Dim Sum and Cantonese Cuisine

This 1st weeks eating has been immense. My first ever HK Dim Sum experience was at a high end resto called Fook Lam Moon. I chose it from a 'best of' guide as it seemed classy yet reasonably priced. [I am yet to try a local tea house where the real experience of Dim Sum hustle and bustle can be attained.] The place was packed with Chinese families which is always a good sign - you would not bring your granny somewhere they wouldn't approve! We ordered 3 things each from a menu with pictures and English translation - so we knew what to expect!



Prawn dumplings, meatballs, spare ribs, soup

turnip cakes

Incidently you get 2 sets of chopsticks and 1 spoon. One set of chopsticks are to take the food from the bamboo steamers onto your plate or bowl and leave aside or at the sharing dish. The other set [usually the nicer ones] are used to eat with. You don't always get a small bowl, as is customary in so many places, and in such cases you are allowed to use chopsticks and a spoon to help get at the food from your plate. When eating from a bowl, it is perfectly acceptable to bring the bowl close to you with one hand and use the chopticks with the other, to shovel the food into your mouth. It is NOT acceptable to spear the food with your chopsticks to get it onto your plate, drop the contents onto the table cloth and then attempt recovery with said chopsticks or by hand. Also you must never ever point at anyone at the table with your chopsticks. All considered very rude apparently...

So - onto my 2nd cooking lesson [last week was Szechuan spicy dishes]. This week it was Cantonese cooking and it has turned out to be a lot more complex than I realised. The list of ingredients per dish was as long as my arm and I was shocked at how much oil was used and re-used not to mention the deep frying of everything. Even recipes that claim to be a stir fry or a steamed dish, have deep fried components. It is definitely not for the faint hearted or with any heart problems and certainly not suitable for everyday home cooking. I think if I change the recipes to be healthier, I will lose some of their authentic flavours but I can assure you I have no intention of starting to deep fry everything after taking these classes. However, I am very impressed with the complexity of their dishes - I think when we stir fry at home what we actually do is cut, chuck and fry with a bit of soya sauce thinking that is what a stir fry is but what we end up with never tastes as good as from a restaurant and the meat is never as tender. Every dish we made in the class was insanely good and perfectly balanced. Here are the yummy food shots...we made.... 

1.Steamed Fish with garlic sauce:

2.Salt and Pepper squid with crispy chilli garlic

3. Braised Duck

4.Stir fried Beef with Chinese Broccoli

5. Stir fried Beef with Gourd [like a courgette/zucchini] and wood eared fungus [type of black flat mushrooms which you get in your takeaway stir fries]

The amount of care and precision of the techniques used was astounding especially when it came to preparing the beef. They use very cheap cuts but the way they cut it against the grain, marinade and tenderise it, results in silky soft bite size portions of meat. The Chinese call the effect 'smooth beef'. I have never created anything like this at home even with marinading, using good cuts of beef and stir frying for the shortest of times.

We also underestimate how hot is 'hot' when it comes to wok cooking. It needs to be 100 times hotter than we think and I doubt many of us can reach the high heats required with ordinary cookers especially electric hobs! They use a clever method - 1st they heat the wok to a very high heat, then they 'rinse ' the wok with a ladle of Canola oil - swishing the oil around then removing what they don't need by decanting it into a metal bowl. If they are deep frying, they use a bucket load of oil and to get it to the right temperature they sprinkle some water off their hands into the hot oil! The resulting spluttering is indicative of the oil not being ready. When the noise subsides and it goes quiet then the oil is nearly ready and at the danger point of bursting into flames [so no going away from the hob]! If the sides of the wok are smoking then the oil is still not ready as the sides get hotter 1st. So you have to wait till the middle of the oil is smoking before you cook. The speed at which they fry is frightening. I may need to invest in a better wok, cooker and exhaust system before I can attempt any of these dishes at home! I still have smokey stir fry hair!