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
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
