After a gap of over 2 months, I put on my pinny again yesterday. I thought I'd try and create 2 dishes from what is my favourite cuisine: Chinese. I opted for one of the items from the list in my very first post, hot and sour soup, and to ensure that my tummy would be full enough by the end of the meal, I 'boldly' (bold by my standards, that is) took on another dish of crispy fried noodles with chicken and pork.
To start at the very beginning, I went in search of the not-so-easy-to-find ingredients for my hot and sour soup (as well as for my noodles dish) at Loon Fung Supermarket in China Town and that proved to be an adventure in itself. Despite the countless number of times I've had hot and sour soup, I wasn't fully aware of some of the weird and wonderful things that go into it, the most striking components being dried black fungus and dried lily buds (also known as golden needles or gum jum). As if on a voyage of discovery, I traipsed around the supermarket eagerly anticipating my encounter with the dried black fungus and dried lily buds. Whilst filling up my basket with numerous not-so-common items such as fish sauce, red rice vinegar and bamboo shoots and whilst also on the look out for my dried black fungus and dried lily buds, I had the pleasure of coming face to face with many other fascinating products such as dried fish bladder. Given the amount of dried products the Chinese have (believe me, they can make food out of anything, tangerine peel, lotus seeds, bamboo fungus, honeysuckle flowers, chrysanthemum flowers, white fungus, foxnut, mede berry or goji berry as it is commercially known, to name a few), it was with great difficulty that I found a very large pack (clearly this item is considered an invaluable addition to all Chinese kitchens that a small pack wasn't something they seemed to do) of dried black fungus. Little did I know that this product was going to give me a very rude awakening on my return home when I happened to skim through the receipt. It turned out to be the most expensive item of all --costlier than the chicken and pork put together-- and put a whopping hole in my pocket of £7.69. I mean it's bloody fungus as in "any of a diverse group of eukaryotic single-celled or multinucleate organisms that live by decomposing and absorbing the organic material in which they grow." I should be paid to eat the damn stuff, not the other way around. And by the way, I had no joy in obtaining the dried lily buds - I was told they had run out -- who would have thought that dried lily buds would be another highly sought after ingredient?)
Moving on to the cooking then, I began with the hot and sour soup. It was a pretty straight forward exercise with few highlights to report, I'm afraid. I was required to carry out some advance preparation involving the anger-inspiring fungus. The fungus and bamboo shoots needed to be soaked in water for a good 20 minutes to reconstitute and soften them. The bamboo shoots let off a none-too-pleasant odour and added a very unappealing flavour to the soup, which was also flawed by the fact that I had added too much salt (again, this whole pitfall about "salt to taste") and rice vinegar. Neither had I thought to slice the fungus into manageable sizes so that the diner was left having to crudely slurp up the slimy substances into their mouth. All in all, the fruits of my labour weren't sweet on this occassion (although the proof of my toil lies in the picture below) and my soup was more smelly and salty than hot and sour. I concluded that it is much better to just buy the hot and sour soup as a take away item from a restaurant. Making the dish at home is too labour intensive and costly an exercise compared to just forking out £2 or so to nip down to your local Chinese.
To start at the very beginning, I went in search of the not-so-easy-to-find ingredients for my hot and sour soup (as well as for my noodles dish) at Loon Fung Supermarket in China Town and that proved to be an adventure in itself. Despite the countless number of times I've had hot and sour soup, I wasn't fully aware of some of the weird and wonderful things that go into it, the most striking components being dried black fungus and dried lily buds (also known as golden needles or gum jum). As if on a voyage of discovery, I traipsed around the supermarket eagerly anticipating my encounter with the dried black fungus and dried lily buds. Whilst filling up my basket with numerous not-so-common items such as fish sauce, red rice vinegar and bamboo shoots and whilst also on the look out for my dried black fungus and dried lily buds, I had the pleasure of coming face to face with many other fascinating products such as dried fish bladder. Given the amount of dried products the Chinese have (believe me, they can make food out of anything, tangerine peel, lotus seeds, bamboo fungus, honeysuckle flowers, chrysanthemum flowers, white fungus, foxnut, mede berry or goji berry as it is commercially known, to name a few), it was with great difficulty that I found a very large pack (clearly this item is considered an invaluable addition to all Chinese kitchens that a small pack wasn't something they seemed to do) of dried black fungus. Little did I know that this product was going to give me a very rude awakening on my return home when I happened to skim through the receipt. It turned out to be the most expensive item of all --costlier than the chicken and pork put together-- and put a whopping hole in my pocket of £7.69. I mean it's bloody fungus as in "any of a diverse group of eukaryotic single-celled or multinucleate organisms that live by decomposing and absorbing the organic material in which they grow." I should be paid to eat the damn stuff, not the other way around. And by the way, I had no joy in obtaining the dried lily buds - I was told they had run out -- who would have thought that dried lily buds would be another highly sought after ingredient?)
Moving on to the cooking then, I began with the hot and sour soup. It was a pretty straight forward exercise with few highlights to report, I'm afraid. I was required to carry out some advance preparation involving the anger-inspiring fungus. The fungus and bamboo shoots needed to be soaked in water for a good 20 minutes to reconstitute and soften them. The bamboo shoots let off a none-too-pleasant odour and added a very unappealing flavour to the soup, which was also flawed by the fact that I had added too much salt (again, this whole pitfall about "salt to taste") and rice vinegar. Neither had I thought to slice the fungus into manageable sizes so that the diner was left having to crudely slurp up the slimy substances into their mouth. All in all, the fruits of my labour weren't sweet on this occassion (although the proof of my toil lies in the picture below) and my soup was more smelly and salty than hot and sour. I concluded that it is much better to just buy the hot and sour soup as a take away item from a restaurant. Making the dish at home is too labour intensive and costly an exercise compared to just forking out £2 or so to nip down to your local Chinese.
1. Soak vermicelli in cold water until soft. Let it dry for a few hours.
2. Heat the oil in a deep saucepan. Deep-fry the vermicelli, a small portion at a time, in very hot oil until crispy and golden. Drain on paper towel and set aside.
I followed these steps exactly as stated, only for the first half of my noodles to turn into a stone hard mass of I don't know what, the moment I submerged the noodles into the hot oil - see the following picture:
Not wishing to admit defeat so early on in the game, I laid the noodles aside on paper towels in the hope that they would magically come unstuck and take the form of the crispy noodles that I'm so used to seeing before me in Wong Kei. Needless to say, this didn't happen. In an attempt to rescue my dish, I chose to boil the remaining half of the noodles in chicken stock and then continued with the rest of the recipe as stated. I had a near miss when adding 3 beaten eggs to my pan as my slow stirring almost turned the dish into a chicken and pork omelette. However, despite all the mishaps and excusing the fact that the dish turned into something other than what was intended, the end result wasn't bad at all. My soft-instead-of-crispy-fried-noodles proved to be a tasty little treat which my parents nicely relished alongside some sake (so much so that my mum even asked me for the recipe for my noodles). So I'm pleased to say that my blood, sweat and tears weren't for nothing!
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