Why the Chinese Don't Count Calories (19 page)

This sauce is usually used to top poached shredded chicken mixed with spring onions, but it may also be used as a dip or sauce for cold noodles or as a dressing for lettuce (on the few occasions that Chinese people eat raw foods they always dress them with a spicy sauce).

3 tsp chilli oil
2 tsp Chinese black vinegar (or use balsamic)
2 tsp sugar
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp sesame oil
2 tbsp sesame paste (or to taste)
2–3 tbsp water
1 tsp Sichuan peppercorns, toasted, or dry fried, ground
and sieved (only if the sauce is served with chicken)

First mix the chilli oil, vinegar, sugar, soy sauce and sesame oil; stirring until the sugar is dissolved. Use chopsticks to stir in the sesame paste, then gradually add the water, stopping when the sauce has reached the consistency you desire. Lastly, if the sauce is for chicken, add the Sichuan peppercorns.

How to put the Five
Flavours into your cooking

Sour:
vinegar • lemon juice • tamarind • olives

Sweet
(naturally sweet ingredients which have a harmonizing action)
:
honey • palm sugar • liquorice • rock sugar • coconut

Bitter:
vinegar • cocoa powder • wine (slightly bitter) • tangerine lemon and grapefruit peel • turmeric, fenugreek and some other Indian spices

Pungent:
ginger • onions • garlic • chillies and Sichuan peppercorns •
mustard • black pepper • most herbs and spices commonly used in the West

Salty:
oyster sauce (salty and sweet) • sea vegetables • soy sauce •
rock salt • sea salt • dried or pickled vegetables • fermented
black bean pastes

(See previous chapter for the flavours of common meats, fruits
and vegetables).

One of the most popular dishes that we taught in my cooking school was
guai wei’r ji
(‘strange-flavoured chicken’), where shreds of tender chicken meat are topped with a sesame paste sauce, which is sweet, sour, spicy and salty. There was one occasion when the lid fell off the soy sauce bottle and the sauce was frighteningly salty. Xiao Ding did not panic – instead she added more sugar and the taste was, thankfully, masked. Sadly, this practice has been adopted by food manufacturers who use salt as a preservative in sweet products and create overprocessed versions of flavour combinations which at first appear satisfying but leave the body feeling cheated. Lemon or blueberry muffins taste good because they are sweet and sour, but the large amount of sugar used in commercial recipes also hides incredibly high levels of salt. Cheating nature in this way will not result in a well-balanced body; the equivalent Chinese meal would be a bowl of
zhou
with splash of soy or fish sauce (salty) and another of chilli sauce (pungent and sweet).

Xing
– shape

Vital as balancing the flavours is, this is not the only weapon in the Chinese cook’s armoury. When choosing his ingredients a Chinese chef will not only be aware of what will taste good, or can be made to taste good, but also what looks good. Shape can be an intrinsic quality of an ingredient – as with long thin beansprouts, the knobbly heads of cauliflower or pieces of sweetcorn – or it can be fashioned by the chef to allow an ingredient to cook in a certain way. Over the years, as I picked crisp slivers of carrot or perfectly fashioned pieces of broccoli from colourful stir-fries, tossed wafer-thin slices of meat and vegetables into a simmering pot or delved into clay bowls with my chopsticks to find perfect squares of beancurd, I began to appreciate that the shape of ingredients affects both their appearance and eating quality. Pieces that are all the same size cook evenly and maintain their shape through the cooking process, resulting in a dish that is appetizing and an eating experience that is strangely more satisfying than when foods have been randomly chopped.

Slicing and dicing

By now you will appreciate that most of the hard work in Chinese cooking is in the preparation. An invaluable tool for the Chinese chef is his
dao
(the word means ‘knife’ but in the West we usually describe these large, flat, rectangular blades as ‘choppers’), used for practically every cutting or shaping task, and for mashing, mincing and scooping up cut ingredients too.

A set of sharp knives can do many of the same jobs as the chopper but would not be in keeping with the simplicity of the Chinese kitchen, and no single other knife is as versatile as a
dao
– nor can they be wielded at such speed or used for mashing and scooping functions. Anyone can use a chopper – and practically everyone in China does. It is simply a question of practice. There are three rules for use: sharp, straight and concentrate.

A brief run-through of the Chinese vocabulary of food shapes may help you think about how you can make your meals more visually interesting but uniform:

Da kuai’r
– chunks. Large chunks are used for stewing or braising. Chicken and other fowl are chopped bones and all, so as to make a rich and nutritious stock, to which fresh or dried vegetables or beancurd are added.

Qie pian’r
– slices. Long round vegetables are best for slicing. Use the chopper to cut a slice off one side to create a flat surface, then lay the vegetable horizontally and slice. Slices are best lightly simmered, shallow or deep-fried, since stir-frying tends to break up the pieces.

Si
– slivers. Shredded or matchstick pieces are ideal for cooking quickly over a high heat and are also used in steamed dishes. First cut the vegetable into long slices (you can achieve minimum waste if you slice on the diagonal). Then with one hand flatten out the slices and in the other use the
dao
to shred them.

Tiao
– small strips. Only choice cuts of meat or tender, firm beancurd are suitable for cutting into finger-sized pieces for stir-frying. These pieces are often partnered with lengths of vegetable (see
duan
below).

Duan
– lengths. Ingredients that are long and thin, such as green beans or celery, can simply be chopped into lengths, often on the diagonal for a more attractive appearance. They are usually blanched before stir-frying.

Ding
– diced. Firm vegetables such as potato, bamboo shoots, carrot and water chestnut and lean pieces of chicken, pork, beancurd and fish are all suitable for cutting into small cubes. First cut into thick slices, then chop into strips and then into cubes. These cubes can be cooked together with naturally small foods such as pinenuts, peanuts, peas or sweetcorn.

Duo sui
– minced. Chinese chefs mince food with a chopper, you may use your electric mixer. Minced meats, vegetables and beancurd are used as a stuffing, or sometimes quickly fried and sprinkled over a dish.

Da zhi duo sui
– roughly minced. Garlic, ginger, spring onion, chillies and other supporting ingredients are cut into tiny pieces for a variety of uses.

Having become used to eating and preparing dishes where the ingredients are uniformly fashioned into a particular shape, I find myself surprisingly offended if presented, for instance, with a minestrone soup where large irregular lumps of potato take their place among long slivers of cabbage, and round slices of carrot. Such a meal neither looks good nor is as enjoyable to eat as when the same ingredients are cut into pieces of the same size.

Se
– colour

The vibrant colours of the Chinese market are reflected in the Chinese table. I particularly love the way many market stallholders sell only one type of ingredient, so the tomato stall will be a sea of red, verdant greens represent every shade of the colour and piles of silver bean and yellow soy sprouts glint in the sunlight. Other stalls display a colourful mosaic, laid with much thought so that brightly coloured carrots or sweetcorn and, my favourite, red radish provide light relief among the greens and browns.

It is not difficult, therefore, for the chef to bring home the foods he needs to create a meal that is equally attractive to the eye. The homely stir-fry of tomato and egg that graces many a family table is a significant dish for its use of contrasting colours as well as a nutritious combination. The tiny flecks of carrot in a pale green winter melon soup catch the eye as well as representing the
yin
and the
yang
, opposing forces that always contain a little of each other.

Kou gan
– texture

It is easy to appreciate the attractive appearance and vivid colour combinations of a Chinese meal. The final dimension, texture or
kou gan
(which literally means ‘mouth feel’) takes a bit more getting used to. Nowadays one of my favourite dishes is called
Lo Han Zhai
(‘Buddha’s Delight’), but I have to admit that it took a while for me to get used to it. It is renowned for its esoteric ingredients, which include bamboo shoots and beansprouts (both crunchy), silver ear-fungus (slippery and chewy) and a sea vegetable best translated as ‘hair moss’ (hair is exactly what it looks like and feels like in the mouth). My ultimate
kou gan
experience, though, is something called
zhu ti,
which is the pith of the bamboo stalk, found between the outer and inner layers. The first time I found it I was convinced it was from some aquatic creature, or possibly an old gauze dressing off somebody’s toe!
Zhu ti
is actually a terrific ingredient because it absorbs the flavours of whatever else is in the soup and releases them slowly into the mouth, resulting again in the comfortable feeling of satiety that I associate with Chinese food.

Tomato and egg

Ji dan chao xi hong shi