In this week's On Golden Fond : Vegetarian misdemeanours with rice paper, big fat juicy braised pork belly with ginger, anise and all those good things.
Ecumer is running so far behind in posts it's starting to get silly! This little bit of exploratory cooking was about a month ago, sometime in mid- or early-November I think. There will be a lot of out-of-sequence posts while I kid myself that I can catch up, so look for weird things to come like hearty casseroles posted when it's 45 C outside and Jerusalem artichoke dishes in December (ho-ho-ho!).
We had Firenze & DDG around for a quiet Saturday night. The purpose was to achieve Five Things #1 and also to play around with a potential dish or two for the upcoming pre-birthday party.
The first two dishes were brought on by a finger food recipe in the Aug/Sep 2009 issue of Donna Hay, being largish batons of salmon fillet wrapped in a soft rice paper roll with a few chives and then shallow fried. They looked pretty good in the photo and were provisionally put on the menu for the party and we also wanted to explore a vegetarian version.
Before you get too emotionally vested in the concept, we didn't do that good a job (first attempt and all that) and didn't end up doing these for the party. So the notes here are informed by our ideas of what we should have done as well as what we did do.
Eggplant & Pepper Rice Crispy Treats
- two cups of eggplant, chopped roughly into dice about 1 - 1.5cm. I don't salt eggplant as a rule, but if you do, do so now.
- stir fry the eggplant over medium high heat in a little vegetable oil until cooked
- stir through about a tablespoon and a half of black pepper sauce (any Asian grocery) and taste for seasoning. Eggplant doesn't taste like all that much on it's own so, for this to have some oomph, you need to be a bit assertive with the sauce. Our version used about two teaspoons of pepper sauce and was anaemic as a result.
- soak a rice paper round in a bowl of warm water for 30 seconds and put on a flat board. We used 16cm rounds and they were a bit big for finger food and a bit small for an entree. We suggest 12cm would be about right.
- put a coriander leaf flat in the middle of the roll. Put a good teaspoonful of filling in the middle and roll the wrapper around, folding the sides over first and then rolling the long edge around. Like any rice paper roll, it's important to pinch the roll closely around the filling and have a firm tight roll with as little free air inside as possible. I wasn't as good at this as I should have been and they were a bit sloppy as a result.
- cook them by either shallow frying over high heat until crisp, probably 2 minutes each side, or by giving them a good spray with vegetable oil and then putting in a nice hot oven, 220 C would be about right, until they are properly crispy all around which should take 15 minutes.
Some people are born to brown food, others have brown food thrust upon them. These are the eggplant rolls.
Mushroom Rice Crispy Treats
Exactly the same as above except the filling was bout three cups (mushrooms shrink a lot in cooking) of roughly chopped mixed mushrooms which in this case were shitake, enoki, portobello and oyster. The flavouring was a teaspoon of light soy (mushrooms love salt) and a little dash of sesame oil.
These are the mushroom rolls.
We served these with saucers of black vinegar, sweet soy and sweet chili to see what would go best. The sweet chili was actually the best match but as I think sweet chili sauce is an abomination, a Vietnamese dipping sauce (nuoc cham) would provide much the same flavour profile and be much less reprehensible.
What was good and bad about these? The flavours of the mushroom rolls were very good. Some of the rolls were still on the chewy side (not cooked long enough), but the ones that were fully crisp had a great texture. Visually these were extremely brown and didn't look pretty on the plate - perhaps we can think of some paler vegetables or just use an opaque spring roll wrapper instead. As I mentioned the eggplant was undersauced but would have been quite nice if I hadn't been quite so gentle with the papper. Definitely I need more practice with my rolling technique. Chopping and pre-cooking the ingredients in batches was quite time-consuming. We don't feel a huge urge to revisit this concept too soon, but ask again in six months or a year.
Braised Pork Belly with Anise & Ginger
I first had this dish a bit under ten years ago at the Post-Mao Cafe in Melbourne's Chinatown and loved it from the start. Pork belly, properly cooked, is rich and lush and hopefully doesn't seem too fatty (although it is), and the flavours of ginger, anise, garlic & soy bring spice, warmth, and depth. I spent years trying to work out how they get the rich red-brown colour on the pork and in the sauce (Soy? No, too brown. Red wine? I did find a recipe that claimed that, but no, wrong colour, wrong wrong flavour and not even vaguely Chinese), and it was not until I was given a present of the Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook by Fuschia Dunlop that I was able to replicate it at home. And now that I know how to, I'm a bit frightened every time I do it.
Here's our version (for 4 people with some leftovers). We completely load up on star anise compared to Ms Dunlop but ditch the garlic (poor Firenze is allergic). Ms Dunlop has a stage of blanching the whole pork belly for 3-4 minutes ("until partially cooked") which we omit. I'm not sure what that step is meant to achieve, because 4 minutes in boiling water will only have a trivial effect on the cookedness of a huge hunk of pork. Maybe Chinese pork bellies are a lot thinner than Australian. The one thing that 4 minutes in boing water would definitely do is kill off any nasty bacteria on the outside and that may be the reason, but as we are not in an unrefrigerated rural market I will skip that step.
750g pork belly with no bones, cut into cubes and patted dry
Vegetable oil for shallow frying
2 tbsp white sugar
2 tbsp Chinese rice wine
30g fresh ginger, sliced into rounds
4 star anise
1 cassia or cinnamon stick
2 dried chilies
1 tbsp light soy
4 spring onions cut into 5cm lengths
Fresh coriander and fresh red chili to garnish
Heat the sugar under the oil on a low heat until it melts, then turn up the heat until the sugar reaches a medium caramelised state then turn the heat down again. I used a heavy-based non-stick wok for this as we have an electric cooktop and it takes a long time to build up a good heat, but a thinner normal wok would be better as it is more responsive to temperature changes.
Gently slide the pork down the side of the wok into the oil and toss around until it's all coated and red-brown.*
Add everything else except the spring onions and then enough water to just cover the pork. Bring to the boil, cover, reduce the heat and then simmer for about 75 minutes. Make sure the pork is soft and luscious and not rubbery - poke it with a fork or squeeze it with tongs or something.
At this stage you can put the spring onions in simmer another minute or two and then serve with the garnishes. We wanted to refine it a bit and did the following extra steps which are totally not traditional and totally not authentic.
- take the pork out of the sauce and put it on a baking tray.
- use a separating jug to remove the oil and fat from the sauce. The ginger and star anise and cassia are inedible and should properly be removed from the sauce at this stage, but they look quite authentic and rural so we leave them in.
- put the sauce back on the heat and thicken with a slurry of 1 tbsp cornstarch dissolved in 1/4 cup of water. Add the spring onions and keep simmering for a minute or two.
- meanwhile, put the pork under a hot grill for a couple of minutes. This will firm up the flesh a little and get a little bit of crispy texture and caramelisation going on.
- serve the sauce over the pork and garnish with coriander and fresh chili. Lots of rice (if you don't have four big bowls you'll go away hungry) and something green and healthy.
* This is the scary bit. Molten sugar under hot oil? I may as well plunge my hand into liquid hot magma and be done with it. That's why it's important the pork is dry of course.
What are the bulby things if Firenze can't eat garlic? Roasted peeled shallots, totally not authentic.
Our green healthy thing was a sang choi bow of carrot, shitake mushrooms, celery, spring onon and ginger lightly sauteed and dressed with tamari & sesame oil.
What was good and bad about this dish? Luscious, unctuous pork belly with browning, rich aromatic sauce, and we even got rid of a fair bunch of the fat. I didn't burn myself during the caramel stage (I can still see the scar from about two years ago when I first did it) and we had four big bowls of rice. I can't think of anything bad.
Happy eating,
Ecumer
0 Yorumlar