#10 China
- Jen
- Feb 18, 2020
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 4, 2022
My excitement levels for this went full circle and morphed into overwhelming anxiety! Not only are there 1.4 BILLION people eating Chinese food in China, but people eat Chinese food all over the world! Where do you start with CHINA?!
Where does any engineer start when faced with reams of information to communicate? With a table.
The Eight Culinary Traditions of Chinese Cuisine
Chinese cuisine is split into Eight Culinary Traditions, based on different regional cooking styles. The table below provides a summary of the different cuisines.
*These are my absolute fave! Cantonese custard tarts are an ancestor of Portuguese pastels de nata (which are about 70% of the reason I went to Portugal in December!). The custardy goodness is retained in a Chinese puff pastry case, which is less fatty than what we recognise as PP. Apparently in Macau the custard tarts are Portuguese-style and caramelised on top, and in HK they’re more like a smooth, glossy British custard tart…either way, custard tarts FTW! I had some a-mazing dim sum yum (that’s just my little pet name for dim sum) in Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia a couple of years ago and was like Christmas dinner full but could still manage one of these beauts. That meal was one of the best of my entire life! You haven’t lived until you’ve gained half a stone in Penang (in 4 days…)!
**Staying in Penang: Gurney Hawkers Stalls – best woklette(another of my pet names for food: basically, an omelette cooked in a wok) of my life! See photo below.
Feeding 1.4 billion people
I considered including a section discussing the challenges of feeding a nation that has 1/5 of the world’s population with only 1/10 of the farmland, and I’ve been fascinated by what I’ve learned during this research. However, I want to keep this space as a light-hearted food blog (occasional dam-related engineering chat is OK) and don’t want it to become a forum for political/environmental debates…so here are some facts that can’t possibly cause unrest:
· China produces 45% of the world’s carrots.
· In 2017, China produced the longest noodle in the world at 10,100 feet long.
A little on Chinese New Year
The date for Chinese New Year is dictated by the new moon between 21st January and 20th February. This year, the new moon was 25th January, coinciding nicely with this blog.
Celebrations take place on Chinese New Year’s Eve and are heavily family-orientated, much like our Christmas Day. Houses are decorated with red paper decorations that symbolise good fortune, happiness and wealth.
A Chinese New Year dinner typically involves several different dishes, each representing a different attribute.
The Chinese zodiac is a 12-year cycle where each year is represented by a different animal. 2020 is the Year of the Rat. Babies born in different years supposedly have certain personality traits. For example, as a Rabbit child, I am quiet and elegant…
Charity Chinese New Year banquet
I decided to celebrate the Year of the Rat by hosting a charity DP (dinner party) as part of my fundraising efforts for the NSPCC. It was a great excuse to cook outrageous amounts of food anyway.
Red envelopes containing money are often given to children at Chinese New Year, which is essentially what I asked my guests to do: put money for the children (via the NSPCC) in a red envelope.
It would have been nice to put together a menu with a dish from each of the Traditions…but you’ve seen the table above; chopped pepper fish head, no thanks! There’s a reason we tend to stick to Cantonese and Sichaun!
I like to push myself in the kitchen – why make 5 dishes when you can make 10, right? This was really pushing myself! I had 10 friends over for a meal that consisted of 10 separate dishes. When I saw the trolley full of food in Tesco that I had to cook I almost cried at the size of the task ahead…that I’d completely brought on myself. I was julienning, frying, wrapping, baking and bleeding for 18 hours in one weekend! I was certainly in breach of the working time regs.
Here’s what I achieved in those 18 frantic hours! I’ve included links to the particularly good recipes so we can all enjoy them! If you want to see a timeline of events, I’ve saved the whole saga to my Insta stories highlights.
1. Vegetable dumplings – bought frozen gyoza wrappers and made 40 dumplings. I really didn’t get the hang of shaping them and couldn’t get a decent seal on all of them. The good ones got the fry-on-one-side-and-steam treatment, as all the best dumplings do, and those on the special side were solely fried to avoid getting loads of moisture inside them from steaming. They weren’t bad but I definitely have room for improvement.
2. Vegetable spring rolls – again, bought frozen spring roll wrappers. They’re super-easy to wrap and you can fry them straight from frozen. As long as the oil in the wok is hot enough you can’t really not end up with perfectly golden and crisp spring rolls. Tip: don’t cook them and them keep them warm under cover because they will go soggy. I did save them with a few minutes under the grill.
3. Yi mein (long life noodles) – nearly always served at Chinese New Year and symbolize longevity. They’re just a standard but very tasty noodle dish.
4. Chun Pi Niu (tangerine beef) – I couldn’t get enough of this! Chewy, stir-fried slices of beef in sweet, tangy sauce. It has pieces of dried tangerine peel and slivers of homemade candied peel (which I love doing, so therapeutic). I was the Homer Simpson drool GIF after every morsel of this. Sexy. If you get chance, please make it and enjoy it as much as I did! https://thewoksoflife.com/tangerine-beef/
5. Kung Pao mushrooms – a veggie version of the Sichaun classic.
6. Aubergine in garlic sauce – the way the aubergine is prepared makes it stir-fry beautifully and hold some crispyness when mixed with the sauce. You salt slices of aubergine and leave for an hour and then it gets nice and crispy without taking up too much oil. The sauce is super-garlicky, which is obviously a good thing. Delicious. https://omnivorescookbook.com/chinese-eggplant-with-garlic-sauce
7. Crispy sesame chicken in sticky Asian sauce – “chicken just isn’t going to be the same after eating this”…”this might be the best thing I’ve ever tasted”. Agreed. It was banging! This dish has everything you could dream of: crispy, sweet, salty…heaven! The chicken is fried off in the classic 1-2-3 cornflour-egg-seasoned flour combo and you make just enough sauce (vinegar, sweet chilli, honey, soy sauce, sugar and other tasty things) to coat the crispy chicken. Better than any Chinese takeaway. If you want people to like you, feed this to them! https://www.kitchensanctuary.com/crispy-sesame-chicken-sticky-asian-sauce/
8. Jasmine rice – not a massive success in the slow cooker, but nobody came for the rice, right?
9. Nian Gao – Chinese red bean cake. It’s a traditional CNY cake and each region jazzes it up differently. I made the Fujian version but in Cantonese cuisine it’s sliced, wrapped in a spring roll wrapper and fried for extra decadence. It is so bizarre. The texture isn’t a million miles away from chewing gum and it’s got beans in it. Everything about it means that it should be gross but it was weirdly really tasty; strong evidence for the butter + sugar makes anything yummy argument.
10. Fortune cookies – you need asbestos fingers to make these! You make a very thin round egg-white biscuit and then have to shape it while it’s still hot. Have as much fun as you want writing the fortunes: be profound, be funny, be mean, include Eric Cantana quotes!
I really wanted to make the custard tarts for my banquet but I felt like I was already biting off more than I could chew so they got canned. In hindsight, thank God for that because I think they would have actually pushed me over the edge! I promise I’ll make them for Portugal!
Despite the size of the challenge/madness, I had the absolute best time! I loved watching YouTube videos to learn how to correctly julienne certain vegetables, loved learning the new recipes and style of cooking and above all, loved hosting and bringing my friends together.
Rosie was lucky enough to get the fortune cookie with the prize of picking the next country out of the pan and she picked…UGANDA.
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