20 novembre 2007
La Table du thé (2)
Let us resume our stroll through the pages you will not find in the book. Today, China. Three dim sum recipes, and some boxed text concerning a famous Cantonese food specialty, were excluded. You will find them below, in this post.
Among the photographs, those by Isabelle Rozenbaum were taken on May 25, 2007, during a tea demo and tasting held at the restaurant L'Orénoc, at the hôtel Méridien Étoile, boulevard Gouvion-Saint-Cyr, in Paris, by Jing and Sébastien from the Cantonese company Jing Tea Shop.
On my first night in Canton (November 2006) we dined at Tian Rong, a restaurant near the teahouse. All the dishes were delicious, particularly a crispy lacquered pigeon which was so good that I asked the recipe from the owner of the restaurant, Mr. Chen Weixiong. After he most amiably gave me all the information I needed, up to and including the mysterious herbs that went into the fragrant stock, he asked me about the French ways with pigeon. You may see the famous pigeon below. The chopsticks are Jing's.
Canton-style pigeon at the Tian Rong restaurant, Guangzhou.
"I pick a 350-g pigeon, about one month and a half of age. The bird should be gutted from the rear end, without opening the belly. I make a stock with water and the following spices and herbs: dang gui (Chinese angelica), xiang ye (pandan leaves), cao gua (black cardamom), hua jiao (Sichuan peppercorns), ba jiao (star anise). I boil the stock long enough for the spices to impart their flavor, then I add the pigeon and I poach it in the simmering stock until the juice that runs out of the bird is no longer pink. I drain the pigeon, I hang it by the neck or by the feet, and I air-dry it until the skin is quite dry.
"In a wok, I heat a large quantity of oil. No peanut oil! (Note: in Canton, peanut oil is cold-pressed and is used for seasoning), no sesame oil, but good frying oil. I deep-fry the pigeon in that oil, which should cover the pigeon completely and not be too hot. When the skin is crispy, I lift it out of the oil and I hang it again, or I put it in a colander, then I baste it with boiling oil until the skin is very crispy.
"I have a secret for an even crispier skin: before hanging the pigeon for the first time, I soak it briefly in a mixture of red vinegar and water.
"If dang gui has too powerful an aroma for you, you may replace it with wulong tea - tieguanyin or a Wuyi tea -, or with a rose-flavored pu-erh.
"You may also use this recipe on duck, goose or small chicken."
Photo © Isabelle Rozenbaum
Here are now the three recipes.
Seafood congee
Congee or juk is a Southern Chinese rice soup, generally eaten at breakfast. Rice is slowly cooked in a large quantity of water or broth. Shortly before serving, other ingredients are added.
Serves 4 to 6
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 1 1/2 hour
Teas: all oolongs, red teas, pu-erhs.
Perfect match: keemun, ying de.
100 g long-grained white rice
1,5 to 2 litres water
2 inches peeled ginger
2 cloves garlic, lightly crushed
2 star anise
10 white peppercorns
1 handful dried shrimp
salt, freshly ground white pepper
The seafood garnish
4 plump oysters
8 raw shrimp
4 shelled scallops
200 g cleaned cuttlefish
4 small sole fillets
1 small bunch fresh coriander
soy sauce
2 level teaspoon cornflour
1/2 lime
2 scallions
1 knob peeled ginger
2 tbsp sesame oil
1 tsp Chiu Chow chilli oil
Rinse and drain the rice. Put it in a large pan, add the water. In a muslin bag, put the sliced ginger, garlic, star anise, white peppercorns and dried shrimp. Tie the bag with a string and add it to the rice and water. Bring to the boil, lower the heat, cover with the lid slightly ajar to keep the rice from overflowing. Cook for about 1 hour and a half on low heat, stirring from time to time. The rice should be soupy, like thin porridge. When the rice is cooked, remove the muslin bag, squeeze its juices into the rice and discard.
While the rice is cooking, take care of the seafood and aromatics. Shuck the oysters, keeping any water. Shell and devein the shrimp. Cut the cuttlefish into squares and cut parallel slits onto their surface in a crisscross pattern with a small sharp knife. Cut the sole fillets into pieces. Marinate all the seafood, including the scallops, in a little soy sauce, cornflour, reserved oyster water and a few drops of lime juice.
Clean and finely chop the scallions and coriander. Finely shred the ginger. Arrange them in small bowls.
In a small bowl, mix 4 tbsp soy sauce, the sesame oil and the Chiu Chow chilli oil.
5 minutes before serving, add the marinated seafoods and simmer gently until they're just stiff. Correct seasoning and add 1 tsp freshly ground white pepper.
Serve in bowls with Chinese soup spoons, along with the sauce and the condiments.
Photo © Isabelle Rozenbaum
"Pancake" fried dumplings
This is a little-known variation on jiaozi or gyôza. Dumplings are first pan-fried, then a thin batter of flour and water is poured over it and left to crisp up.
Serves 4
Preparation time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: 16 minutes
Teas: all oolongs, pu-erh.
Perfect match: oolong tieguanyin.
60 g lean pork meat
60 g raw chicken breast meat
6 shelled raw prawns
40 g blanched bamboo shoots, chopped
2 scallions, cleaned
60 g bok choy or spinach leaves, blanched in boiling water, squeezed dry and finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled
15 g finely grated ginger
24 gyôza skins
50 g flour
sesame oil
Special equipment: food processor; large nonstick sauté pan or frying pan with a tight-fitting lid; large, flat serving dish.
Selling wheat noodles on a Shanghai market.
Finely chop the pork, prawns, scallions, bok choy leaves, garlic and ginger in a food processor. For a better texture, you may chop each ingredient separately with a knife, then blend them all together briefly to mix them well.
Using the gyôza skins, make small elongated dumplings, dampening the edges of the skins to seal them well.
Mix the flour with enough water to get a thinnish batter.
Cover the bottom of the pan with a thin layer of sesame oil. Lay the dumplings side by side in the pan, sealed side up. Put on medium heat until the oil sizzles frankly, then pour the batter into the pan (not over the dumplings!), cover the pan and, holding the lid with your hand, tilt the pan in a circular motion so that the batter spreads onto the whole surface. Cook on moderate heat for 15 minutes, keeping the pan well covered.
After 15 minutes, the batter should be fried and golden brown like a crêpe; its edges should be curling away from the pan. Pour a little more sesame oil between the crêpe and the pan, cover and cook for 1 more minute.
Turn the "dumpling pancake" over onto a large, flat dish. The lacy crêpe should be on top and each guest should break it with their chopsticks to pick a dumpling.
Shanghai, pork butchers at the market.
Orange-flavored beef balls
The secret in this recipe lies in the lengthy, patient kneading of the forcemeat.
Serves 4 (12 balls)
Preparation time: 35 minutes
Cooking time: 12 minutes
Teas : oolong shui xian, green pu-erh, red teas (keemun).
Perfect match: Earl Grey.
1 strip orange or mandarin peel, dried or fresh (if dried, it should be 2 inches long; if fresh, double the quantity)
3 fresh shiitake mushrooms
10 cl boiling water
150 g chopped lean beef
20 g chopped fat bacon
2 fresh or canned water chestnuts
3 blades of Chinese chives, cleaned
2 cloves garlic
1 tsp cornflour
2 tsp sesame oil
2 tsp light soy sauce
2 tsp oyster sauce
2 tsp Shaoxing cooking wine
3 ou 4 Chinese (Napa) cabbage leaves, only the tender part, leave out the ribs
salt, freshly ground white pepper
Special equipment: food processor, a stainless steel steam cooker or a wok equipped with bamboo baskets for steaming.
Shanghai.
If you are using dried orange or mandarin peel, soak it for 10 minutes in boiling water, then drain it. If you are using fresh peel, carefully remove the white part. Chop finely.
Clean the mushrooms, remove stalks, wipe the caps with damp absorbent paper. Chop finely.
If you are using fresh water chestnuts, peel them and rinse them clean. Just drain and rinse the canned ones. Chop them finely. Also chop the Chinese chives and the garlic.
Chop the beef and the fat bacon in a food processor so that it is very finely ground; blend for a few seconds. The forcemeat should be smooth, but retain a bit of texture.
Mix all the ingredients in a large bowl. Add the cornflour, sesame oil, soy sauce, oyster sauce and rice wine, salt and pepper. Knead by hand for 5 minutes to remove air bubbles and make the forcemeat very soft and slightly sticky.
Oil your hands, or wet them, and shape the forcemeat into 12 round balls.
Line a heatproof plate with the Napa cabbage leaves. Arrange the balls on top, put the plate in steam cooker or bamboo basket, and steam for 10 to 10 minutes. The beef balls should be quite firm. Serve hot with tea.
Shanghai.
Photo © Isabelle Rozenbaum
Photo © Isabelle Rozenbaum
13 novembre 2007
The Athens meat market
I found them again in an old folder, stashed on an old CD. They were taken more than ten years ago, around 1995-1996, with a FG Nikon camera and some Kodachrome slide film. They were scanned on a butane-powered device which, after some huffing and puffing, finally laid its Jpeg after three full minutes. As I rediscovered them, I let out a sigh: so that is how I used to scan photos; and no one ever thought of slapping me? Oh, all that you had to go through before APNs! The pictures have poor resolution, and I have trouble remembering how I ended up with that white balance. Sincerely, I have no idea of what happened to those pictures. Unbalanced, burnt, dark, reddish, they touch me as they are, and I dream of what I could do, now, with the same subject and my present cameras. Except for the fact that it is no longer possible.
These veils, a modern version of the antique velum cast over circus games, are meant to protect the market from the sun. What they hang above is the agora kreaton, the Butchers' Market, in Athens, precisely on Athinas Street, between Omonia Square and the old Agora. This is one of the very last examples of a central covered food market located in a large town. When I took the pictures, rumors of tearing the whole thing down were heard. Fortunately, that did not happen. It would have been a crime, indeed, to destroy this beautiful Neoclassical architectural compound. I have not been to the place since then, but I checked its present state through pictures on the Net: in conformity with EEC rules, all the stalls are now enclosed in glass. Photos will never look the same again. At least, this is a better fate than total disappearance.
This is how the market looked like at the time. The meat was piled up, hanged out in the open, butchers moving between carcasses and tripe like Indians through a rain forest. They ruled over their meat world, knowing all its rules. They had a unique, flamboyant look. They were handsome, rakish, cool and sexy, arousing both desire and fear. They were utterly male. How many rebetiko songs, from the 1920s on, celebrated the hasapakia, members of a mysterious order with ties to the underworld, whores and haschish smokers!
I would like to go back as soon as I can manage it. I would like to know if the butchers, like their meats, have been put in glass cases, safe from the outside world or, rather, saving the outside world from them; if my hasapakia have been refrigerated and adapted to European norms.
The photos are red, most of them much too red. But this is partly caused by the subject. In spite of the open skylight, or of the light bulbs and neons in some places, the bright red of meat saturates the light and is reverberated onto every surface. Whatever you do, it will be red.
On the photo above, you may see how carcasses were stacked up to produce that Soutine-like feeling. Or to evoke Dutch painting. In no way could you ever display meat this way anymore. And nobody ever died from that.
There is no way, either, a butcher could now be seen carving a beef brisket while smoking a cigarette.
This is fine lamb, country lamb — arni dopio —, see? The very lamb you rub with lemon juice, salt, pepper and garlic, and slowly roast in a medium oven until melting inside and crispy outside. (I cannot help it if you are hungry.)
Portraits.
In Greece, this gesture means "Come closer." This butcher had something to tell me.
Actually, he wanted both of us to be on the picture and had one of his colleagues handle the camera. As was usually the case in the days before the autofocus, the photo came out blurred.
After taking a few shots, a stop at one of the tavernas located inside the market is recommended. There you may eat everything you have seen on the stalls, only cooked. Well done, Greek-style. You may order a bowl of patsa (tripe soup) in the small hours of the morning, or, at Easter, a mayeritsa (lamb innard soup). This picture was taken under the neons of the taverna To Monastiri. I think the taverna still exists. Oh, hell, I am not sure. I had better go check.
12 novembre 2007
Photo of the month (1)
Luoyang (Henan, China), White Horse temple. Photo by Vincent Hiribarren.
09 novembre 2007
La Table du thé (1)
My book La Table du thé was published in September by éditions Minerva. With photos by Isabelle Rozenbaum, food styling by Lissa Streeter, layout by Laurence Maillet. Isabelle already devoted a blog post to it.
You will also find a very fine article on Thierry Richard's blog Chroniques du plaisir.
The book is based on a simple principle: eating and entertaining over tea, not just for light snacks but for meals in their own rights. Tea offers at least as many tastes, fragrances and flavours as wine does, which makes it a wonderful and much overlooked opportunity for setting up meals, lunches, dinners, brunches, tasting menus, etc. There are examples in several cultures. Such a meal built around a certain number of teas may also be an improved form of tea tasting.
Photo © Isabelle Rozenbaum
Over the years, my travels have taken me to some tea-loving countries: the British Isles, China, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Morocco, Turkey, the US (indeed, in spite of a reputation earned in other countries from the memory of the Boston Tea Party, North Americans do drink a lot of tea). Tea cultures are not always built on tea alone: in some regions, they include food, and special cooking styles are conceived around tea drinking (kaiseki in Japan, yum cha and dim sum in China, krueng wang in Thailand…). Likewise, the mezze of the Near East and the zakuski of the Russian area, though not originally associated with tea, prove to be excellent tea foods. Whether I was able to draw my inspiration from true traditional tea cuisines or picked dishes that were particularly suited to tea, choosing the recipes for the book was never a problem.
The book contains recipes as well as tea-related tips and tricks, plus a lot of advice on tea-food pairing. I am only beginning to explore that aspect of tea culture, and I hope to work with chefs on that subject. Recipes are organized in chapters based on the main tea regions (China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, India, samovar regions (Central Asia, Turkey, Iran…), British Isles, United States, Morocco). In the final part of the book, you will find menu suggestions and a small list of addresses.
I am happy with the finished work. Isabelle's photography imparts a quiet, warm and cozy atmosphere to it. I imagined it as a starting point for imagination and curiosity, an incitation to venture beyond its contents. Tea is known to help daydreaming, and through daydreaming, poetry and creation. Chinese poets are familiar with that. If some readers decide to organize their own tea parties with recipes and tea tips from the book, and reach that dreamy, contented state that is so typical of tea meals, I will have reached my goal.
There have been two signatures for this book; one at Librairie La Martinière-Le Seuil on September 27, another one at Librairie La Cocotte on November 8 (see flyer below).
I intend to devote a few blog posts to this book, not only to promote it but also to publish (with the permission of my editor) a few recipes that could not be included in the final layout.
Slicing a piece of ankimo (marinated monkfish liver) at Librairie La Martinière-Le Seuil,
during the book signature of September 27.
According to the order of the chapters, I will start with Japan and the only Japanese recipe that could not be squeezed into the book: a recipe for gyôza.
Gyôza
Gyôza skins may be purchased frozen in Asian food stores. Unlike wonton skins, which are square and yellow, they are round and white. The recipe for wonton skins below may be found in the book; it can be used for all sorts of stuffed dumplings.
Gyôza skins
Serves 4 (24 gyôza, 250 g dough)
150 g all-purpose flour
17 cl boiling water
You will need a Chinese rolling pin, which you can make by cutting a 30-cm length of a 3-cm wide round-sectioned unpainted wooden stick.
Add the boiling water to the flour and mix with a spatula, then knead by hand until you get a smooth, firm dough. Roll it into a long, 2,5 cm-thick cylinder, cut it into 2,5-cm long chunks. Using the rolling pin, roll each one into a thin, translucent disk.
If you make the gyôza skins some time ahead, stack them on top of each other with squares of parchment paper in-between, put the stack into a Ziploc bag and freeze.
Gyôza
225 g Chinese (Napa) cabbage, only the tender part of the leaves (not the ribs)
salt
225 g finely ground pork
20 g fresh ginger, peeled
3 large garlic cloves, peeled
1 scallion
3 tbsp strong Japanese soy sauce
3 tsp sake
1 tsp sugar
1 tbsp sesame oil
24 gyôza skins
vegetable oil
12 cl dashi
The sauce
15 g sugar
5 cl rice vinegar
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
1 small red chilli, seeded
15 cl light Japanese soy sauce
1 tbsp sesame oil
Finely chop the Napa cabbage, put it in a colander, sprinkle with 1 tbsp salt, mix well and let rest for 30 minutes. Squeeze it with your hands to expel all moisture.
While the cabbage is resting, make the sauce: melt the sugar in the vinegar on low heat, then let cool slightly. Finely crush garlic and chilli, add them to the vinegar. Add the soy sauce and sesame oil.
Grate the ginger and garlic for the filling. Clean and finely slice the scallion.
Put the cabbage in a bowl, add the pork, ginger, garlic, scallion, soy sauce, sake, sugar and sesame oil. Mix thoroughly. Cover and refrigerate for 1 hour.
Make the gyôza: drop a spoonful of filling onto the middle, bring the edges of the dough together and press them right above the filling to seal them well. Proceed this way until all
the ingredients are used up.
Heat 2 tbsp oil in a nonstick sauté pan or in a cast iron skillet with a lid. Lay the gyôza in it; they should not touch each other. Fry for 2 or 3 minutes on medium heat until the bottom of the gyôza is light golden. They should not burn. Add the dashi, cover and steam for 6 minutes, not more. If the dashi evaporates, add a little more, or a few drops of water. If there is too much liquid, take the lid off and let it evaporate. Finally add 1 tbsp oil and let the bottom part of the gyôza brown for 1 to 2 minutes. Serve with the sauce.