Cooking tips and wonderful flavour combinations

[viktorvaughn]

Golden Day :
http://www.london-eating.co.uk/37194.htm

is Hunan. I thought it was OK, not mindblowing but I may have been having an off day*

Ba-shu is more Sichuan. They've changed chef, he's in Brick Lane now with his own place. I think there are better Sichuan places than both of them, to be honest but I eat this shit alot.

Ba-Shan

http://www.timeout.com/london/restaurants/venue/2:21319/ba-shan

more Hunan and it's really, really good there. Mix of Hunan, Sichuan and Shaanxi. It's basically that Dunlop cookbook come to life, but better than you can cook it. The Doc and me take people there to start them off on this sort of food. I recommend it. Go to that one.

* actually I didn't like it there at all, but I'm being polite.

Yipin China in Angel is another one - not been to it tho.
http://yipinchina.co.uk

San Xia Ren Jia on Goodge St also
http://www.sanxia.co.uk

Le Wei Xiang in, erm, Lewisham looks good too, tho mainly Sichuan. My mates said it was nice, good hot pot with tofu and pigs blood cubes.
http://www.timeout.com/london/restaurants/venue/2:27130/le-wei-xiang

 

[luka]

maybe london needs more chinese people/ we should start a recruitment drive.

 

[Slothrop]

maybe london needs more chinese people/ we should start a recruitment drive.

Although UK Chinese restaurants are the notable exception to the white middle class foody rule-of-thumb that eg Turkish restaurants where lots of Turkish people eat are generally good, Indian restaurants where lots of Indian people eat are generally good and so on. I've been to plenty of chinese restaurants in the UK where almost all the other customers were (in some sense) chinese and all the other signifiers of low budget 'authenticity' were there - bilingual menus, cheap fittings, idiosyncratic service - and the food was no better than a standard cheap takeaway in Mansfield or wherever.

 

[luka]

inscrutable orientals, you cant trust 'em.

 

[mistersloane]

Yipin China in Angel is another one - not been to it tho.
http://yipinchina.co.uk

San Xia Ren Jia on Goodge St also
http://www.sanxia.co.uk

Le Wei Xiang in, erm, Lewisham looks good too, tho mainly Sichuan. My mates said it was nice, good hot pot with tofu and pigs blood cubes.
http://www.timeout.com/london/restaurants/venue/2:27130/le-wei-xiang

Ooh sexy thanks, how are they?

 

[nochexxx]

i been vege for 33 years and i think the absence f garlic and other racy spices means this style of cooking is inferior to indian vegetarian cooking which for me is the ultimate. i like the gluten but the indians been doing it for a long time and they are the masters of vegetarian food.

fair dues, i was talking crap, Indians make the best vege food. i'm still reminiscing
over this one Seitan stall in Klang. blew my mind with it's food and celibate cooking philosophies.

 

[baboon2004]

Although UK Chinese restaurants are the notable exception to the white middle class foody rule-of-thumb that eg Turkish restaurants where lots of Turkish people eat are generally good, Indian restaurants where lots of Indian people eat are generally good and so on. I've been to plenty of chinese restaurants in the UK where almost all the other customers were (in some sense) chinese and all the other signifiers of low budget 'authenticity' were there - bilingual menus, cheap fittings, idiosyncratic service - and the food was no better than a standard cheap takeaway in Mansfield or wherever.

I'm not convinced by that rule of thumb in general - it's wedded to the idea of authenticity = good, which is of course baseless.

Largely the Turkish food I've had on Green Lanes has been unremarkable, the Lebanese/Iranian on Edgware Road average, some of the food in Southall has def been bog standard etc. My alternative theory is that where there's a glut of similar restaurants (as in the type of food/country of origin), standards tend to fall to average level because most restaurants get a fairly good trade (due to people coming there because of the area's reputation) and therefore there's not a massive incentive to try harder/employ a genuinely good chef(s).

Of course this theory falls down sometimes too. Most of the south Indian restaurants on Drummond St are pretty good, for example, as are most (but def not all) of the Ethiopian restaurants around king's X. But I'd say there's some truth in it, partic as with those two counterexamples, I wouldn't say those areas are as massively wedded to those types of food in the popular imagination.

 

[Client Eastwood]

Managed to find some fresh turmeric roots over the weekend but wasn't sure what to do with it. In the end I made a variation of this pickle with added ginger root.

http://kamalkitchen.blogspot.com/2008/10/turmeric-pickle.html

Giving it a few days to marinate but first tasting was good but it does make your mouth orange. Preparing the turmeric is very messy too, ended up wearing gloves.

 

[muser]

can anyone recommend some good chinese cooking books, Id love to go to the local chinese supermarket and know what the fuck is going on, and then cook something proper.

 

[luka]

sloane says fuscia dunlop is the bible

 

[baboon2004]

yeah, i spent about £20 at a Chinese supermarket to get everything I needed for several Sichuan dishes (inc chili oil, black vinegar, Xiaojing rice wine, chili paste, bean paste type things), then followed Dunlop's book. Turned out well, she explains the ideas behind the cooking techniques very well - I understood them fairly well for the first time, and the pork belly recipe I made was easily one of the best things I've ever done.

 

[nochexxx]

i'd like to have a go at this. anychance you could share the recipe?

 

[viktorvaughn]

Yep this is the bomb. Obviously it's very regional specific to Sichuan but it's a great window into the food with lots of recipes but also bits of history and background which is fairly interesting.

When i first got it i flicked through and thought hmm, looks a bit complex but when you actually read them they are often pretty simple. The essentials are not expensive. You need to get

Pixian chilli bean paste
Chinkiang vinegar
Sichuan peppercorns
Sesame oil
Shaoxing wine
some preserved veg
maybe some sort of salted/pickled chillies or you can make these at home, tho i prefer the bought ones - look out for

which are on of the best chilli products ever IMO)

and that's it really, obviously there are some more bits you can add later...all those things will keep in you cupboard.

 

[baboon2004]

i'd like to have a go at this. anychance you could share the recipe?

i've misplaced the book, but from a scarred memory:

pork belly marinaded with ginger, spring onion (cut up both very roughly) and Xiaojing (or however it's transliterated) and sichuan peppercorns (the ones i got weren't very good, mass-produced, maybe someone else can help with good sources) and a few whole red chillies.

the wok part is the bit i'm struggling with....will get back to you on that

 

[Mr. Tea]

pork belly marinaded with ginger, spring onion (cut up both very roughly)

If it's chopped very roughly, I'm assuming it's slow-cooked? Specially as it's pork and you don't want any raw bits. I thought the idea with stir-frying was to chop your ingredients very finely so you can cook them quickly at a high temperature, but I'm sure there's 101 subtly different ways you can cook with a wok...

 

[baboon2004]

the ginger and spring onion are just for the marinade, they don't go in the eventual dish, although you'd add some other spring onions later i think. Marinade overnight too, make sit extra-lush

yeah, that would def be the idea with the stir frying itself, to cook very quickly, so fairly thinly sliced pieces of pork belly. And before serving you hold the meat at the sides of the wok while you add a thickener to the sauce, i remember that too.

most important thing is not to crowd the pan so it fries and doesn't steam, that's what i always used to go wrong on, means making several batches cos i don't have a huge wok.

god my hazy memory is doing my head in lately...

 

[Slothrop]

I'm not convinced by that rule of thumb in general - it's wedded to the idea of authenticity = good, which is of course baseless.

It's wedded to the idea that people who have eaten a given style of food from a range of sources on a daily basis for years are going to have be more informed and discriminating about where they get it than people who've eaten it occasionally in a small number of restaurants.

But yeah, it's basically a cliche with a lot of holes in it.

 

[Slothrop]

sloane says fuscia dunlop is the bible

She's got some quite good stuff on ingredients on her website, which is a bonus. Eg this:
http://www.fuchsiadunlop.com/sichuan-chilli-bean-paste/

I should probably get the book.

 

[baboon2004]

It's wedded to the idea that people who have eaten a given style of food from a range of sources on a daily basis for years are going to have be more informed and discriminating about where they get it than people who've eaten it occasionally in a small number of restaurants.

But yeah, it's basically a cliche with a lot of holes in it.

yep, primarily that lots of people grew up with mediocre food being the norm, even if the country is famed as having an excellent food culture. for my money most restaurants in London are pretty so-so, and ones which serve consistently good food are very much the exception (lots of them of course appear in the sister thread to this one). i often regret eating at random restaurants.

 

[muser]

thanks luka (sloane) ill check her book out then sounds important