Cooking School, Days 6 and 7

Monday of our second week of classes featured three Sichuanese classics: rice-flour-coated beef steamed in a bamboo steamer, fish-fragrant stuffed eggplant slices, and twice-cooked pork. Chef Chao no. 1 did the honors.

Chef Chao explaining the finer points of peeling an eggplant.

The steamed beef is a very tasty and not-too-difficult dish, provided you have a steamer. The coating contains (among other things) toasted rice flour, Pixian chili bean paste, ginger, fermented black beans, and just a drizzle of the brine from a jar of stinky fermented tofu. And let me tell you, Limburger cheese has nothing on fermented tofu. Fortunately, its presence isn’t even detectable in the finished product:

You garnish it with minced garlic, crushed red dried chilies, chopped scallions, and cilantro. (The Sichuanese seem fond of pairing beef with cilantro.)

Here’s my version. I used a bit less Pixian chili paste than Chef Chao did, mainly because it’s so salty. But it turned out well:

The fish-fragrant eggplant slices were a bit tricky, since the first step is to make little “sandwiches” of eggplant with ground pork as the filling.

These have to be deep-fried twice before you coat them with the sauce:

Here are mine:

The only down side about the days that feature a lot of deep frying is that you wind up feeling as though you’re coated head to toe in a light film of vegetable oil.

Now, in theory, twice-cooked pork shouldn’t be difficult–it doesn’t have many ingredients, and the technique is simple. But these simple dishes are sometimes the trickiest to get right. Here’s Chef Chao’s version:

And here’s mine:

It looked OK, but I overdid it with the Pixian chili bean paste, and it was almost inedibly salty. I was so ashamed. (By the way, the Sichuanese love their food to be swimming in a pool of red chili-tinged oil.)

At lunchtime, we decided to try another of the open-air restaurants just outside the school gates. This one was vegetarian, and again, the food was simple and delicious.

The restaurant kitchen, which was typically in a state of barely controlled chaos.

Tuesday . . . oh, Tuesday was hard. And I can sum it up in one word: dough. We had to make things out of dough. Well, the dandan noodles weren’t hard, because we didn’t have to make the noodles from scratch, but we did have to make zhong crescent dumplings from scratch and fold (or try to fold) chao shou wontons.

We had a new chef for these dishes, Chef Hu.

Dandan noodles are sold everywhere in Sichuan, but every single cart, restaurant, and noodle shack does them a little bit differently. Some are unctuous with sesame paste, others leave out the sesame altogether and crank up the tart, salty yacai. The “classic” version that we learned had no sesame paste (although it did have sesame oil) and also included yacai, soy sauce, chili oil (with the flakes), scallion, shaoxing wine, vinegar, and (for sweetness) fermented flour paste.

They were good, without a doubt, but I kind of missed the sesame paste.

Our other noodle dish was cold noodles with shredded chicken. These weren’t hard either:

It was when we embarked on the zhong crescent dumplings that things began to go terribly, terribly wrong. These are a Chengdunese specialty, and when they’re well made, they’re delicious. They’re just simple semicircles of flour dough filled with ground pork, and dressed with aromatic soy sauce, chili oil with flakes, minced garlic, and sesame seeds. But first you have to make the little circles of dough. And they have to be perfect.

For making dumplings and noodles, the Chinese use a highly refined bleached white flour with an extremely low gluten content. Mixed with water, it produces an easily worked and stretchable dough. To make zhong crescent dumplings, you have to roll the dough into a log 1 inch in diameter, then cut that into cherry-size nuggets, and then roll each nugget into a perfect 2 1/2-inch circle that’s paper-thin at the edge and slightly raised in the middle. Chef Hu, of course, could do it like a master dumpling maker, and his turned out beautifully.

Mine were too big, they didn’t have enough filling, and the edges were ragged. *Sigh.*

At least they tasted good.

When Chef Hu demonstrated the folding of the chao shou (“folded arms”) wontons, I thought, Ha! This is going to be a cinch! Um, no. They’re supposed to wind up looking like little boats, and in order to do that, you need to make a complicated maneuver with your middle finger. Mine wound up looking like bloated Christmas wreaths. When the chef came over to see what I was doing wrong, he remarked to our translator, “Ta de shouzhi hen da!” (“His fingers are so big!” This was probably the first complete Chinese sentence I’ve understood during the trip.) So there you have it: the problem was my fat, occidental fingers. Oh the shame . . . I had to settle for making Shanghai-style wontons. Still, they didn’t look to bad after they’d been boiled:

Dough keeps you humble.

There’s one feature of our chilly classroom that has fascinated us for days: a pair of posters on the wall near the door, each of which shows 5o or 60 food pairings. One is labeled “Food Not Good to Eat Together” and the other is labeled “Food Good to Eat Together.” The first poster details the dire consequences that will ensue should you foolishly consume the forbidden pairings. For example, if you combine lamb with ginger, you’ll suffer from dry mouth, sore throat, and constipation. Beef with chives will give you bloating and food poisoning. Many of the pairings seem quite innocuous–carrots with radishes, chicken with celery, rabbit with duck, pork with peas. Others you’d probably never dream of even trying, like bananas with sweet potatoes. And still others fall under the rubric of  exotica: dog with garlic, donkey with mushrooms. But they’re all a sure road to an early grave. If you’re smart, you’ll stick to the Foods Good to Eat Together, such as octopus with pig’s feet, which is good for your qi and your blood level, and will make your skin elastic. Or eel and bitter melon, which will lower your blood sugar. Or, more prosaically, chicken and broccoli, which is good for your brain and will reduce your chance of getting the flu. Don’t say I never told you.

Weekend Adventures

Our official itinerary included a couple of weekend field trips–a break from chopping, slicing, frying, and braising. The first, on Saturday, was to the Giant Panda Research Base, which is just 10 kilometers north of downtown Chengdu. At first  I was inclined to skip this, but I’m glad I didn’t. Those pandas are kinda cute.

Even cuter, however, and much livelier, are the red pandas, which are also much smaller and only distantly related to the giant panda. Their wild population is also more robust–about 10,000, versus the giant panda’s 1,600. Four and a half million years ago, there were red pandas living in western Tennessee. Too bad they’re not still there.

Wouldn’t you want to bring one home?

On our way back to Chengdu, we stopped off at another fledgling organic farm. This one is owned by the Gao family, and Mr. Gao gave us a quick tour before lunch.

A row of asparagus cabbage--which seems to enormously popular in Sichuan--at the Gaos' farm.

Mr. Gao, looking uncharacteristically solemn.

Because the Gaos are strict Buddhists, the lunch they gave us was vegetarian. It was delicious. (That stuff that looks like sausage, isn't.)

Besides growing their own crops, the Gaos rent out small plots–very cheaply–to city dwellers who want to raise some vegetables. This involves a fair amount of hard workon the part of the renters.

This young man seemed quite cheerful as he hauled water to his small plot.

 Back in Chengdu, we stopped off at the Bamboo Park for tea at a traditional teahouse. There were also some lovely traditional buildings, including this pagoda.

Ready for a break, we found a tea house and ordered some jasmine and oolong. Then, all of a sudden, we heard what sounded like a large chorus burst into song. Close to where were sitting was a pavilion where a large crowd had gathered. It was a sort of public singalong–the organizers passed out songbooks, a small orchestra of traditional instruments provided backup, and the participants lustily belted out Mao-era revolutionary anthems. They seemed to be having a fine old time.

On Sunday we had a small rebellion of our own. The plan had been to drive to see the Leshan Giant Buddha, which is carved into the stone of a riverbank and is 233 feet tall. It was begun in 713 A.D. and finished in 803 A.D. The drive to get there, however, takes 2 1/2 to 3 hours, and we just couldn’t face six hours on the road. Fortunately, our charming and accommodating tour guide, Tom He (who teaches Chinese history at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine), proposed an alternative trip to Qingcheng Mountain, which is much closer to Chengdu and offers dramatic scenery, historic temples, and brisk excercise. The paths were crowded with Chinese tourists and food and souvenir vendors, but there was indeed dramatic scenery–sheer mountainsides covered with towering evergreen trees–and some very interesting temples. (The mountain is one of the holiest sites in Daoism.)

The entrance to the Jianfu Dong, a Daoist temple built during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.).Inside the courtyard of the Jianfu Dong.

A statue of Laozi, the founder of Daoism and the author of the Dao De Jing.

The entryway to another temple further up the mountainside.

I liked this turtle.

There was a great deal of construction going on at various sites on the mountain, and we encountered a constant stream of porters carrying up building materials–usually sacks of cement or bricks–on their backs. The loads must have been at least 150 pounds, and some of the men were not young; however, they all had calves the size of softballs. At the bottom of the mountain was a scale onto which they stepped before heading up–their pay depended on how heavy a load they were carrying. Each one of them carried a stout walking stick and they rested frequently, but still, I don’t think I’ve ever seen human beings working so hard. I couldn’t bring myself to photograph them; it would have been an insult to their (literally) backbreaking labor.

Cooking School, Day 5

Friday, week no. 1: We’re finally getting the hang of this cooking-school business: how to moderate the flame of the super-hot wok burners; how to handle large quantities of hot oil; how to prep efficiently; and how to tell the difference between pixian chili bean paste and chopped pickled chilies.

Today we had a new instructor, Chef Chao no. 2.

Our three dishes were hula scallops (I’ll explain), fish-fragrant pork slivers (I’ll explain), and braised black poplar mushrooms.

The scallops were pretty easy (once we figured out that they needed to be completely defrosted before we stir-fried them). The hula flavor (which has nothing to do with grass skirts and swaying Hawaiian hips) is a combination of “litchi flavor” (so called because its combination of sweetness and tartness is reminiscent of a litchi) and the “la” chili hotness.

Here's Chef Chao no. 2's rendition of hula scallops.

And here's mine. I used a bit more soy and more dried chilies, but Chef Chao said that was OK.

 The next dish was a well-known Sichuanese classic: fish-fragrant pork slivers. Why the particular combination of flavors in this dish is known as “fish-fragant” is a matter of some debate. There’s nothing fishy about it–it relies mainly on ginger, garlic, scallions, and chopped pickled chilies, which are very salty, somewhat sour, and medium-hot. Most authorities declare that the sauce was commonly used on fish, hence the name. Besides the pork, there are two vegetables in the dish: asparagus lettuce (the thick, crunchy stem of a member of the lettuce clan) and tree-ear mushrooms. The meat and vegetables all must be finely slivered. Here’s Chef Chao’s version:

The consensus among us students, although we dared not utter it aloud, was that Chef Chao used a bit too much oil.

The last dish of the day was the most unusual–black poplar mushrooms braised in a miniature wok ( it’s sort of the Chinese equivalent of a chafing dish, complete with a sterno flame underneath). I’d never encountered black poplar mushrooms before–they’re dried, dark brown, and very long and stringy, with a small light brown cap. Chef Chao said they should be soaked for a full 24 hours before you cook the dish! The other ingredients are fairly basic: thinly sliced pork, with a 50:50 ratio of fat and lean, pixin chili paste, dried chilies sliced in half lengthwise, scallion chunks, and a little soy, sugar, and ground white pepper. You sear the pork a little bit and then just braise everything together with some pork stock until most of the stock has cooked down. The mushrooms have a very resilient texture–which the Chinese love–and a deep, complex, woodsy flavor. I thought they were delicious.

At lunchtime we decided to try an open-air noodle shack just outside the school gates. For less than a dollar we got big bowls of hand-pulled noodles with braised beef and very tasty broth.

This guy was amazing--he pulled that piece of dough into spaghetti-size strands.

These were our neighbors at the next table:

Three friends enjoying their lunch of chao fan.

Clearly they know a good thing when they see it.

Cooking School, Day 4, and Other Adventures

Miracle of miracles, on Thursday the sun came out! Outdoors, you could feel the springtime warmth, although it had no effect whatsoever on our igloo of a classroom. Our watchword was still “layers.”

Chef Cai was our instructor again, but we had only one dish to prepare–home-style tofu–since we planned to spend the entire afternoon visiting the Fu Qin Traditional Market, Chengdu’s biggest produce, meat, and spice market. Nevertheless, Chef Cai also showed us how to prepare Sichuanese “jumping water” pickles (i.e., pickles that are ready to eat after only 8 to 12 hours of brining), and chili-flavored pickled chicken feet. That’s right, chicken feet.

Here Chef Cai is adding vegetables to a special pickling jar, which is designed to prevent air from reaching the pickles while they're fermenting. You also need to use special Sichuanese "well salt," which has a high natural nitrate content.

I decided not to show you the chicken feet, even though they were very nicely boned. Hope you’re not too disappointed.

The first step in making family-style tofu is to deep fry thick slices of firm tofu at a high temperature until they're nicely golden.

Here's Chef Cai's finished product.

Here's my attempt. Chef Cai gave it a thumb's-up.

The Fu Qin Traditional Market was truly a palace of wonders.  We could easily have spent the whole day there.

The entrance to the market.

Just inside the entrace, we saw these super-cute tiny bunnies:

We’re pretty sure they’re meant to be pets rather than dinner, since there’s not much meat on them. But I suppose you never know for certain.

This is just the main room--there are many aisles and alleyways leading off of it.One of the first stalls you come to belongs to the tofu lady. She must have 20 different kinds, including pale green and yellow tofu made from (I think) rice.

A typical meat stand--all pork. Interestingly, we didn't see any beef for sale.

The Sichuanese really like their pickles . . .

. . . and their mushrooms . . .

. . . and their bamboo shoots.

"Shredded Three Kinds"

Some tastefully pastel eggs.

I lost track of the number of dried chili stalls we saw. There must have been dozens.

A typical fruit stand. The mangoes looked nice.

One of the noodle ladies. (There were a lot of noodle men, too.)

More pickles. Pickles are important.

These jars contain baijiu ("white liquor"). It's pretty potent. Each jar contains a different "vintage"--the older it is, the more expensive.

 During our visit to the market, a number of us were on a mission to find the best, zingiest, most potent Sichuan peppercorns (called huajiao–”flower pepper”–in Chinese.) We sampled them at four or five different stalls, at the risk of permanently numbed lips, before we struck gold, so to speak.

This man's huajiao was so potent you could smell it from 10 feet away, even when it was double-bagged. And when you chewed one, it felt as though you were touching your tongue to a 9-volt battery. We cleaned out his entire stock--about 7 pounds. He was happy.

The variety and beauty of the vegetable stalls were mind-boggling.

 

I wish I knew how to do anything as well as this man knows how to make dumplings. (They are, of course, made by hand.)

The Sichuanese seem to be adept at the art of the spontaneous nap. This man had a chicken stall.

After we left the market, some of us took a cab to the “Wide and Narrow Streets” district, which has a lot of tea houses, restaurants, bars, cafes, souvenir shops, and even some private residences housed in traditional building. It was a good place to stop for a beer.

We then took the new, stunningly modern subway to the Wenshu Monastery area for a quick supper of dan-dan noodles. They cost about $1.75. We didn’t go into the monastery grounds, but the neighborhood was quite nice–more traditional buildings–especially after dark.

On our way back to the subway stop, we passed a man playing the erhu, a traditional Chinese two-stringed bowed instrument, with amazing skill. When he saw us, he started playing “The Red River Valley.” A lovely end to the evening

Cooking School, Days 2 and 3

We had three dishes to observe and prepare on Tuesday: baizai chicken (a cold dish dressed with a sauce based on pixian chili bean paste), mala dry-dried beef strips (another cold appetizer), and tomato egg drop soup. Our instructor of the day, Chef Cai, also showed us how to make chili oil, aromatic soy sauce, and strange-taste peanuts (which are perhaps the most perfect thing in the world to snack on while drinking Chinese beer).

Here's Chef Cai showing us the ingredients for making chili oil, along with our ever-cheerful interpreter, Crystal Hu.

The beef that Chef Cai used to make the mala dry-fried beef strips was pre-cooked and fairly salty--almost like corned beef.

Chef Cai appraises his handiwork with a critical eye.

The finished mala beef strips. Chewy but tasty.

Chef Cai insisted that the best chicken for baizai chicken is a scrawny, free-range rooster. Here he is, having just been poached for about 20 minutes.

The finished baizai chicken. The meat is mounded over a bed of scallion chunks and then drizzled with the sauce.

Like much of downtown Chengdu, the neighborhood around the Institute is thick with high-rises. But just across the street from the campus is this lovely little vegetable garden.

You see gardens like this wherever there isn’t something else occupying the space.

On Wednesday, owing to an state of befuddlement caused by an unfortunate combination of Ambien and melatonin, I forgot to bring my camera to class (*sigh*). But Adrienne Lo has kindly offered to share some of her photos, so I’ll post them as soon as I get them from her. I will say only that the day’s activities included stunning, killing, scaling, gutting, and deep-frying a two-pound grass carp. I am now officially a fish-murderer.

Cooking School, Day 1

The Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine, which used to be close to downtown Chengdu, was recently relocated to the suburbs, so each morning we climb aboard a van for the 45-minute drive through teeming rush-hour traffic to the new campus.

Our alma mater, the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine. Landscaping appears not to be a top priority.

The first order of business was to get us into uniform.

It took me about five tries to tie that damned neckerchief.

We had been warned that the school building was unheated, but the reality didn’t hit home until we entered our classroom and discovered that it had evidently been constructed by the Frigidaire company. “Layers” became the watchword of the day.

Our instructor, Chef Chao, and our translator, Crystal Hu, made a great team. Before plunging into the day’s main dishes, Chef Chao demonstrated the art of ornamental vegetable carving.

Chef Chao’s “peony” carved from a daikon radish.

The day’s two dishes were dry-fried green beans and gongbao chicken.

Chef Chao demonstrated the two dishes during the morning session, then we had a go at them after lunch. Owing to some slight confusion, there were only enough ingredients for every two people, but we made do. (Earnest consultations were held with our hosts to ensure that this wouldn’t happen again.)

Preparation of the dry-fried beans involved plunging them into a wokful of very hot oil; to date, mercifully, we have managed to avoid deep-frying any of the staff or students.

One of the ingredients in the bean dish is ya cai, a brownish, preserved cabbage-relative that is agreeably tart and very salty. It gives the dish a big boost.

Chef Chao was extraordinarily meticulous in balancing flavors–adding a dash of vinegar here, or a pinch of sugar there–and in ensuring that the dish’s appearance was up to standard. Interestingly, he tends to use soy sauce as much for its ability to deepen the color of a sauce as for its flavor; it’s never the dominant note.

More to come.

The Hotpot Experience

The elaborate wooden facade of Lao Ma Tou.

Our first get-together as a group was an excursion on Sunday to Lao Ma Tou, Chengdu’s most famous hotpot restaurant. Hotpot  is an obsession with the Chengduese–the locals say that it’s an antidote to the raw, numbing cold of the winter months, and having now experienced a couple of fairly chilly days, I can believe it.

The standard setup involves a large cauldron of bubbling broth and oil set into the middle of the dining table and brimming with dried chilies and Sichuan pepper. (The faint of heart can opt for a non-spicy broth rather than the infernal-looking vat of red oil.) Each diner is given a small bowl of sesame oil to serve as a dipping sauce; this can be doctored to taste with garlic, vinegar, cilantro, oyster sauce, and scallions.

The standard-issue cauldron of fiery oil and broth. Mephistopheles would approve.

Then comes the interesting part: the various foodstuffs that you grasp with your chopsticks and dip into the cauldron until they’re cooked. These include fairly standard items such as sliced beef, lamb, and pork, but the most popular choices run the gamut of innards of all the chief domestic farm animals: cow stomach (very different from honeycomb tripe–this looks like a gray dishrag), beef and pig liver, pig kidney, and a couple of others that elude my memory. Oh, and did I mention fish bladder? And rice-paddy eel? I’m proud to say that I tried them all, and while I doubt I’ll ever become a fan of fish bladder (which is fairly tasteless but extraordinarily chewy and resilient–the embodiment of the snappy texture that the Chinese value so highly), I rather liked the kidney, which wasn’t organ-y at all.

The vegetables were delicious, especially some very slender bamboo shoots that looked almost like asparagus, and five different kinds of mushroom, none of which I’d ever encountered before. The winner here was cow-liver mushroom, so named for its color rather than its flavor, which was deep and woodsy.

If there’s a drawback to hotpot, it’s that the richness of the oil gets to you after a while, and the cooking method and dipping sauce make everything taste the same. I don’t think I’ll be rushing out to have hotpot again anytime soon, but it was fun to try once.

Plunging In

We finished up a little early today at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine, so I finally have some time to write.

I arrived in Chengdu on Saturday, and didn’t do much other than to take a stroll to the park (complete with looming statue of Mao Zedong)  in the center of the city. Chengdu is not what you’d call beautiful–the downtown is dominated by lots of undistinguished high-rises–but it’s lively and thronging (although members of our group who have been to Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong say that Chengdu strikes them as positively rural in its lack of crowds). I had a quick lunch at an open-air restaurant, and for the equivalent of about $2.00 had red-cooked pork with potatoes, a clear soup with bitter greens and gingery pork meatballs, and rice. The very nice family that runs the restaurant seemed a bit astonished that a solitary western tourist wanted to eat at their place.

Sunday turned out to hold an unexpected adventure. Chris Campion and his wife, Mandy Cheng, found out about a new organic farm online. They got in touch with the young couple that’s helping to get it started, and they in turn invited us to visit. (It’s in the small town of Xingyi, about 45 minutes from Chengdu.) They’re an interesting pair–he’s French, she’s Chinese, and they’ve both been involved with a similar project in Shanghai. The scope of the project is huge–not only does it involve the farm itself; they’ve also acquired a huge hotel complex that was abandoned by its backers before it was completed. In addition to the hotel, there’s a traditional arts-and-crafts village, a traditional farming village, and a great deal of woodland. (The backers appear to be Taiwanese businessmen. They must be loaded.)

Anyway, the young couple, Agnes and Christophe, and a very nice older Taiwanese man named Eliot, who seems to be one of the senior partners, met us at our hotel with a driver. (By the way, Chinese traffic is terrifying–worse than Rome. Cars change lanes, cut in front of pedestrians and bicycles and scooters, and generally do whatever they feel like doing. But everyone seems very calm about it all and we only saw one minor accident.)

The sign at the entrance of the Sunshine Earth Bio Farm in Xingyi.

As it turned out, the day of our visit coincided with the beginning of the daikon harvest–they needed to get part of the crop out of the ground so they could start the process of drying and salting them. So we harvested daikon!

Then we washed them so they could be cut up for drying. A charming young woman (whose name I didn’t get, unfortunately) showed us how to do this.

This was the finished product:

Eventually, we produced quite an impressive display:

These women were weeding an extensive scallion plot. (And doing a damned good job.)

After we finished our daikon duties, we were given a delicious lunch of twice-cooked pork with slivered green chilies, mapo tofu, stir-fried Chinese celery with Sichuan pepper, stir-fried cabbage with dried chilies, broccoli with garlic, and marinated daikon (of course). Then we went for a walk around the entire property, which was quite impressive in its extent and in the challenges it presents for the developers.

A fairly good-size river runs through the farm, complete with white egrets (not visible here, alas).

The plan is to turn these buildings into a center for culture and the arts.

My favorite part of the farm was the traditional farm village–a cluster of beautiful rustic buildings linked by meandering paths and rills.

The traditional farm village seemed to be a favored haunt of many of the local older people. This group was playing cards, with much laughter and lively conversation.

This lovely moon gate linked two of the houses in the traditional farm village.

 

A typical house in the traditional farm village.

It’s a fascinating and staggeringly ambitious project. I hope they succeed. If they do, it’s bound to give the nascent organic movement in China a big boost.