cover with aluminum foil

4. Remove from oven when the duck breast or thigh meat measures 165 degrees F with a meat thermometer. Let rest for 15 minutes before carving. Serve warm (with steamed bao, if using).

(Sweet) Steamed Bao

This week I made this twice: once with salt and again without. The unsalted bao ("bread") tasted better. One thing to note about this bread recipe is that leftover rounds of dough can't be left out (even in a food storage container) overnight. The dough will rise and deflate again, and if there isn't enough room, the balls of dough will stick to each other making it a terrible (but edible) mess.

One batch of dough yielded 12 bao. It'll be a good base recipe when get around to making sweet black bean steamed buns. The smooth consistency of the black bean brownies will make a good addition to this future recipe.

To make cake flour: Substitute 2 tbsp cornstarch per cup of flour for flour. An easy way to measure this out is to first put the cornstarch in a two-cup measuring cup and fill it up with all purpose flour. For this recipe, put in 4 tbsp cornstarch and fill the rest of the two-cup measuring cup with flour to make two cups of cake flour.

Ingredients

1 pkg active dry yeast (2 1/4 tsp)
1/3 c warm water (110 degrees F)
1/4 tsp organic granulated sugar

2 c cake flour
1/4 c organic granulated sugar
3 tbsp dry milk powder
2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 c warm water (110 degrees F)
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp sea salt (optional)

Directions

1. In a small bowl, proof yeast in 3 oz warm water (110 degrees F) with 1/4 tsp sugar. After 10 minutes if the yeast hasn't turned foamy, it is probably dead or the water was too hot. There is a tiny bit of baking powder in the recipe, but if your yeast is dead, the dough won't rise properly.

2. In a larger mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, olive oil, milk powder, and water. Mix well, but don't overwork the dough. Add in the yeast water. Mix again. Gently knead the dough by hand and form it into a ball. Cover the mixing bowl with a clean kitchen towel and let rise for an hour.

3a. Knead the risen dough until it is smooth and elastic. The dough will be sticky at this point, and a little bit of flour can be added while kneading. Roll out dough into a log or to 1/2" thickness with a rolling pin.  Separate the dough into equal portions and roll each portion into a ball, if making steamed bao.

3b. This recipe is the same for making steamed bao for roast duck, and balls can be rolled out to a 2" diameter, 1/4" thick circle. Brush some vegetable oil on half the circle and fold it in half. Set aside on a 4" square parchment paper. Repeat until done.

4. Heat a pot with a steamer rack inside to boiling. The amount of water in the pot should be just below the height of the steamer rack. If using bamboo steamer baskets, make sure that the boiling water doesn't touch the bottom-most basket. Place prepared dough (with the parchment paper) into the baskets. If you don't want to be scalded by the hot steam, you could turn off the heat, insert the steamer basket, cover the pot, then crank the heat again. Steam bao for 10 minutes. When done, immediately remove from pot and baskets. Peel off the parchment paper and serve.

Shanghai Styled Soup Dumplings

My dad, who is originally from the Shanghai region, tells me that dumplings, noodles, and all sorts of bread-oriented foods tend to be more Northern in cuisine since wheat and meat are more readily available. You'll likewise find a plethora of vegetarian dishes the farther south you go within China. While these dumplings are very labor intensive and you'll have the satisfaction that you didn't pay a small ransom to eat at Bellevue's Din Tai Fung restaurant, even though they have a visitor's window that lets you see their prep cooks rolling, filling, and making the very same dumplings.

Think of the last bread recipe you've done then multiply the time you spent waiting for that lazy dough to rise up by two and you get the approximate time it takes for all these ingredients to come together. Good thing gelatin that comes in small neat packages or else we'd be scraping down a length of pig skin for its gelatinous properties.

This recipe ratio comes from Brian Yarvin's A World of Dumplings book. The secret to having soup in a dumpling is to add a small amount of jelled soup to the dumpling before it gets steamed. The heat melts the soup that gently bathes the dumpling in a rich meaty broth, enhancing the elements of the dumpling; or at least that's the idea.

Dumpling making is a group affair, and doing this recipe with others is pleasantly more enjoyable. I should also mention that for this batch, I only made the dough and had the patience to pleat one dumpling. Oh, and I wrote the post and took the pics. :)

Review: Fong Chong Restaurant (Portland OR)

Today I was in downtown Portland near the Chinatown area for a work meeting with our ad agency. Not wanting to be stuck in worse-than-Los Angeles traffic for the ride home, I walked about in sweltering heat (like an average summer day in LA) for a few blocks in each direction from where my car was parked and picked a random a restaurant to eat at. I don't know much about Hongkong styled cuisine, but I've eaten my fair share of dim sum. The sign outside read: Hong Kong dim sum. Who could resist? Besides, a nice Indian-ish-looking couple came out of the restaurant and spontaneously pitched the restaurant to me. I guess the locals really like the place. This particular local said that he lived in HK for a few years and this place serves up authentic-tasting HK cuisine, but (he adds) that some of the beef has an off-flavor to it. Maybe 6pm was too early for dinner, especially when it was still about 100 degrees F outside. The restaurant was sparsely populated, and by that, I mean to say I was the only patron at the time. The menu reads "Fong Chong Tea House", but given the very limited varieties of tea on the menu, I think they dropped that aspect of the business. Besides, this entire metro area is about 95% caucasian. The food: If the restaurant really does serve dim sum all day, I didn't really see any while I was there. A cart that had some leftover desserts from the lunch hour sat quietly by itself near the front counter. I could see egg tarts and sesame balls on small rounded plates; but given how hot it was today. Eating deep fried or baked egg desserts that have been sitting out all afternoon.. not such a good idea. My order's portion size was good and perhaps too much for one person to eat in one sitting. I had the beef in garlic sauce. It came with a scoop of what tried to pass itself off as fried rice, BBQ pork that should have been reconstituted in a broth, a crab puff (might have been the chef's invention), and a slathering of overly sweet and spicy brown sauce with mixed vegetables. Overall, the dish was way too sweet, though probably just right for the American palate.

In my food..

• Meat - the beef was very tender and tasty, as it should be; the BBQ pork should not have been added to the dish at all and it was dry, hard, flavorless and chewy
• Sauce - typical brown sauce with soy sauce, chili sauce, corn starch, garlic, sugar
• Vegetables - green bell peppers, celery, bamboo, carrots, white onion, snow pea, white mushroom, mu erh (wood ear fungus), and zucchini (which, unfortunately was very bitter)
• Rice - had bits of egg in it, tasted entirely wrong, and someone probably stir fried it up with soy sauce several hours ago. It had the taste of salted egg coated rice. Bleh. Nobody eats salted egg in anything except in rice porridge.
• Crab puff - It's a wonton wrapper stuffed with "crab" meat and deep fried. It's an appetizer, but not terribly appetizing.
• Egg roll - who knows what's in it. I didn't touch it.

The tea: Ordinary black tea, and not a particularly quality one either. Generic. Maybe a Lipton black tea or something. I didn't get a choice about the tea, but I also wasn't charged for it either unlike other Chinese restaurants in the Portland area. Service: Only one host for the evening, which might have been fine if there had only been a few customers, but by 6:30pm several more sets of people wandered in and it took a while for me to even get my bill. The host speaks at least three languages that I could tell...Cantonese (to the kitchen staff), Mandarin to the family of six sitting to my right, and somewhat decent English to the rest of us. Surroundings: Decent. It looks like this place would have no problem accommodating the needs of a large banquet, as it could seat about 300 people in its main galley area. There might be private rooms at the back, but I wasn't feeling too adventurous at the time. Among the evening's patrons were asians, besides myself. That's at least a sign of decent food that another Chinese person would eat. That's also not saying much because there aren't a lot of restaurants to choose from, not in Old Town. Overall: I'd say, for dim sum, it might be passable to the locals who live on the west side / downtown Portland. From looking at the menu and eating here for dinner, I still cannot fathom what it really means to have Hong Kong sytled food. For eating lunch or dinner from the specials menu, I'd say skip it and go eat elsewhere. The place: Fong Chong Restaurant 301 NW 4th Ave, Portland OR 97209 (503) 228-6868