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Google can't read my hamhock-ridden mind!

Phyltre — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:00:21 -0800

Help me find the right crockpot-esque Chinese ham hock preparation. I'm a huge fan of a particular Chinese ham hock preparation I see turn up a lot at Chinese New Year celebrations (I have no idea if this is related.) The ham hock is cooked, apparently very slowly, until it turns into basically a melty mass with bits meat mixed in (but it's still all in one piece). I remember them sitting inside a ceramic pot, along with a rather thick sauce that really reinforced the pork taste. Googling shows me "Chinese" recipes for roasting, for ham hock with black beans, and for braised ham hocks. I don't know if black beans are even involved in the recipes I've had, they could have been, but I don't remember seeing them. It's a recipe I've seen on several more expensive Chinese buffets, so I know it's some kind of standard. Can anyone validate which recipe I might be thinking of, and point me in the right direction? One catch, I'm looking for a recipe that is crock-pot friendly. I'm guessing that won't be much of a problem.

Bonus/Related: Can anyone tell me specifically what recipe might have been used to generate this lovely piece of work? By the way, the crock pot I'm-guessing-braised version this post is about looks just like that, except there's more sauce all over it and presumably it's softer.

Wok stir-fry cooking: best resources for instuctional cooking videos?

Ligament — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:14:29 -0800

Wok stir-fry cooking: best resources for instuctional cooking videos? Hi All,

I recently purchased a very high end cast iron wok, and a very high output outdoor wok stove (165k BTUs). Now that I have the equipment to do true high temperature wok cooking, I'm looking for online cooking videos for some great authentic recipes. I'm interested in any type of cuisine that uses a Wok as a main cooking vessel. I'm also interested in videos that try to instruct on authentic recipes as opposed to easy or watered-down for the American palette recipes.

Links, please! thanks!

blah mein

ijoyner — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 23:25:21 -0800

Why do all strip mall chinese restaurants taste the same? Is there some kind of turnkey Chinese restaurant package from the foodservice provider (Sysco, US Foods, etc)? Do they all just happen to order the same red-colored cubed pork (for PFR), breaded chicken (Sweet & Sour) and eggrolls?
They all appear to have the same Americanized menus with the same price points and the same food pictures on a backlit menu board. Are there any clues to finding an authentic Chinese place in anywhere, USA?

Help!! Teach Me How To Make NY Style Chinese Food!

FireStyle — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 01:42:48 -0800

Anyone know how to make pork fried rice and chicken and broccoli just like in New York Style chinese food? I am a chinese fodo addict. I could eat chicken and broccoli for the rest of my life and never grow tired of it. however, when I moved to California, I noticed these restuarants in LA SUCK!!! I went to just about every restaurant in LA, Venice, Santa Monica, Marina del Rey, and even El Segundo! they all taste the same and they all taste bad. (mostly that express chinese crap)

In New york, some restuarants are better than others, but East coast chinese generally taste the same. Out west, it lacks flavor, expression, attention to detail, color, and intensity!

I tried a few recipes for pork fried rice and chicken and broccoli online, but they all taste west coasty to me. If anyone can get me a NY recipe, I'm forever in your debt!! Tell me where to shop, and what I need to make it, and I'm there! Thanks!

WOK FU!

saysthis — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 01:48:15 -0800

Seeking >20 minute recipes, but with a twist: I'm in China, and that means I have a wok, vegetable oil, garlic, black pepper, salt, sichuan peppers, no cheese, and limited options on Western meats. Also got a couple other pans, but nothing to specialized. Aside from the usual (fried rice), what are some interesting meals I can make with this in 20 minutes?

Jai

porpoise — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:09:15 -0800

(old?) Vancouver Buddhist-style "ketchup gluten" recipe. How do they cook the gluten with the sauce-which-isn't-a-sauce? When I was young, my parents used to get "takeout Vegetarian" from Buddhist restaurants. Consisted of soysauce soybeans, dense sponge-like tofu (in a dark sauce), and wheat gluten ... pillows? chunks? wringled-masses. And other kinds of soy/gluten food products in a variety of flavours.

One of the flavours was/is "ketchup." The other flavours were curry (yellow) and low sui ("old[seasoned?]-water"/"not-quite-five-spice").

The local Asian-Megamart (T&T next to Tinseltown) used to have an (independent?) supplier that sold this stuff on weekends. They no longer do (although they have a self-serve bar for different vegetarian stuff).

I can get fried gluten in bulk. I can't imagine a suitable approach to try cooking it with a ketchup-like sauce to get the same effect. The end result is like industrial sweet&sour sauce that saturates the outer 1/3 of the gluten mass, then removes everything that hadn't been absorbed into the gluten mass except for a thin evenly spread hint embracing every surface area of the gluten mass.

Question 1: Recommend places with this kind of takeout (usually taken out in round aluminium pans with a foiled-cardboard top) in Vancouver*

Question2: How would I go about stewing chunks of wheat gluten (which I have several sources for) and in what mixture of seasoning to get the same kind of effect?

Thanks!

*the childhood place I remember - a hole-in-the-wall - was a block down from Pain&Wasting and the VPD; I checked recently, it's no longer there

I'll have a number 42...

Rabulah — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 12:47:49 -0800

I want to cook chinese takeaway style food at home. Is there a website that will tell me how to do this? One of my NYR's is to cook from scratch more, and another is to get in shape. So I figured I'd combine the two, and learn how to cook chinese takeaway style food (fried rice, sesame prawn toasts, lemon honey chicken, etc) at home. I have a takeaway 200 yards from my home, and it's really making me fat.

I've found websites online that tell me how to cook "lemon & honey chicken", but the results don't seem very much like takeaway food. It's very important that it still looks/tastes like it's from the Happy House. I can experiment a bit, but I'm not a confident chef, so I'd prefer to have a recipe in front of me.

Is there a website, or perhaps a book, that specialises in takeaway food?

What should I do about a screw in my food?

cerebus19 — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 16:56:18 -0800

I found a metal screw in my takeout Chinese food. What should I do? This is from a restaurant I really like--one of the only authentic Sichuan restaurants in the area. I've never had any problems with their food before, but I just found a screw in the leftovers from the takeout I got yesterday.

I found it by biting down on it, fortunately not hard enough to injure my teeth at all. I spat it out instantly, assuming it was a bone from the chicken used to make the dish, then discovered what it really was. I saved it, still covered in sauce, in a plastic bag, and threw out the rest of the food.

Should I bring it to the restaurant, perhaps with a friend of mine who speaks Mandarin, as the staff there doesn't speak English that well? Are there any authorities I should notify?

No soup for you (?)

CRM114 — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 10:16:37 -0800

On behalf of my girlfriend, who wanted the soup from my Chinese delivery lunch special but now is too full to eat it: Can you reheat egg drop soup? Any safety considerations? "Died of salmonella from bad egg drop soup" would be a lame obituary.

Good dim sum in London?

sueinnyc — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 17:14:58 -0800

Please recommend a great restaurant for dim sum in central London (UK). I am familiar with Gerrard Street but have never had dim sum in London. I would be interested in recommendations in that area, or anywhere else in central London.

I want to take my mother, so quality is more important to me than price.

I have searched old questions, but can't find one where people actually name London restaurants in the dim sum context.

Thanks!

Why do orange chicken vapors make me cough?

lostburner — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 07:34:44 -0800

This question is about chinese fast-food orange chicken (the deep-fried amorphous nuggets with a thick tangy glaze). When I take a deep smell from a hot bowl of this chicken, or hold it in my mouth and breathe around it, some sort of irritating vapor makes me cough (or stings my nose). Just one cough – enough to keep it from getting into my lungs. Once the chicken cools down (to mouth temperature, even) it doesn't happen. It reminds me of the reaction I've had sniffing acid in lab – could it be lots of volatile vinegar? I've experienced this with fast-food chicken in more than one college food court.

Can I make potstickers at home, or am I doomed to produce mere wontons?

nebulawindphone — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 17:20:00 -0800

I want to make potstickers (a.k.a. "fried dumplings"), those round, doughy, dense, well-stuffed meat dumplings you can buy at American Chinese restaurants. But the recipes that I find, they produce something I only recognize as a wonton soup dumpling — a light, triangular, thin-skinned noodle with only a small ball of meat. Help me, oh filter of filters! Problem 1: the noodles

The dumpling skins I bought at my local Chinese grocery... well, they might be very close to what you get in China, but I'm looking to re-create a comfort food from my American childhood, and for that they just aren't right. They're far too thin, for starters — like I said, much closer to what I'd call a "wonton." And the texture is wrong too — they're light, sticky and even a little slimy if overcooked, not thick and hearty like I was hoping. What should I be buying instead?

Problem 2: the filling

The filling recipes Google has turned up for me — most recently this one, after Wikipedia suggested that jiaozi might be the true name for what I sought — have produced a light-colored, light-textured, slightly dry filling, not the dark and moist one I was expecting.

Am I barking up the wrong tree entirely? Does "potsticker" not mean to other people what it means to me? Is there a Chinese name for these tasty treats that will enable me to buy the right noodles and Google the right recipes? (Hell, does anyone ever make these things at home? Or are they a purely food-service item?)

Stir Fry Advice

empath — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 07:15:26 -0800

Help me make a decent stir fry. I think I'm a fairly decent cook, but I'm a complete failure at Chinese food, and it seems like it should be dead simple. I've finally mastered cooking tofu (press, marinate, cook at very high heat until brown), but vegetables and sauce defeat me. Vegetables are always either soggy and limp or underdone and any sauce I make ends up being extremely thin and bland. I can make it edible if I coat it in soy sauce afterwards, but I'd prefer to do it right -- any advice?

I've found plenty of recipes for stir-fry online, but not a lot of articles about technique-- are there any really good, detailed articles about stir-frying out there?

Chopsticks!

saysthis — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 03:17:58 -0800

Give me some ideas about what can be done with those disposable chopsticks at Chinese restaurants once they've been used (I live in China, so there's lots of 'em). China, believe it or not, actually has a pretty effective recycling apparattus - since nobody recycles, there are people who dig through the trash at about 3 in the morning, pull out anything they can sell, and leave the rest for the garbage shovelers and street sweepers who come out at about 5-6 in the morning. The garbage shovelers then sort by hand what's left. Sure ain't pretty work, but it's effective, at least where I live.

Anyway, one type of garbage I almost never see pulled and recycled is the disposable bamboo chopsticks/kebab sticks (coal grills and food on sticks are a stable of the street food market). I remember reading once about a guy who collects them and makes furniture out of them, and I guess now that I'm managing to store away a little capital and thinking about starting my own business, I'm wondering if there's a way to recycle these locally and turn them into something resalable. Any ideas/ballpark costs? The more ape-able and small-scale this thing is, the better, because it would get rid of a major pet peeve to my tree-hugging conscience (and probably open up consulting opportunities in the future :D ).

Best restaurant in Montreal Chinatown?

ITheCosmos — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 14:39:21 -0800

What's the best/your favourite restaurant in Montreal's Chinatown?

Crispy duck for Christmas

Flitcraft — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 18:03:09 -0800

Does anyone know a Chinese restaurant or takeaway in London which opens on Christmas day? Extensive googling and ringing round last year failed to turn up any that did. We're non-cooks with very limited kitchen facilities (think microwave). Last year we ended up eating at a very fancy hotel when all we really wanted was a crispy duck with pancakes and hoi sin sauce. Please help us feed our tasty waterfowl habit.

Why do Chinese restaurants serve soup for two?

nebulawindphone — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 20:13:51 -0800

At most Chinese restaurants in the U.S., there are a few soups that only come in servings big enough for two people. Why do they do that? And why is it so common at Chinese restaurants and so rare other places?

Secret of the Lotus Seed Bun

picea — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 06:58:11 -0800

After having a delightful dim sum experience this past weekend, my wife and I are trying to figure out how to make what I believe is called a steamed lotus seed bun. I've just spent awhile on the Google, trying to find recipes, but haven't had any luck. It's a white bun with a sweet, eggy center. Online and printed recipes are both fine.

Cheap, fast Chinese food in NYC

cyrusdogstar — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 08:43:57 -0800

NYCFilter: This should be a simple question, where can I get fairly decent, cheap, fast Chinese food in Soho or Chinatown? Details and Midtown analogies inside. I work in Soho, specifically the Puck Building (corner of Houston and Lafayette Streets, a block from Broadway). In the immediate neighborhood all I've really found is a Subway and a passable pizzeria; but, I occasionaly tire of those and I do like Chinese/Japanese food (don't we all?).

My girlfriend works on and off in Midtown, and she's got a plethora of cheap & good Chinese/Japanese food to choose from when she's there--Yoshinoya's, a place that recently closed called Yip's, another place whose name I forget on 38th Street. They all offer your typical compact rice + meat (+ sometimes veggies) meal for approximately $3-6.

However, I haven't yet found any similar places around here, and I'm afraid to wander 10 minutes down to Canal and start trying random Chinese restaurants in Chinatown. Mostly because A) I wouldn't know where to start and B) I'm unsure what the general range of quality is down there.

So I'm hoping someone can suggest places they've been to or heard of that would offer some fairly cheap, fairly decent General Tso's or whatnot, that would be in this general area of Manhattan. Thanks!

Sweet and Sour

XQUZYPHYR — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 09:58:26 -0800

Take-out Chinese food: I love take-out sweet & sour chicken. For some reason, some places serve it just as the fried nuggets with a container of the red sauce on the side, and some places serve it as a big mishmosh of the chicken and veggies all in the sauce. Are there actual terms for this difference, and if so would I be able to order it the way I want at your generic take-out place?