At Home with Chinese Cuisine (6 page)

Blanching

The most common reason for blanching the ingredients in water or oil at the preparation stage is to pre-cook them so they are in the same degree of doneness as the accompanying ingredients ready for the next stage of cooking. For example, after blanching thinly sliced marinated beef in oil over a medium heat to about 80 per cent of doneness, combine them with sliced bell peppers of different colours for a high-heat stir-fry. A colourful, healthy dish can be ready to serve in less than two minutes of cooking time: the meat is tender and the bell peppers are crunchy.

Blanching can influence the colour, the taste, and the texture of ingredients. For example, chefs often blanch celery in salted water for one or two minutes before stir-frying. Quick blanching turns the colour of the celery into a soft jade-green that matches well in a stir-fry dish with white meats, seafood, or vegetables such as the Chinese yam or fresh water chestnuts. Proper blanching results in a cleaner, sweet taste of the celery. One can choose a desired degree of crunchiness by varying the blanching time so to match the accompanying ingredients and to give the dish a desired texture.

Blanching is also done for nutritional reasons. Vegetables such as spinach, Swiss chard, or asparagus are rich in calcium, but they also contain oxalic acids that interfere with the body’s ability to absorb and utilise calcium. The Chinese often quickly blanch them in boiling water prior to mixing them for a salad dish. A quick boil can break down the oxalic acids molecules so that one can benefit from the intake of calcium. However, the down side is that blanching destroys some heat-sensitive nutrients such as vitamin C.

Chlorophyll is the pigment that gives vegetables their green colour. The chlorophyll molecule contains a magnesium ion, and heat makes it easy to lose magnesium. The magnesium is then replaced by hydrogen from natural acids in the plant, causing the colour to go dull. Salting the water for a quick blanch helps keep the magnesium in the chlorophyll, and the vegetable stays green. Adding baking soda to the cooking is another method restaurants often use. Although baking soda neutralises the acids, it also weakens the cell walls of the vegetable and makes them soggy.

When blanching beans, do not add salt to the blanching water. The calcium in the salt reacts with molecules of the cell walls in the skin of the beans and makes them harder. In order to keep the beans green, blanch them in boiling water. Boiling can destroy the enzymes that contribute to the breakdown of the chlorophyll. Make sure the water is boiling when adding the beans. Use a lot of water, do not put the lid on, and keep up the temperature so the water continues boiling. Remove them and plunge then into ice water when the texture is right. Season the beans towards the end of the cooking process.

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Before I left for Shanghai, my family took a two-month trip in Europe. I had wanted to make this trip to Andalucia for years. It was about sherry and the Iberico ham from the black Iberian pigs (pata negra). We wanted to know more about sherry, which is very versatile and matches with quite a few Chinese dishes. More important, cream sherry has an association with Chinese cooking in the West as a substitute for ShauXing Wine. I wanted to find out whether my doubts about its substitutability were justified.

We spent more than a week in Jerez de la Frontera and the neighbouring cities visiting the bodegas that provided tours and sherry tasting. From Fino to Manzanilla pasada, Amontillado, Cream sherry and Oloroso, we tasted a wide range of sherry and used the younger ones for cooking in our motor home. The substitutability between these fortified wines and the fermented rice wine in the food preparation remains elusive, but I enjoyed using sherry in cooking in its own right.

Cured ham had a special presence in my childhood. JinHua ham from ZheJiang Province in China is one of the four most well-known cured hams in China, and it made its appearance in my parents’ house from time to time. My father was from a town between JinHua and ShauXing. JinHua ham and ShauXing wine were a part of his childhood memory. We often had a leg of JinHua ham hung in the back of the house to air throughout the winter. It looks very similar to the cured leg of ham from the southwest of Spain. We made rich, creamy soup with the bone from the ham, and the meat was steamed or boiled and sliced thinly to serve. Aged ham in small dices goes so well with scrambled eggs, peas or corn, and spring onions in a stir-fry rice dish.

When I arrived in Shanghai in 2006, I set myself a task of finding out more about the ShauXing wine and the ham from JinHua in order to acquaint myself with the produce of my father’s hometown. It was during this quest that I became aware that the ShauXing wine and the JinHua ham are protected by the Chinese Geographical Indication Protection (GIP) legislation. The GIP system gives the quality assurance and the proof of authenticity from the government to help consumers to make informed purchasing decisions.

Chinese GIP logo

ShauXing Wine

Wherever one walks into a Chinese kitchen, one is likely to find yellow wine in the kitchen larder. Yellow wine (HuangJiu in Chinese, known by the colour of the liquid) is the generic name for alcohol
beverages that are fermented using grains such as rice, corn, maize, wheat, or millet.
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They have been made in China for more than four thousand years.
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The best-known Chinese yellow wine must be the ShauXing wine from ZheJiang Province.
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This wine is used for food preparation and is also a common drink in the south for those who seek some alcohol to go with their meals or to match a particular dish – in contrast to the people in the north, who prefer to sip stronger, grain-based spirits with their food.

ShauXing wine has been granted the GIP status since 2000. In order to be eligible for the GIP, the wine has to be fermented in ShauXing, using the water from nearby Jen Lake 
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and in conformity with a stipulated, traditional fermentation process using the newly harvested glutinous rice. Not all rice wines made in ShauXing can be sold as ShauXing wine. It is up to the individual producer to apply for the GIP status for each product line. The GIP status does not give a blanket protection to a producer’s whole product range.

The GIP rule further regulates that the base wine used in the blend of the vintage ShauXing wine has to be at least three years old. For a bottle of eight-year-old wine, it is a blend that contains 50 per cent of the base wines that are at least eight years old; the remaining 50 per cent can be the combination of vintage wines that are eight years old using a weighted-average.

For the Western palate, the drier version of the young ShauXing wine is suggestive of Amontillado sherry by colour, taste, and the impact of alcohol, whilst the aged ShauXing wine is closer to Palo Cortado. Taste them side-by-side, and the distinction will be apparent. Sherry is made from grapes, whereas ShauXing wine is made from rice. They both are the products of fermentation process, but sherry is a fortified wine in that spirit is added towards the end of the fermentation process to increase its alcohol content.

There are four categories of ShauXing wine to choose from: the dry, the semi-dry, the semi-sweet, and the sweet ones. Their sugar contents range from 10-15 grammes per litre for the dry one (YuanHong wine) to over 100 grammes per litre for the sweetest. The semi-dry HuaDiao wine (also called JiaFan wine or NuErHong) has sugar content around 15-40 grammes per litre; this category is regarded as most suitable for aging and food matching. ShanNiang wine is semi-sweet in taste and is regarded as ideal for matching sweet tasting dishes and desserts. The sweetest wine is called XiangXue wine, and it uses the distilled spirit from the solids left from pressing as the substitute for water. It is therefore comparatively sweeter with a higher alcohol content of around 20 per cent by volume.

The three-year-old HuaDiao wine I use for cooking is easily available from supermarkets in major cities in China. I do not use bottles labelled as “cooking wine” for cooking because they have extra ingredients of some sort added to the yellow wine. It is easy to be tempted by the rustic look of the ceramic jars displayed in shops by the roadside or in the traditional markets. From the perspective of food safety, only purchase the wine ladled out from the jars when you can ascertain its source and freshness. Once the jar is open, the wine oxidises quickly, and it will soon taste flat and stale with the acidity increasingly apparent.

The best-selling aged ShauXing wine is HuaDiao wine, and it has a clear amber colour with an orange-red hue. It is a prized drink to match red-braised meat dishes and seafood. When crabs are abundantly available (starting from the autumn onwards), supermarkets in crab-loving cities such as Shanghai are in a frenzy to stock up this wine. The traditional autumn treat for locals in Shanghai is to warm the aged HuaDiao wine (eight years or older) to around 40ºC to accompany the steamed crabs served with a dip made of ZhenJiang vinegar, finely shredded or chopped fresh ginger, and a small pinch of brown sugar.

In China it is common to use the rice wine in the food preparation. Even though the wine takes up a small percentage of the overall ingredients, and a large percentage of the alcohol in the wine evaporates during the cooking process, the alcohol nevertheless plays a part as a flavour carrier and enhancer. When the alcohol in the ShauXing wine meets the acetic acids in the different varieties of the Chinese vinegar, the undergone esterification process imparts unique fruity and fragrant notes that are partly attributed to their distinctive production process.

The wine also has flavour of its own that adds extra dimensions to the dish in different ways. The ShauXing wine is rich in amino acids and sugars, and it acts as the accelerator to kick-start the Maillard Reactions. In pan-frying fish, for example, it enables one to obtain a crispy golden-coloured fish skin with the rich savoury and sweet taste of umami. It is a simple dish that has charmed all my guests, especially when the mandarin fish or flatfish is used. The wine is also ideal for deglazing the pan after pan-frying duck breasts. The resulting jus adds complexity to the flavour of the meat that is quite different from when fortified wines or spirits are used.