Of 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.
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 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
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
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
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.
The An family runs a group of Vietnamese restaurants in California. The restaurants have different menus, but the family’s famous garlic noodles are on offer at each of them. I ate a dish of them at AnQi, the group’s newest restaurant in Costa Mesa – a restaurant so swanky it has a catwalk for fashion shows slashing a line through the tables – and discovered that those noodles are justly famous. (I can also heartily recommend the filet mignon potstickers, the shaken beef and the salt and pepper calamari.)
Those noodles though: stupendous. The An family has cottoned on to this, keeps the recipe secret, and tried to trademark the term “garlic noodles” a few years ago. Unsurprisingly, this was unsuccessful, but since then they’ve tried again with “An’s Famous Garlic Noodles”. So I should make the point here that the noodle recipe on this page is not the An family’s jealously guarded secret recipe, but my own (pretty successful) attempt at reverse-engineering the noodles I ate. They’re garlic dynamite, the sort of thing that you should consider eating to repel an unwanted suitor. The garlic is sweet, the buttery sauce gorgeously umami, and the whole arrangement coats the strands of wheat noodle (angel hair pasta is indistinguishable from what the restaurant uses) in a velvet-slick coating of flavour.
The Vietnamese have been working with what we’d now call fusion food for a couple of hundred years, the result of French colonialism. Some of the best Vietnamese food out there is a real mish-mash of cultures; just look at banh mi on rice-flour baguettes, with goose-liver pate spread thickly beneath the Vietnamese roast pork and pickled vegetables. So the use of butter and Parmesan cheese isn’t as barking here as it might look at first glance. This is a very easy recipe, but beware: this dish won’t just make your breath smell of garlic. Your hair, your sweat and the whole of your immediate environment will be curiously pungent for a good day or so after eating. Go with it. It’s worth it.
To make enough noodles to serve four as a side dish, you’ll need:
Peel the garlic and use a large, sharp knife to chop it into very small pieces. If you hold the tip end of the knife in one hand and the bottom of the cutting blade in the other, you’ll find you can walk the knife up and down your board, chopping as it goes. Melt the butter and, over a very low heat, simmer the chopped garlic in it for about 20 minutes, until the garlic is soft and giving its fragrance up, but not browning. Stir the oyster sauce into the garlic and butter, and remove the pan from the heat.
Cook the pasta according to the timing on the packet, but using just enough water to cover the noodles. Drain, reserving the cooking liquid, and place in a serving bowl. Stir 50ml of the starchy water into the noodles along with the buttery garlic sauce and the Parmesan. Serve immediately.
I found myself invited to two very different terraces on the Thames Embankment yesterday. The Royal Horseguards Hotel, near Hungerford Bridge, is offering a Wimbledon-themed afternoon tea for the whole of this year’s Wimbledon fortnight – just the ticket for those of us who don’t like tennis, but who do like patisseries. And just off Waterloo bridge, a few hundred yards upstream, the terrace at Somerset House has been transformed for the summer into an open-air restaurant fronted by Tom Aikens, with a spectacular bar and summer-casual menu.
The Royal Horseguards is one of those super-swanky, highly polished, five-star hotels, all harpists in the lobby and marble floors. Doormen and concierges line the halls, and a customer visiting for tea is treated with as much care as one staying in one of the most expensive suites. We were there to visit the very pretty terrace café, shaded by a line of plane trees along Victoria Embankment.
The Wimbledon tea is only running for a couple of weeks, so you’ll have to get in there quickly – and then you can sit back and be spoiled for an hour or so while you work your way through a very generous and gorgeously presented high tea. Proceedings open with a strawberry and grenadine Bellini, to glug your way through while you listen to Big Ben clanging away in the background before a big silver pot of tea arrives.
Teatime treats
We were served (underarm) a long glass tray packed with pretty little patisseries, two glasses of a strawberry and Pimms consommé and a bucket of white chocolate truffles masquerading as tiny tennis balls – totally charming, tooth-hurtingly rich, and utterly addictive. Joanne Todd, the hotel’s new pastry chef, is behind this very frivolous and very romantic (seriously – take someone you want to impress, because those tennis balls alone will work wonders) outing; she’s only been at the hotel for a couple of weeks, and if this tea is anything to go by, there will be other good things in the Terrace Café’s future. The little cupcake with the logo was delicately scented with elderflower; that’s a perfectly squishy strawberry macaroon with a perfumed rose ganache hiding behind it, and a strawberry vacherin. The little truffles come with three fillings: champagne, strawberry and a fresh, creamy mint that I could have kept eating all afternoon.
Tennis ball truffles
It’s just as well I didn’t, because a tray of scones came out next, two plain and two with fruit and spices – along with a ball of clotted cream so enormous you could have played tennis with it. The Terrace Café runs non-Wimbledon afternoon tea for the rest of the year, from £28 for the Champagne tea (finger sandwiches, pastries, a cream tea and all that good stuff) down to £13.50 for the Westminster Tea, a straightforward cream tea. It’s well worth a visit if you’re having a day out. I spotted one of the new intake of MPs and an actress I shall not name because she was obviously trying to have a private moment (not with the MP) while I was scarfing my scones. If you don’t have a date to take, head on over with your Mum to impress her with the crowd you mingle with.
Tom's Terrace
I barely had time to get started on digesting tea before heading over to Somerset House to meet Tom Aikens and sit down for a meal at Tom’s Terrace, a pop-up restaurant overlooking the river. Tom’s Terrace opened at the end of April and will only operate for 22 weeks over the summer, closing in September – it’s packed out every evening, so you’ll need to book ahead. I hate to get all Enid Blyton, but food really does taste better outdoors, and Tom’s Terrace has been designed to make the most of the unpredictable English summer, with architectural covers over the tables, sculptural heaters (not used on the night I visited, when the weather was positively balmy) and coloured lights punctuating the restaurant.
Coronation crab salad
The menu is short, outdoorsy, unpretentious and simple, full of good ingredients prepared well. There are beautifully selected charcuteries; a whole clutch of summery salads; grilled chicken; a burger cooked to a perfect medium-rare. (You can see the whole menu on the restaurant’s web site.) There are fat, truffle/parmesan chips, parboiled then fried twice to a shattering crisp outside, with fluffy middles. The coronation crab salad pictured here was sweet, fresh, and perfectly balanced – a dense, marie-rose-type sauce lifted with a very subtle dose of curry spicing, diced mango and toasted almonds had me swiping the inside of the empty glass bowl with my fingertips and sucking them. To top everything off, you’ll find a really interesting range of cocktails (and a short but well thought out wine list), which you can enjoy either at the table or at the bar area at the other end of the restaurant. It’s refreshing to find a bar that pays as much attention to non-alcoholic cocktails as it does to the boozy ones; ultimately, I couldn’t work out whether I enjoyed Tom’s Tequila or the virgin blueberry cocktail, made with floral syrups and fresh juices, more.
Chicken liver and foie gras parfait
This is great summer’s evening stuff, pre- or post-theatre, or for sharing with friends. The staff are great – our table found itself sparking off competition between two bartenders over who could produce the best drink, and the service staff will bend over backwards to explain the menu and make suggestions if you get stuck. I could have stayed for hours longer, bibbing blueberries and ordering more mango rice pudding; I left at 10.30 to get my train with the greatest reluctance.
Many thanks to both restaurants for the invitations, and here’s to a great summer.
A couple of weeks ago, I was footling around in the sun at Ciudad, one of my favourite restaurants in LA, with a Margarita and some devilled eggs. (This goes some way to explain the recent hiatus at Gastronomy Domine; I went away for a week and forgot my laptop, then caught something filthy from one of the insanitary people on the plane on the way home and spent all of last week in bed. To be honest, enforced absence from the internet has been great – I highly recommend it.)
I have some friends who claim they don’t like eggs, and whose idea of picnic hell is a plate of devilled eggs. This recipe, inspired by the two helpings of Ciudad’s spectacular and spectacularly expensive jalapeño and bacon devilled eggs that I ended up face down in, is not for them. If you are a fan of devilled eggs, you’ll be pleased to learn that these keep well, refrigerated, for a couple of days. They’re a great outdoor food – just pack them in the bottom of a plastic box before you go, and make sure you keep it the right way up.
To prepare 12 eggs, you’ll need:
12 eggs
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
2 tablespoons creme fraiche
½ pickled habanero chilli – or other chillies to taste
6 spring onions, white and pale green parts only
1 small handful each dill, parsley and chives
½ stalk celery
½ sweet dill pickled cucumber
8 rashers smoked streaky bacon (a sweet, dry cure is best here – try to get a reasonably thick cut too)
Start by boiling the eggs. Perfect hard-boiled eggs are as easy as anything – just cover all the eggs with cold water in a saucepan, and bring it to the boil with the lid on. As soon as the eggs boil, remove them from the heat, keeping the lid on, and leave to one side for 12 minutes. Put the saucepan in the sink and run cold water over the eggs for a few minutes until they are cold, then peel.
While the eggs are boiling, grill the bacon until it starts to crisp at the edges. Put all the ingredients except the dill pickle and bacon in the food processor, and whizz until you have a creamy paste.
Dice the pickle finely by hand. You’re chopping it rather than processing it so that it adds a bit of crunch to the eggs. If you’re in the UK, Mrs Elswood pickles, which are available in most supermarkets in the pickles section and sometimes in the kosher section, are excellent. (Like Betty Crocker and Sara Lee, the Mrs Elswood pictured on the label is a fiction – the name is a portmanteau of Elstree and Borehamwood, where the company is based. They’re still damn good pickles.) Dice the bacon finely with a sharp knife, reserving one rasher. Slice that rasher finely to use as a garnish and reserve. Add the diced pickle and bacon to the whizzed ingredients in a large bowl and taste for seasoning. You may find you don’t need to add any salt.
Halve the peeled eggs and pop their yolks out into the bowl with the other ingredients. Use a fork to squish the yolks into the creamy mixture, and stir vigorously to combine everything. Put the mixture in a piping bag with a medium nozzle and pipe dollops into the empty egg halves. Use a squeeze-down-up motion for the best results – you don’t need to twist the bag or nozzle as you work. If you don’t have a piping bag, just spoon the mixture into the eggs or pop it in a freezer bag with the corner snipped off and use that instead – it won’t look as pretty, but it’ll taste just as good.
Sprinkle some herbs and the reserved bacon over the top, and serve cold.
A complicated set of circumstances saw me having to leave China after a week and flying straight to Hungary. Budapest is a beautiful city, but it’s not somewhere I’d recommend for those of you who travel to eat; menus around the city bear identical lists of paprika-heavy casseroles, and there’s not much in the way of haute cuisine. I found two standout restaurants, one in Buda and one in Pest. Café Pierrot, up in the castle district in Buda, is a pricey cellar restaurant with a pretty garden and a French chef, where you’ll find the best foie gras preparations we ate in the city (and Hungary is the biggest producer and consumer of the stuff per capita in the world). And Café Kör, down in Pest by the basilica, has a menu of Austro-Hungarian classics with a really charming wine bar atmosphere.
I really don’t mean to slam paprika-heavy casseroles above (and given that I’ve made one here, you can probably see that I’m actually rather fond of them) – they only get tired after a week or so. I became horribly addicted to nokedli, a spaetzle-ish kind of tiny dumpling, while we were in Budapest. They’re a perfect accompaniment to these rich, dense casseroles, so I swiped a nokedli recipe off the back of a nokedli maker in a Buda craft market (stupidly, I didn’t buy the nokedli maker, which would have meant an easier time for my and Dr W’s ladling arms when it came to making this) and made up a goulash to go with them. If you don’t fancy nokedli with your meal, the casserole is very easy and will go beautifully with rice or with mashed potatoes.
A note on goulash and etymology. The word comes from the Hungarian gulyás (pronounced as we in the UK pronounce goulash – Hungarian is one of those languages where none of the consonants and very few of the vowels do what you think they will), which means cow-herd. If you order a goulash in Hungary you’ll either get a a beef or veal soup, which may or may not contain paprika, or an un-thickened stew with beef, veal and vegetables. The paprika casserole which we in the UK call a goulash is called a papricás (pronounced “paprikash”) or pörkölt – it’s also a dish which originates with Hungarian herdsmen, but somehow the word goulash has come to embrace it over here. I know at least one Hungarian out there (hello Andras) who will probably find something horribly inauthentic about the casserole I’ve made here, but I think you’ll like it nonetheless.
To serve six (it’s worth making plenty – this is an easy recipe which freezes well), you’ll need:
Goulash
1kg beef braising steak, chopped into pieces
3 tablespoons plain flour
4 onions
2 tablespoons sweet paprika
1 teaspoon hot paprika
1 teaspoon sugar
4 cloves garlic
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon caraway seeds
3 tablespoons tomato purée
250ml white wine
750ml stock (vegetable, chicken or beef)
Zest and juice of 1 lemon
Soured cream/creme fraiche to dollop
Olive oil/bacon fat to brown the meat
Nokedli 4 eggs
1 teaspoon salt
350ml cold water
500g plain flour
Preheat the oven to 160ºC (320ºF).
Dust the meat with the flour and a generous seasoning of salt and pepper. Bring the olive oil or bacon fat to a high heat in a large, thick-bottomed pan, and brown the meat all over (you’ll probably need to do this in a few batches to avoid crowding the pan), removing the browned meat to a bowl.
Reduce the heat to a medium flame, and in the same pan, sauté the onions until they are translucent. Tip the paprika, tomato purée, sugar, garlic, bay and caraway seeds into the onions and continue to sauté for a minute. Return the meat and any juices to the pan.
Pour the wine over the contents of the pan, and using a wooden spoon, scrape away to deglaze any flavoursome brown bits that have stuck to the bottom. Pour over the stock, and bring to a simmer. Cover with a well-fitting lid and put the casserole in the oven for two hours. Check and stir occasionally, and top up with a little water if you think the stew is becoming too dry.
After the two hours are up, add the juice and zest of a lemon, and taste for seasoning. Set aside and heat up when you are ready to eat.
To make the nokedli, put the eggs, salt and water in a large bowl and use a hand whisk to beat the mixture thoroughly. Add the flour a couple of tablespoons at a time until it is all incorporated. You will have a thick, wet dough.
Bring a large pan of water to a rolling boil. If you have a spaetzle or nokedli maker, now’s the time to bring it out. If you don’t, don’t panic; just get a colander out, spoon a ladleful of the mixture into the bottom of the colander, and use the ladle to push the mixture through the colander straight into the boiling water. It will snake out of the colander’s holes in little pieces, which will swell as they hit the water. The colander process can take a fair amount of elbow grease (this is why you might want to buy yourself a nokedli maker), but I like to think I’m mindfully burning off calories in advance of eating far too much. Most of the calories that got burned off here belonged to the chivalrous Dr W, who was probably getting tired of the swearing coming from the kitchen, and took over after a few minutes.
The nokedli are ready as soon as they float to the top of the boiling water. Fish them out with a slotted spoon and keep them in a bowl in a warm place as you work your way through the mixture. You can serve the finished nokedli as they are, or warm them through in a knob of butter in a frying pan, without browning.
Serve the goulash over the nokedli, with a generous splodge of soured cream spooned on top. A sprinkling of oregano and parsley can give this dish a lovely lift, but you may well find you don’t need it.
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 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.
This one’s for my friend Michael and his daughter, who are going in for a pie competition this weekend. I’m very pleased with the way it turned out – it really does taste as good as it looks. This pie is made with an all-butter pastry (none of your revolting shortening here, Californians) which is flavoured with lemon zest, and has a juicy filling that’s very easy to put together. I have been obsessing a bit about meringue recently, and the lovely puffy cloud that makes the lid of this pie is a beautiful and really delicious way to top things off.
Michael and Yael are cooking in the US, where weighing scales are not the norm – unfortunately, cup measures aren’t the norm here in the UK, and I have real trouble using them when I’m baking. As a result, I’ve measured by weight, not volume, below. For those who don’t have a set of scales at home, there is a decent conversion tool here.
You’ll need an 11 inch (28 cm) flan case with fluted edges and a loose base that you can push out, and some baking beans (some use ceramic beans – I just used half a pack of dried butter beans from the cupboard). If you plan on transporting your pie, you may prefer to use a foil dish.
To make one totally fabulous pie, you’ll need:
Pastry
225g plain flour
25g icing (confectioners) sugar
100g salted butter
Zest of 1 lemon
1 egg yolk
3 tablespoons water (approx – see below)
Filling
4 large, ripe peaches (I used white peaches – choose the most fragrant fruit you can find)
3 ripe mangoes (I used Alphonse mangoes, which are my favourite)
2 tablespoons caster sugar
3 level tablespoons semolina (cornmeal for Americans)
Start by making the pastry. Sift the flour and sugar into a large bowl, and rub in the butter with your fingertips until you have a mixture resembling breadcrumbs. Try to keep things as cool as possible as you work; your pastry will be crisper and shorter if it stays cold. (My grandmother used to make pastry in a large bowl placed in the kitchen sink while she ran cold water around it – perhaps there’s a degree of overkill in this, but it does work well to help your pastry along in hot weather.)
Use a butter knife to stir the lemon zest, yolk and water into the mixture until you have a stiff pastry. You may need a little more water according to the weather; the behaviour of pastry varies horribly according to how much moisture there is in the air on any given day. Wrap the pastry in cling film (saran wrap for Michael and Yael) and put it in the fridge for 30 minutes to rest.
While the pastry is resting, turn the oven to 200ºC (400ºF) and prepare the fruit. Quarter and peel the peaches, then cut each piece into three. Dice the mango in pieces the same size as the peach bits (I’m sure you all know the mango trick, but here’s a YouTube video of someone preparing a mango just in case you’ve not done it before). You can keep the fruit around the stone section to nibble off as a chef’s treat. Cover and set aside.
Roll the pastry out on a cool, lightly floured surface to fit your flan dish. (I have a marble slab for pastry that my Mum bought for me at a gravestone shop. Again, this is probably overkill. It’s also a bit sinister, now I think about it.) Line the dish with the pastry, use a fork to prick the base of the pie case all over, and cut a circle of parchment paper to fit in the bottom. Slip the parchment inside the pie and cover it with baking beans. Bake blind – that is to say, without any filling – for 20 minutes until the pastry is golden. Remove the beans and parchment and cook for another 5-10 minutes or until the base is dry and golden too. Turn the oven down to 150ºC (300ºF).
Prepare the meringue by whisking the eggs and vinegar for about five minutes until you have stiff peaks (the vinegar will not add a detectable flavour to your pie, but it will make the peaks of the meringue simultaneously crisp and chewy, like a baked marshmallow), adding the sugar a tablespoon at a time as you go. You should end up with a very stiff, glossy mixture.
Sprinkle the semolina into the base of the pie dish – this will soak up excess juices from the fruit. Fill the dish with the fruit mixture (depending on the size of your peaches and mangoes, you may find you have some left over to make a fruit salad with) and sprinkle over the sugar.
Spoon the meringue carefully all over the top of the pie in a dome, making sure there are no gaps, and use a spoon to tease it into lots of peaks on top. Put the pie in the oven at the cooler temperature (don’t worry if the temperature hasn’t quite settled down yet – a little bit of extra heat at the start of cooking won’t hurt it) and bake for 1 hour – 1 hour 10 minutes until the pie is an even gold colour all over and marshmallowy inside. Serve warm or cold, but do make it as close as possible to serving as you can manage to keep the meringue nice and high and puffy.
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
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
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
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.
A quick and dirty picture post today; having spend the weekend doing the tourist thing, I’m spending the day battling with Beijing tailors, braving traditional foot massages and eating congee while Dr W is whisked around a dairy and a pharmaceutical company. (Rather him than me.) We’re staying at the gargantuan (it’s the largest Marriott outside the US) and very plushy Marriott City Wall, which has a superb Chinese restaurant charging prices which seem more London than Beijing, where I’ve been gorging on dim sum. I’m on the hunt for the perfect Beijing duck, which, if everything works out and I manage to avoid accidentally booking one of those cultural show places with no Chinese people in it, I’ll post about later in the week.
Incidentally, if you’re one of my Twitter followers, you’ll find me uncharacteristically quiet this week. The Great Firewall blocks access to Twitter (and to every Twitter client I’ve tried), so I’m not able to update.
Photography is tricky here in the city, because of the smog which hangs over the city and does very peculiar things to the light – it’s useless trying to take pictures with any depth of field because the haze turns everything yellow and blurred. Here, anyway, are three holiday snaps to keep you entertained until I can write about some of the eating we’re doing.
Of 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.
