Towards a theory of Chinese Marinades: Part 2

The traditional method for marinades in the west has been to work with acid and oil as the basis. The acid was to help tenderize and flavor the meat, the oil to improve the mouthfeel and succulence of the final product. 

It doesn't really work on cuts of meat common in the west and is dropping from favor. 

First off, there's no real penetration of flavor beyond the outer 1/4 inch. Secondly, the acid tended to make the meat mushy and the oil didn't offer much most of the time.

These marinades have fallen from favor in the west, and rightly so. However, with the thinly sliced meats of many asian cuisines, this sort of marinade for the shorter times still has some value. Or if you're cooking thin cutlets or paillards, don't discard the standard marinade technique either.

Of interest though is the rise of salt, glutamate and nucleotide marination. Salt and glutamates can penetrate deeply in meat in common marination times. Cook's Illustrated, particularly in their PBS shows America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country have pushed this sort of marinade into the public eye. 

Glutamate combined with nucleotides offer a boosted savoriness to a dish. The common example is Caesar Salad with glutamate from the Parmesan cheese and nucleotides from the anchovies. 
 

What does any of this mean for Asian marinades. 

Soy sauce is salty of course, but also a good source of glutamates. The rice wine, is acidic as well as offering it's own flavors.  Wikipedia offers a good list for common foods high in glutamate. Scroll down to the section on Concentration in Foods.

Salt penetrates into the meat. Depending on the length of time and concentration, salt can denature protein and help retain moisture as seen in the popularity of brining, or the recommendation of Kosher poultry, which has been salted as part of the Kosher butchering.  This last part doesn't really apply to marinades in general, but I do sometimes wonder about it Asian food where the meat is so thin. In the first link below, Jack Bishop indicates it does, but that seems fast compared to the effect in brining so I still wonder.

Fish sauce offers nucleotides. Also other meaty products that often show up in the completed dish such as mushroom, mushroom based condiments, and stock are more sources of nucleotides. 

It seems that the Asians had stumbled into this combination of flavors intuitively.

Worth reading for more information:

• NPR interview with America's Test Kitchen
• Culinary Guild interview with a Test Kitchen employee, particularly the last third or so
• IFT article on umami
• CJBIO actually about nucleotides as a food additive, but still interesting and with some good information
• Principles of Food Chemistry via Google Books  the section titled Flavor Enhancers

CNN: 50 best Chinese Restaurants in the US

CNN has a fun listing of what they consider the best Chinese Restaurants in the US. The two they picked for my area, Utah, are certainly good choices.  But Red Maple is no longer at that location as they had an oil fire that ruined the kitchen.

They're supposed to be re-opening in a new location soon out in Taylorsville. Originally, they were supposed to open in January, but they're still not open yet.

There have been some who disagree that Red Maple is particularly good. Lisa Dang's blog has a pointed critique with some valid points.  And I think they're sloppy with too much oil in many of their stir fries, but Red Maple is better than most of the other Chinese places in Salt Lake City.

I look forward to their re-opening and need to give the Golden Dragon's dim sum a try.

Cheater Hot Wings

Hot wings in the classic Buffalo style are good.They're messy to make with all the frying and butter based sauce. And messy to eat as well. So I usually take the easy way out with hot wings and start with prepared and fully cooked hot wings. Then I augment it with some extra flavor and smoke. If you don't have a smoker, they're also good grilled. Beyond the flavor boost, the cooking renders out some fat, improves the texture of the skin and turns the messy sauce into a nice glaze.

This is what Costco in my area carries and it works well.

Set up your smoker or start heating your grill. Even the broiler improves the wings if you don't have a grill.

Lay them out on the rack. Season with a Cajun seasoning. There's a lot of good ones commercially available, but I usually make my own blend without salt. This lets me build the Cajun flavors with out the dish getting too salty. I'll give my Cajun blend at the end of this post.

In summer weather, I smoke the wings for a total of 2 hours. Turn them at the halfway point and season the other side with more Cajun seasoning. If you're using a grill or broiler, watch them for picking up grill marks, darker color and drier appearance.

But this time, it was 40 degrees outside so they were cooking slower. They needed 90 minutes on a side to cook to the proper texture.

 

While the wings finish up, prepare a barbecue ranch dipping sauce. This is very simple too, just equal parts Ranch dressing and barbecue sauce of your choice. I used about 1/4 cup of each. In this case,  I'm using Stubb's Smokey Mesquite barbecue sauce though I often use Stubb's Spicy barbecue sauce.

  

Stir to mix.

 

So in winter weather, at the end of three hours, they were nicely smokey and ready for eating. 

Server the wings with the sauce and enjoy.

 

Salt Free Cajun Seasoning

I'm a fan of the guajillo pepper so I use it here. It's not traditional and if you prefer cayenne, which is traditional, then use 1/4 teaspoon of that instead. Adjust up or down to match your heat preference.

• 1 tablespoon paprika
• 2 teaspoons garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon onion powder
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
• 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon groundwhite pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon ground guajillo pepper 

Mix the ingredients and store in a spice jar with your other spices. 

Other fun additions are some ground mustard, a little ground bay leaf, dried basil. Many good variations are possible.

Funeral Potatoes

A note about the pictures this time. I'm experimenting with a High Dynamic Range photo app on my phone. So you'll notice some odd highlights in some of the pictures as I figure this out. 

In my neck of the woods, Funeral Potatoes means a mixture of convenience items mixed together and served by caring friends and neighbors to the grieving family after the funeral services.

It's basically a form of Au Gratin potatoes itself a variation on the classic Gratin Dauphinois (Wikipedia details link). I've never successfully made Gratin Dauphinois. It always curdles on me. I think it's because of my altitude and that the cream comes to a boil at a lower temp than lower elevations. So I've come to rely on a roux-based bechamel sauce to reinforce my sauce for these sorts of potato dishes. 

I needed to hurry things along, so I chopped up potatoes and set them to simmer in some seasoned water.

This is about 10 cups  total of 3/8 inch cubes raw russett potato. The water is seasoned with some kosher salt (1 teaspoon), onion powder (1/2 teaspon), garlic powder (1/4 teaspoon) and dried thyme (1/2 teaspoon)  These are the flavors I wanted to infuse into the potato.  Simmer the potatoes about 15 minutes. They'll be mostly cooked but not completely so at that point.

While that's coming to a simmer, I chopped up 4 green onions, green and white parts. 
 

And minced 2 cloves of garlic. Whack the clove or garlic wtih the flat side of your chef knife. This breaks the clove up a bit and loosens the skin from the clove of garlic. Pick out the skin.

Chop it up.

Sprinkle it with kosher salt.

Drag the knife edge across the garlic and salt with some force. You'll feel and hear the salt grains cut apart and grind the garlic. 

Repeat that a few times to create a garlic paste. 

 
Melted 3 tablespoons of butter, whisked in 4 tablespoons of flour to form a roux.

Let it cook a minute or so to cook out the flour. In the last 30 seconds of that roux cooking, add the minced garlic and stir to develop it's flavor. 

Add 2 cups of milk, whisk to form a bechamel. 

Where funeral potatoes use a can of cream of something soup, I opt for a simplified Supreme Sauce (a form of veloute) instead, being a sort of comination of bechamel and chicken stock thickened with roux.

Season with 3 teaspoons chicken base. 1/2-1 teaspoon dried thyme, pepper to taste.  Continue cooking until it thickens and starts to boil.

Add 2 cups sour cream and mix together.

Grate parmesan cheese. This is hard to give a consistent measure for as people's graters are different and so the result packs differently. So it's about an ounce to an ounce and a half of freshly grated parmesan. i grate mine on a Microplane grater. This will provide extra cheese impact in the dish without looking so heavily full of cheese and dense.

Add the cheese and the onions to the  sauce.

Combine. Taste and correct seasoning as needed. 

Add the drained potatoes to the mix--they should be about done now anyway or cook further as needed to the par-cooked stage.

Stir to combine.

Sprinkle on about 1/4 cup grated sharp cheddar cheese. This is mostly for looks so there will be strands of orange cheese in the casserole. 

Pour all that into a 9x13 baking dish.

Top with grated cheddarBake at 350 until bubbly and the top has browned, about 30-40 minutes

 

Serve while hot. 

Copycat Panera Bread Company Souffles

This recipe has been kicking around the internet for a few years. I've made it twice now. The first time without as much success as the second, but I'll help you avoid my mistakes.

You can get the recipe nice and legally from this ABC newscast link as this is Todd Wilbur's copyrighted work. The first time I thought the microwaving of the scrambled eggs seemed needlessly tedious and slow and so I did the par scramble in a frying pan. That came out dense and less appealing than anything with the name souffle.

The key step is the microwaving and stirring in between bursts. It does give the eggs the structure and lift to pull this off.  Like so many home cooks, I felt it was OK to change the recipe for my convenience but there are risks to that attitude with this dish.

I happened to just use some sausage and cheese this time, as that's what was waiting to be used up. I'm not totally cured of changing recipes. That change was a safe substitution.  

If you follow his recipe, you're stuck in making this recipe in multiples of four because that's what the tube crescent dough supplies. Any extra souffles will freeze well if you let them cool first and then wrap them tightly. Reheat in an oven or toaster oven. A microwave would work too, but will give you a soggier bread crust.

I'm thinking next time I'll try it with Pepperidge Farms puff pastry from the freezer case. I think that will give an even better texture to the crust and still be easy to do.

Towards a Theory of Chinese Marinades: Part I

This a topic I'll Likely revisit, thus the numbering. 

Executive Summary:

This is a long entry, so you might like an early summary. Balanced seasoning of salt and sweet through either salt/soy and wine/sugar with other aromatics representative of the chef.

Most stir fries marinate the protein in at least some soy sauce and rice wine, usually in equal parts. While reading Ken Hom's  Top 100 Stir-Fry Recipes, I noticed that he'd vary his marinades by a teaspoon of soy or rice wine now and then, and he used sesame oil in a lesser amount quite often as well.  And I wanted to understand why. 

That started me going back through some of my favorite Chinese cookbooks and looking carefully at the recipes and thinking about their construction. All this an effort to make my Chinese cooking more intuitive and flexible. But it's been educational as well.  This first entry then catalogs the authors I refer to most frequently and includes an effort to distill their basic marinating practices.


Ken Hom
 I don't actually own any of his cookbooks, though I've read most of them, and have been reading a few of his newer ones from the library recently. I did quite like his recent Complete Chinese Cookbook and have been waiting for the price to drop before I add it to my collection. 

If I were to characterize Ken Hom's marinade, for 8 oz of protein, it would be:
1 Tablespoon light soy
1 Tablespoon rice wine
2 teaspoon sesame oil
2 teaspoon corn starch 

He tends to reduce the wine by a teaspoon if the dish has a more pronounced earthy flavor, such as from dark soy, peanuts or with lamb or mushrooms as the main ingredient. If he's going to pass through oil or deep fry the protein, it's usually just egg white, sesame oil and corn starch. He'll reduce soy and the wine even more if seasoning with citrus flavors in the sauce as in his Quick Orange and Lemon Chicken which doesn't use a battered chicken. Apparently to not compete with the citrus flavors.


Martin Yan
Martin Yan can be pretty varied in his marinades, but his most consistent ingredients are soy, wine and cornstarch, heavier on the cornstarch than most. Ginger is probably his most frequent aromatic to add to a marinade, but oyster sauce appears a surprising amount as well.

1 Tablespoon soy, could be light, or dark, or even a T of each.
1-2 Tablespoon rice wine
1 Tablespoon corn starch


Yan-Kit So
She constructs more complex marinades, tends to marinate longer  and with a twist on adding the oils for the last half or third of marination time. I think it's interesting that she breaks with the equal parts of soy and shao hsing wine and also the addition of plain vegetable oil in combination with the sesame oil.

If I average her most commonly used ingredients, then this is her marinade for 8 oz of protein. Marinate 1 - 2 hours in the refrigerator; combine the oils and stir in for the last hour.

1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 Tablespoon light soy
2 t shao hsing wine
1/4 teaspoon black pepper (8 grinds is her usual specification)
1 1/2 teaspoon corn starch
1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
1 1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

I did learn some interesting things from her about ginger and alcohol in marinades with a little help from the people at Cheftalk. 

And Fuschia Dunlop lists Yan-Kit So as one of her more important influences.


Nina Simonds
As with the others, there's a fair bit of variation customized to the recipe at hand, but I'll delve more into how marinades reflec the ingredients in another posting.

1 Tablespoon light soy
2 teaspoons shao hsing
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

That forms her baseline. 2 t water, 2 t corn starch make enough appearances for an mentioning but not enough to be part of the baseline. Aromatics like ginger, garlic, and green onion are more likely to appear in her marinades than anyone else.


Eileen Yin Fei Lo
I cannot construct an averaged marinade for her. She's too varied in her marination practices and is prone to include some western ingredients as substitutes for hard to find Chinese wines and spirits.  She does use oyster sauce in marinades more often than most. Martin Yan is probably the other frequent user of oyster sauce.  She'll likely get her own Marinade topic after I spend more time trying to figure out what she's up to.  There's a lot of depth to her knowledge and experience.

However, from perhaps her simplest cookbook My Grandmother's Chinese Kitchen, I think there is a baseline marinade that can be extracted and looks like this:

1 Tablespoon light soy
1 Tablespoon shao hsing
1 Tablespoon oyster sauce
1 1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon salt 
1 teaspoon sugar 
pinch white pepper
2 teaspoon cornstarch

The recipes in this particular book reflect what she ate growing up and in learning to cook. So there is less meat marination going on to draw this baseline from than in her other books. But it does exhibit the kinds of flavors she grew up on. And I think this book is quite an enjoyable read in its own right for her life story.


Barbara Tropp
1 Tablespoon light soy
1 Tablespoon shao hsing wine
1 1/2 teaspoons corn starch
pinch of sugar

Like Nina Simonds, Barbara Tropp is prone to include garlic, ginger, green onion as well as hoisin, but she also exhibits a tweak where she'll skip soy and use salt or skip wine and use sugar.


Grace Young
Most of Grace Young's cookbooks compile recipes from other cooks, but The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen does capture much of her family cooking. I think there are really interesting parallels between this book and Eileen Yin Fei Lo's My  Grandmother's Kitchen. Both tell the tale of growing up Chinese and eating Chinese food and learning to appreciate it. But Grace Young grew up in San Francisco and in a more recent time. But what they share is surprising. Both are filled with good tales of family, food and life. Read them together, it's a good experience. Both have very few stir fried protein dishes too showing that how we eat in the west at Chinese restaurants is not so much how Chinese really eat.

1 Tablespoon light soy
1 Tablespoon shao hsing wine
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar 
pinch of pepper

Cornstarch does make an appearance in her marinades, but not as often as with other authors. 


Kenneth Lo
Most of his cookbooks are out of print but worth seeking out. Grace Young uses him for recipes in a few of her books.  I want to mention 3 in particular. 

Step by Step Guide to Chinese Cooking  This is from 1974 and expects that about the most authentic ingredient you'll be able to find is soy sauce. The cooking is quite different from what we'd expect today but is still respectful to the cuisine within the limits of what was available. So the recipes are carefully chosen to use only simple widely available seasonings. Perhaps the most noteworthy thing is the use of Chicken Bouillon cubes as a seasoning, something referred to as Chicken MSG in the restaurant trade of the time.  It's surprising what he pulls of in this short cookbook.

Chinese Regional Cooking from 1979 seems to be written to preserve hotel and restaurant cooking from all over China of the time as well as from regional archives. Very different recipes from what you're used to seeing in contemporary cookbooks but they work pretty well. This was written at the time that China was switching to the current form of pinyin but Lo chose to use the more familiar terms of the time. So Peking instead of Beijing and that sort of thing.

New Chinese Cooking School is from the mid 1980s but full of good color photographs and well written recipes. Barbara Tropp is still tops at teaching technique, but the pictures here and the recipes are better than Barbara's.

He's difficult to pin down on a seasoning marinade which he uses only rarely.  He uses velveting techniques a lot so there's a lot of cornstarch and egg white marinades. Also a fair bit of rubbing meat with salt and ginger, which is then paired with the egg white and cornstarch in different ways. 


Fuschia Dunlop
She  writes detailed well-researched cookbooks and has been very regionally focused in what little she's published so far.

Wine and salt comprise the most common marinade, though usually something else is also included. Ginger and green onion probably most often, but cornstarch is pretty common too. Not much soy in the marinades here. 

1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons shao hsing wine

1 1/2 inch piece of ginger lightly crushed
3 scallions, white parts only, light crushed



 

Rice Paper Bowls

While browsing through one of the local Asian grocers today, I saw something new. A specialized bowl for soaking rice papers. I thought it was a pretty slick idea to simplify the process, not use so much water and so on. Most have a rack or slot on the back to hold dry papers, but I think that's asking for trouble. I'd probably drip or spill some water into them. 

No pictures of my own yet, but Amazon has a few different ones that illustrate the idea.  In no particular order:

•  Mr. Spring Roll Rice Paper Water Bowl 
• Another Mr Spring Roll of a slightly different style (no palm tree)
• New Star International has them in different colors: Yellow (though they call it lime green?), Clear, Blue

Check your local stores if this looks like something you'ld like. They were cheaper than Amazon in my case.