Ants climbing a tree

Ants climbing a tree
Ants climbing a tree

The name of this Szechuan dish is one that’s always confused me. There are, most emphatically, no ants in it; no woody bits either, unless you’ve failed to soak your dried mushrooms properly. I’ve heard suggestions that the bits of minced pork resemble ants and the glass noodles a tree. Whoever came up with that one had either been at the opium pipe, or had spent his life locked up somewhere where there are neither ants nor trees. There are other, even more unappetisingly named Szechuan dishes out there: husband and wife offal, strange-taste pork, pock-marked old woman’s bean curd. Struggle past the names – they all taste great. Szechuan cuisine lays all its emphasis on intense chilli spicing, and salty, savoury flavours.

Peculiar name aside, this makes for a terrific main dish, which you should serve with some rice to soak up the sauce. It’s important that you get your hands on glass noodles (sometimes called bean-thread or pea-thread noodles) rather than rice noodles when you cook ants climbing a tree. Their texture, slippery and glassy, and not particularly absorbent, is an important part of this dish. As always with a stir fry, make sure all your ingredients are chopped and ready to hit the wok as soon as you start to cook; things move quickly here.

To serve 6 (this also freezes well, so it’s worth making plenty even if you’re not serving that many people) you’ll need:

450g minced pork (I like a mince that’s not too lean here)
200g dry weight glass noodles
½ teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon cornflour
75ml Chinese rice wine
12 spring onions
1 piece ginger about the size of your thumb
4 fat cloves garlic
200ml chicken stock (you can use half stock, half soaking liquid from your mushrooms if you prefer)
6 large, dried shitake mushrooms
6 dried cloud-ear mushrooms (sometimes sold as Chinese black mushrooms)
1 tablespoons chilli bean sauce
2 tablespoons shredded bamboo shoots preserved in sesame oil (optional – don’t worry if you can’t find these)
1 teaspoon Chinese chilli oil (look for a jar at your local oriental supermarket, and use more if you like things extra-spicy – I used about 3 heaped teaspoons in mine, but I have an asbestos tongue)
3 tablespoons dark soy sauce
6 tablespoons light soy sauce
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon ground nut oil

Combine the pork with the sugar, salt, rice wine, cornflour and one tablespoon of light soy sauce in a bowl, and set aside for half an hour while you prepare the other ingredients.

Soak the mushrooms for at least 20 minutes in freshly boiled water (I like to soak shitakes for an hour or more for the sake of texture; the cloud ears won’t need so long). Chop the spring onions, keeping the white and green parts separate. Dice the garlic and ginger finely. Pour boiling water over the noodles, soak for 10 minutes and then drain. Remove the mushrooms from the soaking liquid and slice them into fine strips, discarding the woody stalks of the shitakes.

Heat the oil until it starts to smoke in a wok, and throw in the garlic, ginger and the white parts of the spring onions. Stir fry for a few seconds until the aromatic ingredients start to give up their fragrance, and tip the contents of the pork bowl into the wok. Stir fry until the pork is browning evenly, and add the mushrooms to the wok with the bamboo shoots, stock, chilli bean sauce, chilli oil and soy sauces. Stir well to combine everything and add the noodles, stir again until the noodles are dispersed evenly through the wok, and turn the heat to medium. Allow the dish to bubble away until the sauce has reduced by about a third (a mixture of absorption and evaporation in this dish means this won’t take long). Remove from the heat and stir through the sesame oil and the green parts of the spring onions. Serve immediately with rice.

Steamed ginger chicken rice

Steamed ginger chicken rice
Steamed ginger chicken rice

This is similar to a lot of Chinese claypot dishes, and is really worth rolling out on a day when you have guests you want to spend time talking to rather than cooking for. It’s very, very tasty indeed, but it only uses one dish (or a rice cooker, if you happen to have one in the house) and doesn’t require any advance preparation or marinading. You’ll be using the food processor to blitz some chicken thighs into something a bit like a try rough chicken mince. Be careful when blitzing – you want small pieces of chicken, which steam to a really tasty, juicy result, rather than a smooth paste, which steams to a rubbery horribleness. The rice absorbs juices from the chicken along with all its seasoning, making for a really savoury dish.

I’ve been really pleased to see so many oriental ingredients make their way into even some of our…slightly rubbisher supermarkets. I found a jar of bamboo shoots in sesame oil when on an emergency tonic water run to Tesco. They’re great, and if you can track them down they’re well worth using, but if you can’t find them, substitute with canned shoots, rinsed well under the tap. All the other ingredients should be easy for you to get your hands on.

Texture’s a really important part of this dish. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a tasty crust at the bottom of the rice, created by the fat from the stock and the sesame oil which drips to the bottom “frying” the rice at the base of the dish. (Be sparing with the stock when you come to add the chicken mixture to increase the chances of a good crust.) The chicken will be soft from the steaming, and the vegetables, with their lower water content, will cook rather more slowly than the chicken surrounding them, leaving a lovely fresh crunch to things. As ever, use a home-made chicken stock if you have some in the freezer. If you don’t, I’ve had great success recently with the stuff Waitrose have been producing since their partnership with Heston Blumenthal, which is made with some kombu (a Japanese sea vegetable) for an extra umami kick.

To serve two (just multiply the amounts for more people and add an extra 5-10 minutes’ steaming time when you add the chicken for each extra portion) you’ll need:

370g jasmine rice
1 litre chicken stock
2 pieces of ginger the size of your thumb
12 spring onions
6 boneless, skinless chicken thighs
6 cloves garlic
3 tablespoons oyster sauce
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
2 tablespoons sesame oil
1 tablespoons Chinese chilli oil
75ml Chinese rice wine
100g bamboo shoots in sesame oil, drained
100g long-stem broccoli

Choose a Chinese claypot or a heavy saucepan with a close-fitting lid to cook the dish in. (You can also use a rice cooker – see below.) Combine the rice and 750ml of the stock in the pan with two of the spring onions, left whole, and one of the thumbs of ginger, peeled and sliced into coins. Put the lid on and bring the pan to the boil over a medium heat. Turn the heat down low and steam the rice for 20 minutes while you prepare the chicken.

While the rice is cooking, put the chicken thighs in the bowl of your food processor, and pulse gently and briefly until the chicken is chopped finely. Put the chicken pieces in a mixing bowl. Peel and dice the remaining ginger, mince the garlic and chop the rest of the spring onions and the broccoli into little pieces. Throw them in with the chicken, add the bamboo shoots, sesame oil, chilli oil, oyster sauce, rice wine and soy sauce, and use your hands to make sure everything is well combined. (I know, you hate touching raw chicken. Use a spoon if you must, but make sure everything is really well mixed.)

When the rice is ready, it’ll have little holes in the flat surface. Spoon the chicken mixture on top of it, pour over the remaining 25ml of stock, and stick the lid back on. Steam over the low heat the rice cooked at for another 25 minutes, and serve.

If you plan on cooking this in a rice cooker, just cook the rice with the stock, ginger and spring onions under the normal white rice setting, then set it to steam for the required amount of time. If your cooker doesn’t have a steam setting, just set it to “keep warm” when you’ve added the other ingredients, which should provide enough heat to steam the topping, but may take a little longer.

Pork with chilli and cashews

Pork with chilli and cashews
Pork with chilli and cashews

While recovering from flu, I’ve found myself turning to the wok even more than usual. It’s the perfect cooking implement when I’m feeling under the weather; there’s not too much washing up, you can get dinner on the table very quickly (you should be able to prepare this stir fry in under half an hour). Stir frying invites the use of powerful aromatics and savoury, fiery ingredients like soy and the chilli bean sauce I’ve used below – just what you need if you’re feeling a bit bunged up.

If you’re in a Chinese restaurant in the UK, you’re most likely to see cashew nuts paired with chicken. I prefer them with pork, which gives you a denser and more interesting flavour, and to my mind works much better with the sweet cashews. You’ll need raw, unsalted nuts. Most supermarkets seem to sell them these days, but if you can’t find any there, your local health food shop should stock them.

To serve three, you’ll need:

500g pork fillet
75g raw, unsalted cashew nuts
10 spring onions
3 tablespoons Chinese rice wine
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
1 tablespoon chilli bean sauce (I like Lee Kum Kee’s sauce, which you’ll be able to find in any oriental grocer)
2 fresh red chillies
1 tablespoon caster sugar
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon cornflour
2 tablespoons ground nut oil
Salt and pepper

Chop the cylindrical pork fillet into bite-sized slices measuring about 4 cm by ½ cm. Put the slices in a bowl and stir in 1 tablespoon of the rice wine, 1 tablespoon of the light soy sauce, the sesame oil, the cornflour, a large pinch of salt and several grinds of the peppermill until everything is well mixed. Leave to sit on the working surface to marinade quickly 15 minutes while you put together the rest of the ingredients and have a cup of tea.

Cut the white parts of the spring onion into thin coins, and put in a bowl. Chop the green parts finely and set aside. Chop the chillies finely, and make sure that the other ingredients are all within easy reach of the stove top.

Heat the oil to a high temperature in your wok, and stir fry the pork for three minutes. Remove the pork to a bowl with a slotted spoon. Add the cashew nuts to the wok and stir fry until they are turning gold (about one minute). Now add all of the other ingredients except the green parts of the spring onions. Return the pork to the pan and stir fry everything for another two minutes. Serve immediately, sprinkled with the green parts of the spring onions.

Congee – Chinese rice porridge

Congee
Congee

Congee is a Chinese breakfast dish – soothing, savoury, and aromatic with ginger and stock. (You may know it as choke, jook, bobo or cháo; it’s common all over Asia and its name varies as you’d expect with language and dialect.) I find it hard to separate the physiological effects of eating congee from the cultural ones. It’s a favourite dish when I’m ill, cold or miserable, but I couldn’t honestly tell you whether that’s because it makes me think of sharing a bowl in my pyjamas with my Dad; or because of the soothing magic that so many cultures assign to soupy, chickeny mixtures. It’s filling, easy to digest, and wonderfully satisfying. The Chinese say it’s good for an upset stomach, and it’s a standard sickbed dish used to perk up those with little appetite.

For Dad, it’s all about the texture. He’s even fond of plain congee, where water is used instead of stock. As a novice in congee, you’re likely to find the plain version too bland; my (English) mother and husband both say they would sooner eat papier-maché. At a conference in China earlier this year, I filled up happily every morning at the hotel buffet with a couple of small bowls of congee with century eggs, pickled bamboo shoots and catkins, while all my English colleagues looked on in horror over their Danish pastries. So I’ll happily admit that congee is not for everyone, though I can’t for the life of me work out why – you texture-phobes are eating more outlandish things every day. (Sausages, anybody?)

Congee is a base for you to add extra flavours to. There’s no ruleset to follow – top your porridge off with what you fancy. Here, I’ve used canned fried dace, a small oily fish, with black beans (available at all Chinese supermarkets). Try a dollop of Chinese chilli oil, some fresh ginger and spring onions, a splash of sesame oil. Experiment with your toppings, which are best when they’re salty and umami; I love Chinese pork floss (a kind of atomised jerky), Chinese wind-dried ham, century eggs or salted duck eggs, roasted meat, garlicky shitake mushrooms, and, for days when I’m feeling seriously brave, fermented tofu. Crispy dough crullers are a traditional addition, as are pickled mustard greens (zha cai), which you’ll find sold in vacuum-sealed plastic packs. This is a good time to explore the aisles of your local oriental supermarket; you’ll need to visit anyway to pick up the glutinous rice, so go mad and furtle in the darker corners of the shop to see if you can find any gingko nuts or dried scallops to accompany your porridge.

Congee with toppings
Toppings, clockwise from top: spring onions, chilli oil, fried dace with black beans, fresh ginger

I like my congee relatively loose in texture. For a stiffer porridge, reduce the stock in the recipe by a couple of hundred millilitres. Some rice cookers have a congee setting – follow the instructions on yours if you’re lucky enough to have one. And as always, the stock you use should be as good as you can find; home-made is always best, and if it has a little fat floating on top, all the better.

For a congee base for 2-3 people, you’ll need:
150g glutinous rice
1.2 litres home-made chicken or pork stock
1-inch piece of ginger, cut into coins
1 teaspoon salt

Whatever you choose to top the congee with, you’ll find it much improved by:
Another 1-inch piece of ginger, peeled and cut into julienne strips
3-4 spring onions, cut into coins
2 teaspoons sesame oil
Soy sauce to taste

Rinse the rice in a sieve under the cold tap. Combine the stock and rice in a large saucepan with the salt and coins of ginger, and bring to the boil. Turn down to a bare simmer, and put the lid on. Continue to simmer for 1-1½ hours, until the congee has a creamy, porridgy texture. Stir the congee well. Spoon into bowls to serve, and sprinkle over the toppings.

I much prefer the flavour and texture you’ll get with glutinous rice, but if you really can’t find any, you can try the Cantonese style of congee, which is made with regular white rice and liquid in the same proportions as the recipe above, and boiled for about six hours until it breaks down into a mush. You’ll also find congee mixes including other grains, like barley and beans, for sale, particularly in the medicinal foods section.

Iceberg lettuce and beansprout stir-fry

Iceberg lettuce and beansprout stir fryI’ve never really caught on to this British idea of the lettuce as mere salad vegetable. The Chinese aren’t alone in cooking them; you’ll find lettuce simmered gently in French soups and especially in dishes with peas. Cooked, the lettuce becomes silky and sweet; a totally different beast from the salad leaf you’re used to.

In China, you’re much more likely to find a lettuce cooked than raw. This preparation works very well with the spicy, rich, Vietnamese caramel pork from the other day; in Chinese terms, its clean, fresh flavour would be described as being Yin, against the Yang of the pork. This philosophy of food strives to balance the body – if you are prone to cold fingers and toes, and have a slow heart rate, you’re considered to have an excess of Yin. If you’re sleepless, sweaty or jittery,  Chinese grandmothers would tell you you’ve too much Yang. Yang foods tend towards richness: think chestnuts, squashes, onions and garlic, meat, ginger, coffee, alcoholic drinks and fruits like peaches, mangoes and cherries. Apples, bananas, asparagus, watermelon (as distinct from cantaloupe, which is Yang), shellfish, lettuce, beansprouts, citrus fruits and cucumbers are among the foods considered Yin.

I live in a post-enlightenment age, and do not think my cold fingers are due to an excess of lettuce, rather an excess of typing. But it’s still an interesting philosophy which works surprisingly well to help you balance the flavours in a meal. In Malaysian Chinese households, you’ll often be offered a Yin mangosteen to accompany the excessive Yang of a durian, for example; the two work together exceptionally well. Try this dish, which only takes minutes to cook (and is only Yanged-up slightly by the chicken stock, rice wine and a little garlic) to accompany fierce and rich flavours like Monday’s pork. To serve two generously, you’ll need:

1 iceberg lettuce, halved and chopped into strips
500g beansprouts
3 fat cloves garlic, sliced
1 ladle good home-made chicken stock
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
2 tablespoons Chinese rice wine
Groundnut or grape seed oil to stir fry

Bring a small amount of oil to a high temperature in a wok. Throw in the sliced garlic and stir-fry for ten seconds, then add the beansprouts to the pan and continue to cook, stirring all the time. After three minutes, add the liquid ingredients, bring to a simmer and add the lettuce. Cook, stirring, until all the lettuce is wilted, and serve immediately.

Singapore noodles with miso chicken

Singapore noodles with miso chickenSingapore noodles are another dish with a misleading name. They don’t appear at all in Singapore, despite their ubiquity on Hong Kong, UK, US and other Chinese restaurant menus. It’s unclear where the recipe originates, but it’s now a take-away standard. I suppose it makes sense; Singaporean and Malaysian food is characterised as being a bold, mish-mash of cultures, and this dish fits that description well.

Given that noodles in this style are something of a made-up dish, I allowed myself some latitude when I couldn’t find all the ingredients I wanted to use. You’ll see beansprouts in the ingredient list below, and they do make for a much more interesting mouthful, so include them if you can. There appears to be a beansprout drought in these parts at the moment, so you won’t see any in the photo. I’ve used a wheat/egg ramen noodle rather than the traditional rice vermicelli you often find in restaurants; this isn’t such an odd choice, and you’ll find many UK Chinese restaurants using a wheat noodle, but some do prefer vermicelli, so substitute them if you’re a particular fan. As always with curry powder, find the best you can. There’s a world of difference between those jars from Sharwood’s and Bart’s and a good curry powder from a small producer. Malaysian curry powder is preferable here, if you can find it, for its complex and herbaceous aromatics.

The chicken, sweet and intensely umami, is a lovely foil to the noodles. Marinate it overnight if possible. The marinade, boiled through thoroughly, makes a fine dipping sauce to go alongside this meal, or can be spooned over in small quantities. The sauce is packed with flavour, so you won’t need much. You can, of course, cook the chicken separately from the noodles; it’s fantastic cold and makes a very good sandwich filling or, diced, a Chinese salad addition.

To serve two, you’ll need:

Noodles
200g thin ramen or rice vermicelli
6 spring onions
1 medium red onion
1 red pepper
1 carrot
75g beansprouts
3 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons of  your favourite curry powder
30ml rice wine
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
Small amount of oil to stir fry

Chicken
2 skinless, boneless breasts
2 tablespoons white miso
2 tablespoons rice wine
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
1 tablespoon soft brown sugar
1 teaspoon sesame oil

Marinate the chicken overnight in all the chicken ingredients (or for at least six hours). Remove from the marinade and grill under a medium flame for 8-10 minutes per side until done while you cook the noodles. Put the remaining marinade in a little pan and bring it to a rolling boil for a couple of minutes, then put to one side until you are ready to serve.

Chop the spring onions into coins, chop the garlic, slice the onion, dice the pepper and cut the carrot into thin diagonal slivers. Prepare the noodles for stir-frying by following the instructions on the packet. In your wok, take a little groundnut or grapeseed oil, and fry the spring onions, garlic, onion and pepper with the curry powder over a very high heat, moving everything around all the time, until the onion takes on a little char at the edges (only a few minutes). Add the noodles, carrots and beansprouts to the wok. Stir-fry until everything is well mixed, then add the liquid ingredients. Stir through again, turn the heat down and put a lid on the pan for 2 minutes before serving.

Dish the noodles out and slice the chicken breasts on the diagonal before placing them on top of the noodles with a little of the cooked marinade. Serve immediately.

Stir-fried chicken in XO sauce

XO chickenOf all the bajillion little bottles and jars of stuff littering my fridge and kitchen cupboards, the jar of XO sauce is probably my favourite. You know – the one you’d take to a desert island to make all those coconuts more interesting.

XO originates in Hong Kong, and gets its name from the Hong Kong taste for cognac. In cognac terms, XO means “extra old”; in Hong Kong terms, it means “really very delicious and pricey, like cognac”. The sauce itself doesn’t taste like or contain cognac; it’s made from dried seafood and preserved meat (usually scallops, shrimp and wind-dried ham), garlic, chillies, shallots and oil. Until fairly recently, you’d have to make your own or go to a restaurant to try it, but good XO sauces are now available bottled; I like the Lin Lin brand, which you should be able to find at a good oriental grocery. If you’re interested in making your own, the superb recipe from David Chang at Momofuku in New York is online at this tribute blog. Despite all that dried seafood, the resulting sauce isn’t particularly fishy; it is, however, a wonderfully savoury, spicy, rich and flavourful thing to cook with, and it’s a good way to pack flavour into a dish quickly. This should take you all of ten minutes to make – a great dish for an exhausted end-of-the-week supper.

To serve four, you’ll need:

500g boneless chicken, cut into bite-sized pieces (I like thigh best here – brown meat carries much more flavour)
5 tablespoons plain flour
½ teaspoon Madras curry powder (I like Bolsts)
6 spring onions
100g sugar-snap peas
100g baby corn
3 cloves garlic
50ml Chinese cooking wine or sherry
3 tablespoons light soy sauce
2 heaped tablespoons XO sauce
Salt and plenty of black pepper

Mix the flour with the curry powder, a good pinch of salt and several grinds of the peppermill, and toss the chicken in it in a large bowl. Set aside while you chop the other ingredients. Cut the white parts of the spring onions into coins, and put in a bowl with the chopped garlic. Cut the rest of the spring onions and the baby corn into pieces on the diagonal.

Heat a couple of tablespoons of ground nut oil (or another flavourless oil) in a wok over a high heat, and fry the spring onion bottoms with the garlic for a few seconds until they start to give off their scent. Add the chicken to the pan and stir-fry for about 2 minutes, until there is no pink visible. Add the green parts of the spring onions, the baby corn and the peas to the wok, stir-fry for about 30 seconds and throw in the Chinese wine and soy sauce. Stir-fry for another 30 seconds and stir in the XO sauce. Put a lid on the wok and cook for another minute or so, until the chicken is cooked through.

Serve immediately with steamed rice.

Whampoa Club, Shanghai

The Bund from Pudong
The Bund (the low-rise, illuminated buildings across the river) from the Hyatt in Pudong

Having spent decades energetically trying to purge itself of any traces of its colonial and pre-colonial past, Shanghai had a turnabout just in time for the 2010 Expo. Two years ago, there wasn’t a tree to be seen in the city; today, most of the main streets are lined with thousands of plane trees which all look to be about 20 years old. It’s amazing what you can do with a command economy; there was, it seems, a forest of the things somewhere inland which have been carefully uprooted and planted wholesale along Shanghai’s bare roadsides. We visited the Jing’an temple, the original building long obliterated but now being newly rebuilt for tourists and worshippers (in approximately that order), the finishing touches being installed as we walked around by artisans. The core of the old city, by the Yu Yuan gardens and the City God temple, has been sanitised and rebuilt in antique style, all carefully paved with concrete and lined with tourist information booths, resulting in a sterilised pedestrian precinct clad in red lacquer and glossy varnished wood.

Chinese chess
Chinese chess in one of the unimproved back streets

It all feels very disjointed. You’ll still find pockets of the old city in there (the streets around the pedestrianised area are untouched, the Yu Yuan gardens are gloriously crumbly and the City God temple, despite a restoration about five years ago, feels much less Disney than the surrounding area), and areas like the French Concession keep much of their colonial atmosphere. Best of all, though, for those looking for colonial Shanghai, is the Bund.

Whampoa Club lobby
Whampoa Club lobby

Until a couple of years ago, the arc of neo-classical and deco buildings curving alongside the Huangpu river wasn’t somewhere you’d want to walk, with an eleven-lane road eating up the space where the promenade gardens used to be, a huge flyover blocking much of the view and a large concrete bridge. Miraculously, the whole thing has been swept clean – the road narrowed, the flyover pushed into a tunnel, the bridge demolished – and the promenade is now open again for the first time in decades. It’s heaving with people, especially at sunset, when the view of the lights over sci-fi modern Pudong contrasts so extravagantly (and really rather wonderfully) with the classical sweep of the Bund. Rents are high here, so the Bund is packed with luxury goods shops and some of the city’s pricier restaurants. We were celebrating, so we headed for the Whampoa Club,  in the gorgeous surroundings of 3 the Bund. You’ll find classical Shanghai cuisine here (fifteen pages of it) alongside regional specialities from other parts of China, in a lavishly decorated space dense with lacquer, gold leaf and bronze – and the inevitable wall of awards.

We were here to sample some traditional Shanghai dishes, and ordered the Legendary Su Dong Po Braised Pork: fat, braised belly in a sweet, glossy red bean and soy sauce. It’s a fatty dish, but the many hours of braising result in cubes of tender, intensely savoury pork, the fat carrying the velvety flavour to every corner of the mouth.

The atmosphere can’t be beaten. What I thought was a piped recording of extraordinarily delicate Chinese music turned out to be sound drifting from two ladies with a flute and a dulcimer in the corridor leading to the restaurant entrance. And part-way through the meal, an oddly magical power cut left us  illuminated by candles glinting off the chandelier in the centre of the room and the weird glow of Pudong slanting through the window. “This,” said Dr W, “Is a super-romance-peak-experience.”

Shanghai "smoked" pomfret
Shanghai "smoked" pomfret

Smoked Old-Fashioned Shanghaianese Pomfret is a Shanghai cuisine A-lister. It comes in bite-sized pieces, fried crisp with a caramelised coating and more sweet, soy-based sauce. It’s another classical dish, and the name is misleading; the fish itself is never actually smoked, but is cooked in a wok of fuming oil. A dish of gai lan (mustard greens) in XO sauce made in-house, thick with wind-dried scallops and pork, offered a respite from all the protein and fat – just as well, because we’d also ordered a Beijing duck.

Portions at the Whampoa club are huge – this is probably somewhere you’re best off visiting in a large group if you want to sample more from the long menu – and we’d already eaten a lot, so we passed on the stir-fried meat of the duck, just concentrating on the skin in little egg crepes. In texture, the skin was very different from what we’d eaten in Beijing (and much more traditional – I’ve never seen the puffy, popcorny skin at Da Dong replicated anywhere else). Molten fat gushed from under the skin as it was carved by the table. The skin on this duck was less crisp than the specially prepared skin at Da Dong, but ultimately rather better tasting, presumably because of the lubrication from all that fat. The duck sauce was also more up my alley, with a strong taste of rice wine and a dark sweetness.

"Clearing sputum" tea
"Clearing sputum" tea

We drank very pricey medicinal tea from the lengthy tea menu, in an attempt to clear our heads of the accumulated smog and traffic fumes from a few days in Beijing. “Clearing Sputum” tea does not have a pretty name, but it’s a beautiful drink; dark apricot in colour, with notes of orange, camphor and osmanthus. I am not at all sure it worked, but nothing ventured and all that. Tsing Tao beer, on the other hand, worked splendidly to do that thing that beer does.

The menu is available in English, and while not all the members of the very attentive staff speak English, you’ll find that a little miming, pointing and smiling go a long way. If this fails, there’s always someone on the staff who does speak the language, so you won’t get stuck. We didn’t get as far as dessert; the other dishes were in that space where things taste so good you can’t stop eating even though you are bloatedly, lumpishly full. We were, and we couldn’t.

The duck and the tea were both on the pricey end of the menu, and we’d drunk several beers; the eventual bill of RMB 900 (£90) is a hideous price for much of China but pretty much what you’d expect at one of the restaurants on the Bund. And do you know what? It was worth every penny.

Nan Xiang dumplings, Shanghai

Xiao long bao
Xiao long bao

Xiao long bao, or soup dumplings, are an emblematic piece of Shanghai cuisine. They’re a testament to the chef’s skill – ideally, the dumpling will have a thin, thin skin which gives instantly to the teeth, but still has enough integrity to hold in a spoonful of soup alongside the dense pork filling. That soup doesn’t appear until the dumplings are cooked; it’s created when a jellied stock, which is solid when cold, is mixed in with the meat filling, melting with the heat from steaming.

There’s a bit of etiquette involved in eating a Xiao long bao. Pick the bun up by the “knot” on the top with your chopsticks, dip it in the black vinegar and shredded ginger mixture on your table, and place the bun in your little spoon. Use chopsticks or teeth to make a little hole in the side of the bao, allowing the rich soup to leak out into the spoon. Eat the dumpling (carefully – if cooked properly, it should be hot enough to fetch the skin off your tongue) and slurp the soup from the spoon.

Xiao long bao are available all over the city, and some are much, much better than others on offer. I had some surprisingly good ones alongside some surprisingly bad ones at the surprisingly grotty Hilton (unfortunately, while they’d turned out enjoyable, if somewhat MSG-tacular dumplings for a couple of days, they screwed up on our last morning and the few I had there for breakfast on our last day turned out to be tepid, resulting in an 11-hour flight spent developing a close relationship with the airline toilet. Learn the lesson I didn’t – don’t eat a tepid dumpling).

Queues of locals snaking out of a restaurant are a great sign. If you’re visiting the People’s Square or the excellent Shanghai Museum, head for Jia Jia Tan Bao – you’ll spot the restaurant long before you get there from its queue. My favourites were the dumplings at Nan Xiang (sometimes transliterated as Nanxiang), probably Shanghai’s most celebrated dumpling stop.

Dumpling chefs
Dumpling chefs at Nan Xiang

Nan Xiang is an institution that the city is so proud of that a canteen-style branch has been set up at the 2010 Expo, in the middle of a very satisfying food court arrangement. It’s well worth locating if you’re visiting the 5.28 square kilometres that make up the largest ever world’s fair – you’ll need the fat, carbs and protein to get you to the other end.

In the city proper, you’ll find Nan Xiang near the Yu Yuan gardens in the Old Town God’s Temple precinct. No matter when you visit, there will be a queue. Check whether the queue you have joined is for the take-out window or for the restaurant itself, which is upstairs. As you work your way higher and higher up in the restaurant, you’ll find the offerings on the menu become more complicated, so we queued for the third floor, where crab-roe buns are the speciality. If you’re not too fussed about crab roe and just want to sample the pork buns, stop at the second floor, from which you’ll get a great view of the zig-zag Jiuqu bridge.

There are photographs of the dishes on the wall you’ll be queuing alongside, which is helpful in the face of the eccentric English menu (the buns are referred to as “characteristic dessert” – they’re characteristic, but they’re sure as hell not dessert). We ended up with a big steamer full of the traditional pork buns, some crab roe, vegetable and tofu parcels deep-fried to a marvellous lightness (the menu calls these spring rolls), and a plate of superb baked rice-flour and sesame buns filled with cashew nut and garlic chives, all flavoured with a rich sauce.  Someone at an adjacent table was wrestling with a giant, fist-sized bun full of crab roe and pork with a straw sticking out of the top to suck the soup out with, which convenience left him howling as it precision-poached his soft palate. Exercise caution with hot substances and straws.

You’ll find yourself paying RMB 15 (about £1.50) per bamboo steamer. Plus the air fare, of course. If you’re in London and find you simply can’t manage without a plate of xiao long bao, head for Leong’s Legends in Chinatown’s Macclesfield St – they’re no Nan Xiang, but they make the best I’ve found yet in the UK.

Da Dong Roast Duck, Beijing

Duck preparation area
Duck preparation area - these ducks have been steamed but are not yet roasted. Note koi river.

Chain restaurants occupy a very different place in the foodie ecosystem in China. Here in the West, chains tend to be reliably mediocre (or worse), only worth visiting if you’re away from home and have a particular hankering for that very specific and very homogeneous pizza/burger/pasta thing that they do in the branch round the corner from your house.

In China, though, you’ll find chains (smaller than your average UK effort, but chains nonetheless) like Da Dong Roast Duck and Nan Xiang dumplings (more on them later this week) where the number of branches is an advertisement for the popularity and excellence of the cooking, not a sign of bland uniformity. Several people had suggested Da Dong to me (I’m afraid there’s no English website), so I asked the hotel concierge which branch he recommended, and ended up at the newest, at Jinbao Place in the Dongcheng district.

Jinbao Place is one of those glistening, insanely swanky shopping malls, all Gucci and Burberry, where an emergency shirt to replace the one you’ve spilled hot and sour soup down just before a meeting (this actually happened to one of the people we were travelling with) will cost you RMB 2000, or £200. The whole of the fourth floor is taken up by Da Dong, with its koi stream running through the restaurant, around an open duck prep area; its Scandinavian-style interior decorations; and an awful lot of polished black granite. Despite all the gloss, we only paid RMB 600 (£60) for a battleship-sinking amount of food and an awful lot of beer – this is pricey for Beijing, but the food is so much more interesting than anything you’ll find at home, I’m sure you can wear it.

Menus are printed in English. There’s a very expensive seafood section full of abalone, lobster, sea cucumber and other premium ingredients, where exquisitely photographed pictures of each dish accompany each description, alongside a much more affordable section of traditional Beijing dishes, without photos. We ordered mostly from the non-photo section – and we steered clear of the oxtail soup with a dirty great seahorse (a creature on the Red List of endangered species) bobbing up and down in it. A colleague did order a seahorse by accident at another restaurant without an English menu, and said it was a lot like eating an ear.

At the moment, Euro/American molecular techniques are pretty fashionable in Beijing, so our little starter plates of wind dried ham with tiny sweet peas, quite different from a Western pea with their thin skins and intense sugary flavour, came delicately arranged on a spoon, all accompanied by a frothy little shot glass of something that appeared to be minty mouthwash. A palate cleanser? Whatever it was meant to be, it was a little alarming and a very curious choice of flavour next to those glorious little peas, but it was oh-so-pretty that I feel like letting them off. You can just make out some tea being poured in the background – there’s a long and involved tea menu, and it’s well worth your while exploring something other than the bog-standard jasmine tea.

Braised aubergine
Braised aubergine

Some peeled prawns, deep-fried in batter then simmered in a garlicky sauce, which was soaked up by the softened batter, were curious texture-wise, but that limp batter created an incredible vehicle for the flavour of the sauce. A Kilner jar of pork chops, cooked according to a “mystery technique”, was threaded through with sugar cane and grilled over charcoal, then snipped into bite-sized bits with scissors at the table – and was so heavy on the  MSG that we got through our glasses of beer very quickly, and needed a top-up for the teapot. Add a really superb braised aubergine, gorgeously dense with thick, sweet soy and aromatic with anise and garlic; and a dish of gai lan (mustard greens) stir-fried with ginger, and we were pretty much full – but it remains my firm belief that everybody has a separate stomach for dessert, and it’s my enormous genetic good luck to be blessed with yet another stomach just for roast duck in pancakes. (I managed to put weight on at a rate of about a pound a day while we were in China, and spent the next week in Hungary – long story – running up and down hills to try to burn it all off, so be warned: gorging yourself like this doesn’t come without consequences.)

Roast duck
Roast duck

The duck at Da Dong is the main event. They claim to have invented a technique whereby the duck is much leaner than other Beijing roast ducks – the skin here is popcorn-puffy and exceptionally crisp and dry, while the flesh remains moist and juicy. Peering into the dark duck prep area, which was manned by chefs in toques and anti-sneeze facemasks (see the picture at the top of the page), I could make out that the ducks were being steamed or boiled in a purpose-built-something that looked like a small well in the middle of the room, then hung on racks before being cooked until a glorious gold in wood-fired ovens.

Duck condiments
Duck condiments

The duck is carved tableside, and you’re given the halved head (full of curdy brains and covered with crisp skin), sans beak, to chew and suck on – which I did, to Dr W’s great displeasure. Your first pancake is assembled for you, after which you’re left on your own with a heap of pancakes, two little pitta-ish buns, and dish of condiments – sugar, a duck sauce, pickled ginger, pickled vegetables, crushed garlic, spring onions, radish and cucumbers. You can do what you like with these, but do try a sliver of skin dipped into the granulated sugar – surprisingly, abominably good. A pallid soup also accompanies the duck, but it’s eminently missable. This wasn’t the only Beijing roast duck I ate in our week in China, and there’s definitely something to that technique – the duck is much less fatty and exceptionally crisp, which appears to be more palatable to Western tastes. The accompanying duck sauce wasn’t the best I’ve had – full-on sweet, a little bitter and without the fragrance of fermented soy and rice wine I’d been hoping for – but this seems a minor quibble alongside that shatteringly crisp skin.

A complementary fruit plate arrives at the end to cleanse you of ducky thoughts. It sits on top of a gushing dish of dry ice, which doesn’t make it taste any nicer, but is awfully good fun to look at.

Once we’d finished looking at fruit, we waddled, duck-wise, down past the shops full of diamonds and branded leather and collapsed into a taxi. A great evening, but given my waistline, it’s a restaurant I’m glad that I have to travel 11 hours to get to. One of the branches of Da Dong is definitely worth the visit if you’re in the city.