Viet World Kitchen

Peking Duck Meal at Home -- LA Times Article

 

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Remember my experiments with Sichuan and Peking duck earlier this year? After those initial forays, I wanted to make a whole 3-course Peking duck meal with the Mandarin pancakes, stir-fry and final soup. Editor Russ Parsons of the Los Angeles Times "Food" section let me go at it and the article was published today.

I cooked a lot of ducks to perfect the recipes, and the photos above give you the highlights. The roasted duck. Its crisp flesh in a homemade pancake (it's like a flour tortilla but better), the stir-fry with the roast duck meat, and the final soup made from ducky broth and cabbage.

Don't be daunted. It surprisingly doesn't take much to produce this wonderful Chinese meal in your home kitchen.  My husband and I ate it multiple times during recipe development. We never tired of it and didn't even develop duck tummies. Seriously.

Check out my journey toward Peking duck-dom, recipes, and techniques:

Dine-in Duck  (Los Angeles Times, July 29, 2010)

Start practicing on your family and friends. Let me know your thoughts!

Related Chinese duck recipes:

Chinese Fragrant and Crispy Duck - Version 1 (Xiang Su Quan Ya)
Chinese Fragrant and Very Crispy Duck - Version 2 (Xiang Su Quan Ya)
Homemade Peking Duck

• Step 1: How to blow up a duck
• Step 2: How to scald and give the duck a tan
• Step 3: How to roast the duck

Low-Cal Hmong Spicy Eggplant Recipe

I love eggplant but don’t always want all the calories that go with eating it. It’s a vegetable that’s often times cooked into rich foods, fried in oil or simmered in rich sauces. Even when I grill whole ones, either for Vietnamese eggplant with scallions or Indian bhaigan bharta, there’s some oil involved to enhance the vegetables plush qualities.

Giving into all the fatty eggplant pleasures -- deep-fried eggplant tempura, stir-fried eggplant in garlic sauce, baked eggplant parmesan -- seems inevitable. A low-calorie eggplant dish? Nah!

Never would have I thought of boiling eggplant. That sounded nasty when a Hmong farmer suggested it to me. It’s a common way for us to prepare eggplant, John Xiong assured me. He harvested some Chinese eggplant from his Fresno field and we went back to his home to prepare this dish, among others that hot afternoon in 2006.

The Hmong eggplant mash (called lws kubtshis tuav, don’t ask me for a pronunciation!) was enlightening. John and his wife, Bee, boiled their eggplants whole so they would not get water logged. When soft, they peeled them, then mixed the flesh into a fiery chile, scallion, and cilantro mixture that had just been pounded in their mortar.

The result was full of heat and herbal pungency. It was great scooped from the mortar onto balls of steamed sticky rice, but John said that it was rather lean. If you want to take it another step, he revealed, cooking it with some oil and add extra scallion. He did and it was richer tasting.

Grilled Okra Recipe

If people dislike okra, it's usually because of its mucilaginous (read: slimy) nature.  I know okra as a bright addition to tart-sweet Vietnamese seafood soups and an earthy fried Indian side dish. In those Asian preparations, okra doesn’t reveal its gummy nature. Rather, you savor its ridged skin and little round seeds. You marvel at its lovely spoke structure and graceful appearance.

Okra is native to Africa but traveled to India at some very early point in time; no one is sure when that happened. In the 19th century, okra found itself in Southeast Asia and it moved on to China after that.

The pod has a mild flavor and plays well with other ingredients. It’s also a relatively expensive vegetable most of the year. For those reasons, it rarely has a starring role and is often cooked with other ingredients.

Summer is okra season as the warmer months coax their tropical nature and foster growth. The quality of the pods during summer is spectacular. Last week, at the India Cash and Carry market in San Jose, CA, a group of women huddled around a particularly fresh box of unblemished okra, picking their purchase one pod at a time. My husband noticed the group and jumped right in. He ended up with 1 1/2 pounds of gorgeous okra.

Spicy Asian Chicken Wings Recipe

I’ve had a hankering for hot wings these days and it’s not even close to Super Bowl Sunday, the uber chicken wing event in America. At many of the hippest Asian restaurants these days, there is some version of chile-hot, savory-sweet chicken wings. From RockSugar PanAsian Kitchen in Los Angeles to Pok Pok in Portland, Oregon, to Momofuku in New York, Asian-style of chicken wings are on the appetizer menu. Naturally, I wanted to make my own.

Admittedly, I’m partial to the renditions that involve Southeast Asian ingredients, fish sauce, garlic, and chiles. Can you blame me?

When I had the wings at Pok Pok by Ich Truong and RockSugar by Mohan Ismail, I was hooked. Ich (“Ike”) claims that his version is from Vietnam and Mohan is a talented, smart Singaporean chef who monitors and delivers on tasty Asian food trends.  (Read more about Mohan Ismail and RockSugar in my post, "Can Real Asian food be mainstreamed?" on MarkBittman.com)

It was hard to decide whose version was better as they were both addictive to eat. At RockSugar, my husband and I had minor squabble as to who should/would eat the last one. We also could figure out if this style of wings is Vietnamese or Thai or something else. Shed some light, if you happen to know.

My solution is to make spicy Asian chicken wings at home. That way, you can have as many as you want.

Roasted Pork Belly Banh Mi Sandwich Recipe

My parents are both in their 70s and despite their concerns over maintaining a healthy diet and low cholesterol, they manage to splurge every once in a while on fatty pleasures such as crispy roast pork. We typically get it from a Chinese barbecue shop and tell the butcher we want a lean cut. I realize that that is somewhat of an oxymoron when it comes to roast pork but perhaps going lean lessens the guilt a bit. When we buy the pork from a Chinese barbecue shop located in a Vietnamese community, the shop usually sells a few accompaniments for the rich indulgences, such as fine rice noodles (banh hoi) and freshly baked baguette.

I’ve written about eating rich grilled foods with banh hoi rice noodles but a roast pork banh mi – well that is something rather visceral in the Vietnamese culinary consciousness. The primary reason is that it is fast. Get the pork cut up from the barbecue shop, grab a baguette, slit the bread open and stuff it with the warm, crisp, juicy pork. That’s instant gratification. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve brought roast pork (thit heo quay) home to my parents and my mom drags out the baguette. We sit around the table and eat our sandwiches and my parents grin from ear to ear, as if they are kids again in Vietnam – refreshed in body and spirit. What a pleasure to witness and share.

Yesterday, after having picked weeds for hours in the front yard, I needed a rewarding pick-up. I decided to make a pork belly banh mi from last week’s leftovers. My roasted pork belly was obviously not freshly roasted so I had to revive it somehow.

Fragrant and Crispy Duck Recipe (Xiang Su Quan Ya)

“There’s nothing I can do to stop you,” Rory said when I laid out my plan to make Peking duck, which entailed borrowing a neighbor’s air compressor to detach the skin and fat. When I brought my duck home from the Chinese market, I realized that I couldn’t figure out where I should stick the pump. The recipe instructions in Eileen Yin-Fei Low’s Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking did not give me enough guidance. The duck was casting a gentle gaze at me in the fridge, and I had to figure out what to do with the dear bird.

I perused my Chinese cookbooks to discover a Sichuan preparation of crispy duck, which Fuchsia Dunlop says is the duck that most Chinese restaurants abroad actually serve. What I've enjoyed hasn't been roasted, but deep fried! Maybe that's why they get the duck to the table relatively quickly.My friend Carl Chu, a Chinese food expert and author of the Chinese Food Finder series , verified Fuchsia’s claim by saying that Peking duck at most Chinese restaurants are mostly made in advance and then deep-fried to refresh and serve. So I gave up on using the air compressor pump (Rory was relieved) and embarked on a weekend of Sichuan duck.

Book Review & Recipe: Momofuku Slow-Poached Eggs

I love eggs, particularly soft boiled, poached, and fried. I love the firmish white commingling with the rich yellow-orange yolk. Whether with toast, in banh mi, or atop a bowl of rice, eggs comfort and satisfy me. All I need is one and I’m complete. Little did I know that Chef David Chang and Peter Meehan’s new Momofuku restaurant cookbook would shine some extra bright eggy light into my life. Reviewers have praised the book but also commented that the recipes are not tailored for home cooks. I beg to differ as there are a number of simply brilliant ideas, such as Momofuku’s slow-poached eggs.

In fact, there are lots of wonderful takeaways from the book that go beyond the recipes, such as Chang’s frank humor and observations on race. “OS” sauce is Momofuku’s generic pan-Asian seafood sauce and the acronym stands for Oriental Sauce. Telling it like it is in a thoughtful-yet-brusque manner, Chang explains – as channeled through Meehan’s prose, in the recipe introduction for pan-roasted bouchout mussels with OS (page 100):

I enjoy appropriating the out-of-date and borderline-racist term Oriental whenever I get the chance. But I was one of the few Orientals working in the kitchen at Noodle Bar, and the rest of the round-eye crew wasn’t happy with the name. So we kept it under wraps. Since we’re here alone together, let’s call it what it is: Oriental sauce.

That’s not such an outdated term. It’s just one that’s used behind closed doors.

Few Glitches, Lots of Brilliance
It’s that straight-ahead tone that makes me overlook several Vietnamese misspellings in the book. If you’re going to use all the diacritics (accent marks), you should go all the way and across the board, regardless of culture and cuisine. 

Crisp Daikon Rice Cakes with Egg and Scallion Recipe (Banh Cu Cai Bot Chien)

If you visited my other site this week, Asian Dumpling Tips, you’ll notice that I went on a daikon rice cake jag. I test drove a recipe for the dim sum favorite from The Dumpling cookbook and then developed a vegetarian version based on ones at Slanted Door restaurant in San Francisco. I have to admit that watching Charles Phan battle Cat Cora on Iron Chef America inspired the vegetarian daikon rice cakes. Plus I’m attending the CIA’s World of Flavors conference this weekend in Napa and the theme is street food and comfort food. All that converged and as I pondered how to repurpose all the daikon rice cake in my fridge.

Bingo -- one way to use up some of the cake was to spiff up a Vietnamese street food favorite called bánh bột chiên (fried cakes, literally), which is made of crisp fried pieces of plain rice dough, with scrambled eggs, scallion and a tangy-sweet-spicy soy dipping sauce. Bot chien is a Chiu Chow (Triều Châu, Chinese people tied to Chaozhou, an area bordering Guangdong and Fujian provinces) invention and quite popular among school children as an after-school snack. Earlier this year, I had the dish at a Dynasty restaurant in San Jose, California, during their dim sum service. I noticed on Yelp that a small number of Vietnamese restaurants offer the dish too.