Cooking
Hutong CuisineChinese food is so delicious, but it certainly loses something in the translation when it’s transported across oceans and continents. The food at Chinese restaurants at home just don’t taste the same. In fact, I call most of what’s served at home garbage and find it's only edible if I don’t think of it as Chinese food.
I have many Chinese cookbooks, and the one I use the most is Chinese Homestyle Cooking that I bought in 1995 at the Foreign Languages Bookstore on Wangfujing in Beijing. But it didn’t have all my favorite recipes in it, or at least I didn’t recognize them by their English names. I decided to take some cooking classes, and on our last two trips to Beijing I have spent a day learning how to fix my favorite dishes at Hutong Cuisine, located about a 25-minute walk through the hutongs from the Drum Tower. Owner Zhou Chun Yi, a transplant from Guangzhou, runs the cooking school out of her home in the hutongs. She speaks excellent English. Classes are small so there is time for individual attention. Zhou offers the class in three segments: a market tour, a lecture on seasonings and the actual cooking class. I recommend taking all three. Though I shopped at Chinese markets when I lived in Beijing, I learned a lot on her trip to the market to buy ingredients for that day’s class. She explains some of the vegetables used in Chinese cooking. The second segment is devoted to seasonings, with a half-hour discussion on the best soy sauces, rice wines and rice vinegars to use. Note: This session is free if you’ve taken a class from her before. The third segment is when you get to prepare the food and then eat it. Zhou offers daily |
classes with a rotating schedule of dishes to be prepared. Zhou wields a Chinese chopping knife with amazing accuity — fresh garlic is sliced so thin you can see through it. Luckily she doesn’t expect her students to achieve this feat. The recipes she gives students taste just like what you find in restaurants in China. I learned how to make gongbaojiding (pictured at the top of the page) in my first class, and I make it every week or so at home — it’s one of our favorite dishes. |
GongbaojidingThis is the recipe for gongbaojiding I got in her class. Outside of China, the spicey peanut and chicken dish is known as kungpao chicken, though I've never seen anything at home that remotely resembles what you get in China.
Main ingredients 100g chicken breast, diced in small cubes 30g deep-fried peanuts Seasoning 1.5 tsp minced garlic 1.5 tsp minced ginger 1 green onion, cut into sections 1-2 dried Asian chili peppers, more if you like really spicey foods (Mexican chili peppers don’t have the same taste), crumbled into sections; leaving the seeds in will make the dish even spicier ½ tsp Sichuan peppercorns Marinade ½ tsp rice cooking wine 1 tsp soy sauce 1 tsp corn starch Sauce ¼ tsp salt 1.5 tsp sugar ½ tsp corn starch 2 tsp soy sauce 1 tsp rice cooking wine 1.5 tsp rice vinegar 3 tbsp water Mix the marinade and sauces in separate bowls and set aside. Mix the chicken with the marinade and let sit for 15 minutes. Pour 2 tbsp cooking oil in a wok and add the chili pepper. Add the Sichuan peppercorns a few seconds later. Next add the chicken and marinade, stir-frying until the chicken is cooked. Add the garlic and ginger next, |
stirring for about 15 seconds. Move the mixture to the center of the wok, and add thesauce on the side. When the sauce comes to a boil, stir it into the chicken mixture. Turn off the heat; add 1 tsp sesame oil, the green onions and the peanuts. This recipe makes one serving. Zhou says doubling the recipe is not a problem, but for more than two servings, she suggests starting over. |
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Copyright 2012 by Cheryl Probst. All rights reserved.
Copyright 2012 by Cheryl Probst. All rights reserved.