For a long time, I thought of tofu as a sort of health food, eaten by those whose healthy eating obsession loomed larger in their lives than their ignored, despised, insensate palates. That didn’t interest me, so I didn’t get around to tasting any tofu for many years. When I came to understand that tofu is a common ingredient in Chinese food, I had to reconsider. So I did the worst thing one could possibly do, if the goal is to get on familiar terms with tofu: I brought home a big, pale block of the stuff from the supermarket (extra firm, please, to make it as un-gross as possible), sliced off a chunk, gritted my teeth, and took a taste.

Well. One might as well try to understand mayonaisse by eating a spoonful. It wasn’t disgusting, exactly, but it sure didn’t seem like food. A vaguely cheeselike texture, and…nothing much in the way of flavor, pretty bland, and what flavor there was, was sort of bitter and cheesy. Why eat the stuff at all, unless you’re desperate?

A lot of time has passed since then, and a lot of taste experiences. I started to tolerate tofu — those slippery, elusive, ethereal bits in a Japanese miso soup, that would disintegrate if I wasn’t very delicate with my chopsticks; firm strips of tofu in a stir-fry or in a hot and sour soup. And, best of all perhaps, strips or slices of tofu in a Chinese hot pot, slowly absorbing subtle flavors from the sauce as the dish bubbled away, its smoothness complemented by the starchy savory glycerininess of the sauce.

And, more recently, I’ve crossed over and become a serious tofu fan, which emphatically does not mean that I have any more desire than I ever did, to eat the stuff plain. I came, I think, to understand what tofu really is to Chinese cuisine — it’s a texture food, and one that absorbs flavors. Somehow, once I had tofu neatly categorized with the tree ear mushrooms, the snow fungus, the shark’s fin and other special Chinese cuisine texture experiences, it became a treat.

It was the hot pots that did it, mostly. But there were two special dishes that put me over the top. One was a cold dish of tofu, century eggs, and pickled mustard greens, from Wu Kong Shanghai Restaurant in Hong Kong. A simple but brilliant dish, pairing two strong flavors that would have been overwhelming on their own, with the light delicate texture and bulk of tofu.

The second special tofu dish, I’ll talk about in my next post. And I’ll give the recipe for the best version of it that I’ve ever had.

It does tend to freak out the Westerners, at least those who haven’t dipped their toe very far into the pool of Chinese cuisine. There it is, a whole fish, sitting on a plate, its eye glaring up at you, and you’re supposed to eat it. Why should you?

Well, how’s this for starters: if there’s one area of cuisine for which Western cooking comes across most clueless compared to Asian, it’s in the treatment of fish. Westerners should know that meat on the bone is best — we’re well versed in the magnificence of a marbled Porterhouse, practically the world experts on just what can be done with a rack of ribs, and every now and then we’ll splurge on the luxury of an expensive rack of lamb. So why do we take a nice fresh fish, and assume that the best thing we could do to it is deftly remove the fillet from the bones, cook it, and serve it up?

To paraphrase Calvin Trillin, you might have a good experience that way, but you haven’t made any effort to take advantage of the percentages. All things being equal, meat on the bone will be far better than meat off the bone, and fish is emphatically not exempt from that rule. One of the simplest and easiest meals you can make, and one of the best, is to take a wonderfully fresh whole fish, spend about 10 minutes dressing it for the steamer, then just let it steam for 10 minutes or so.

I remember watching an early season of the Survivor television show. Maybe it was the second season. Anyway, they’d caught some fish, and it was a festive moment. Here they all were, visibly getting thinner from week to week, making their way with barely enough food, and one of their number had brought home several wonderful fish out of the sea. So what did they do with this bounty of fish? They cut the fillets off of them and cooked them, leaving behind, abandoned, ignored on the discard pile, bones with plenty of meat on them, the head, the cheeks. Even the skin would probably have been tasty, the fish being so fresh. All of this tasty treasure was considered trash, by a group of hungry people. It just goes to show how far the Western idea of what’s edible on a fish has been ingrained in the culture.

The Chinese know better. Sometimes painfully so. I can go to some Bay Area Cantonese restaurants, and have a delicious steamed whole catfish, for far less than $20. But if I go to Hong Kong, many restaurants seem to be charging US$50 and more for a whole steamed fish (Garoupa, usually) no larger than that catfish. I don’t understand why, but it sure is good.

First, of course, you have to get yourself a nice, fresh whole fish. If you do any fishing, of course you’re in great shape, though the recipe that led to the fish pictured above is aimed primarily at neutralish white fish. Fish for perch or pike or bass, and you’re in business. Fish for salmon or bluefish or trout, and some rethinking is in order.

But let’s say you don’t fish. What do you do? I mean, I’m lucky, I live in the Bay Area, and I can get to places that will take a fish out of a tank, give it a couple of whacks on the head, clean it, and send it home with me in a bag. If you don’t have that, though, hope is not lost. Talk to the best fishmonger you can find locally. I would be very surprised if he/she were totally unable to order you a whole fish or two.

There’s another piece of good news here. In Western markets, they charge a bunch of money for fish that is loaded with flavor (fresh sardines are a fortunate exception). Salmon and tuna cost a pile of money. But all you need for a good..no, great steamed fish is a nice neutral whitefish. Sea bass is really great. Tilapia, the cheap junk fish that used to be discarded before the boats reached the shore, is very good, and is in fact my most common choice for steaming, because it is so often available live.

The fish in the picture above isn’t a Tilapia, though. I happened to be at my local Whole Foods (which is about 6x closer to my house than the place that’ll whack a nice Tilapia on the head for me), and I saw a couple of these guys staring out from the fish cooler. They’re called Tai Snapper. No, I have no idea why they’re called that, but their eye was clear (an important indicator of freshness), and they looked cool, and I’d never had them before, so they had to come home with me.

I have a standard default preparation for a whole steamed fish, one which I got from the book that helped me take my journeyman steps in Chinese cooking, Barbara Tropp’s The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking. It works very well with many neutral white fish, and I love it. But I do feel I’ve only scratched the surface of the possibilities. One favorite Bay Area Cantonese place (I’d tell you what it is, but they changed owners recently, so I don’t know if it’s still good) makes use of yellow chives in their steamed fish, with magnificent results.

But here it is.

Steamed Whole Fish with Black Bean

Sauce mixture:

Let’s pause on this ingredient. The brand matters a lot. For some years, I used a brand that came in a plastic bag, with black and white and red on the package. Hearing some talk about vastly superior black beans that come in a yellow cardboard tube, I looked around and found them — and they were about 3x better — richer, earthier, more of everything a black bean should be. It’s worth seeking out these superior black beans. I wish I could show you a picture, but I repackage mine in glass jars, and my Web searches turned up no picture. There’s the brand with the yellow cardboard tube, and there’s also the Pearl River Bridge brand, which should be just as good.

Chop the black beans and mix with the other sauce ingredients

Wash the fish inside and out, pulling any stray dark colored organs out as you wash. Pat dry inside and out.

Cut slits into the fish’s sides, from top to bottom, angled a bit, cutting down to the bone, or almost. Rub the salt into the fish, inside and out, rubbing it into the slits you cut.

Place the fish into a low bowl you can use in your steamer (I use Pyrex pie plates for my small steamer; what’s pictured above is a large one I found for my large steamer). You don’t want a plate — the fish exudes delicious juices during the steaming that are great with rice. Pour the sauce evenly over the fish, then scatter the ginger threads and scallion over it.

Bring water to a full boil in your wok, then add the bowl to the steamer, and the steamer onto the wok. Steam over medium-high heat for 10-15 minutes, depending on the size of the fish. Check after 10 minutes, and every couple of minutes thereafter, until it’s just cooked all the way down to the bone at the thickest flesh.

A fish like this, served with a pile of white rice to soak up the wonderful savory juices, is all you need for an elegant and satisfying meal. And it makes for a very spectacular presentation if you’re serving guests — as long as they can deal with that eye, staring up at them.

Still, I wouldn’t make it if it weren’t delicious, and I’ve made it over and over, because I love it, and it’s one of my wife’s favorites. Moist, resilient, oily chunks of chicken breast, livened up with plenty of garlic and ginger, and, this dish’s distinctive touch: thin strips of flavorful red pepper. The pepper shreds cook in the oil, so they’re softened, the raw-peppers bitterness goes away, and their subtle sweet flavor, and their chili-hot bite, suffuses the dish.

It matters a lot what sort of pepper you use. This is not a dish for red bell pepper — you want more character, and a denser texture, than that. One reasonable thing to do is use a small quantity of red serranos (if you can find them; I usually can’t without a trip to the city, and sometimes not even then), or little fiery hot red Thai peppers. Then you get a really spicy dish, but one in which the distinctive flavor of the peppers you chose comes through. I usually use a slightly hot pepper, the Fresno pepper, a 3″ or so long red pepper that’s easily available in my area. Their relative mildness means you can use a lot of them. But use whatever nice, fresh, unwrinkled hot red pepper you can find, and adjust the quantity for your spice tolerance.

As with most dishes I’ve made a lot, I’ve done some tweaking here and there to suit my tastes. The original recipe was light on salt, so I increased the soy sauce and salt, though I use Kosher salt, which comes across less salty, so you might want to throttle back a bit if you’re not using Kosher salt. I increased the garlic, and the ginger. I’m not sure you can have too much garlic in this dish. Of course it cooks in the oil so it won’t be bitter.

The picture is a 2.5x recipe. But don’t do that in one batch unless you’ve got really serious heat available to you.

The original recipe comes from Raymond Delfs’ The Good Food of Szechuan, my first Chinese cookbook and still one of my favorites. If I ran the world, Delfs would be famous; instead, his book is out of print and you’ll have to pick it up used.

Chicken with Red Pepper Shreds

Marinade

Mix up the marinade, whisking vigorously to break the gel of the egg white and get it to mix smoothly with the cornstarch. [Update: I forgot to mention you should mix it with the chicken at this point. Duh!] Then let it sit and infuse flavor while you proceed with the chopping steps. Put in a bowl (peppers on top):

You can use more hot pepper than that if you can take the heat.

Almost there. It’s not a particularly hard recipe, but it’s really good.

Sauce

Mix in a small bowl:

I use Shao Xing wine, and not the kind labelled “cooking wine,” which contains salt. Don’t try to substitute Japanese Mirin, it’s too sweet and just doesn’t work in Chinese cooking, in my experience.

I use a Taiwainese aged vinegar that’s available in my area, but any white rice vinegar will probably do.

I like Kadoya brand.

Ok, you’re ready to cook. Add a cup or two of oil to the wok, and heat it until hot (350 degrees or so). Drain the marinating chicken, and add it to the wok, stirring it around until it turns white, then getting it quickly out of the oil and letting it drain. This step is something I’ve heard called “velveting” or “going through the oil,” and it does remarkable things for the texture of the chicken. You don’t have to do it, but the change in the results is noticeable.

Dump the oil out of the wok and add 3 tablespoons of fresh oil. Heat it until very hot, then add the peppers, ginger, and garlic. I suggested above putting the peppers on top; that’s so the garlic doesn’t hit the hot oil first, and brown.

Stir it all around, letting the flavors infuse the oil, and the pepper shreds soften, until it’s really fragrant, which may be a matter of seconds depending on how much heat you have.

Add the chicken, stir fry it until it’s almost done, which I judge by poking my finger into pieces of it to see how it feels, but you can also cut open a piece if you’re not sure. You don’t want it raw in the center, but you sure don’t want to overcook it. Chicken breast is so superb and bouncy and sweet when properly flavored and just cooked, and turns fibrous and bland when overcooked. The ideal of chicken breast stir-fry would be if the bit of pink in the center just vanished while the dish was sitting in the serving dish, still quivering from the heat of the wok.

Stir the sauce to get the cornstarch back mixed in with everything else, then add it to the wok. Stir around for a few seconds until the sauce thickens and clings to the chicken, get it quickly out of the wok and serve.

Yum!

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?

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.

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

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.

The Meat Mixture

I prefer ground chuck, which used to be ubiquitous, but has now often been replaced by the supposedly-more-prestigious ground sirloin. And don’t get the super-lean stuff

I used to be able to find this easily at any supermarket, Heinz brand. When I looked this time, it had been replaced by entirely premade gravies. So instead I chopped some carrot and onion, cooked them well in oil, added 1/2 lb hamburger, broke it up and browned it very thoroughly, added water, let it cook down until there was not much liquid left, strained, reduced the liquid to a tablespoon, and crumbled in 1/2 cube of Knorr’s beef bouillion. That was probably overkill. You could probably just dissolve a whole bouillon cube in a tablespoon of water and call it a day, maybe cutting down the salt above a bit to compensate.

I use Kosher salt

Mix the hamburger thoroughly with the rice wine, cornstarch, pepper, sugar, and brown gravy syrup/bouillion. Heat a wok or saucepan, and add the oil. When it’s hot, add the salt and ginger; when the ginger is fragrant, add the onion and celery, cooking over medium heat until the veggies are soft, about 3 minutes. Add the hamburger mixture, stirring to separate. Once the hamburger is completely cooked, turn the mixture out into a strainer over a bowl. You’ll use the liquid in the next step (which is why you didn’t want lean hamburger).

The Cabbage

Wash the cabbage and slice it into thin strips. The firm stem parts should be especially thin, about 1/8 inch. Take the liquid you drained off of the hamburger, and heat it in a wok, or a fry pan with some depth to it. Add the cabbage, little by little if your pan won’t hold it all at once. It will reduce greatly in volume. Keep stirring and cooking it until it is soft, which can take 10 minutes. Turn it out into a strainer and let cool. Thoroughly press all of the water out of it, then mix it with the flour and MSG.

Once both mixtures have cooled, combine them. Add:

Or don’t. This time, I forgot the bean sprouts, and my wife loved the final rolls as much as ever.

See the previous post for the process of filling and wrapping and frying. I know it’s hard to believe, reading the recipe, that these are good, but they really are. It’s not like stuffing hamburger and cabbage into a spring roll filling. For whatever reason, it’s much, much better than that.

The Veggies

I used green beans, as suggested as an alternate in the recipe, and regretted it — their bitterness is less appropriate than the sweetness of the peas would have been

Peel the carrots and cut them into thin strips, about the size of a small wooden matchstick. Put them into a bowl with 1 teaspoon salt, mix thoroughly, and let them sit 30 minutes. This will draw out the moisture (moisture is the enemy of a good spring roll filling). Squeeze out the water and set aside.

Slice the peas diagonally into strips about the same width as the carrots.

Soak the bean thread noodles in very hot water. Barbara Tropp’s book taught me that if you are using a Taiwanese brand, you need to soak for 5 minutes; a Chinese brand, 30 minutes. In any case, soak them until soft. Then chop them up into lengths about the same as the carrots.

Heat a wok and add the oil. When it is hot, add the ginger and scallions, stir-fry 5-15 seconds until fragrant. Add the peas and cook 1 minute; add the carrots and noodles, and stir-fry over high heat, letting the water evaporate thoroughly. Add the salt and soy sauce, turn it out onto a plate or wide bowl and let cool.

The meat

Soak the dried mushrooms in cool water until soft, which can take several hours. You can use hot water if you’re in a hurry, but I like the character better with the long, cold soak. Then cut off and discard the hard stems, squeeze out excess water from the caps, and cut them into thin slivers.

Cut the pork into matchstick-sized lengths. This is easier if you almost-freeze it first, or if you have a razor-sharp cleaver.

Peel the shrimp and cut them into matchstick-width strips. Yes, this is a pain.

Cut the bamboo shoot into matchstick-width strips. Sick of chopping yet? You’re done with that part of it.

Heat the wok and add the oil. Add garlic, ginger, and scallions. When fragrant, add the pork and cook for about 30 seconds, by which time it should be separated. Add the shrimp and cook until it’s mostly done. Add the rice wine, down the edge of the wok, and flip it around with the other ingredients as it hisses aromatically. Add the mushroom and bamboo shoot, stir everything around to combine, and when it’s all nicely heated through, turn it out into a bowl and let cool.

The Spring Rolls

Once both mixtures are cool, you can make the spring rolls. Beat the egg whites just enough to thoroughly break up the gel. Take a wrapper and lay it out with one of the corners toward you. Put two tablespoons of the veggie filling and one tablespoon of the meat filling in a horizontal strip about 1/3 of the way down from the top, and arrange it in an even rectangle that does not come too near the edges. Take the corner that’s farthest away from you and fold it toward you, over the filling. Brush the newly-exposed surface of the wrapper with the egg white; also brush the surface extending from the corner nearest you, to about 1/4 of the way up the wrapper. Fold the side corners over the filling and the brushed area you folded over the filling, and rub with your finger to seal. Roll toward you to complete the spring roll, making sure you have a good seal and no exposed filling. Your first ones will be ragged, but don’t worry about it as long as they’re sealed. After a while you get better at it.

I know it’s tempting to try to get more filling in there, and I won’t discourage you. If you can make it work, go for it.

Do this repeatedly until the filling is exhausted, or you run out of wrappers if you didn’t buy enough (1 package may be enough, 2 should be more than enough even if you mess up a few wrappers).

Heat the wok, then add the oil and heat it to 350 degrees. Add about 6 of the spring rolls and fry, turning to fry evenly, until light golden brown, about 3-4 minutes. Remove and drain on multiple layers of paper towel. Repeat, making sure the oil has heated to 350 again before adding another batch.

Here is where you should store away and freeze or refrigerate the rolls you’re not going to eat the same day. Wrap them in a paper towel, to absorb moisture, if you’re refrigerating, and put them in a bag. If freezing, wrap them individually in plastic wrap so they don’t stick together. Thaw thoroughly before re-frying.

Heat the oil back to 350 degrees, and fry the rolls in batches a second time, 1-2 minutes until nicely golden brown. This really crisps them up in a way that a single frying can’t do. I strongly suspect that restaurants fry a lot of rolls in advance, and do the second frying right before serving.

Drain on paper towels, and eat as soon as they’ve cooled enough. The filling takes a lot longer to cool than the outside, so be careful not to burn your mouth.

Enjoy!

These days, contemplating a Chinese appetizer menu, I’m really unlikely to choose spring rolls. Faced with one of those appetizer plates offering 6 or so possibilities, I’m likely to leave the spring rolls to others at the table.

Why? Is there something wrong with spring rolls as a concept? Not at all. There’s great pleasure in a good spring roll. The teeth crunching on a wonderful crisp outer layer, passing through the softer underlayer of the wrapper, firmed by the oil but not crisped by it, and finally the filling, a mixture of veggies for body, meat and mushroom for umami, and a bit of shellfish to round out the flavors.

And spring rolls are a great comfort food. Fried crunchy things are appealing — just look at French Fries. Fried crunchy things with a soft center are appealing — just look at French Fries. And spring rolls cap that off by having actual interesting flavors and textures in the interior. I’ve made spring rolls in the past, and eaten 5 or 6 of them just about as soon as they’ve (almost) cooled enough so that the interior doesn’t burn my tongue.

I do have to admit, though, that in a way there is something wrong with spring rolls. You have two choices. You can order them at a restaurant, or you can make them yourself.

If you order them at a restaurant, and you’re not in Hong Kong, where the chefs go the extra mile to put magic in a dish, chances are that they’re not going to be as good as you dreamed when you ordered them. If the oil is old and tired, you’ll taste it for sure, because the wrapper absorbs enough oil so that you can taste just what it’s like. The filling, which really needs to be loaded with flavorful goodies to overcome the impact of the wrapper, will probably be dominated by cabbage, carrots, and other inexpensive ingredients, to keep the costs down.

So you can make them at home, and fix all that. But if you wrap and fry 18-20 spring rolls, which is about what a package of wrappers and a recipe of filling will make you, you can have as many excellent spring rolls as you can stuff down that night. But what about tomorrow? You’ll never get that crust to be crisp again.

Those are the sort of arguments that keep me from making spring rolls very often. Then, occasionally, I relent, and wonder why I waited so long. Yes, spring rolls are a pain to make. Typically you stir-fry two separate mixtures, one veggie, one meat. After all that, you still don’t have food — you have to stand there with your sealing egg wash and your wrappers and your brush, and make 18 or so neat little sealed packages, and then deep fry them. If that weren’t enough hassle, many of them tend to favor one side over the other when floating in the oil, and you have to force them to stay flipped, to fry evenly, with a chopstick and/or some tongs.

Horrible. But there’s nothing like a really good freshly fried spring roll. Nothing.

So I found myself once again with a large jug of peanut oil, a supply of spring roll skins, and ingredients for two very different spring roll filling recipes.

One of these was the real deal, from the magnificent Yan Kit’s Classic Chinese Cookbook. The other was a throwback to the “bad” Chinese-American food of my childhood, a thoroughly inauthentic, and thoroughly delicious, recipe, containing hamburger and MSG, from the out-of-print Joyce Chen Cook Book. Would you believe that my wife likes the inauthentic one better, and I’m not so sure she isn’t right?

So it’s fitting that the place of honor in this series of posts about chicken wings goes to a Cantonese dish. I’ve only had this recipe for a couple of years, but it has become a favorite, and I’ve made it more than a dozen times. It has captured my imagination because it’s relatively simple to make, has relatively few ingredients for a Chinese recipe, and yet seems to incorporate so many different principles that make Chinese food so special:

1. Deep-frying, then stewing is a remarkable technique that produces both great caramelization flavors and great textures
2. Ginger is a chameleon, expressing itself in so many different and magical ways
3. Chicken wings are a special ingredient, for the reasons I outlined in the first post of this series
4. Fish essences provide a magical, elusive, savory note in meat dishes
5. Luxurious textures combine with luxurious flavors to make one feel privileged to be able to taste a dish
6. A bit of sugar brings out flavors and makes you want to keep eating

Okay, that’s a lot of verbiage for a simple chicken wing dish, but try making it, and you may agree with me that it’s deserved. Do you ever encounter some foods and ingredients that seem special to you, like they ought to be really expensive, and yet, somehow, by a quirk of fate, they’re cheap? Sardines seem that way to me. So do chicken wings, and oyster sauce. This dish combines them both.

It took me a long time to realize that oyster sauce is special. Partly that’s because I had only encountered it at Chinese restaurants, blopped on to boiled Gai Lan (Chinese broccoli), in excess and without artistry. Partly that’s because I had bought inferior versions, before discovering the good stuff, Lee Kum Kee’s luxury version. They make a more ordinary version, with a red label, but I like to spring for the fancy stuff.

How much for this luxury item? About $2.50 - $3, though I’ve seen it on sale for less.

So, to make these cheap and luxurious wings, you need:

Wash the wings, pat dry, cut into their three sections, discard the wingtips, and mix with the soy sauce.

Mix together:

and set aside. Separately mix together:

and set aside.

Add 6-8 or more cups peanut oil to your wok or deep-frying vessel. Heat to 400 degrees. Deep-fry the chicken wings in batches small enough to brown with your stove in about 5 minutes. Remove when golden-brown and drain on paper towels.

When all of the wings are nice and golden brown and drained, empty the oil from your wok (carefully!).

Now prepare:

Heat the wok until nicely hot and add 3 tablespoons of fresh oil. When the oil is hot, add the scallions and ginger, and stir-fry until nicely fragrant, just a few seconds if everything’s really hot. Add the fried wings and stir to coat with fragrant oil, then pour in the first of the liquid mixtures.

Let the wings stew, cover off, at a pretty brisk rate, stirring occasionally so all the wing surfaces get some time in the liquid, and poking any stray bits of ginger or scallion back into the liquid. At some point, 5 or 8 or 10 minutes, the liquid will be reduced to about 1/3 to 1/2 cup. Stir the water-and-cornstarch mixture to combine it, then add to the wok. Stir to coat the wings as the mixture thickens, then, when it won’t get any thicker, remove the contents of the wok to a plate, and try to resist eating them before they cool enough to not burn your mouth. I haven’t managed it yet, but maybe you can.

Here’s how mine looked:

This recipe comes from this terrific book, which has great pictures: Wei-Chuan’s Chinese Cuisine by Huang Su-Huei. I admit I doubled the recipe. What good is a single pound of chicken wings?

When I doubled the recipe, I didn’t double the water, though. I did that the first time, adding 2 cups water for 2 lbs wings, and it took too long to evaporate. Even when I quadruple it (don’t try it unless you’ve got serious BTUs on your stove), I only use 1 3/4 cups water, and do some extra stirring to make sure it all gets exposed to the delicious stewing liquid.

It’s not very precise, this business of trying to make the liquid evaporate at the right time. You need an ingredient which will forgive imprecision, for which a variation of 30% or more in the stewing time doesn’t really make much difference. Pork shank works. So does pork belly. But you wouldn’t want to do it with chicken breast.

Which made me surprised when I encountered a Shanghai recipe that suggested applying this technique to a whole (cut-up) chicken. I dutifully followed the recipe, and while it was terrific and juicy for the most part, the chicken breast was hopelessly stringy. This time, I decided to use wings, instead.

The recipe comes from this little book, which I picked up in Hong Kong. That link is to the only place I found it online, and it’s a Singapore source. I’m not sure where to tell you to get it in the U.S.

Adapted for wings, and doubled to allow for some leftovers, it goes like this:

I like Pearl River Bridge brands of both of these, but if you’re in Hong Kong, pick up some soy sauce from Kowloon Soy in Central, and prepare to be amazed.

Okay, I increased the ginger a bit from the original recipe

The original, un-doubled recipe calls for 2 cups of water. I’ve learned that just doubling this for a doubled recipe means you have too much liquid to evaporate. You’ll have to learn, for your stove, what an appropriate amount of liquid is.

Cut the wings into their 3 segments, discarding the wingtips or saving them for stock. Wash the wings and pat dry. Deep fry in batches in 400 degree oil until golden brown, about 6 minutes. The wings will stew so it’s not critical that they be cooked through. Drain on paper towels.

Mix together the soys, rice wine, water, and ginger. The recipe says that you should not add the sugar until the sauce is mostly reduced, but I ignored that, just mixed it in at the beginning, and nothing bad happened. Still, they came out darker than the picture, and I’d imagine that if you added it later, you’d get less of a caramelization effect. I liked the caramelization so I’ll keep doing it my way.

Empty the wok, then heat it over high heat and re-add a few tablespoons of oil. When the oil is hot, add the scallions and briefly saute them until just wilted. Add the fried chicken wings and the liquid, stirring to coat the wings. Let the liquid boil and adjust the heat for a vigorous uncovered simmer. Stir and turn the wings from time to time, as the liquid reduces, so that all sides get some simmering time in the liquid. As the liquid turns thick and glaze-like, stir more often, and finally you’ll reach a point where all of the sauce is clinging to the wings. That’s the time to serve them.

Mine looked like this:

Dark, rich, decadent, delicious. Add a nice green veggie and you’ve got a complete, but messy, meal. The same recipe works great with chicken thighs and drumsticks, too. Make sure you fry them long enough to get the large quantities of fat they carry to exude into the frying oil.

Chicken wings are cheap. That’s odd, really. They only come two per chicken, so they ought to be scarce. They’re easy to cook, so they ought to command the sort of premium that a beef tenderloin does. Why aren’t chicken wings expensive?

My own theory is that the relatively high cost of things like tenderloin and chicken breast in the U.S. is due to the influence of French cuisine ideas here. The relatively flavorless filet mignon (note the adoption of the French name) and chicken breast (okay, I don’t know how to say that in French) form an ideal placid substrate for the sauces that are considered by some to be the glory of French cuisine. Glory or not, this is the sort of thing that gets considered hifalutin’ cooking in the U.S. So the easily-overcooked, realatively flavorless chicken breast costs more per pound than a tasty drumstick or savory wing.

Consider the positive qualities of the chicken wing. It deep-fries to a beautiful crispness, leaving you with a perfect skin-to-meat ratio. It stews well, better than any other part of the chicken, and without a tendency to shed its skin. It’s actually hard to overcook. Wings fried 6 minutes in 375 degree oil are juicy and flavorful; wings fried 12 minutes are sort of gnarled but chewy and tasty. A single chicken wing provides its own variety — the larger bite of the mini-drumstick segment, and the ultimate meat-on-the-bone experience of chewing all those glistening bits off of the two-bone segment. It retains its flavor even in the presence of aggressive spicing. It’s fun to chew. It defies pretensions — just try eating chicken wings with a knife and fork. And, it looks cool.

So why aren’t there more wonderful chicken wing recipes? Actually, there are pretty many. It’s just that I haven’t found as many as I think there should be. I admit I don’t know what the French and Italians do with chicken wings as a separate piece, but I have enought respect for both of those cuisines that I imagine that they must have figured out something. The Chinese, of course, have not missed out on the special qualities of the chicken wing. More to come on that point.

Even the U.S., which barely has a cuisine outside of the South, has a special chicken wing recipe. It’s almost trivially simple, and really really delicious.

Buffalo Chicken Wings

At least 6-8 cups. I prefer peanut oil for its ability to withstand high temperatures, and avoid corn oil, mainly for reasons of flavor.

I like to make about 4 lbs at a time

Frank’s Hot Sauce

Very roughly, 1/2 cup of Frank’s per lb of wings. You MUST obtain Frank’s Hot Sauce in order to make the true Buffalo Chicken Wing. It’s milder than other hot sauces, or 1/2 cup of it would about kill you. Franks has its own distinctive and special flavor; it’s not fruity like other hot sauces. Substitution just won’t work here. But I’ve found Frank’s Hot Sauce to be pretty available in various parts of the U.S., which makes it pretty shocking to me that restaurant wings rarely seem to use it.

About 1/4 - 1/2 as much butter as hot sauce, to taste. Salted or unsalted, doesn’t seem to matter much.

A matter of taste. If, at the very end, your sauce isn’t lively enough for your taste, add just a little white vinegar to liven it up.

Traditional Accompaniments (optional)

Cut the wings into their 3 segments, discarding the wingtips or saving them for stock-making. Rinse them and dry very thoroughly to avoid spatter.

Heat the oil to 400 degrees in a pan deep enough that the inevitable spatter won’t set your kitchen on fire. Fry the chicken wings in batches until golden brown and cooked through, at least 6 minutes per batch, and drain on paper towels. You should judge your batch size by how much heat your stove can put out. I’ve made them with an apartment stove that could only support 6 wing segments per batch, and I’ve made them over my 30,000 BTU wok burner, which supports about 1 - 1 1/3 lbs per batch, and on some stoves in between.

Heat the hot sauce in a small saucepan until just simmering. Stir in the butter (cut it into small chunks first if it’s cold). You want that French “finishing a sauce” effect where they butter doesn’t heat so much that it turns greasy instead of creamy. When the butter is just melted, and there’s enough of it to get the balance between the rich creaminess of the butter and the bite of the hot sauce right (add vinegar if needed to satisfy your palate here), take it off the heat.

Put the wings in a large, low bowl, and pour enough sauce over to coat, then toss until the wings are thoroughly and generously coated.

Serve with extra sauce on the side for dipping. To be traditional, also serve washed celery sticks and blue cheese dressing for dipping the celery in.