Cooking The Books

Cháo Vịt - Vietnamese Rice Porridge with Duck

Rice porridge is eaten all over China and South East Asia where it takes many names.  In Hong Kong (and the UK) it's called congee, in mainland China zhōu, the Thai know it as โจ๊ก (joke) and in Vietnam it's cháo (the ch is j pronounced I believe) - to name a few.  In it's most basic form it is rice boiled in water and a little rice goes a long way as with prolonged simmering it goes beyond tender and starts to break down, thickening the water with its starch.  This transformation of small amounts of rice into big bowls of food may well be how it came about, making a reduced crop go a long way after a poor harvest.  During the Cambodian revolution it certainly took this role, with the ousted city dwellers sustaining their back breaking lifestyle with nothing but a watery rice porridge.  On bad days they were lucky to find a few grains in the bottom, let alone a meal's worth of carbohydrate.

By the addition of various flavourings though it can be transformed from a basic meal to something luxurious, a fine start to the day that may seem weird for the temperature of South East Asia but for some reason works well. It's salty and soothing, filling the stomach for the day ahead.

First step is to cook the rice in stock and not water and then near anything goes.  Soft pork and the black and purple century egg make a fine congee, the pig and egg are again bedfellows in the Thai joke moo, or pork porridge, where minced pork is added to the simmering slurry shortly before serving and even nearer to the bowl an egg is broken in.  You can choose to leave this to poach slowly in the residual heat or stir through straight away, adding rich yellow streaks of yolk.  It's not finished then either as toppings are provided - spring onion and ginger are seen nearly everywhere and soy, fish sauce or black vinegar are all used as seasonings, not to mention salt, sugar or white pepper depending on where you are.

Duck legs lend themselves well to this dish as the prolonged simmering they need to tenderise provides a base stock for the rice (for other everyday congees I tend to turn to the Oriental favourite chicken powder for my stock - quick, simple and pretty authentic).  The duck flesh then shreds easily from the bone, providing texture and rich strands of meat.  When I eat this for breakfast I prepare the night before up until the rice is cooked then shred the meat, add to the porridge and warm through when I get up.  It makes a fine lunch too and is even meaty enough for an evening meal.  As I've made this as a Vietnamese cháo I've seasoned with fish sauce, if this isn't to your taste then the aforementioned black vinegar cuts through the richness well.

For other flavours simply boil the below amounts of rice in stock to get your base porridge and add things as you see fit - whether it's meat, fish or seafood - topping with whatever you fancy.  It's pretty much a do what you want dish like noodle soup or fried rice.

Cháo Vịt - Vietnamese Rice Porridge with Duck

Ingredients, for 4 people

2 duck legs

120gr jasmine rice

2 spring onions, halved and crushed

2" ginger, crushed

To Garnish

Greens from 2 spring onions

1 red chili

Fish sauce

White pepper

Method

Chop the duck legs in two to expose some marrow then simmer in 2 litres of water, with the ginger and spring onion, till tender.   This should take about an hour to an hour fifteen.

Remove the duck and flavourings, strain the stock through a fine sieve and then make back up to 2 litres with water.  Add the rice, bring to the boil and then simmer, again for one hour to an hour fifteen, until the rice has broken down and the cháo has thickened nicely.  The stock is very light so it will need to be seasoned, using salt and fish sauce and - if you like the stuff - the ubiquitous chicken powder.

Whilst this is happening and when the duck legs are cool enough to handle remove the meat from the bone and shred.  Just prior to serving add the meat (and skin if you want) and warm through.

Provide your diners with sliced spring onion, red chili, fish sauce and white pepper for them to add as desired.

Hong Kong: The Rest

I was completely bowled over by Hong Kong.  In my short stay there I fell in love with the place.  Such a great mix of east and west that I think it would be easy to live there.  It may be as metropolitan as they come, all sky scrapers and narrow, dark roads but it's cosmopolitan too - you can sit and drink wine outside a cheese room or slurp on cheap wan tan.  I'm seriously considering looking for a job there when my travels come to an end.

Here's a collection of photos of things that made me feel that way.

In a slide show

The flickr album

Or this pictobrowser

Asian Meal #7: Ngau Lam, Hong Kong Airport

Meal: Ngau Lam, King's Palace Congee and Noodle Express, Hong Kong Airport
Cost: HK$4 (about £3.60)
Thoughts: Ngau lam is a Cantonese dish of stewed beef, frequently with some tendon thrown in for extra chewy goodness.  It's not unlike a British beef stew, just meat and gravy, but fragrant with the Cantonese braising staples of star anise, tangerine peel, Chinese cinnamon (cassia bark), garlic and ginger.  I eat it in London's Chinatown quite a bit - where vats bubble away in windows, ready to be served near instantly - and it was a definite to do in HK.  Alas although I saw many a noodle house serving it up it was never when I needed a meal, luckily for me one of the places in HK airport had it so I made it my last meal there.

I've read it's an ideal hangover cure and I needed it.  The last night in HK turned out to be a big one and we'd stumbled in at 6.30am having started 12 hours before.  At one point in the early hours we bought and polished off a bottle of vodka in a club between 2 or 3 of us in the space of maybe 2 hours.  It was a heavy night.  Add to that getting up at 10.30am to leave for the airport and I definitely had a hangover I needed curing.

Whilst not as exciting as the HK noodle shops - with their bubbling vats of beef, tendon and tripe - the airport version (to the right of the snap) was just what I needed.  The meat was melt in the mouth and the noodles slippery soft but with just enough bite.  Whilst it may not sound the thing for when you're feeling tender the tendon was just the ticket, gelatinous and soft but meaty in taste.  The stock itself ended up a bit on the fiery side after I spooned in a load of chili oil before testing how hot it was - a bit of sweating was probably just what I needed though.

It was until a few hours later, sat on the plane and getting ready to land in Kuala Lumpur, that it dawned on me I'd survived the day pretty much hangover free - maybe it is the great cure folk say it is.

Won Ton Noodle Soup: Mak's Noodle, Hong Kong

If there's two things that stick in my mind from childhood Chinese takeaways it's crispy duck and won ton soup.  I remember as a young teenager calling won ton soup 'brains in used dishwater' but derogatory moniker aside I loved them.  The pork and prawn filling, sometimes given crunch with some water chestnut, and the overcooked pasta dough that didn't need teeth to remove.  The broth may have looked like used dishwater but its murkiness was nicely flavoured.  The love of won ton soup has stuck with me, kept alive with cheap bowls of it in Wong Kei, and so when the trusty Lonely Planet spoke of Mak's Noodle - churning out cheap bowls of it to tourists and locals alike - I had to go check it out.

We arrived to find a tiny crammed in affair, luckily with space for two more where we were stuck on a little round table with two locals.  I knew Lonely Planet rated the place but was pleased to find a quote from Anthony Bourdain (near hero of mine) in the window too.  There didn't appear to be a menu but a glance around showed there was only three things being eaten anyway: won ton, ngau lam (stewed beef brisket) and a side of choi sum with oyster sauce.  A glance into the window kitchen showed they were well set up for speedy delivery of bowls of noodle soup.

As much as I wanted some brisket I was here for won ton and that's what I was going to have.  A two fingered salute and muttered 'won ton' received a solitary 'mee' in reply.  I nodded to confirm our desire for noodles, added a 'choi' to get some vegetables too and we were off.  Well within a couple of minutes we were anyway as that's all it took to arrive.

The most striking feature of the soup was the broth, the light chicken affair was still discernible but riding on top was a big slap in the face of prawn - gorgeous.  The mee were toothsome and the won ton lovely and firm, not the overcooked dough I've grown to love but I guess that's not what you should be aiming for really.  The prawns in the filling were big lumps, no paste here.  My one complaint was there wasn't enough, maybe only 4 of them and not the biggest bowls either.  Quality over quantity is definitely the aim here.

Just as we were getting up to leave a big new Audi pulled up outside and a pair of immaculately and expensively dressed locals hopped out, him in blazer and slacks and her a well tailored skirt suit.  They stepped inside and squeezed in on one of the little tables with everyone else.

Java Road Market, Hong Kong

When it comes to eating when I'm away I'm a big fan of the Lonely Planet guides.  In Peru it was pretty much the case that if we ate somewhere they recommended it was good and if we tried somewhere random it wasn't so good.  Looking through the Hong Kong entries in the China guide this place was billed as being a bit off the beaten track but if you wanted the real Hong Kong experience you had to go.  Well we did want a real Hong Kong exeprience so we hopped on the MRT and travelled a few stops to North Point, a locals' area that my HK resident friend said most expats would never make it too, let alone in their first three days.

The food we were after was sat on the third floor of a closed for the evening wet market and we stepped in to be confronted with a very raucous, entirely Asian crowd eating away, chatting loudly and playing dice.  All along one wall was a number of kitchens and then masses of melamine tables stretching as far as the eye could see.  It was a functional sort of place with all staff - whether washer uppers, waiters or chefs - donning white wellies, probably to ease the post-service hosing down.  Luckily one of the places there had an English translation on the menu so they got our custom.

Whilst deciding what to order we were served a beer with bowls for drinking vessels which we loved, although I seemed to be the only person in there who liked it so much they photographed it.  We also witnessed the ritual of the waitress washing our chopsticks and dipping bowls in front of us in green tea, something I'd heard of but not seen.

We decided upon noodles in black sauce, salted Chinese leek shoots, white gourd with preserved egg and minced pork and braised beancurd with bamboos and crispy pork.  The noodles were a pretty plain affair, just thin egg noodles with the occasional bit of onion and cabbage, a welcome carb but nothing special.

The salted leek shoots sat amongst beansprouts, giving a lovely sweet leek flavour competing with not too subtle garlic.

One of the stars of the show was the white gourd with preserved egg and minced pork.  The gourd was moist and refreshing, holding lots of liquid but remaining flavoursome.  It sat in a rich broth, topped with both normal egg (separated into white and yolk) and the black and purple preserved egg, the minced pork adding welcome texture.

The braised beancurd with bamboos and crispy pork was fantastic.  We got two types of beancurd, fried cubes and beancurd skin, Chinese mushrooms and cubes of crispy pork, rendered soft and gelatinous from the braising.  A savoury gravy had enough starch to just cling to it all without being gloopy.

As if we weren't full enough (we ordered far too much) we were presented with a ginger soup for dessert.  Heavy with ginger and very sweet it was full of cubes of something starchy, boiled till holding their shape, just, but melt in the mouth - it wasn't potato but may have been taro.

Aside the kitchen was a tank of live fish and shellfish including a pair of rather large grouper seemingly completely unaware of their purpose.

If ever you're in Hong Kong drag yourself the few stops east on the Island line of the MRT and experience something a bit local.  It's well worth the trip.