Recipe Road Test: Ching He-Huang's Beef and Chilli Bamboo Shoots in Little Gem Lettuce

My trip to China and Hong Kong was one of the most brilliant experiences of my life. (For my tips on travelling around China, see my previous blog post: http://snigskitchen.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/top-tips-for-travelling-round-china.html) The food was a real highlight. One leg of our trip involved a cruise along the Chiang Jiang river (better known to Westerners as the Yangtze). We arrived in Yichang in good spirits, but also with something of an appetite. Our tour guide wondered what we wanted and offered the option of 'burgers, KFC or Pizza'. We were puzzled and interjected 'Chinese food, please!'. He was surprised. He told us that usually all his clients complain that they've had nothing but Chinese food for three days and ask to be taken to McDonalds, Pizza Hut or KFC (as already mentioned). 

It's funny, but after three and a half weeks of travelling around China, my appetite for its flavours remains undimmed. The food is varied, vibrant and enticing.  I feel even more energised towards making Chinese dishes to taste that wonderful spectrum of texture and flavour.

Having said that, eating all that wonderful food has taken its toll. My clothes are ever so tight since I left London! One skirt I had packed can just about be done up, but only when I breathe in. It was not always thus! So I wanted to find something tasty but a little on the healthy side.

I've already written on this blog about Ching-He Huang's book "China Modern" before, when I road tested her recipe for Nutty Chicken Cool Noodle Salad (see post here). It is a favourite recipe. So it is to her book I have returned and decided to have a go at Beef and Chilli Bamboo Shoots in Little Gem Lettuce. You will find it at page 17 of her book. A similar dish was served up on Come Dine With Me, so you will find a version of the recipe here:

http://www.channel4.com/4food/recipes/tv-show/come-dine-with-me-recipes/series-4/chinese-chilli-beef-recipe

This dish reminds me of 'San Choi Bao'. It is a dish I first had at Deptford Malaysian-Chinese Restaurant Kaya House, back when it was run by Ambrose and his lovely wife. Theirs is a vegetarian version, which is such a wonderful combination of flavours, hardened carnivores do not miss meat. They put in some 'secret' ingredients, including tinned pickled cabbage. 

Other versions use pork, or chicken and I've even read that in some restaurants, they use the meat from the Peking duck as part of the filling:

http://www.notquitenigella.com/2012/05/11/healthy-vegetarian-san-cho-bau-filled-lettuce-cups/

So after shopping for the ingredients, I was ready to get cracking!

Ching-He Huang's take on this dish involves using Little Gem lettuce rather than iceberg. I am deeply grateful to her for this. It is FAR easier to remove the leaves of a Little Gem and get something resembling a small plate/shallow cup. If I had to deal with extracting intact leaves from an Iceberg lettuce, there would have been chaos here at Snig's Kitchen. I don't have the patience or the knife skills or the care. There would have been lots of torn leaves, swearing and perhaps drawn blood from a not-quite-so-near-miss with a knife. This variation is a heartily recommended!

As I have previously suggested in my Kitchen tips - it is a good idea to get all of your preparatory work done in advance, before you start cooking. It may take a little longer, but makes for a much more relaxed experience of cooking. This way there are no panics about not having peeled this, or chopped that or diced this at the time it needs to go in the pot.

One annoying thing was having to peel the individual segments of orange. Yes, Ching does recommend Mandarins. But I couldn't find any, so had to make do with Satsumas. However, I doubt that removing the membrane from the segments would have been any easier had I been able to find Mandarins. This is a highly fiddly step. My domestic goddess status has never been assured, so if some of the segments fell apart, I was neither going to get upset or start again. Broken segments? I think we can survive! I am not on Come Dine With Me and neither am I a professional chef!

Once the ingredients were prepared, the dish was a breeze to cook. Perhaps I could have made it in our households' wok, but the bottom is uneven and I was afraid to lose control of it and its contents. Far better to use a bog-standard non-stick frying pan and stay on top of things. I could control the heat, the stirring and weight of the overall contents. If you are bigger than me (chances are you are - I am a munchkin), you need not worry about this.

So I started by frying up the 'holy trinity' (ginger, garlic and chilli) in the frying pan. They sizzled, giving up their flavours and aroma, promising a great supper in due course.

Next came the minced beef. I bought some low fat minced steak meat. I have found that cheap mince is a false economy. There is too much water and foamy gunk which comes out of cooking cheap mince. I don't want that rubbish in my dinner! So best to pay more for stuff which has had the fat trimmed off and has as little water added as possible. Better still, make your own. I DO have a mincer which gets used reasonably often, but this time I decided against the extra work of using the mincer and cleaning it out afterwards. 

Next up came the onions and mushrooms. My only real deviation from Ching's original dish was the addition of two thirds of a red pepper, diced. I could not have sold the dish to Him Indoors as a supper dish without a little more taste, colour and flavour. It is a sympathetic ingredient which thankfully worked rather well.

As the mince browns, it needs turning over, and then the sauce ingredients (light soy sauce and sesame oil) need to be added and mixed thoroughly. These will infuse the ingredients and get cooked out to add moisture and subtle flavour to the dish. 

The spring onions and coriander are added at the last moment. They don't need much cooking, and you want to keep their integrity. 

The last task is  the assembly. The beef mixed is divided up between the Little Gem leaves, and them topped with the orange segments and chopped peanuts. A simple operation, but looks extremely effective and colourful. I served up the dish with hoping that it tasted as good as it looked.

So what is the verdict? Well, it is remarkably tasty. And the variety of ingredients gives a good variation of texture in each bite. The sweet but slight tartness of the orange plays against the crunch of the Little Gem and the deeper tastes of the beef. An enjoyable, flavourful, healthy dish.  Because you can eat it with your hands,  you don't even need to get any cutlery dirty! So it saves on the washing up! 

Thanks Ching! Another great meal from your debut book!

If you want to buy China Modern, the ISBN number is 978-1-85626-673-4, and it is published by Kyle Cathie.

For those of you who think lettuce or Little Gem are dull, there is another variation I found online. This involves serving the beef in hollowed out tomatoes

http://jaejiahui.multiply.com/journal/item/94/Beef-and-Chilli-Bamboo-Shoots-in-Tomato-Cups

Recipe Road Test: Ching-He Huang's Nutty Chicken Cool Noodle Salad

In previous 'Recipe Road Test' articles, I have tried to recreate dishes based on the written instructions of those more experienced at recipe writing than I. I've been trying to learn what makes a good recipe. Obviously, taste is the most important criterion; if it don't taste good, it's never going to be eaten the first time, let alone be cooked the second! However, other important factors are how easy the dish is to make overall and how much time it takes. Another consideration is how enticing and attractive the dish looks, because after all, we eat with our eyes first.

This dish makes salad seem like a treasure hunt, with its varied vibrant colours. Although the dressing is quite calorific, it is indecently tasty, and given the rest of the dish's low fat count, can be forgiven.

We made this dish having had roast chicken the day before. It is a completely excellent way of using up leftover cooked chicken. Chicken sandwiches are all well and good, but to essentially get a 'free dinner' out of your Sunday roast seems like getting a wonderful present.

Ching-He Huang's recipe comes from her first book, China Modern. Her concept for the book is to concentrate on the different influences shaping contemporary Chinese food; ethnically Chinese living in Europe or America are influenced by Western flavours and techniques, hence broadening the cuisine. China's neighbours add their own special touches such as different and diverse spices or more tropical ingredients. Her recipe is set out verbatim below, with the road test to follow.

Nutty Chicken Noodle Salad

Serves 2 as a main or 4 as a starter

Ingredients:

400g dried whole-wheat flour noodles

toasted sesame oil for dressing

½ cucumber, cored and cut into long strips

1 large carrots, cut into long strips

1 yellow pepper, deseeded and cut into long strips

1 mango, stoned and cut into long strips

1 spring onion, cut into long strips

350g cooked skinless chicken breast, shredded

For the peanut dressing:

6 tbsp olive

1 tbsp sesame oil

1 garlic clove, crushed and finely chopped

1 tablespoon minced ginger

1 red chilli, deseeded and chopped

2 tbsp light soy sauce

2 tbsp rice vinegar

3 tbsp crunchy peanut butter

1 tsp brown sugar

juice of 1 lemon

Handful of chopped roasted peanuts (optional)

Preparation time: 10 mins plus refridgerating

Cooking time: 30 mins

Method:

1. Cook the noodles according to the pack instructions, then drain and rinse in cold water. Drizzle with a few dashes of sesame oil to keep them from sticking together. Place on a plate and cover with clingfilm and chill in the fridge whilst you slice and prepare the rest.
2. In serving bowls, place equal amounts of cooked noodles. Then add layers of cucumber strips, carrot strips, yellow pepper, mango slices, spring onion strips and shredded chicken. Cover with clingfilm and refridgerate for 30 minutes. This salad tastes refreshing when cold so refridgeration is a must.
3. When ready to serve, whizz all the dressing ingredients in a blender and pour a generous amount over the salad. For an even nuttier flavour and added crunch, sprinkle some chopped roasted peanuts over the top. Enjoy with chilled Chinese beer.

I started off by cooking my noodles. Having not had the opportunity to visit my local Chinese supermarket, I had to use Waitrose's own brand noodles.

They took 4 minutes to cook, and I admit I was initially sceptical, but they had enough springiness to work in this dish.

Then it was on to stripping the chicken. I should have done this the night before, and it would have saved me a lot of time. It would also have saved me a lot of space in my fridge. Still, after cooking the Sunday lunch with Him Indoors (he is a whizz at roast dinners) and clearing up the kitchen afterwards, I had had enough, and just wrapped the remaining whole chicken with foil and slung it in the fridge.

The most time consuming part of this dish is cutting all the juliennes of vegetables and fruit. Ching is a dab hand with a cleaver, having seen her on TV, and perhaps she is able to get everything prepped in 10 minutes, but I would say that it is going to take us average joes a lot longer. But looking at the colours in the bowl together, I had the feeling that this was going to be a dish where the effort would be well worth it.

The dressing involves a lot of ingredients, and seems intimidating. However, if you have Chinese or Thai food at home, the chances are you have most of these ingredients knocking around at home. The rice vinegar was something I had in for making potsticker dipping sauce, but it may be something you need to buy in especially. I used to hate the hassle of preparing ginger; peeling with a knife, grating and hoping not to lose my fingertips, but it really adds something to Indian and Chinese food, so I have gotten over my animosity. Sadly, Him Indoors ate the pack of salted peanuts I'd bought for the topping on the Saturday night, so I couldn't top the dish as Ching suggested. However I did have a jar of Chinese fried onions bought on my last trip to See Woo, so they had to do. And there you have the dish:

The verdict: this dish took much longer to prepare that I expected. If you are using leftover cooked chicken, however, you could still manage to have this as a midweek supper, because you would not need 30 minutes cooking time. This is a good 'in at 7, dinner at 8' sort of evening meal. I thought it looked very appetising in the dish. As I said from the outset, the real yardstick of a good recipe is taste, and this has it in bucketloads! The dressing seems overly thick and cloying when you mix it up, but it really works over the light cucumber, peppers and mango. It coats the chicken and noodles, transforming them from bland to flavourful. My only regret is that there wasn't any left over for taking into work the following day! This will be made again, the next time we plan to have roast chicken on a Sunday. Score!

Ching herself has an alternative version to this recipe, her own version of 'Bang Bang Chicken' which she cooked on Market Kitchen and is a little simpler than this recipe: http://uktv.co.uk/food/recipe/aid/611266

Another possible alternative to this recipe, the dressing for which would certainly be lower in calorific value, might be Allegra McEvedy's Bang Bang Chicken, to be found at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jun/03/allegra-mcevedy-recipe-chicken