Why the Chinese Don't Count Calories (9 page)

If you are a habitual dieter, the idea of basing your meals on grain foods may seem radical, but remember that Chinese people have based their diet on carbohydrates for thousands of years, and that plainly boiled staples, especially wholegrain ones, are low in fat and high in nutrients and fibre. Staple foods are cheap, easy to prepare, incredibly versatile and delicious and satisfying to eat, especially when accompanied by freshly cooked
cai
(vegetable dishes).

Steamed bread

Mantou

These simple buns are a popular staple food in northern China, often eaten with
cai
instead of rice. They are also good with soup or
zhou
, or simply on their own. Chinese people spread them with fermented red beancurd cheese, but butter is an option.

Mantou
are simple (and sociable) to make but there are several stages to the recipe, so a little forward planning is needed.
Mantou
are best eaten freshly steamed, but, in the unlikely event that you have any left over, they will keep 48 hours in a tin.

This recipe can be made either with white or wholemeal flour, but a 60–40 mix of white to wholemeal works best. Depending on the size of
mantou
you require, this recipe will make 16–24. Bigger
mantou
(some are as big as a tennis ball) tend to be moister and keep longer.

25 g/¾ oz/. cup dried yeast
½ tsp salt
2 tbsp sugar
500 ml/16 fl oz/2 cups warm water
800 g/1lb 11 oz/8 cups flour
2 tbsp oil

Put the yeast, salt and sugar in a bowl. Add a small amount of the water, dissolve the yeast, then add the rest of the water. Leave to stand in a warm place for 15 minutes or until frothy.

Sieve the flour into a large mixing bowl; make a well in the centre and pour in the liquid, gradually working in the dough. When all the water is incorporated, continue to work the dough for a few minutes until soft and smooth and all the flour from the edges of the basin has been incorporated. Add the oil and work it in.

Cover the bowl with a damp cloth and leave in a very warm place for 1½ hours. The dough should double in size.

Pick up the dough and divide it into two. It will be quite sticky and you may need to flour your hands. Divide each half of the dough into 8–12 pieces.

Taking one small piece of dough at a time, place it on the palm of one hand to form a small ball. Flatten it slightly so that you have a little round cushion and use the other to pull the outside edges into the centre. Then turn it over and flatten it on a level surface to make a flat roundish piece. Roll this into a rough sausage shape, then pick it up and roll it between your palms. Then, using this new ball, repeat the process a few times to work the dough. Finish each piece by rolling it between your palms so you have a small ball. Place each ball on a piece of greaseproof paper, flattening the base slightly and move on to the next piece of dough.

When all the
mantou
are ready place them in a steaming basket and leave in a very warm place for half an hour to allow the dough to rise again.

Finally, steam for 12–15 minutes and eat as soon as possible.

four
Eat until you are full

‘While travelling don’t reckon the distance; while eating don’t reckon the quantity. ’

The Chinese eat until they are full – and then they stop. A phrase that is uttered almost as often as ‘Have you eaten yet?’ is ‘
Wo chi bao le
’ (‘I’ve eaten until I’m full’). The statement is not questioned because it doesn’t need to be. ‘Full’ doesn’t mean ‘Oh, I would love some more but I won’t because I am watching my weight. ’ It means full.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Filling up on Western food is not difficult either, especially now that our diet has become so international. Breakfast could be eggs, bacon, sausage, tomato, mushrooms and fried bread, or croissants and pastries. If we were not counting our calories we might well enjoy a pizza at lunch-time, followed by our favourite ice-cream, and stop for tea or coffee with cakes or biscuits in the middle of the afternoon. And for those with the time to cook or the opportunity to eat out, a gourmet meal might include a deep-fried starter, a main fish or meat course with a rich, creamy sauce and chips on the side, followed by a gooey pudding and cheese. But eating like this doesn’t always result in a sensation of satisfaction – more often in an uncomfortable, bloated feeling, a surreptitious undoing of the waistband and a wash of guilt as we reach for a chocolate to eat with our coffee. Whether or not we count calories we know that we can’t eat this way every day without risking weight gain, or worse. This is why we now have the ‘healthy options’: muesli and yoghurt in place of the fry-up, a caesar or niçoise salad lunch (with low-fat dressing). Sadly though, low-fat, low-calorie meals tend to be distinctly uninteresting: scour a restaurant menu and you might find a slice of melon, a house salad, grilled chicken breast or salmon steak and a range of fruit sorbets. Faced with these rather bland and dry options, many people prefer a pattern of indulgence and denial.

I was once asked by a major retailer to put together an itinerary for a group of food technicians to help them deepen their understanding of authentic northern Chinese food. I took them to the countryside where we feasted on freshly picked soya beans boiled until tender with Sichuan peppercorns and star anise, smashed cucumber with garlic and chilli and little cornmeal cakes topped with lightly scrambled egg and bright green Chinese chives. But they didn’t really pay attention until I demonstrated a lamb stir-fry. Are the English too conservative for soya beans or are the margins much better on lamb, I wondered.

Enjoying sumptuous evening meals and lots of wine in Beijing’s top restaurants, my clients outlined the eating habits of the typical British consumer. People who want to ‘be good’, the euphemism for losing weight, or eat what they regard as healthy options, do so from Monday to Friday, the marketing director confided. Many people starve themselves all week so that from Friday night to Monday morning they can have maximum taste and satisfaction. ‘This is what the ready-meals market tries to offer,’ he said. ‘So we’ve got to forget the tofu and vegetables and think about rich meals made of meat. ’

Wouldn’t it be better, I tried to suggest, to eat tasty and satisfying meals every day of the week? Could they not promote a diet that would make nutritious food a way of life instead of an optional extra? No one took me seriously; for a start they didn’t believe such a phenomenon was possible and in any case their target was only two to three meals per week per household.

Multi-dish eating

The Chinese diet doesn’t countenance overindulgence, but it doesn’t have ‘healthy options’ either. People eat well at every meal, never making do with a couple of snacks and one main eating occasion. One great advantage of the Chinese style of eating is its multi-dish approach. Chinese meals do not have a centrepiece: the dishes arrive on the table in random order so that everyone can take a little from each of a selection of different foods. The variety of foods relieves the diners from the burden of choice and their palates from boredom. It is a relaxed and stress-free way of eating, with everyone using chopsticks to select tasty morsels from the various dishes. A Chinese table always promises satisfaction yet it is almost impossible to count calories by the chopstickfull.

In China no single ingredient is ever served in large quantities; the preference is always for a large number of different foods served in manageable amounts. Rather than increase the quantity of any particular dish, a Chinese chef will add another element to a meal. Cold dishes and stir-fries are usually served on small dinner plates or in shallow soup or cereal bowls, which show off the chef ’s exquisite knife work, rather than in large, irregularly shaped containers which would hide their qualities from view. The table might also feature a simmering tray and a clay pot, and always a big bowl of soup. By taking a little from each of the dishes the diner soon feels satiated. It is bad manners to take too much of any one dish and good manners to try a little of everything. This enables all the diners to consume a feast without feeling uncomfortable.

Children who are brought up to eat in this fashion are never overwhelmed by a mound of food. A child is much more likely to experiment with a small tasting of a new ingredient when everyone else is digging in and there is no pressure. In this way they learn to listen to their own appetites and so do not fall into the ‘American portion’ trap, where larger quantities promise more satisfaction, and which, when combined with a lifelong habit of ‘clearing the plate’, can lead to eating too much of the wrong things in adulthood. There is, incidentally, no concept of ‘children’s food’ in Asia, although many of the colourful and interesting dishes appeal to a youngster’s sense of adventure.

Eat promiscuously

In my journey into Chinese food culture I inevitably moved away from the type of Chinese dishes favoured by ‘foreigners’ towards those enjoyed by native Chinese people. Sometimes even I found myself outside of my comfort zone. Yet the more I ate, firstly in terms of quantity but most importantly in terms of variety, the better I felt. To really benefit from the Chinese approach you too need to be adventurous and accept that you cannot limit your diet to the foods you prefer.

The Chinese poet Huang Ting Jian, writing in the eleventh century, listed three bad attitudes: ‘To be greedy for something palatable, to shun what is unpalatable and to be oblivious to the source of what one eats. ’ He could also have said: ‘Don’t be fussy and squeamish or always choose what is tasty and convenient. ’ Either way his voice would most likely have fallen on deaf ears in today’s society.

Our dietary preferences are strongly defined by cultural boundaries that we are all too often blissfully unaware of, especially as ‘foreign foods’ in our own countries are cleverly adapted to local tastes so as to give us the illusion that we are cosmopolitan in our eating habits. The nature of the Western diet does not encourage promiscuous eating, instead it forces people to choose one main ingredient per meal, be it a cut of meat, a topping for pizza or pasta or a sandwich filling, and this leads people into the habit of eating the same foods over and over again, foods that are not necessarily providing total satisfaction or sufficient nourishment.

After a few years in China I became completely at ease with fungus and beancurd in its many varieties, and was not averse to seaweed, but I still found that while the students on my cooking course genuinely wanted to learn about Chinese food, they were very conservative about what they were prepared to eat. We would take a trip through the market and pass through a tempting array of street stalls, where I would buy a few of the green eggs that my children, as Dr Seuss fans, considered to be a natural partner to ham. After three months in quicklime, the yolk of these eggs turns black while the white becomes a transparent, greenish jelly. The objective of the process, which I imagine was discovered by accident, is to achieve a new combination of textures. The yolk becomes creamy and the white transforms to something akin to gelatine. At lunch-time we would peel and quarter the eggs and dress them with a simple mixture of minced ginger, soy sauce and sesame oil. My advice was always to close your eyes and take a bite. Those who had the courage to try were pleasantly surprised.

The Chinese know when to stop eating since they are relaxed in the knowledge that the next meal will be as good and filling as the one they are savouring at the time. And the nature of Chinese food is such that they have time to savour it because they use chopsticks to select small pieces from the array of dishes in front of them. With less food per bite, but more bites overall, the meal is both physiologically and psychologically satisfying. When the stomach is given enough time to realize that it is full and the mind has time to recognize this feeling, the overall sensation of satiety is very different from the one of physical engorgement that we often associate with being full in the West.