Why Why WHY can't I make Chinese food taste great??

[dteng]

My mother bought me this book -
http://www.amazon.com/The-Food-China-Series/dp/155285227X

I’ve done a bunch of the recipes and they are pretty dang good.
Stir fried beef with scallion good.

[Bob_Wood]

@Christine Huang

Here’s a confession for you: I almost NEVER cook Chinese food at home. I’ll cook virtually any other cuisine, but other than dumplings and steamed whole fish, I won’t even try. I go to Chinatown.

Well, yeah. Look where you live. Almost all the Chinese here is built for us of the gwai lo persuasion. In other words, it sucks.

[Steven_Miller]

Reportedly it takes chefs in top Hong Kong kitchens years to perfect their wok skills.




Steve

[CWun]

I don’t think ponzu or yuzu are in any classic Chinese cuisines, but in any case…for authentic Sichuan food, I would recommend Dunlop’s Land of Plenty book.

Chinese recipes that require “frying” can be difficult to replicate at home… not to mention most recipes generalize everything as “stir fry” but there are really different types of frying techniques. Dishes easiest to replicate are steamed and braised dishes. Luckily, steamed and braised dishes leave the least mess. Frying/sauteeing gets grease everywhere, and I’m the lucky fellow that has to clean everything.

[CWun]

Sadly many Chinese restaurant kitchens use lots of MSG to hide the fact that they have poor technique and it’s “standard practice”.

[Randy_Bowman]

I miss MSG. I even e-mailed Lawry’s and asked how much MSG to add to their 8 oz seasoned salt and 4 oz seasoned pepper containers to replicate their product before MSG was removed. Got a kinda snippy note back, that they no longer use MSG, nor recommend the use of MSG in their products. We’ve gotten so lazy that we get Chinese food twice a week from Panda Express.

[Merrill_Lindquist]

@Stefan Blicker

Last night I tried again - another “authentic” recipe. They NEVER taste like it does in a good Chinese place - NEVER! I’ve followed directions to a T- got all the right spices, black beans sauce, fermented, not fermented, spicy fermeted, garlic non-fermented, yuzu, ponzu, black soy, black vinegar, hoisin, rice wine rice vinegars, sesame oils, black sesame seeds, toasted rice, homemade chicken stock, seasoned wok, organic chicken, organic garlic, ginger, on and on and on and it NEVER tastes like it should…WHY? WHY???

The “Asian” recipes I get from Food and Wine Magazine turn out better than the stuff from the Chinese cook books.

[P_Moy]

Great question. My uncle, who was a cook in a restaurant in Hong Kong, once told me that the best cooks possessed a skill called “wok qi (pronounced “chee”)” or “wok energy”. Cooks who possess this ability are able to coax the energy out of every ingredient through vigorous stir frying over an intense fire. It’s for this reason that when cooking with a wok, each ingredient is added at the precise moment since the energy in each ingredient is released at a different time. My uncle said that this skill was a combination of technique and feeling, and took years to develop. It’s the ability to extract the energy from each ingredient that accounts for the taste of a dish. I spent ten summers as a kid with my uncle, auntie and cousins in Hong Kong, and ate my way through Hong Kong and Guangzhou (on the mainland) with my uncle. In every restaurant we went, he explained every dish we ate, how it should be made, and what it should taste like. And for good measure, he gave me a good dose of Daoist philosophy and the principles of traditional Chinese medicine, the tenets of which are incorporated into the cuisine. What a great man he was.

[Randy_Sloan]

@P. Moy

my way through Hong Kong and Guangzhou (on the mainland) with my uncle. In every restaurant we went, he explained every dish we ate, how it should be made, and what it should taste like.

Sounds like a dream trip for me. I’d love to get to do that even just once.

[WKChoy]

@CWun

Sadly many Chinese restaurant kitchens use lots of MSG to hide the fact that they have poor technique and it’s “standard practice”.

There’s a 2 michelin * restaurant in London that I dined at twice last year. On both occasions I felt extremely thirsty after the meal. Intense thirst is one sign of MSG counsuption.

[Victor_Hong]

@P. Moy

Great question. My uncle, who was a cook in a restaurant in Hong Kong, once told me that the best cooks possessed a skill called “wok qi (pronounced “chee”)” or “wok energy”. Cooks who possess this ability are able to coax the energy out of every ingredient through vigorous stir frying over an intense fire. It’s for this reason that when cooking with a wok, each ingredient is added at the precise moment since the energy in each ingredient is released at a different time. My uncle said that this skill was a combination of technique and feeling, and took years to develop. It’s the ability to extract the energy from each ingredient that accounts for the taste of a dish. I spent ten summers as a kid with my uncle, auntie and cousins in Hong Kong, and ate my way through Hong Kong and Guangzhou (on the mainland) with my uncle. In every restaurant we went, he explained every dish we ate, how it should be made, and what it should taste like. And for good measure, he gave me a good dose of Daoist philosophy and the principles of traditional Chinese medicine, the tenets of which are incorporated into the cuisine. What a great man he was.

In a top-notch Chinese restaurant kitchen, each wok burner resembles the back end of a Tomcat fighter jet.
That is why dishes are served as fast as possible, once done. You can almost “hear” the just-ended sizzling echo through the palate. Ten minutes later, the thrill is past.

By the way, be sure to stir with not a wok ladle, but a heat-seasoned feather duster. It doubles as a great meat tenderizer.

[Merrill_Lindquist]

@P. Moy

Great question. My uncle, who was a cook in a restaurant in Hong Kong, once told me that the best cooks possessed a skill called “wok qi (pronounced “chee”)” or “wok energy”. Cooks who possess this ability are able to coax the energy out of every ingredient through vigorous stir frying over an intense fire. It’s for this reason that when cooking with a wok, each ingredient is added at the precise moment since the energy in each ingredient is released at a different time. My uncle said that this skill was a combination of technique and feeling, and took years to develop. It’s the ability to extract the energy from each ingredient that accounts for the taste of a dish. I spent ten summers as a kid with my uncle, auntie and cousins in Hong Kong, and ate my way through Hong Kong and Guangzhou (on the mainland) with my uncle. In every restaurant we went, he explained every dish we ate, how it should be made, and what it should taste like. And for good measure, he gave me a good dose of Daoist philosophy and the principles of traditional Chinese medicine, the tenets of which are incorporated into the cuisine. What a great man he was.

I really liked this explanation. Thanks for sharing it.

[Larry_Kaplan]

If you want to get close to the high temps use in the restaurants, you need to cook on the gas heating element of a turkey fryer unit. This will get you close to that heat level.

[CWun]

For sauteeing/frying what I do at home is preheat the wok or pan over low heat for 10 minutes so it’s evenly heated. Then I up the heat to high and proceed as normal. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best my home range can do. I also use high-heat oils like saffola (safflower) so it doesn’t smoke too early.

[Steven_Miller]

We have an outdoor wok similar to what Larry described that works pretty well. We use it primarily for thai recipes.

[Patrick_Friel]

High heat is definitely important and because of that cutting everything into relatively small, uniform pieces is also key. Everything has to cook quickly. Too much time in the wok will cause ingredients to shed water and make things soupy.

I think of Chinese wok cooking as being all about prep: chopping, measuring, and staging ingredients within easy reach. For many dishes the actual cooking is over in minutes.

Another vote for Fuscia Dunlop’s books.

[CFu]

Don’t forget to tenderize the meat with baking powder. That’s one thing recipes never talk about but every chinese restaurant does wih their red meat.

[Alan_C_h_a_n]

@David K o l i n

The heat makes a huge difference and you can’t get close at home or even in most non-Chinese commercial kitchens - 75,000 to 125,000 BTUs per burner are common

I used to think this was the reason I couldn’t replicate at home what relatives taught me in a Chinese restaurant. Since then I have seen relatives cook their dishes with makeshift ingredients on barebones cookware in a rented vacation condo, and get pretty much the same results. The other factors cited in this thread do matter, but to me the overriding factor is the skill of the chef. Basically, the same reason you don’t sound like Jimmy Page even if you play a Les Paul, and you don’t play tennis like Roger Federer if you buy the right Wilson racket. As in all those fields, learn the technique from the best teacher you can find, and practice!

[CWun]

@Alan C h a n

@David K o l i n

The heat makes a huge difference and you can’t get close at home or even in most non-Chinese commercial kitchens - 75,000 to 125,000 BTUs per burner are common

I used to think this was the reason I couldn’t replicate at home what relatives taught me in a Chinese restaurant. Since then I have seen relatives cook their dishes with makeshift ingredients on barebones cookware in a rented vacation condo, and get pretty much the same results. The other factors cited in this thread do matter, but to me the overriding factor is the skill of the chef. Basically, the same reason you don’t sound like Jimmy Page even if you play a Les Paul, and you don’t play tennis like Roger Federer if you buy the right Wilson racket. As in all those fields, learn the technique from the best teacher you can find, and practice!

+1. I hesitate to post similar comments usually on online forums because people take offense. Whether it be tennis, cooking, photography, music, what-have-you, people do not like being told that their skill level is low versus their expensive, high quality tools.

I think BTU/hr discussions for Chinese frying techniques are a bit shallow. The reason high btus are required is that the woks are generally thin steel and the pan/wok has a low total heat capacity (although restaurant woks are humungous). When items are dumped into the wok, it loses heat quickly unless the burner supplies the heat back immediately. So the way a home cook gets around this is to use a pan that can maintain its heat even after some items have been dumped in it, and to also control the amount of items cooked one time. The downside is that these big, thick pans can get heavy and expensive for the average person, can’t cook a lot of food at once, and the cook needs to spend some thought on preheating and heating the pan. Yes, it’s much easier with a big fat burner supplying lots of energy, but it’s not a showstopper.

Besides, all that stir frying gets grease everywhere. I hate cleaning the grease vents and the area around the stove. Steaming is much cleaner

[Tom_Blach]

@WKChoy

@CWun

Sadly many Chinese restaurant kitchens use lots of MSG to hide the fact that they have poor technique and it’s “standard practice”.

There’s a 2 michelin * restaurant in London that I dined at twice last year. On both occasions I felt extremely thirsty after the meal. Intense thirst is one sign of MSG counsuption.

But far more likely a result of heavily reduced sauces.