At Home with Chinese Cuisine (5 page)
Read At Home with Chinese Cuisine Online
Authors: T P Hong
It had long been a common practice in the imperial and mandarin households to match the colour and the shape of the plates with those of the food. Tableware made of gold, silver, or exotic materials were used to match the equally exotic dishes, whereas materials such as ceramics, wood, and bamboo were more affordable for commoners. By the time of the Tang Dynasty in the seventh century, the mass production of porcelain crockery became accessible to the general public. Porcelain was robust, hygienically safe, and aesthetically pleasing. The choices of colour, size, and shape offered the opportunity for people to be creative in the presentation of the dishes. Elaborately arranged, colourful dishes started to make inroads commercially, and before long it became the norm that a properly presented dish is the reflection of the host’s taste and courtesy. It remains the case today.
There are theme-related plating that one can still come across in elaborate private functions today. To celebrate an elder’s birthday, vegetable carving or food-based decoration of pine tree and white crane symbolise longevity. The meticulously designed food patterns are calligraphy on the plate, an artist’s expression to be appreciated.
Fruit and vegetable sculpturing that adorns the banquet table or the restaurant entrance used to be part and parcel of the presentation for state banquets or formal diners, but these practices have been out of fashion in recent years. The old practice of life-size sculptures has been replaced by the bite-sized, edible garnish on the plate.
The Chinese are well-known restaurant goers. How the restaurants present themselves can strongly influence diners’ impression of the place and the food. The quality of the serving staff and the way they present themselves has been cited by both management and customers in the hospitality industry as an important factor that influences the guests’ dining pleasure. The décor of the restaurant is the face of the place; diners often associate the first image of the place with the quality of the food offered. The shabby or scruffy-looking eateries located in the narrow alleys that sell excellent food are very much in the minority, and a group of us who have been in the legal profession for too long often discuss the consumer protection issues relating to the unforeseen health consequences resulting from eating at those places – but more often than not, their inability to compensate did not deter us from going in.
Food serving temperature is a much-discussed topic in recent years in China. Based on scientific research, the food serving temperature does have a bearing on the perception of the intensity of the tastes and the overall flavour of the food. It is the microscopic channels (TRPM5) in our taste buds found on our tongue that are responsible for different taste perceptions at different temperatures.
In general, most of our taste perceptions are enhanced as the temperature increases, and the flavour of the food linger longer in our mouths when served warm. Most of the research done in the West experimented with the temperature–single taste interaction. How to apply the results to identify ideal serving temperature of Chinese dishes that include different tastes interacting with each other, such as sweet and sour sauce with the pungency of SiChuan peppercorns, would be an interesting area to explore. Furthermore, our sensory sensitivity is affected by variables such as age, health condition, eating habits, ambient temperature, and seasonal changes, to list a few. We need to tread cautiously with any generalization of one ideal temperature for all dishes.
I am of the opinion that there is a serving temperature for each dish that will bring out the best of its flavour. What the temperature is differs among individuals. My suggestion is to taste a dish from when it is hot to when it turns cold in order to find out when you like the flavour most. Similar to the way we learn to enjoy the wine, tasting and memory are what we need to discover our preferences in serving temperature for different dishes.
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Science
There is usually a mental checklist for the Chinese to go through in the food preparation process. Food preparation is a more encompassing process than the narrow definition of “cooking”. Cooking involves the actual cooking activities, with the attention paid to the heat control while making sure the ingredients go into the wok in the right sequence. The food preparation process starts with the purchase of ingredients, the choice of the cooking method, the initial preparation of knife work, marinating or blanching, and the action of cooking. There is no standard procedure to follow because the interaction among all these elements is not sequential. With practice, the conscious effort of going through the thought process becomes a part of instinct. This instinct, backed up by one’s own logic and creativity, allows one to enjoy playing with food and be adventurous.
Amongst the steps in the food preparation process, shopping for ingredients is easy, but shopping for
quality
ingredients is not. Mixing in all the marinade ingredients in one go is easy, but how to optimise the benefit of each ingredient is not. The Maillard Reactions bring about the aroma, colour, and taste of umami in food, but there are still people relying on artificial ingredients to give tastes to their dish.
When people visit seafood restaurants with water tanks on display in China, the attendants will lead customers to them and ask whether they wish to choose any of the live aquatic creatures for the meal; the choice will then be ready to be served in no time. The majority of people will say that the freshest and tastiest way of having seafood is to cook them alive or immediately after they have been killed.
Southern China has plenty of ponds and rivers. Freshwater fish are widely available for sale; one can find them in large bowls or water tanks in traditional markets or larger supermarkets. Fishmongers work hard to keep them alive because nobody will buy dead fish unless it is sold at a heavy discount. Mandarin fish and snakehead are my favourite freshwater fish. Mandarin fish is pricey, and therefore it is treated with care when slaughtered and cleaned on demand. Snakehead is a tough nut to crack. Fishmongers use the back of a chunky knife or hammer to break the skull. After it is killed and all the innards are removed, the body still twitches. By the time I finished the morning shopping and brought freshly slaughtered fish back to the apartment, the body of the fish was already stiff to touch. I cleaned it and kept it in the fridge for dinner so it had time to “relax”. The issue of rigor mortis and how it affects the quality of meat and fish is worth considering.
Immediately after being slaughtered, the muscle of the animal is soft; this pre-rigor stage lasts around half an hour for freshwater fish such as mandarin fish and snakehead.
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The animal muscles progressively become contracted and stiff afterwards. This stiffness is called rigor mortis (Latin for “stiffness of death”). If we cook the animal at this stage when its muscle is contracted and stiff, the meat will be tough, and tough meat does not make for good eating.
It is common for Chinese householders to buy live chickens from the poultry market. When the freshly slaughtered bird is brought home, cutting it up or deboning it for cooking usually happens fairly quickly. Considering the pre-slaughter stress of the bird from, for example, being confined to a crammed cage for the journey from the farm to the market, cutting the meat for cooking during the rigor will result in tougher meat. Leaving the bird in the fridge for six hours or until the next day will result in a more tender meat.
When we purchase pre-packaged meats or fish displayed on a bed of ice from supermarkets, we have no idea how they were handled earlier. We can only find indications of the quality from the colour, the firmness of the texture
, and the odour, even though these indicators can all be manipulated by technological means these days. It is best to have access to reliable butchers and fishmongers who share our values regarding quality and the humane treatment of animals. Humanely treated animals provide better quality meat.
The tenderness of the meat
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and its overall flavour are the two main indicators of the quality of the meat. That is why we talk about meat ageing. The ageing process gives time for the rigor to pass so that the muscle loses its rigidity and becomes meat that is tender and flavoursome. This conversion of muscle to meat is a controlled process mostly done by the meat industry. In China, the demand for the twenty-eight-day aged beef has been growing very quickly. Consuming aged beef is somewhat contrary to the notion that fresh food tastes the best, and yet the flavour of the aged beef and the novelty of consuming meat that is “old and raw” have won over many converts. The number of venture capitalists travelling around northern China and exploring cattle farming projects bears testimony to the continuation of this trend in the years to come.
It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century that people first learnt about the scientific explanation of the Maillard Reactions and woke up to the fact that the reactions have always been a regular contributor to the flavour of many Chinese dishes without us realising it.
The reactions (also known as the browning reaction or the nonenzymatic browning) were identified by Louis-Camille Maillard in 1912, and they involve a complex series of chemical reactions between the amino acids (the building block of proteins) and sugars (from any carbohydrates). The reactions can take place at a temperature as low as 10°C over a longer period of time.
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It can also take place within seconds when the temperature is high enough. What we are interested in here is the browning stage of the reactions that take place when the temperature reaches around 130–150°C or higher.
Using the wok over a medium heat is the default setting for most of the cooking methods that use oil as the heat transfer medium. This setting will bring the temperature of the cooking oil to around 150–180°C, which gives ample opportunity for the reactions to take place when cooking meat. The roasted or toasted aroma, the golden or brownish colour, and the taste of umami are what raw meat does not offer; these are all telltale signs of the reactions that the Chinese are familiar with and fond of.
There are vegetables that contain both protein and carbohydrate, such as potatoes and onions. The golden, crisp, pan-fried potato with its aroma and tastes are the effects of the reactions. If one adds extra carbohydrate and protein to the potato, one will make the flavour of the potato even richer. This is where onions come in: they contain both amino acids and sugar. Sauté finely chopped onions in a frying pan over a low heat until they are soft. Turn up the heat for them to pick up a light golden colour. Add boiled potato, well drained and coarsely mashed, to the pan and continue sautéing them over medium-high heat until the potato is golden in places. Salt and white pepper are added last. It is a simple and satisfying dish that the younger generation in my household has learnt to prepare. With this basic recipe, a long list of additions, such as minced beef, pancetta, reconstituted porcini mushrooms, broad beans, or even beetroots can be added to give variety and a touch of seasonality. Dried chilli, mustards, balsamic vinegars, or harissa can further spice-up the dish. By knowing what we can do with the reactions in cooking, we can be globetrotters and enjoy the pleasure of simple cooking with a lot of flavour, the young ones told me. Onions and potatoes are available in almost every country, they said.
Marinading
As a noun, marinade is the mixture of condiments, seasonings, herbs, and spices we add to the main ingredients of a dish, which are mostly meat or fish. There are four reasons why the Chinese marinade the ingredients prior to cooking. It is to remove unwanted odours (such as adding vinegar to neutralise fishy smell), to add colour (for example, by adding soy sauce to meat slices to give them a more appetising reddish brown colour when cooked), to ensure the desired texture can be obtained (by adding vinegar to tenderise the meat)
, and to season them as required (e.g., for deep frying, ingredients need to be properly seasoned before coated with batter).
Let us take marinading beef for stir-frying as an example. Stir-frying is a high-heat, speedy cooking method that only takes seconds. The beef is sliced thinly so it can be cooked as such. The marinade penetrates the meat slowly. Slicing the meat thinly allows the marinade to penetrate the meat within a short period of time.
There is a technique to mix the marinade with the main ingredients. Leave the beef in a bowl after being cut to size. Hold the lower arm parallel to the work surface with the fingers pointing downwards in a closed circle and lift the arm up and down whilst simultaneously opening and closing the fingers. With this mixing motion, massage in the liquid condiments such as water, wine, spring onion and ginger water, soy sauce, and vinegar first, one at a time, so that the meat can absorb them fully. With the same mixing motion, add the salt and pepper until no visible liquid is left in the bowl and the meat is slightly sticky to touch. The sticky surface will give more friction for the egg white and cornflour to cling on to the meat surface. Mix in the egg white (if required) with the same mixing motion. Finally, mix in the cornflour or the cornflour and water mixture (if required) the same way.
The egg white and the cornflour (or the cornflour and water mixture) act as an insulation to protect the surface of the meat from the impact of coming into contact with high-temperature cooking. They also give a smoother texture to the meat, contribute to the flavour of the dish by promoting the Maillard Reactions, and enable the sauce to better cling to the meat surface.
When the cornflour or the cornflour and water mixture is used, leave the marinaded meat aside for at least thirty minutes, if not longer. That period gives the cornflour granules sufficient time to absorb the moisture fully and form a protective layer around the meat. It is always advisable to set aside the meat in the refrigerator for hygienic reasons.
Mixing the marinade ingredients by hand provides us with a lot of information. It tells us how gentle we have to be while doing the mixing. It also tells us how the meat is changing texture, especially after the salt is added. When mixing the salt into the meat, add it in small quantity at a time, starting with 1/4 teaspoon and increasing until the meat is slightly sticky to the touch. This is normally when the meat has been properly salted.
It is important to know how to mix salt to marinaded ingredients that have high protein content because it affects their texture. For marinading chopped or minced meat for meatballs and for deep-frying, mix salt into the meat mixture and vigorously stir by hand or chopsticks in one direction to extract proteins to create a sticky mass. The meat binds together and has a firmer texture when cooked. In contrast, mix the salt into sliced meat pieces by hand gently and in an up and down motion; the meat pieces stay separate and are tender when cooked.
Apart from providing the taste of saltiness, salt is also a flavour enhancer and a flavour carrier. Salting the food properly gives flavour to the dish and increases the eating pleasure. Chinese cooking often involves using spices and condiments that add the taste of savouriness to the dish. Therefore, tasting to season is a necessary step in the food preparation.
When it comes to the wine used for the marinade, ShauXing wine is the preferred choice. Amino acids and sugars in the ShauXing wine speed up the Mailliard Reactions when pan-frying meat, and they bring the umami taste, the meaty aroma, and the golden-brown colour to the dish. When the alcohol in the wine meets the acetic acids in the vinegar, the encounter kick-starts the esterification process that imparts fruity and fragrant notes to the diner’s sensory delight. In addition, the wine has a flavour of its own and enriches the flavour of the dish in its own right.
When vinegar is added to the marinade, its acids soften the connective tissues of the meat and tenderise them. Vinegar also restricts the activity of microorganisms because they do not like an acidic environment. When preparing fish for cooking, rubbing rice vinegar into the skin and the cuts is a common practice to counter the fishy smell. The fishy smell comes from amines, an organic compound derived from ammonia. One can smell ammonia because they are volatile. When the fish is mixed with acetic acids in the vinegar, the acids neutralise the alkaline ammonia and produce ammonium salts. Because ammonium salts are not volatile, we do not smell them.