Hong cai tai... oh yum...

I’m back in Changsha, where I lived for a few months while researching my Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook, for the first time in five years. It’s wonderful to see some old friends, including Peng Tieh-cheng, the son of legendary Hunanese chef Peng Chang-kuei (of General Tso’s chicken fame). He’s in Changsha for the same Hunan food conference as me, and I hadn’t seen him for about six years. Peng Tieh-cheng tells me his father, who is now 93, is in good health, and still popping into their main restaurant in Taipei every day.

I’ve had some rather lovely meals in the last 24 hours, and one of the highlights of all of them has been the simplest of dishes: stir-fried red rape shoots (hong cai tai 红菜苔), served at lunch with a little dried chilli, and at dinner with slivered ginger. Only the tenderest tips of the shoots are used, and the thicker parts may actually be peeled of their skin. Stir-fried, they have an exquisite flavour and mouthfeel, sweet and juicy, with a hint of dark sleek bitterness in the leaves. Hong cai tai have a similar appeal to asparagus, although I think they are even more delicious. When they are in season, they are served at almost every meal.

‘Seasonal greens’ are often served as an afterthought at Chinese meals, but I think they are one of the glories of Chinese cuisine. In Sichuan, I adore purple amaranth 苋菜 stir-fried with garlic, served in its bright pink juices, and water spinach 空心菜 wokked with chilli and Sichuan pepper; in Shanghai alfalfa sprouts stir-fried with strong grain spirits 草头; in Hangzhou tender young greens blanched and then served in a delicate stock; in Hong Kong Chinese broccoli 芥蓝 blanched and then sizzled with garlic and rice wine. Cooked well, with a little salt, oil and garlic or ginger, and perhaps a dash of wine and/or stock, they can have an almost buttery deliciousness. And of course they’re very healthy as well.

This is what they look like raw

I wonder if any of you are as addicted to leafy greens as me. In London, I often eat leafy green vegetables, Western or Chinese, and I really miss them if days go by without my fix. Sometimes I’ll cook them in a Western manner, but more often I’ll reach for my wok or steamer, and cook them in one of the many Chinese ways I’ve learnt, because they are so damn good, and also quick and easy.

Any of you like to share your thoughts and cooking tips for your favourite Chinese greens?

I am trying to figure out whether there is any way to reduce sodium in these
recipes, though. Like many Americans, I have high blood pressure and am trying
to manage it through diet modification. That means really watching salt intake.
I see that my soy sauce has nearly 1600 mg of sodium per tablespoon. It tastes
fantastic, but wow! That's a huge number. And that's hardly the only source of
sodium in Sichuan and Hunan cuisine.

Eat salty dishes like this...

Thanks for writing to me, Tom! This is actually quite a common question about soy sauce and Chinese cuisine in general. I think the important thing to remember is that salty and strongly-flavoured dishes are used in China to ‘send the rice down’ 下饭 – which is to say that they are normally eaten with quite a lot of unsalted (and usually completely unseasoned) rice, noodles or bread. So although a dish or a relish in itself may be salty, it is actually eaten in fairly modest quantities.

So what I would suggest for you and others with similar concerns about salt intake, is to reduce the amount of salt, soy sauce and other salty seasonings in dishes if you can do this without sacrificing flavour, BUT also, and more importantly, to make sure that you serve salty dishes with plenty of plain rice or noodles, and other, lightly-seasoned dishes – for example, you could serve General Tso’s chicken or Mapo doufu with plain, unsalted

...with plenty of plain rice...

rice (brown rice if you want to be really healthy – I often do this when cooking at home), and one or two very lightly-salted stir-fried vegetables. You can also remember that Chinese dumplings are often dipped in vinegar rather than soy sauce (Chinkiang vinegar is very good for this), and that Chinese people traditionally eat far more fan 饭 (rice or other staple grain food) than cai 菜 (accompanying dishes). So if you eat in the Chinese way, a dish like General Tso’s chicken, served with some simple vegetables and rice, can be shared by 4-5 people – which means that the salt will be spread very thinly around!

...and lightly-seasoned vegetables

Do also make sure you rinse your fermented, salted black soy beans and salty preserved vegetables before using them in dishes like twice-cooked pork and dry-fried beans, since they can carry a lot of excess salt.

Personally, I prefer to adjust my salt intake in these ways, rather than buying ‘low-sodium’ products, just as I prefer to eat a little bit of rich and glorious real butter to some synthetic ‘low-fat’ spread.

I do hope this is helpful. Any blog readers have any other suggestions?

Rice threshing in Fujian

A study in the US is suggesting that replacing white rice with brown rice could cut the risk of diabetes – findings that might provoke some serious interest in China, given the country’s rocketing rates of the disease.

I have to admit that, although I wouldn’t serve brown rice with Chinese food at a dinner party, I often eat it as part of simple meals at home. I love the taste and texture of brown rice, for a start, and I also like parboiling the rice, and having the silky boiling liquid (米汤）as a soup, perhaps with the addition of a few spring onion slices. And egg-fried brown rice has a lot of character.

Do any of you blog readers think that Chinese people might gradually give up their insistence on white rice, and eat brown rice as a staple, just as many westerners now eat wholemeal in preference to white bread?

Incidentally, I bought the oil at the Wild Beef stall at Broadway Market run by Richard and Lizzie Vines, producers of fantastic grass-fed beef. I’ve been using their meat for a while in Chinese dishes, and I highly recommend it. Their cattle are grass-fed and traditionally reared, and the meat is delicious. Yesterday Zhang Xiaozhong and I used some of their beef shin in a Sichuanese cold meat dish – magnificent. They do mail order as well as market stalls, in case anyone’s interested…

Has anyone heard of this practice in other parts of the world?

There was a Q&A with the director and Patrick Holden of the UK Soil Association after the screening. One of the topics that came up was the particular US focus of the film. Robert Kenner said they’d decided to concentrate on the US, but could have gone anywhere, including to mass meat-processing centres in Romania. And he also mentioned that China was heading in the same direction as the US.

Does anyone out there know much about factory farming in China? Many of my Chinese friends are very worried about speed-rearing, and about hormones in meat, and prefer to buy what we would call free-range and organic foods where possible, but it is hard to find trustworthy sources unless you know the farmers yourself. Certainly I’ve met farmers who don’t eat their own pesticide-laced vegetables themselves, but keep a separate patch for produce grown for the family table.

His arguments struck a real chord with my own experiences in China. One of my overwhelming impressions of China was how WELL people ate – they knew how to nourish their minds and bodies, how to vary their diets according to the seasons and the climate, how to hasten recovery from illness. And yet, ironically, many of the Chinese people I met, especially the culinary professionals, would go on all the time about ‘Western nutrition’ and how ‘scientific’ it was. They clearly felt that there was something a bit backward and old-fashioned about their own wealth of nutritional knowledge, and that thinking of food in terms of nutrients in the Western style would be a great leap forward for Chinese cuisine.

It seems to me absolutely tragic, that the Chinese, who of all the world’s people surely know how to eat, have so little pride in their own culinary culture. As far as I can see, the traditional Chinese approach to diet and health could be a model for the entire human race – and if my own compatriots, who live increasingly on processed food, could learn from the Chinese example, they would be a lot healthier. Unfortunately, however, exactly the opposite is happening, and the Chinese are following the ‘advanced’ example of Western dietary advice, and talking more and more about ‘losing weight’ and ‘nutrition’, while getting fatter, less healthy, and more prone to problems like diabetes and heart disease.

Has Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food been translated into Chinese? I do hope so, and I hope everyone reads it!

Have any of you blog readers had similar experiences? What are your favourite Chinese comfort foods?

shui zhi yu - as seen on the Barshu menu

An illuminating little story from Sichuan, told to me by my friend Dai Shuang, the wife and business partner of the Sichuanese chef Yu Bo (who you will meet in the ‘Rubber Factor’ chapter of my ‘Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper’):

A friend of Yu Bo and Dai Shuang’s, an American chef who works in Shanghai, was complaining that many Sichuanese dishes, including mala yu, were too oily. As I’m sure you blog readers, will agree, this is a common western complaint about Sichuanese cuisine, and even Chinese cuisine in general.

Anyway, later that day, Dai Shuang and Yu Bo watched their American friend make some mashed potatoes, and they were incredulous at the amount of milk and butter he added – Dai Shuang said it was so rich she could hardly bear to eat it.

That evening, they offered him some of that classic Sichuan supper dish, hui guo rou (twice-cooked pork), and asked him if he found it oily – he did. So Dai Shuang pointed out that his mashed potato had been full of butter, and that they had been expected to eat it all, whereas with the Sichuanese dish, almost all the oil had remained on the serving dish. Moreover, the oil used in Sichuanese cooking was mainly vegetable oil, whereas in Western cooking it was often less-healthy animal fats. ‘It’s very funny’, she said, ‘The way Westerners think Chinese food is so oily, while we think Western food is so oily!’

Personally, I find I’m often required to rebut the accusation that Chinese food is oily. The best answer, I find, is that:

1. If you use chopsticks to take food from the serving dishes, you leave most of the cooking oil behind. Only Westerners spoon lots of oil onto the rice in their bowls.

2. In very oily dishes like mala yu (a.k.a. shui zhu yu), the oil is used as a medium for the fragrance of the spices – you are not supposed to eat much of it.

3. A well-balanced Chinese meal might include some oily or fatty dishes, but will also include light stir-fries and steamed dishes, plenty of vegetables, and plenty of plain rice or wheat (in the form of noodles and other pasta concoctions, or some kind of bread). You would never eat the equivalent of a huge steak and chips at a traditional Chinese dinner table.

4. Restaurant cooking tends to be richer than home cooking, and you can’t judge a cuisine only by its restaurants. In China, people often host meals in restaurants to show off, to express their generosity and hospitality, or to celebrate – it’s normal under these circumstances to eat rich food. No one really eats ma la yu at home, or if they do, it’s likely to be an occasional thing.