Soup Noodles

I’m willing to go to great lengths to try to cook awesome Chinese food. Sometimes you have to, to make wonderful things like Peking Duck. I don’t really have much of an interest in recipes that have been streamlined, to make things easy on the cook, at the cost of losing some of the subtlety and beauty of the final result. The surest way to keep me from buying a Chinese cookbook would be to put “recipes and ingredients adapted for the American kitchen!” on the front. Sure, maybe there’re ingredients that I can’t find (though that’s less likely since my move to the Bay Area). I don’t care. Tell me what should be in there. Sure, suggest a substitute if you want, but don’t hide from me what really should be in the recipe. I might just be able to come up with it.

Not all truly delicious Chinese food is complex to make, though. There’s a wonderful recipe for cauliflower, that I found in Fuchsia Dunlop’s magnificent Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking. Actually, I have the British version of her cookbook, but I think it’s pretty much the same, except for cultural translations (the use of grams for weight, “aubergine” for eggplant, “groundnut” for peanut, things like that).

I find this recipe amusing. Usually, the Chinese solutions to culinary problems are distinctly different from those in Western cooking. Need some bread and don’t have an oven? Steam it. Want to season a fish to rescue it from blandness? Cover it with chopped fermented black beans and ginger threads before you steam it. Many Chinese cooking solutions address issues which aren’t even regarded as problems in Western cooking: altering the texture of things; removing or mitigating the “bloody” taste of beef.

But here, the solution, if not the technique, seems very Western to me.

Problem: Cauliflower is pretty bland, yet has a subtle flavor you don’t want to lose

Solution: Lots of bacon and garlic!

Works for me. And this one is easy, possibly the easiest recipe I’ve posted so far, except maybe the one for Buffalo chicken wings. Ok, there’s one thing that’s not necessarily easy: it calls for stock, which is a pain if you don’t have any around. But I’d bet it’d be almost as good with just water; and maybe canned chicken broth would be OK.

Cauliflower with smoky bacon

I doubled the recipe from the original, because it called for half a head of cauliflower, and what are you going to do with the other half?

1 head cauliflower

150 grams thick-cut bacon (about 4 slices)

4 cloves garlic

1 1/2 cups stock (I used chicken/pork/country ham stock)

The original recipe, halved from this one, called for 1 cup of stock, but with these recipes where the liquid evaporates and reduces to form a thick sauce or glaze, you don’t want to double the liquid when doubling the recipe.

salt and white pepper to taste

3 teaspoons potato flour mixed with 4 teaspoons cold water

Ms. Dunlop specifies potato flour rather than cornstarch in her recipes, and I was able to find it, but cornstarch should be fine.

3-4 tablespoons peanut oil (or lard)

Cut cauliflower florets into roughly uniform, roughly ping-pong-ball sized pieces. Cut remaining stem pieces into thin slices, if you wish to include them. You want the slices to be at a thickness at which they’ll be tender when the florets are, maybe 1/4″ or a bit less. Tough stem parts should be peeled first.

Cut the bacon into 1 1/2″ lengths, then cut the lengths into 1/8 - 1/4″ strips.

Peel the garlic and slice it very thinly.

Heat your wok until very hot, then add the oil. When the oil starts to smoke, add the bacon strips, and stir them around until cooked and fragrant. Add the garlic slices and stir everything around until the garlic is fragrant, too. Add the cauliflower, stir fry it until it is evenly coated with the oil.

Now add the stock and let the whole thing come to a boil. Let it simmer vigorously. Add white pepper (I use about 8 turns of the pepper mill), and a bit of salt if you think it will need it when the liquid reduces (this depends on the saltiness of your bacon).

The recipe says you should cover the wok and cook for 5 minutes. When I do that, though, the liquid doesn’t reduce fast enough. So I cover it for a couple of minutes, take the lid off, stir it around to make sure all parts of the cauliflower are exposed to liquid, and decide whether to cover it some more. What you want is for the cauliflower to become tender about the time that the liquid has reduced enough that you can call it a sauced dish instead of a stew.

When the cauliflower is tender to your taste, and the liqud reduced to a sauce, give the potato flour-water mixture a stir to combine, and add it to the wok. Stir things around until the sauce thickens, and serve.

Mine looked like this:

Which brings me to another point. I’ve been unhappy with many of the pictures of food I’ve posted on this site. The above picture makes the dish look gluey and much less tantalizing that it does in real life. Then I go look at other sites, and see pictures of food that made me drool over the idea of eating what I saw.

So I did some reading, got a different camera, fiddled with its settings, made the same dish, and got this picture:

I’m sure this is yet vastly imperfect from a camera geek point of view, but the important thing to me is that it looks much more like the dish does in real life, and more like something I’d want to eat, than the other picture.

I also got this picture of the dish cooking in the wok.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 2nd, 2006 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Chinese Recipes, Chinese Cooking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.