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.
Beef with Cumin (for a couple of people)
Ingredients
300gr of steak, sliced against the grain into thin, bite sized bits
5cm of ginger, peeled and minced
4 cloves of garlic, minced
2 red chilies, seeded and sliced thinly on the diagonal
3 ts of chili flakes (be careful with these as some can be pretty hot - base on your tastes)
4 spring onions, green bits only, thinly sliced
2 ts ground cumin
1 ts sesame oil
Marinade
1 TB each of cornflour, water, Shaoxing rice wine, dark soy and light soy
Method
Chuck the beef in the marinade whilst you're preparing all the other rest of the ingredients. The cooking of this dish, as with any stir fry, is very quick so you want everything laid out on a plate ready to chuck in the wok as needed.
In the cook book the meat is deep fried briefly but I couldn't be bothered so just stir fried until just coloured. This had a marked effect on how the dish turned out though so if you want it to be as intended then you want to deep fry it.
Once the beef is removed just chuck the garlic, ginger, chili, chili flakes and cumin into into the wok and fry for about 30 seconds, then add the beef, the marinade and maybe 100ml of water cooking just till thickened and combined. Take off the heat, add the spring onion and sesame oil, stir and serve.
As mentioned I deviated from the recipe by stir-frying rather than deep frying the beef, this meant the wok got covered in the marinade. Due to this I added the 100ml of water (not from the book) which cleaned the wok and created a sauce. The photo in the book has no sauce though and is just a dry, glossy dish of fried beef with the different colours of the ginger, garlic, chili and spring onion. I will try it again at some point following the recipe to the letter to see how it turns out.
Even if it wasn't as it is meant to be the dish was great, the brief cooking and across the grain cutting give you beautifully tender beef. The abundance of ginger, garlic and chilli give it a fiery, fresh taste and the cumin works really well. Two teaspoons of ground cumin seemed loads in relation to the other ingredients but it was perfect, I guess you need a lot to compete with the rest of the spices. Served with some boiled rice and stir fried Chinese leaf it made a tasty meal. I'm about to have the leftovers for lunch now and can't wait.
This makes me think of Hakka cuisine. Have you come acros that before? Apparently Hakka tribes from China migrated into India and formed their own hybrid cuisine which included some dishes like this beef with cumin.
I found out about Hakka cusine after visiting a very good restaurant in Wimbledon a few years ago that specialised in it. I can't remember the name off the top of my head but, if you're interested, I'll go and prod Dad to find out what it was called.
Posted by: ros | March 26, 2008 at 10:38 PM