posted
So, last night, I cooked my first truly successful Chinese food (apart from potstickers).
I stir-fried cabbage, broccoli, some torn-up nori, and whatever other vegetables we had in sesame oil ( really the key, I think) with ginger, salt, soy sauce, and red pepper.
With the advent of all the other food threads, I think Chinese Food needs a place of its own Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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My secret ingredient to homemade Chinese food is oyster sauce. Coupled with sesame oil, it is the touch that makes chinese food taste like chinese food.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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According to my officemate (who brought in some awesome-smelling beef and broccoli leftovers a couple of weeks ago), the secret to authentic-tasting Chinese food is including beef or chicken stock in the mix.
Since when is nori Chinese?
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
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Chinese five-spice powder is another secret. Also, a wok is a necessity. There is something about the shape, construction and cooking techniques used with the wok that make it a requirement of good Chinese cooking.
Posts: 2848 | Registered: Feb 2003
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Dang, you guys are scaring me with your oyster sauce and your beef stock.... I hope the places in town aren't lying to poor vegetarian Mark!
Posts: 2220 | Registered: Jun 1999
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You can make perfectly wonderful vegan Chinese, Ayelar. I have.
And while I can't comment on oyster sauce, never having had any, I will agree on the sesame seed oil. Preferably toasted sesame seed oil, but raw is fairly close.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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I just bought a new wok Saturday evening. An authentic hand hammered one from the South East Asian grocery. I can hardle wait to stir fry something in it.
The South East Asian grocery is a wonderful place, so many festive ingredients. Tamarinds, fish balls, dried mushrooms, rice noodles, squids, green, red and yellow curry paste, taro root flour, jasmine tea.
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I love chinese noodles of all sorts. Whenever we go to a new chinese restaurant I always try their noodles. Each one calls lo mein, cantonese, pan noodles a bit differently.
I also love tempura. We bought a big batch of tempura batter mix from a chinese grocery. We had tried it at home, but didn't quite get the right consistency.
Plum sauce is good.
Also, after hitting the chain PF Changs, we went home and tried to make lettuce wraps with shredded chicken, cherries, nuts and chili sauce. Mmmm! Not quite as good as the restaurant, but very good.
Posts: 1777 | Registered: Jan 2003
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I like Plum sauce. Hmm... rice wraps with plum sauce and peanut butter sauce...
I think that's more Thai than Chinese.
Dan, if it's a sincere question, I highly reccomend the oyster sauce. It sounds somewhat gross to my seafood-hating ears, but it makes all the difference.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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Oh, please. If you're going to object to Americans having difficulty distinguishing between Chinese, Thai, Japanese, and other Asian cuisines -- what about the fact that there are (at least?) two distinct Chinese cuisines? Or that most Americans have no real idea what EITHER is like?
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I would have no problem with a Chinese man lumping California cuisine, Southern barbecue, and New England seafood into generic "American" food, especially because it wouldn't even be incorrect to do so. Likewise, an American not distinguishing between Szechwuan, Cantonese and Hunan cuisines and just saying "Chinese food" is not really wrong.
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
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I believe Hunan is Chinese for "You don't need that tongue any more, excuse me while I burn it off."
That is the only difference in Chinese food that I am aware of, but then nobody ever said I was aware of much.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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So we should change the title of this thread to "Asian Food," so tempura and nori can be discussed here?
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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*giggle* Sorry. Yes, I like ASIAN food. Most of the "Chinese" restaurants that we frequent often offer plates from different regions. I find "Indian" restaurants to be the same way.
If you really want to be technical, though, American "Chinese" food is more American than Chinese anyways.
Posts: 1777 | Registered: Jan 2003
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I'm not saying the thread title needs to change. I'm just saying that calling tempura Chinese is like talking about French wienerschnitzel or Italian bangers and mash.
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
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Darn you people with access to transportation that can get you to chinese grocery stores. I have to make do with overly expensive mediocre soy sauce and sesame oil with halfway decent tofu, which is all very bad on a poor college student's pocketbook! Ah well...real food is still good. Satyagraha
Posts: 1986 | Registered: Apr 2001
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The chinese place in West Yellowstone has a really excellent orange beef (or is it orange chicken). It makes me drool just thinking about it.
I'm looking for a good recipe to baptize my new wok. Any suggestions. I have some japanese eggplant, tofu, chicken, many asian spices, about 8 different varieties of rice, rice noodles of several diameters, chillies, and onions on hand but I can get other things as needed.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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quote:Well, you can go yell at the Sunshine Grocery in Urbana Champaign, then, because I'm pretty sure that's where I got the tempura batter
I just might. The nerve of those Chinese people, daring to think they can sell Japanese food and get away with it!
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
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FWIW, for the first ten or fifteen years of my life, the only place I ever had tempura anything was in Chinese restaurants, where we loved to order tempura shrimp.
-ignoramus
It's understandable that people wouldn't know better. It's not like not knowing where Canada is on a map. The only place where we can develop an underanding of what is what is in restaurants, and if they're not authentic . . .
But I share in your frustration . . . each time somebody says "I don't like Cuban food--I don't like anything spicy!" Posts: 1001 | Registered: Dec 2002
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I'm looking for a good recipe to baptize my new wok.
I'm a fan of simple faires when bringing in new cookingware. Simple but good of course. Last night, I finally got around to trying out a recipe that my father sent me, I made it into a vegetarian and a meat dish:
2 boxes of firm tofu 1 bag of frozen peas and carrots (you can use fresh ones if you want, but we're college students and thusly lazy) 1 can of corn a smidge of salt and pepper (according to taste) about 2-3 teaspoons of corn starch (I measure by tapping the box and going hmm...that's looks like it's enough) 2 cups (or so) of broth an undisclosed amount of chinese mushrooms (one person wasn't partial to mushrooms and thusly I didn't use any) a smidge of sesame oil (yet again, dab it in as you're cooking) a smidge of soy sause (you may be able to do without the salt) you can use any kind of ground meat, personally I suggest ground pork, but we used ground beef last night which is rather edible as well
First, you boil the vegetables in plain water. dice the tofu into about 3/4 inch cube peices. start to lightly stir fry the tofu in the wok (use VERY little cooking oil, for you will be pouring everything else in there, personally I've learned from my father and use canola oil because it's healthier, but there isn't a difference in taste if you use vegetable oil). If you're cooking this with ground meat, you obviously want to put the meat in first and let it cook, and then throw in the tofu. When the vegetables are done, and the meat is mostly cooked, throw the vegetables (strained of course), stir it all together and then add the broth and everything (except the corn starch) to your liking. When it start to bubble lightly (I usually cook between medium and high heat when doing this) add around two teaspoons of corn starch, this tickens up the soup. Serve over rice, simple, yet yummy. Satyagraha
posted
For the greatest eating experience of your life, find an authentic Morroccan restaurant. Expensive, but good, and semi-Asian.
Posts: 767 | Registered: Oct 2003
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We've eaten at the Marrakesh restaurant in Epcot and enjoyed it, but I certainly wouldn't go so far as to call it "the greatest eating experience" of my life. (It wasn't all that expensive, either.)
Posts: 1001 | Registered: Dec 2002
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Every three years or so my uncle asks for a big sushi and tempura blowout for his birthday so the whole family [aunts, uncles, cousins, boyfriends, girlfriends] gets together at granpa and grandma's house and we cook up a storm. Roll after roll of sushi is made with many ingredients [avocado, carrot, spinach, cucumber, daikon, fake crab, etc. (not much raw fish because although we all like it -- that gets expensive for 24+ people]. A large vat of miso is heated up for the soup course. Many pounds of shrimp are deveined and butterflyed, and myriad vegetables are sliced and peeled [mushrooms, broccoli, potatoes, carrots, yams, zuchini] and then 2 or 3 electric woks are heated up (electric so you can get the temp just right and so you can have several stations) and then there is a 40 minute frying frenzy. We end up with several trays worth of tempured goodies. The batter is perfect and homemade (recipe from a cookbook of authentic Japanese 'peasant' cooking).
It's the most awesome food gorge ever. Not bad for a Mormon family with roots in southern Utah.
Also: the great thing about making your own tempura is that you are assured that the oil used is fresh and of decent quality. Nasty oil is what dooms tempura in some restaurants.
Posts: 3423 | Registered: Aug 2001
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The best Chinese I ever had was in France, where most Chinese restaurants are more Vietnamese than anything. They make nemes, which I also saw called nāmes, spring rolls that you eat wrapped in fresh mint leaves and dipped in what was, as far as I could tell, rice vinegar.
And I have no problem mixing cultures when I cook. Putting nori in stir fry is as innocent as using potatoes in my Algerian dishes. Nothing wrong with a little cross-cultural contamination. I made Algerian won tons once, which were filled with a beef and onion mixture with coriander and cinnamon and sprinkled with powdered sugar. Good stuff.
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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Look, just to clear things up a bit: I don't have a problem with anyone putting nori in a stir fry or putting tempura batter on or in whatever they want. Some amazing flavor combinations (and almost all truly innovative cooking) can come out of combining ingredients from various cultures. And I'm not actually offended that anyone gets different cultures mixed up. It's understandable that people would be unfamiliar with cultures not their own. All I was saying is that nori and tempura are not Chinese food. Nothing more.
I do have one more thing to add:
After my small container of leftover improvised pasta, which I ate for lunch three hours ago, I think that it may actually be required by law that I hate Zalmoxis.
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
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quote:And I have no problem mixing cultures when I cook.
My favoritest Chinese restaurant of my childhood was actually a Cuban Chinese restaurant, or a Chinese Cuban Restaurant. They only billed themselves as Chinese, but they were all Cuban as well, and there were some Cuban items on the menu. When I describe it to some Americans, particularly Americans from South Florida who think Cubans mess everything up, they think it's some sort of phony place, but it's not. Rather, just as there are people living in the US who were perhaps born here but are of Chinese descent, these people were living in Cuba but of Chinese descent, and maintaining ties to that culture. They immigrated to the US just like other Cubans did, and, in this restaurant, they offered a great fusion of two very different cultures. In my opinion, they had the best palomilla steak around, far better than any of the local Cuban restaurants, because they marinated it ever so slightly in soy sauce. You could also get combinations you could never get at a restaurant that was only Cuban or only Chinese, like a palomilla steak with a side of fried rice, and maybe some wontons too!
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Now I reeeeeally want Chinese food... ::drools:: Just don't ask Bernard where 'sweet and sour' came from, you don't want to know, trust me.
Posts: 873 | Registered: Apr 2003
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For the first time yesterday, I went to the Chinese restaurant about five minutes walk away. All you can eat for £6.50 !!!! And you can choose from about fifty different things. And all the things that I tried were nice. Anyone up for chinese breakfast, lunch and tea ?!?!
Posts: 20 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:The origins of tempura go way back to the 15th Century when Portuguese traders first introduced their cuisine & later combined it with Japanese & Chinese dishes, creating Tempura. The word 'Tempura' is said to be a corruption of the Portuguese word 'Temporo' which means 'cooking'.
Other sites, though, dispute the assertion that "Temporo" means "cooking," (which I too find strange, given that it's not similar to any Spanish cognates) and suggest instead that it comes from "temperance," as it was used to cook seafood, which was eaten by the Catholic Portuguese on Fridays (just during Lent, or year-round?)
Posts: 1001 | Registered: Dec 2002
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On the subject of tempura, from what my father has told me, comes from Japanese and southeastern Chinese influence.
And yes...you do not want to know what sweet and sour comes from...though...you don't want it if you ever go to China Satyagraha
Posts: 1986 | Registered: Apr 2001
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Daniel, is the Chinese all-you-can-eat place you went to called Mr Wu's or something similar? The price seems to have increased quite a bit ... it only cost GBP4.50 three years ago...
Having said that, I've never eaten at Mr Wu's myself. Roasted duck with rice or dim sum is my usual choice ... especially in London!
Posts: 18 | Registered: May 2003
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