Cooking The Books

Jen Cafe

I spend a lot of time in Chinatown - whether eating out, grabbing takeaway or doing a grocery shop - so it was a pleasure this weekend to find a gem that I'd never been to before.  At the back of my mind I have memories of a small green establishment where ladies make dumplings in the window but it wasn't until this weekend that I finally got around to going and confirming its existence.

Jen Cafe is a tiny place at the far end of Chinatown, sat on Lisle Street just before you hit Charring Cross Road (here in fact).  Its most distinguishing feature is a pair of ladies in the window working on a dumpling production line.  One lady rolls out the wrappers while the other deftly fills and folds them creating tray after tray of neatly pleated pork and vegetable (or plain vegetable) dumplings.  Inside it's very basic, green melamine tables - each with a tray of condiments: black vinegar, soy, chilli oil and sugar (I think this is for drinks) - and single A4 print out menus inside plastic folders.  The menu had the usual Chinese roast meat along with quite a few fried noodle and noodle soup dishes, I hardly looked at it though as I was there for one thing and that was the dumplings I'd seen made in the window.  I went for one portion of boiled and one portion of fried, probably a bit too much for one person really but I couldn't make my mind up and I had no one to share them with.

I had to wait quite a while for the dumplings to arrive but it was worth it.  For £4 the first plate had 8 boiled dumplings on it which were stuffed full of flavour (and heat).  They also made me feel a lot better about my own attempts as they looked closer to them than the perfectly pleated ones I buy frozen in the supermarket.  They were so good in fact that I had to keep eating them despite the ridulously hot temperature and I ended up burning my mouth. 

Second to come was the £4.50 fried dumplings, the same as the boiled ones I believe but fried in a potsticker style so a crisp bottom and steamed top.  Although the texture was great with these they didn't seem to taste as good but I think this was more to do with my burnt mouth and the after effects of the chili oil I'd consumed that anything else (I have since returned and can confirm my burnt mouth and chili overload was the cause of these not tasting so good - they're in fact equally as gorgeous as the boiled). With a mug of green tea this lot came to £9.70, which was lucky as I only had a tenner in my wallet and it doesn't look like the kind of place that takes cards.  It did mean they got a very paltry tip though.

When I left I had a little look at the ladies making them and once thing I noticed was the lady rolling the wrappers out rolled the edges of the circles a lot thinner leaving a really pronounced thick piece in the middle.  I'd read about this in recipes but had found it really tricky to do with my huge rolling pin, the lady here did it perfectly though with a tiny little wooden rolling pin.  The thinking behind it is the edges get pleated together and become double thickness and so by making them thinner you stop your pleats being double thickness to the dough surrounding the filling.  In the future I shall try harder to perfect this.

I'll definitely be going again (as mentioned above I've actually been again already before getting around to blogging the first time) as I want more of them and I'd like the girlfriend to have the pleasure too.  Next time I'll try and get more of a spread to see what the roasted meats and noodle dishes are like too.

Ma La

The food of Sichuan is often referred to as having ma la, numbing heat - the heat coming from chilies and the numbing from Sichuan pepper.  From what I've read in my new Hunanese book they tend to stick just to the heat though.  There's one dish in the book that has both though and even takes its name from the combination - hot and numbing chicken.  I'd been wanting to cook something with chicken thighs for a while and so this, along with the chili and Sichuan pepper, caught my eye and I decided to give it a bash.  The dish starts with the chicken being deep fried and after my recent efforts with beef with cumin I made sure that I followed the recipe to the letter this time.  As much as I like cornflour thickened sauces the idea of the glossy, oily chicken appealed more.

Fuchsia Returns

My current most used cook book, and so the one that's appeared on the pages of this blog the most, is Fuchsia Dunlop's Sichuan Cookery.  Never before have I been so blown away by the recipes in a book, they're just so different from anything I've cooked before, so full of flavour, colour and texture.  Well she's written another book too, not recently but until recently I've not had it.  It's called The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook and where the first opened my eyes to the Sichuan cooking I'm hoping this will do the same for Hunanese cuisine.

I don't know a lot, well anything really, about the Hunan region and it's food but if the first recipe I've cooked is anything to go by I looking forward to learning more.  One of the only dishes I'd heard of from Hunan, well heard of in relation to the region anyway, is called Beef with Cumin.  I remember the first time I bought cumin, it must have been as a teenager, and with my first taste it suddenly dawned on me what the unmistakable taste was in so many curries.  Up until now it's not a flavour I've associated with Chinese food though - if that's not the perfect reason to try it I don't know what is.

Dongpo Pork

Pork is my favourite meat.  Whether it's minced in dumplings, cured into bacon, sausage or ham, griddled in chop form or slow roast till it melts in the mouth I think there's no meat more versatile.  It may not be as glamourous as a fillet steak but the variety of flavours and texture it offers are second to none.  The Chinese know this with them consuming something like 70% of the pork eaten on this planet and they were the first to domesticate this animal a good few thousand years ago, in fact if a chinaman says meat then what they mean is pork.

For melt in the mouth succulence the cut of choice for me has to be belly.  With slow cooking the layers of fat melt away, redering out and through the surrounding meat keeping it moist and breaking it down into its individual striations.  The aim always being to gain the succulence the fat gives you but cooking it out enough that the fat isn't offputting in its chewiness.  I've roast it on the bone, deboned it and rolled it around a stuffing of herbs and confitted it and all have been a success so when I read about Dongpo Pork on this website I knew it was for me.  3 1/2 hours of various cooking methods, all low and slow, had to leave an amazing final texture.

Last weekend was a really busy one - 2 gigs, one meal for the girlfriend's parents, a musical and a museum visit with my parents -  so this weekend gone was to be spent at home, the perfect opportunity to cook a time intensive dish.  I only got as far as the supermarket so it wasn't the best bit of pork belly around and looked a little less fatty than the one on the recipe page.  It was only £4 odd for just over a kilo though so I can't grumble too much.

As far as the recipe goes the main issues were getting a uniform browning on it during the frying stage, the serious hot oil spitting at that point and the finding something to steam a kilo lump of meat in.  The curved bit of pork belly just did not want to sit right in the frying pan and holding it down whilst it popped and spat has left a series of burns all over my hands.  To steam I used a big flat saucepan, creating to big boulders out of crushed up tin foil to rest the pork on above the water level.  Outside of these the recipe went very smoothly and once cooked and the sauce drizzled over I couldn't wait to get stuck in and find out if you really could pull the meat away with chopsticks.

 

The simple answer to this is, yes, you could.  I thought the photo at the top of the page summed the texture up perfectly.  The skin was so soft you could push chopsticks through it yet it still retained a nice, gelationous chew.  The fat was delicate and melt in the mouth, no unpleasant greasiness, and the meat was the most tender pig (well adult pig anyway - the 3 week old suckling piglet in Peru still had it beat) I've ever eaten.  I can't recommend it enough. 

Here it is in all its glory too, not quite the uniform colour of the original but still quite a nice looking centrepiece for a meal I think.

Pork and Vegetable Dumplings

I love dim sum, whether it's early in the day as it should be or in the evening English style I don't care.  The mass of textures and flavours, all wrapped up in little bite-size morsels is perfect for a man that can never decide exactly what he wants to eat.

A while back I photographed a dinner of kangkong belacan which contained a few shop bought  pork dumplings.  Although I do tend to buy them frozen they are reasonably simple (if not a tad time consuming - hence the buying frozen) to make at home using supermarket ingredients.  This weekend I decided to give them a go again to see if I still had it in me.  The recipe I chose to adapt came from a Keith Floyd book which has graced this blog before.