Sesame ginger chicken wings

My Dad always taught us that the best part of the chicken was the wings. The flesh in the wing is sweet from its proximity to the bone, delicate, and lubricated with plenty of flavour-carrying fat from the skin that covers it. Accordingly, we used to fight over the wings every time a chicken appeared on the dinner table, occasionally with our cutlery. Ours was a savage household.

Dad’s Chinese, and this is the kind of comfort food he used to rustle up for us when everybody else’s Dad was frying mince with baked beans. I used to take great pride as a little girl in helping out – slicing the garlic, chopping the ginger, carefully mixing the cornflour into some cold water, and watching, fascinated, as he whirled around the kitchen with a wok and a pair of chopsticks. You can’t beat the cosmopolitan nature of the food education my brother and I got from my parents: Mum’s wonderful meals were from Jane Grigson, the Roux brothers and Elizabeth David, and Dad’s all did something fabulous with soy sauce. Alongside lengthy gastronomic holidays in France, where my brother and I were expected to sit quietly for hours in restaurants with endless cutlery and a million cheeses while Mum and Dad bibbed and tucked (and we did – there’s still little I find as fascinating as my very own slab of foie gras), there were the frequent visits to Malaysia, where food is as important to the national psyche as football is in Britain. Back in the UK, there were regular and keenly looked forward to family trips to London’s Chinatown, which, at the time, was the only place you could find ingredients like sesame oil, chilli sauces and tofu – even ginger was sometimes hard to find in 1970s Bedfordshire. There were bribes of candied winter melon and sesame caramels for the kids, and Dad swiftly made friends with all the local Chinese restaurateurs. We met Kenneth Lo once at a garden party when I was about six. Dad didn’t stop talking about it for weeks.

While most wing recipes you’ll find will have you grill or fry the wings so they are crisp, this Chinese method will have you simmering them in an aromatic, savoury sauce. You’re best off eating these with a knife and fork; fingers will be a bit messy. The popularity of chicken breasts and legs, all neatly pre-jointed, means that there are a lot of surplus wings kicking around out there, and you’ll likely find that you can buy them very cheaply (I prefer the butcher’s wings to the boxes from the supermarket, because I’m more confident about their origin) – this is a good budget dish for the end of the month.

I like to remove the wingtips, which don’t yield any meat, with a pair of poultry shears, and use them to make stock. This isn’t absolutely necessary – if you’re in a hurry, leave yours on. And although my Dad would use a wok to make this, I find a large casserole dish a bit easier, not least because it’s an even depth and comes with a lid.

To serve two, you’ll need:

800g chicken wings
1 teaspoon sugar
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
½ teaspoon salt
2in piece of ginger
2 cloves garlic
12 spring onions, chopped and separated into green and white parts
75ml sesame oil
100ml soy sauce
Water
2 teaspoons cornflour
Groundnut oil to fry

Half an hour before you start to cook, sprinkle the salt, pepper and sugar over the chicken wings, mix well, and set aside.

Heat a couple of spoonsful of oil in your pan, and brown the wings on each side. You may need to do this in a few batches, depending on the size of your pan. When they are browned, return them to the pan with the chopped garlic, the ginger, cut into coins, and the white part of the spring onions. Keep stirring carefully for a minute until the garlic, ginger and onions start to give up their aroma – be careful not to break the skin on any of the wings.

Pour over the sesame oil and soy sauce, and reduce the heat to a low flame. Add water to cover the wings, stir to combine everything, and bring slowly to a simmer. Put a lid on the pan and cook, stirring occasionally, for 12 minutes.

Combine the cornflour with a little cold water. Remove the lid and stir the cornflour mixture through the dish. Continue to simmer until the sauce thickens. Stir through the green part of the spring onions, reserving a little to scatter over the finished dish, and serve with steamed rice and a stir-fried vegetable.

Crispy pork belly with bak kut teh spicing

With what, you say? Bak kut teh. It’s a Hokkien Chinese term which translates roughly as “meaty bone tea”, and it denotes a particular herbal, scenty soup spicing which is traditionally meant to warm you from within. It’s got yang, this stuff. So much so that my mother and brother won’t eat it, because it makes them turn bright red and start sweating.

In a period when my village is only accessible over a hump-backed bridge coated with half a foot of sheet ice (it’s been like this since before Christmas), red and sweating is exactly what I’m after. Hurrah for yang.

You’ll find bak kut teh served regularly in Malaysia and southern China. Bak kut teh mixtures are available in the UK in oriental supermarkets, in sealed packs containing a couple of tea-bag style sachets. These sachets are preferable to the whole spices, which you also see sometimes in neat plastic packs – the whole spices can make your recipe a bit gritty. If you’re making the traditional stew, just pop a bag in a crockpot with some rib bones, simmer for a few hours, and serve with rice or as a noodle soup with a generous slosh of soya sauce. It’s hearty stuff – the traditional mixture includes star anise, angelica, cinnamon and cloves. This mixture is, somewhat eccentrically, close to what you’ll find in a British Christmas cake.

The recipe below is not a traditional use of a bak kut teh sachet, but it’s none the worse for that. Here, you’ll be combining those spices with rice wine, several gloppy Chinese sauces, honey, spring onions and garlic, and using this stock to perfume a slab of pork belly. The belly meat is pressed under weights overnight in the fridge, then chopped and fried in a wok until it’s crispy. I know, I know: but the long simmering will render a lot of the grease out of the meat, and sometimes the weather just calls out for fatsome, sticky pork.

I served mine with some sticky hoi sin sauce to dip, alongside a little of the stock, thickened with cornflour, to moisten the rice we ate with it. Hang onto the stock – you can freeze it and treat it as a master stock. I poached a couple of hams in mine, leaving them spiced and savoury but not overtly Chinese-tasting; it’s back in the freezer now, and I have plans to poach a chicken in it next. This procedure may sound overly parsimonious to those used to stock cubes, but it’s a method that produces a stock with an incredible depth of flavour, and you can keep using it indefinitely as a poaching liquid, adding a bit more water or wine and some more aromatics every time you cook, and making sure that every time it comes out of the freezer the stock gets boiled very thoroughly. There are restaurants in Hong Kong which claim that their master stock has been on the go for more than a hundred years.

To poach one boneless pork belly (enough for four, but be warned, this is very moreish) you’ll need:

1 boneless pork belly, with rind
1 bak kut teh sachet
Water to cover the belly (about a litre)
150ml Chinese rice wine
5 tablespoons light soy sauce
3 tablespoons dark soy sauce
3 tablespoons oyster sauce
2 tablespoons hoi sin sauce
3 tablespoons honey
2 anise stars
1 bulb garlic
6 spring onions, tied in a knot
Groundnut oil to fry

Stir the liquid ingredients together in a saucepan that fits the pork reasonably closely, and slide the pork in with the star anise, garlic and spring onions. Bring to a gentle simmer, skim off any froth that rises to the surface with a slotted spoon, cover and continue to simmer gently for two hours.

Remove the pork from the cooking liquid carefully and place it on a large flat dish with high enough sides to catch any liquid that comes out of the meat as you press it. Strain the poaching liquid if you plan on using it as a master stock. Place a plate or pan lid large enough to cover the whole belly on top of the meat (the skin side) and weigh it down. I used a heavy cast-iron pan lid and all the weights from my kitchen scales. Cover the whole assembly with a teatowel and leave it in the fridge for 24 hours.

When you are ready to eat, remove the pressed meat to a chopping board and use a sharp knife to cut it into bite-sized pieces, about 2cm square. Bring about 5cm depth of groundnut oil to a high temperature in a wok, and fry the pieces of pork in batches of five or six pieces until golden (this should only take a couple of minutes per batch). Serve with shredded spring onion and some hoi sin sauce with steamed rice and a vegetable.

Asia – The Pan-Asian Dining Room, Regent St, Cambridge

Regular readers will know that I have always had a mild distrust of those restaurants which purport to specialise in the foods of more than one culture. You know what I mean – those places offering up dim sum alongside sushi, or Thai food with Japanese soba. So I went to Asia, up at the Catholic church end of Regent Street in Cambridge, with a bit of trepidation. (Full disclosure here – I’d been invited by the owners and got a free meal.)

Asia (the restaurant, not the continent) is smart enough not to try to do Japanese food, but explores Chinese, Thai and Indian foods in a very similar way to that you’ll find in Malaysian cuisine, with food from all three cultures served up alongside each other – and thankfully, they do it all very well indeed. This is actually a combination of cuisines that makes really good sense. It can be a bit disconcerting ordering Indian and Chinese side dishes to go with a Thai main course, but once you get into the swing of things, the flavours – aromatic lime leaves here, Goan curry spicing there, oyster sauce and fermented beans over there – gel surprisingly well. Ask the very helpful waiters if you’re trying to work out some good flavour combinations; they know the menu backwards and are very ready to help. Ingredients are fresh and, where possible (obviously, you’re going to run into trouble sourcing mangoes in East Anglia), local.

It’s a big space, and just avoids that hard-surface thing where restaurant interiors become loud and boomy. It’s all handsome, contemporary dark wood and marble juxtaposed with Indian and South East Asian artifacts – a Thai screen, an Indian limestone frieze – and the odd bit of upholstery. It’s spotlessly clean, it’s a very pretty room to eat in, and the welcome and service, which was warm, friendly and helpful, didn’t seem to be at all different from what the guests around us were getting. So far, so splendid – and did you know that Kingfisher, the Indian restaurant lager people, are also doing a very good fizzy mineral water now?

We opened with my favourite Thai salad, Som Tum, all green papaya, sour lime, savoury fish sauce and dried shrimp, with two fat prawns. Dr W went for scallops, and the restaurant must be proud of these, because they’re stupendous and very unusual – sweet Scottish scallops, seared to a barely-cooked wobble with a coriander crust, served with salted yoghurt and, right out of left-field, olive purée. (They say the purée is Peruvian. No, I have no idea either, but it was good, and perfectly salty against the sweet flesh of the scallops.)

Mains are served individually, not family-style. This is not the Upton way of doing things, especially when everything on the table is so interesting, and we wanted to put the dishes in the middle so we could share. Waiters swished around elegantly as soon as I asked, conjuring hot, clean plates out of nowhere. And just as well too, because Dr W’s Goan halibut curry in a lovely rough tomato and tamarind sauce was a firm, moist beast, so there was no way I wasn’t going to eat half of it. We’d also gone for a dish of Kai Krob, a Thai chicken in pieces, cooked in a light, floury coating that was halfway between chewy and crispy – fabulous – with a good hit of sweetness and a scattering of intensely aromatic kaffir lime leaves.

Presentation’s great here, such that we found ourselves remarking that one of the side-dishes (shitake and oyster mushrooms with home-made garlic chilli sauce and yellow beans) was much less pretty than the other things on the table, particularly the Bombay potatoes, all scattered with crispy vermicelli and punctuated with bright green coriander. But beauty’s only potato-skin deep, and the Bombay potatoes tasted pretty ordinary, while those mushrooms (must have been the home-made sauce) had us wiping the empty bowl with a naan. A naan, I will have you know, that was studded with dates – if you get that Goan halibut curry, the date naan is a brilliant foil to it.

A short pause for hot hand towels soaked in eau de cologne. Rumpole of the Bailey once bit into one in a dark Chinese restaurant, mistaking it for a spring roll. You will know better.

The dessert menu is short, especially when compared to the pages and pages of mains and starters that go before, all divided up by origin and method (so tandoor dishes are listed on one page, classical dishes on another, noodles on another). To be honest, it was a bit of a relief; main courses and starters were so generous we were pretty stuffed by this point, and weren’t up to hard decision-making. Dr W nearly went for something called Funky Pie, then changed his mind (if you go and order a Funky Pie, do let me know what it is – I’m intrigued), settling for Indian carrot cake (Gajar ka Halwa), all dense and moist and achingly sweet. I went for the crème brûlée, thrilled to see that they’d got the accents in the right place on the menu, and ended up wishing I’d had the saffron-poached pears instead – it tasted beautiful, but the acid from the mango had turned it into watery whey and curds under the crisp sugar crust. A single dud in an otherwise really enjoyable meal.

There are currently some promotions on the restaurant’s website (click on the ‘information’ tab), which include a 10% discount for students. Without discounts, you’re looking at around £5 for a starter. Mains start at £7.25 – the price rises steeply once you get into things like lobster, but starving students looking to impress attractive art historians should head on over, try for a table by the huge window so you can people-watch, tell them I sent you, and get ordering.

Chinese chicken with cashew nuts

I’ve lost the magic USB string for my camera. No matter – I did take some pictures of this recipe, and will put them up as soon as my magic string makes an appearance. In the meantime, here is a placeholder botanical print of a cashew nut borrowed from Wikipedia.

Chicken with cashew nuts pops up on Chinese restaurant and takeaway menus the world over, all with slightly different saucing and attitudes to things like batter and breading. Where I come from, we neither batter nor bread our chicken in this preparation, but if you can’t bear missing out on the missing cholesterol, feel free to bread/batter and deep-fry your marinaded chicken before you add it to the stir-fried sauce and vegetables.

The sauce here is made up from hoi sin with smaller amounts of chilli bean and black bean sauces – all from jars, and all from your local Chinese supermarket. If you don’t have access to these ingredients locally, try the excellent Wai Yee Hong, whom I’ve found to be superbly reliable and well-stocked over the last year or so. Unsalted cashews are no longer very hard to come by – most supermarkets will stock them in their whole foods section. It’s very important that you don’t use salted cashews here; all the above sauces, and the soy sauce in this recipe, are pretty salty, and salted cashews will be overpowering.

To serve four, you’ll need:

800g chicken breast, chopped (some Chinese people prefer dark meat, but breast is commoner in restaurants)
2 glasses Chinese rice wine
4 tablespoons light soy sauce
4 teaspoons cornflour
4 teaspoons sesame oil
150g unsalted cashews
4 fat cloves garlic
10 spring onions (scallions)
2 sweet peppers (I used one yellow and one orange)
2 teaspoons chilli bean sauce
2 teaspoons black bean sauce
2 tablespoons hoi sin sauce
2 birds eye chillies
Ground nut oil for stir-frying
Water

Start by preparing all the ingredients for stir frying. Marinade the chicken pieces in 1 glass Chinese rice wine, 2 teaspoons cornflour, 2 tablespoons light soy and 2 teaspoons sesame oil for half an hour while you chop the garlic finely, dice the peppers and chop the spring onions on the diagonal into chunky pieces. In a hot frying pan without oil, toast the cashews for a few minutes, keeping them on the move with a spatula, until they are browning nicely but not burned.

Heat the ground nut oil in a wok until it begins to smoke. Stir fry the garlic for a few seconds, then tip in the chicken and its marinade, and stir fry until the chicken is half cooked through. Add the spring onions and peppers, and continue to stir fry until the chicken is cooked and the vegetables are softer. Add the hoi sin, chilli bean and black bean sauces, stir well and then add the remaining glass of rice wine. Simmer the chicken and vegetables in the sauce and add two teaspoons of cornflour made into a paste with a little cold water to thicken the sauce. Cook for another minute, stir through the cashew nuts and two teaspoons of sesame oil, and serve immediately. Totally delicious and – dare I say it – probably nicer than what’s on offer at your local take-out.

Korean hotpot with pork, scallops and black beans

I hadn’t come across chunjang, a Korean black bean sauce, until January’s meal at the excellent Tanuki in Portland. In Korea, it’s actually considered a Chinese sauce, but it’s rather different from the saltier, stronger black bean sauces you’ll find in the Chinese supermarket – very dark in colour, mild and sweet alongside the soy saltiness, and altogether delicious.

Once chunjang is cooked, it’s called jajang (or fried sauce). It’s usually served over noodles with stir-fried pork. I found some at Wai Yee Hong, my favourite online oriental supermarket. When it arrived, I realised I had some scallops and a big chunk of belly pork in the freezer, a sack of sticky rice, a nice block of tofu in the cupboard and a jar of kimchee in the fridge – and a recipe for a hotpot suddenly sprung into in my head, fully formed. Cooking the pork for this takes a long time, but it’s actually very little work and is more than worth the extra effort for the incredible texture you finish up with.

To serve three, you’ll need:

500g pork belly with rind
¼ bottle Chinese rice wine
Water
12 queen scallops
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
1 tablespoon Chinese rice wine
1 teaspoon grated ginger
450g firm tofu
5 dried shitake mushrooms
4 tablespoons kimchee
½ cucumber
8 spring onions (scallions)
2 green birds eye chillies
2 cups Chinese sticky rice (or Thai jasmine rice)
3 cups water
1 tablespoon cornflour
Flavourless oil

Begin the day (or two days) before you want to eat by heating two or three tablespoons of oil in a large frying pan or wok over a high flame. Brown the slab of pork belly until it crackles on the skin side and changes colour on the bottom.

Move the pork to a saucepan that fits it closely, and pour over the quarter-bottle of Chinese rice wine. Add water until liquid covers the pork by about an inch. Bring to a gentle simmer on the hob, then put in an oven at 120°C (240°F) for six hours or overnight. Remove from the cooking liquid (you can freeze this stock to use later, because you won’t be using it in this recipe) and place the pork on a large plate. Put another plate on top and put the weights from your kitchen scale on the top plate to press the pork down, and chill for at least six hours. You can put the scallops in the fridge to defrost at this point too.

When the pork has been pressed and the scallops are defrosted, mix the scallops well in a bowl with the light soy sauce, a tablespoon of Chinese rice wine and the grated ginger, and set aside in the fridge. Pour boiling water over the dried shitake mushrooms to rehydrate them. Dice the tofu, chop the spring onions, and cut the cucumber into thin julienne strips.

Cut the pork into slices. Cook four tablespoons of chunjang in four tablespoons of oil (preferably groundnut, although a flavourless vegetable oil will be fine too) for five minutes over a medium flame. Much of the oil will be absorbed into the sauce. Add the chopped spring onions to the pan, reserving one of them for a garnish later, and stir-fry until they are soft. Add the pork to the pan with the chopped chillies and stir-fry until everything is mixed. Stir the cornflour into a quarter of a mug of cold water, and stir the cold mixture into the pork and black beans (now jajang, not chunjang, because you have cooked it) over the heat until the dish thickens. Remove from the heat and put to one side.

In a claypot or heavy saucepan, bring the rice and water to a brisk boil with the lid on, then turn the heat down very low. After 12 minutes, remove the lid and quickly spread out the black pork mixture over one half of the exposed surface of the rice. Spoon the raw, marinaded scallops and their marinade into the dish along with the sliced shitake mushrooms and the diced tofu, leaving a bit of space for the kimchee when the dish is finished. Sprinkle over five tablespoons of the soaking liquid from the mushrooms. Put the lid back on, and cook over the low heat for another 15 minutes until everything is piping hot.

The ingredients at the top of the dish will have steamed, and their savoury juices will have soaked deliciously into the rice. Add a few tablespoons of kimchee (I really like Hwa Nan Foods’ version, which comes in a jar to keep in the fridge), arrange the cucumber on top of the dish as in the picture, and scatter the reserved spring onion over the pork. Dig in.

Star anise chicken wings

I’ve been trying very hard to find a silver lining in this economic collapse. The best I’ve been able to manage is in the fact that supermarkets are suddenly stocking more of the cheaper cuts of meat – and those cheaper, nubbly cuts, like pork belly and hock or breast of lamb, are great. They’re often fattier, tastier and altogether more fun to cook with than the clean, boneless slabs of muscle supermarkets usually fall back on.

Chicken wings are among my favourite of the nubbly bits – all that lovely, crisp skin, and the sweet little nuggets of meat, full of flavour from nestling up against the wing bone. The nice chaps at SealSaver (keep this up, fellas, and you’ll become my very best friends) have recently sent me a couple of new SealSaver vacuum canisters, which, besides increasing the storage life of foods make marinading an absolute breeze. Stick the meat and marinade mixture in a Sealsaver, pump the air out, and some magical process occurs, making the meat marinate in a fraction of the usual time. If you don’t have a SealSaver (and you should – they make life in the kitchen very easy), marinate these wings for 24 hours in the fridge. In the SealSaver, they only needed two hours – brilliant.

To make 16 wings (enough for two as a main course or four as a starter) you’ll need:

16 chicken wings, tips removed
5 tablespoons dark soy sauce
8 tablespoons light soy sauce
2 tablespoons molasses
8 tablespoons Chinese cooking wine or dry sherry
3 heaped tablespoons soft dark brown sugar
3 tablespoons sesame oil
8 star anise, 4 kept whole, 4 bashed to rubble in a mortar and pestle
Spring onion to garnish

Prick the chicken wings all over with a fork. Mix all the ingredients except the chicken wings and spring onion in a bowl, and combine the marinade with the chicken wings. If you’re using a SealSaver, marinate, refrigerated, for two hours – otherwise, marinate in the fridge for 24 hours.

Remove the wings, reserving the marinade. Bring the marinade to a low boil for two minutes. Grill the wings (use the barbecue if you possibly can – the only reason I didn’t was that it was snowing) over a slow heat for about 15-18 minutes, basting regularly with the cooked marinade and turning regularly until they are mahogany brown and crisp. Serve with more of the hot sauce and sprinkle with spring onion.

Twice-cooked aromatic pork hock

I mentioned earlier this week that I’d found a pork hock, big enough to serve three, for a recession-busting £2.30 at the butcher. Now, as with a lot of the more knobbly bits of a pig, my favourite thing to do with this cut is to stew it slowly, for a long time, with rich and aromatic Chinese flavourings like soy and star anise. That said, there are already a couple of recipes on this blog which show you how to stew a piece of meat like this (see the braised pork belly or the Malaysian braised pork with buns), so I decided to ring the changes by turning this into a twice-cooked dish. The soft, braised meat has its bones removed and is cooled before being deep-fried whole, then shredded. Served with the thick, reduced cooking liquid and a sprinkling of herbs and chillies, it’s just gorgeous – crisp bits, soft bits, all with fantastic rich flavour that penetrates all the way through the meat.

The Japanese, who have a word for everything foodsome, call the mouth-feel you get with a dish like this umai – the sauce is umai because its thickness comes from the gelatin in the meat. (You know the kind of sauce I mean – it’s the sort that turns into a set jelly if you leave it in the fridge.) If you enjoy the rich, silky texture of sauces like this, it’s worth reducing and freezing any that you have left when you’re done cooking and eating, and saving it to use as the base of the stock you use next time you cook a similar Chinese pork dish. You can do this indefinitely, and a master stock like this will just get better and better. Just follow your recipe as usual, but add the defrosted master stock to the dish at the same time you add any other liquid ingredients.

To serve two ravenous and unfortunately greedy people or three ordinarily-hungry people, you’ll need:

1 pork hock
1 teaspoon five-spice powder
5 cloves garlic
4 shallots
3 stars of star anise
1 stick cinnamon
1 tablespoon sugar
6 spring onions
1 in piece ginger, sliced
3 tablespoons dark soy
5 tablespoons light soy
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
4 teaspoons runny honey
2 teaspoons salt
250 ml pork stock
1 glass Chinese cooking wine
Water to cover
1 handful fresh coriander
1 red chilli
750ml peanut oil (use a flavourless oil if you can’t find any)

Blend the shallots, garlic, five-spice powder, 2 stars of anise, the sugar and the spring onions together in a food processor, and fry the resulting mix in a small amount of oil in the bottom of a heavy saucepan until it is turning a light caramel colour. Add the pork hock to the pan and brown on all sides, then pour over the stock, Chinese wine, honey, sauces and salt. Add three of the spring onions, the ginger and remaining star of anise to the pan with the cinnamon stick, broken into a few pieces. Add water if necessary to cover the meat.

Put the lid on the pan and bring to a very gentle simmer. Continue to simmer, turning occasionally, for 4-5 hours. At the end of this time, the hock should be soft and aromatic, and the bones falling out of the middle. Remove the meat to a plate and, when it is cool enough, remove both bones from the hock (they’ll slip out very easily – you won’t need a knife). Don’t remove the skin – it’s the best bit.

Remove the spring onions and ginger from the stock and discard, and boil the stock to reduce it to about half its volume. Dice the chilli, chop the coriander and remaining fresh spring onions finely, and put them in a small bowl.

Heat 750 ml of oil in a wok to between 175 and 190°C (345–375°F). Fry the cooled hock for four minutes, then turn it over and fry for a further four minutes. Drain and remove to a plate, and use two forks to shred the meat. Serve over rice, with some of the thickened stock poured over, and the spring onion, chilli and coriander mixture sprinkled liberally on top.

Crisp vegetable stir-fry in oyster sauce

This makes a great accompaniment to Chinese dishes, but it’s delicious enough to eat as a meal on its own with rice, and it works out very inexpensive – just right for the end of the month. No good for vegetarians, I’m afraid, because I do recommend that you use oyster sauce that contains real oyster essence – it’s worlds apart from the oyster-free sort. Several manufacturers make the good stuff. It’ll come with the word ‘premium’ somewhere on the label on the front, and should list around 9% oyster extract on the ingredients label on the back. I really like Lee Kum Kee’s premium oyster sauce, partly because it has such a fantastic label – a 1950s pastel-coloured confection surrounded with roses, featuring a pretty lady and little, sailor-suited boy in a boat, ferrying some absolutely giant oysters across a river. (This picture isn’t huge, but if you squint, you can make it all out.)

Despite the presence of shellfish, oyster sauce doesn’t taste at all fishy. It’s very savoury, and has a lovely sweet edge, but there’s no hint of fishiness, so you can serve this to fish-hating children (and adults) without needing to worry.

Chopping your veg into slim batons shouldn’t take too long, and I actually rather enjoy the repetitive slicing – it’s somehow rather soothing at the end of a long day. Try to buy reasonably small courgettes – these will be sweeter, and their flesh will be denser and easier to chop.

To serve two as an accompaniment (double the quantities if you want to eat it as a main course), you’ll need:

4 large carrots
3 courgettes
4 plump cloves of garlic
6 spring onions (scallions)
1 piece of ginger, about the size of your thumb
3 tablespoons oyster sauce
5 tablespoons Chinese cooking wine
1 teaspoon cornflour dissolved in 5 tablespoons cold water
Flavourless oil to stir-fry

Cut the carrots and courgettes into slim batons, about five centimetres long and a couple of millimetres in cross-section, and set aside in a bowl. Slice the garlic thinly, chop the ginger into slim batons around the same size as the bits of vegetable, and chop the white bottom parts of the spring onions into little coins. (You won’t be using the green parts, but it’s worth popping them in the fridge so you can use them later on.)

Heat a couple of tablespoons of oil in the bottom of your wok over a high flame until it begins to shimmer. Throw in the garlic, ginger and spring onions, and stir-fry for about thirty seconds. Tip in the carrot and courgettes, and continue to stir-fry for a 1-2 minutes, keeping everything on the move until the courgette pieces start to go bendy (bendiness is starting to occur in the picture).

Pour the oyster sauce and wine into the wok and continue to stir-fry for two minutes. Add the cornflour mixture and keep stirring until the mixture thickens a little. Serve immediately with rice.

Hoi sin beer can chicken

This is an extremely tasty hybrid – American barbecue crossed with Chinese roast chicken. Regular readers may already have read my original beer can chicken post, and it’s worth glancing at it again for more on this cooking method, which is one of my favourites for roasting chicken. A can of beer is – how can I say this delicately? – rammed up the chicken’s bottom, and steams the bird from the inside while the outside roasts to a lovely crisp.

Usually, I make chicken cooked in this way with an American-style dry rub. This time, I’ve made a Chinese paste to marinade and cook the bird in, and I’m very pleased with the results. I served this with some steamed rice and sweetly stir-fried carrot and courgettes – about which you can read more later in the week.

To roast one chicken to toothsome perfection you’ll need:

1 chicken weighing around 1.5 kilogrammes
4 tablespoons hoi sin sauce
3 teaspoons five-spice powder
2 teaspoons sesame oil
1 piece of ginger about the size of your thumb
3 cloves garlic
1 can lager

Make a paste from the hoi sin, two teaspoons of the five-spice powder, 1 teaspoon of the sesame oil, and the ginger and garlic, grated. Rub it all over the chicken, both inside and out. Leave to marinade for at least three hours (I left mine overnight).

Preheat the oven to 180° C (350° F), pour half of the can of beer into a glass and drink it, and use a hammer and nail to knock a few holes in the top of the can alongside the ringpull. Sprinkle the remaining teaspoon of five-spice powder into the can (be careful – it will fizz extravagantly, so do this over the sink). Put the can in the centre of a roasting tin. Cut the string holding the chicken’s legs together, pull them apart so it looks like it’s standing up, and push the upright chicken firmly onto the can. I use a very cheap stand, whose wires I’ve bent so you can fit them round the can, when I roast chicken this way – it helps keep the whole apparatus from falling over while it cooks.

There is little dignity in death for chickens.

Roast the chicken for 1 hour and 30 minutes (if you have a large enough barbecue with readily controlled temperature, cook it in there instead of the oven), and remove carefully from the can. Pour away the beer in the can – it doesn’t taste great. Rest the chicken in a warmed dish for ten minutes – it will produce plenty of delicious juices to go with any that have dripped into the roasting tin during cooking. Whisk the juices together with a teaspoon of sesame oil, and pour over the carved chicken. Garnish with some chopped spring onion and serve.

Ma-po tofu

Ma-po tofuI write this with two of my friends in mind – Francis, whose tofu disintegrates, and Simon, who, on hearing that I was making something with beancurd in, said: “Ewww! Tofu!” – the sod.

Now, unlike Simon, I’m lucky enough to have spent a childhood being exposed not to the vegetarian tofu-masquerading-as-meat school of cooking, but the Chinese sort, where tofu is a delicious addendum to meat. In this dish (whose name means ‘pock-marked old woman’s tofu’, just to put Simon off even further) the tofu isn’t treated as a blank sponge of protein to absorb flavour – instead, its own flavour, actually rather subtle, delicate and somehow cooling, is a contrast to an amazingly savoury, chilli-hot surrounding of soy, chillies and pork. Totally delicious, and it’s very easy to make – just make sure that all your ingredients are chopped and ready in bowls before you start to stir-fry, because you’ll have to move fast once you begin cooking.

To serve six, you’ll need:

500g pork mince
3 tablespoons dark soya sauce
3 teaspoons cornflour
1 teaspoon sugar
50ml Chinese wine
700g firm silken-style tofu (Blue Dragon is good, and it’s easy to find in UK supermarkets)
5 cloves garlic
1 piece ginger, about the length of your thumb
6 dried shitake mushrooms without stems
400ml water
3 red bird’s eye chillies (I like this hot – cut down on the chillies if you don’t)
2 tablespoons chilli bean paste
12 spring onions (scallions)
1 tablespoon sesame oil

In a large bowl, mix the pork (I like quite a fatty mince here) with one teaspoon of the cornflour, the dark soy, sugar and Chinese wine. Set aside for a couple of hours in the fridge.

While the pork is marinading, soak the mushrooms in the boiling water. Chop the tofu into cubes about 2cm on each side and set aside in a bowl. Chop the garlic and ginger into tiny dice, slice the chillies finely, and put them all in another bowl. Chop the spring onions into small pieces and put the pieces from the lower, creamy and pale green half of the stem in the bowl with the garlic, ginger and chillies, and the pieces from the top, dark green half of the stem in a third bowl. When the mushrooms have soaked for half an hour, chop them into dice about the same size as the spring onion pieces, reserving the soaking liquid, and put the chopped mushrooms in the bowl with the garlic, ginger, chillies and the bottom half of the spring onions.

When you’re ready to start cooking, heat a wok with a couple of tablespoons of flavourless oil in the bottom until it starts to smoke. Throw the pork and its marinade in, and stir-fry until the pork has browned and starts to look a little crusty. Add the contents of the ginger and garlic bowl, stir-fry for about twenty seconds, and add the chilli bean sauce. Keep stir-frying until everything is mixed well, and add the tofu with the soaking liquid from the mushrooms. Stir very gently to make sure everything is combined.

Turn the heat down low and bring everything to a simmer – the tofu should be distributed evenly through the mixture. Don’t stir (this instruction is especially for you, Francis), or the tofu will break up – as it is, you’ll notice it breaks up a little, but the vast majority should stay in firm cubes. Allow the mixture to simmer for ten minutes, then add the remaining cornflour mixed with a little cold water (the water must be cold, or you’ll get lumps), stir very gently and simmer until thickened. Throw in the green tops of the spring onions, sprinkle over the sesame oil, and transfer to a bowl to serve.