Yahoo Lifestyle This is Chinese Food
When it comes to dining out in Australia, we’re spoilt for choice. Three cuisines high on our list of favourites are Chinese, Italian and Mexican. But how much has been lost in the process of “Westernising” this fare?
By Oliver Broudy
Photographs by Nigel Cox
We sent a writer straight to the source to recapture a better, more authentic Chinese cuisine – one you can cook quickly and well at home. Man your chopsticks, men.
AT THE CHINESE JOINT in the food court up the road from his office, Hinnerk von Bargen, an associate professor at the Culinary Institute of America, scoops up a spoonful of sauce from No.39, kung pao chicken. “Look at that,” he says, dribbling it slowly.
“It’s almost snotlike.” Then he holds up a bean sprout for inspection. “The top hasn’t been removed,” he points out. “No chef who knows real Chinese food would leave the top on like this.”
Von Bargen specialises in Asian cuisine, and this, he says, indicating the kung pao, ain’t it. Take the carrots: they’re not sliced finely enough. And the chicken: rubbery, boneless and cut way too big. Kung pao is supposed to be a Sichuan dish, known for its spiciness, so where’s the heat?
What any of the ingredients actually taste like is anyone’s guess, given the glop they’re drowning in. Commercial-grade stuff – typical for food-court Chinese. Chances are the cooks slopped it on like gravy after the meat was cooked, says von Bargen. That way it’s easier to clean the wok.
More often than not, says Betty Xie, the editor of Chinese Restaurant News, the chefs are recent immigrants just trying to make a living, and they have no more formal culinary training than the kid manning the grill at a fast-food joint.
In Australia, we are perhaps a little luckier. Outside the food court, it’s not too difficult to find authentic Chinese food. But even then, many of the traditional tastes have been warped by years of exposure to Australian tastes. But it’s gone the other way, too. We no longer just dig into a tub of chow mien and wolf down sweet-and-sour pork. As our palates have grown, so have the variety and quality of Chinese-restaurant menu items.
A 2006 Sensis Consumer Report that published the results of a survey of 1500 people found that Chinese is the favourite cuisine for about one-third of Australians. “Interestingly, 35 per cent of males prefer Chinese food, six percentage points higher than for females,” says the study’s author, Christena Singh.
Eateries serving Chinese range from cheap, MSG-laden takeaways to high-class authentic restaurants offering traditional methods and cuisine. And while you wouldn’t guess it from looking at the food court, real Chinese food is one of the world’s greatest and healthiest cuisines. This is why so many star chefs are going fusion these days, tapping history’s oldest uninterrupted culinary culture to spice up their game. It’s also why basic wok management should be a part of every man’s arsenal, right up there with backyard barbecue skills. That’s why we sent our writer, Oliver Broudy, straight to China to learn from the masters.
TURNING CHINESE
“Parallel-cutting technique!” shrieks the grim-faced Chinese chef, flourishing his cleaver. He brings it in sideways on a red capsicum and unseams the flesh around the core. Soon, the capsicum vanishes into a stack of red diamonds. A chicken breast appears and then disappears just as quickly in a flurry of diagonal cuts. Moments later, what sounds like a jet engine roars to life beneath a large wok. A splash of oil, a sizzle of ginger and garlic, and minutes later, an enticing stir-fry popping with flavour sparkles beneath the lights.
The cook is Martin Yan, the preeminent culinary apostle of Chinese food in the United States, and the founder and executive chef of a new culinary institute here in Shenzhen, a new city in southern China wrapped in neon and deranged traffic patterns. Yan has authored more than 30 cookbooks, hosted more than 3000 episodes of his television show, Yan Can Cook, and built a career on teaching culinary half-wits like me that cooking good Chinese food isn’t nearly as difficult as it seems.
Watching Yan in person, I discover the secret to his productivity. He moves at double the speed of everyone else. Half of him appears to be in the present, the other half five seconds ahead. That he still has all his fingers is a testament to his skills.
“Look at this!” he shouts, meaning the dish steaming on the counter. Besides me, a dozen Chinese students also obey.
“This is a classic example of how easy it is to do Chinese food,” says Yan. “Eighty per cent of Chinese food is by stir-fry. It’s quick, it’s healthy. So then you can use shrimp [prawns], scallops, beef, lamb, turkey, pork.” Yan smacks the counter with his cleaver for emphasis. “You can change the sauce. You can change the flavour, you can change the combination of vegetables. Then you create a multitude!”
There are, in fact, eight great cuisines in China, each loosely associated with a different province, but wok cooking is common to them all. Once you master the basic stir-fry, adding a bit of Sichuan spice or Qingjiang tang becomes as easy as finding the ingredients.
Yan promises to elaborate, and then promptly vanishes. Upstairs in the testing kitchen, one of Yan’s chefs, who goes by the name of Mu and moves at a decidedly slower pace, agrees to re-enact Yan’s demo. Mu Zhicheng is a baggy-eyed veteran of countless kitchens, with sons who live on two continents and who never call. And, as it turns out, he knows plenty about Chinese cooking.
“So, you want to cook?” he begins.
Here’s the thing about stir-fry. Everyone knows it’s quick and easy – ta-da, instant dinner. And yet somehow it never feels that way. In fact, screwing around with new cooking techniques always feels like a hassle. If by luck the dish does somehow come out all right, you call it a triumph and never cook it again. But let’s be honest; cooking shouldn’t be a triumph. Real cooking is an everyday business, like folding your socks. No-one’s going to do it if every meal requires some fantastic exertion of culinary genius.
This is the beauty of the backyard barbecue – the technique against which all others must be measured. It’s low-stress. It’s familiar. You throw the meat on, hang out, drink a beer, pull the meat off again. Plus, it makes sense. It speaks to some primal instinct to touch meat with fire and chew on the result. Wok cooking, on the other hand, entails the adroit combination of diverse flavours in a tight timeframe under clamorous conditions. There’s nothing laid back about it.
But watching Mu, I realise something. Very little of wok cooking involves the wok. Most of it is prep – five minutes for every one minute of cooking, he estimates. It’s precisely because the cooking process is so intense that everything has to be made ready beforehand. Once the chicken is cut, the capsicums diced, the ginger sliced – and all of it set aside in neat piles – the actual cooking becomes much less stressful. It’s really just the finishing touch.
Mu pulls a bag of sugar snap peas from the cupboard and begins snipping their stems. Next comes the red capsicum, which Mu harvests with four swift vertical cuts around the core. “For me, because the sugar snap is shaped like a diamond, I’m going to try to cut everything into that shape,” explains Mu, attacking the capsicum flesh. The spring onions, likewise, are cut the same length, diagonally across the stalks. Already, the ingredients are beginning to cohere. The idea, says Mu, is to create a visual and textural balance. He also cuts the garlic and ginger large. That’s a lot of flavour in a single bite, but the Chinese aren’t afraid of big flavours. The whole point, in fact, is to gather these flavours together and let them fight it out.
But there’s another reason, says Mu, for cutting the ginger and garlic large: to guard against the wok’s searing heat. Cut any smaller, they’d burn. “Not only that,” he adds, “if you don’t like it, you don’t have to eat it!”
It makes sense. In the West we stab and shovel our food with forks, but the Chinese use chopsticks, selecting their food piece by piece. The prep for the entire stir-fry is carried out with this in mind. Nothing is cut so small that you can’t grab it with chopsticks, or so large that it can’t be eaten in a single bite.
WHAT GOES IN
Super Star Seafood, with 3000 seats, is the largest restaurant in Guangzhou, the capital city of China’s southernmost province and the mecca of southern Chinese cuisine. It’s also where I learn about another crucial factor of wok cooking: ingredients.
At Super Star, the ingredients are hard to miss. Tiers of bubbling tanks line the walls, stocked with Thai prawn, Pacific lobster, Japanese scallops, pinkish rice-paddy worms bound together like bunches of asparagus, and a hundred other species, squirming, writhing, squirting, scuttling or, like a metre-long grouper, just ponderously abiding, waiting for the tide. Super Star’s like walking through an aquarium. The difference? Anything you can point to, you can eat.
The Chinese, it’s true, are known for their “omnivorousness”, especially in the south. And shocking tales of dog soup, barbecued bear’s paw and butterfly fricassee will probably never go out of style. I even heard one apocryphal story about a turtle that’s cooked in a special pot with a small hole for the head to poke through so the chef can nurse it with wine when the turtle grows thirsty.
But it wasn’t until I spoke with Willy Ng, a close friend of the chef at Super Star and the proprietor of four restaurants of his own – each with a showcase aquarium that doubles as a menu – that I began to see past the turtle stories to understand the real lesson of all those brimming tanks. “Freshness,” says Ng, simply.
With fresh ingredients, observes Ng, there’s no need for heavy sauces. The flavours speak for themselves. I had already found this to be true the day before, when a chef from a local restaurant agreed to cook a fish I’d just bought fresh from the wet market. It was still flopping in the bag. Stir-fried with mushrooms, capsicum and garlic, the flesh was clean and toothsome, with only a light soy sauce to enhance the flavour. Each ingredient stood out sharply.
For Ng, Guangzhou serves as a hunting ground for new ideas. He is excited about a hollow noodle he’s discovered at a local shop. He hopes to re-create the noodle and serve it with soup. Fifteen minutes with him has me thinking differently about cooking Chinese food.
Take the most basic ingredient of all, rice, the foundation of the Chinese diet. “The Chinese, they enjoy the rice’s sweetness,” says Ng. “Every bite, they feel the rice. But for Westerners, they don’t appreciate rice, so they cover it with sauce.”
This aligns with something von Bargen had told me. “It takes a while to not look for the salt kick,” he’d said. “With plain rice, nothing tickles the tastebuds. So basically you’re tasting more with your nose. As you exhale, as you chew, all the aromas pass by your olfactory cells. That’s how you would normally appreciate the rice. It’s meant to be a contrast to the other foods.”
Ng proves to be a font of simple, easy recipes that sound nothing like the standard stir-fry most men know. Steamed fish with soy sauce, poached Chinese broccoli, tomato beef, pork with spicy pickles, smoked sea bass. At the Super Star restaurant, you might easily find all these dishes on the table together. Von Bargen’s rule of thumb is to prepare one dish more than the number of people eating – “not a big deal, because the main prep in any Chinese cuisine is in the cutting and dicing, which you can do way ahead of time”.
With that much diversity, there’s much less pressure to try to stuff everything into a single dish and throw a sauce over it all like a circus tent. With the sauce stripped away, the food emerges in all its diversity. The fish tastes like fish again. The carrots taste like carrots. The rice tastes like rice.
COUNTRY ROAD
If you want to understand the true soul of Chinese cooking, you have to go to the countryside. Here, the peasants still cook like they did a century ago: with fire.
In the village of Xi Tang, in the south-central Hunan province, Xiang Luo has been subsisting on a simple diet of rice and pickled bean curd, augmented by the occasional scrap of meat, for 88 years. We’re sitting on tiny bamboo chairs in front of her great-nephew’s house. Xiang Luo’s daughter squats nearby, her silver teeth sending back reflections of the foreigner who has come to talk to them about eating in the old days.
Xiang Luo’s ancient eyes squeeze out a few tears remembering that time, when the Japanese shot her brother and her father died in the famine. Holding tight to a dragon-head cane, she daubs her cheeks with the rolled-up cuffs of her little blue Mao suit.
Someone brings out a plastic cup of scalding green tea flavoured with peppercorns. They’ve invited us to stay for dinner.
The cooking here takes place in a small crude shed with a cement floor. You won’t find much brushed steel in here. The rice is prepared in a giant, dented teapot over a wood fire. Two huge woks, one slightly larger than the other, have been sunk into a stone counter near the shed’s only window. The larger wok is half filled with some sort of unidentifiable dried vegetable matter.
“For the pig,” explains the old women’s niece, as she stuffs kindling into the crevice beneath the stone counter.
It’s unclear if the pig has its own wok in every traditional Chinese kitchen, but it does in this one. And the system seems to work. Leftover oil from the first wok is scooped into the pig wok, along with any inedible vegetable parts, like capsicum cores and cucumber stems; the fire under the counter heats both woks; cooked sludge from the pig wok is scooped out the window for the pig; the pig eats the sludge, turning it into meat; the farmer will slaughter the pig, render the fat, and return it to the first wok for cooking.
As the twigs catch fire and the wok starts smoking, it dawns on me that this, in a nutshell, is the real secret of Chinese cooking: economy. Every vegetable is optimised, every thermal unit is milked. And meat is used less as the centerpiece of a dish than as a flavouring agent. Wok cooking may seem flamboyant, but scholars say it simply developed as an adaptive response to limited resources: shorter cooking times burn less fuel.
It’s not just the food, in other words. The technique itself is lean. Somehow, knowing this makes the vast diversity of Chinese cuisine all the more admirable. At the same time, it makes fast-food Chinese, which has adapted the lean technique to churn out fatty junk, seem all the more perverse.
I’m munching fresh cucumber when my translator asks if I want to see a live snake. Outside the cooking shed, a cobra in a white net sack flares its hood and hisses. The old lady’s great-nephew, a slight, ageless figure wearing a short-sleeve work shirt and a perpetual cigarette, explains that he caught it on the hillside, near the graves of his ancestors. He grasps the hissing snake by its gullet and holds it up for display. A single question occurs to me.
“Can we eat it?”
Shortly thereafter we all march down to the rice paddy, where the nephew squats on a short jetty and, like a florist, snips off the head of the outraged cobra with a pair of red-handled shears. The cobra dies with its mouth open and the nephew flips its head into the weeds. Snake blood from the still-writhing body stains the paddy water.
A moment later he’s unseamed the snake and stripped off the skin, discarding it like wrapping paper. He digs out the guts and locates the prize, a dark-blue bean that my translator identifies as the gallbladder. It’s served to me in a plastic cup of bai jiu, a rank, rice moonshine with a horse-dung aftertaste.
“Good for the eyes,” says the nephew. The gallbladder, I think he means. The moonshine could probably make you go blind.
GASTRONOMY BOOT CAMP
I had come to the school, along with the 1500 other students, in hope of finally learning how to handle a wok. Despite the short notice, the school officials gladly agreed to let me sit in on some classes. It wasn’t always this easy to learn cooking in China.
In the old days, Martin Yan told me, anywhere from 10 to 25 years might go by before a master chef would trust an apprentice.
These days, with the Chinese economy in overdrive, there simply isn’t time to train chefs the old way. And so schools like this one have appeared, teaching all eight traditions of Chinese cooking.
By Western standards, the place is a bit shabby. Most of the students live in ageing cement dormitories redolent of urine. Each room accommodates eight students, who seem happy for the most part, buoyed by a sort of military camaraderie. (Before classes, they belt out motivational songs.) Hidden speakers randomly crank out deafening Chinese pop music.
Culinary boot camp begins at the north end of the campus, in a series of cement shelters where new recruits spend 2-3 hours a day for a month simply learning to handle a cleaver.
When I arrive with my guide, about 40 students are standing at three long wooden tables arranged in a U, each with one cleaver and one turnip. In the centre of the room, the chopmaster holds a clipboard and a stopwatch. The students have two minutes to reduce their turnips to stacks of uniform strips as thin as matchsticks. A whistle blows and the room fills with the sound of 50 cleavers furiously at work. Later, when I ask the chopmaster what happens to students who bungle the job, he tells me, in all seriousness, “100 push-ups”.
The advanced classes take place at the other end of campus, past the commissary, where adhesive bandages sell like cigarettes (“20 a day,” says the shopkeeper). In the class I visit, the students sit in tiers, facing a long cooking counter up front, where another student is busy prepping ingredients for pig-heart soup. Despite my late arrival (met with applause and passionately documented by the school photographer), the students remain intently focused on their colleague’s actions. The teaching process, my guide explains, boils down to this: watch and learn. First, the professor demonstrates a dish. Then a student is selected to duplicate it. Meanwhile, everyone else observes. Even with the demise of the old way of teaching, the Chinese still aren’t big on explanations.
So I observe, and for a moment I become just another student struggling to fathom the secrets of wok cooking. Under way now is a dish called Ma-Po Tofu, a Sichuan specialty, prepared by stir-fry. By now, I’ve seen enough to recognise the basic outline of the process: splash in the oil, coat the wok, pour it out – what remains is what you cook with. Meat in, meat out. Garlic in, ginger in, vegetables in. Meat in again. Then the sauce – a mere daub of bean paste mixed with stock, accented with a trickle of soy sauce.
What’s more interesting is the way the student handles the flame, a 50,000 British thermal units inferno with the control knob cranked open. The wood fire in Xi Tang, of course, had no control knobs, which may have something to do with why in Chinese cooking the heat is managed from within the wok rather than beneath it. If the wok becomes too hot, the student sprinkles it with cooking wine and, after a crackle, resumes cooking at a slightly lower temperature. A good cook, in other words, tracks not just the effect of the wok on his ingredients, but also the effect of his ingredients on the wok.
Texture is critical, too. There’s even a word for the ideal texture, ts’ui, which, according to E.N. Anderson, a noted scholar of cultural anthropology, “implies a texture offering resistance to the teeth followed by a burst of succulence”, like fruit ripe enough to eat. “The goal of Chinese quick-cooking,” says Anderson, “is to produce the most ts’ui texture possible, while bringing flavours to their maximum, and not cooking the food a second longer.”
A lick of fire rises from inside the sizzling wok and the students applaud. Mu had called this, in Cantonese, wok hay, which translates broadly as “the breath of the wok”. If “economy” is the secret to the technique of Chinese cooking, then wok hay may be the secret to its art. Simply put, the heat itself, properly regulated, affects the flavour.
The best chefs manage the quick encounter between food and heat so adroitly that when the food hits the plate, it’s wearing a shocked expression – like a starlet surprised by the photographer’s flash. And you can taste that shock when you eat it: it’s vivid and bursting, caramelised and lightly charred. Ultimately, the heat is an ingredient. You have to learn what it tastes like.
Applause follows us as we leave the classroom. One kitchen over, a master chef is glazing a pig spitted through the jowls on a 1.5m fork. Noticing our approach, he raises the spit above his head and, as students swirl around him, shouts, “I am the pig master!”
It’s a prestigious calling in a country that values pork above all other meats. But China also boasts a long tradition of vegetarian food, rooted in monastic culture. Chen Sheng Lin spent 10 years cooking in a monastery until fate steered a jade mogul, named Nee, towards a bowl of his ethereal lotus-leaf soup. Today, Chen lives in Nanjing and serves as the jade mogul’s personal chef. He’s also one of the most highly regarded vegetarian chefs in China.
TOFU HAS FLAVOUR
I talk with him one day about the final mystery of Chinese cuisine: making tofu taste good. Chen’s answer is simple: “Freeze it.”
Then he elaborates. There’s nothing particularly special about the recipe, aside from the frozen tofu. It doesn’t even have a name. But every Chinese family, says Chen, knows how to cook it. It’s a stir-fry with wood-ear mushrooms and bamboo shoots. The only difference is that the freezing process dehydrates the tofu, so when you add it at the end – still cold – it soaks up all the flavour. The technique, says Chen, can be used with any ingredients, just as long as they’re not green – somehow that ruins the taste.
By the time I get home, I have collected 100 recipes like this. Still, a week goes by before my hankering for Chinese returns. Then, one day, I’m walking past my local Chinese takeaway when I stop. I can hear the sizzle of the battered chicken and can almost taste the rich, candied sauce. In the light box above the counter, No.53 glows through a film of grease. Sweet Chicken is calling my name.A month ago, I would have given in to this craving without question. But two weeks in China have changed me, and now a screamingly obvious question begs for an answer: why go get takeaway when in the same amount of time I can buy fresh ingredients and cook up a healthier, tastier meal at home? Later that night, Chen Sheng Lin’s frozen-tofu stir-fry makes its Western debut.
