Asian Cuisine - Eastern China

Our menu this week for Eastern China included:

• Seaweed Soup
• Jellyfish and White Radish Salad
• Pearl Balls
• Emerald Shrimp
• Shanghai Sweet & Sour Spareribs
• Red-Cooked Duck
• Bean Curd in Oyster Sauce
• Yangchow Fried Rice

Seaweed soup is just as it sounds, a soup with nori in it. It also has shredded pork as well as egg whirled in just before service. Chef said that our soup turned out with the correct flavour and consistency, and used our soup as a demonstration for incorporating the egg so the strands were well formed.

The Jellyfish and White Radish Salad is a straightforward salad containing sliced jellyfish and daikon in a peanut oil based dressing. The key to this dish is that the jellyfish is incredibly salty and needs to be soaked at least overnight in fresh water to draw out the salt content. Even at this point, the salad may require extra sugar to compensate for the saltiness. Our salad definitely fell into this category and we added quite a bit more sugar to it. However, at service Chef said our flavour ended up being good although some of our jellyfish was cut into strands that were a little long.

Pearl balls is a steamed dish where a pork meatball is rolled in rice. The steaming of the rice causes the rice to stand on end during cooking giving a prickly appearance to the dish. Chef was very happy with our presentation for this dish as the rice appeared just as it should. Also, our flavour was very good on the dish and it's accompanying sauce.

Emerald Shrimp is a dish given its name by the colouring of shrimp an emerald green. Chlorophyll is extracted from spinach and is then applied to shrimp to give it the desired colour. Chef was happy with the colour on our shrimp and said our presentation was in general very good. The flavour itself was also fantastic on this dish.

Shanghai sweet and sour spareribs are just as they sound, a sparerib dish with sweet and sour sauce. The spareribs are marinated and then cooked in 2 phases in a wok - first deep fried and then pan fried to give a brown colour to the ribs. A sauce is then added to the wok and thickened down, and the ribs are served like this. Chef commented that we had cooked the ribs well and that they had become tender enough - if cooked too short or too long, the ribs will be too tough. Our sauce also had good flavour, and while the presentation was fine we served a large amount of ribs on a single plate, too much for a single person.

Red-cooked duck is a dish which uses the "red-cooking" method. This is a common eastern Chinese cooking method where a protein is marinated in dark soy-sauce before cooking. When cooked, the soy sauce gives the protein a red tinge, hence the name. For this dish, the duck is marinated in the dark soy and then braised. The recipe for this dish called for a chili to add some spice, and I added extra chilies for more heat - the end result was spice at a level just right, and Chef was happy with the flavour and the spice in this dish. Our presentation was good for this dish as well.

Bean curd in oyster sauce is a simple dish where bean curd is wok fried to give it some texture and then has a sauce added to the wok to flavour the curd. Our dish had good flavour, although Chef commented that the curd could have used more cooking time to give it more texture. Otherwise, the presentation was good and he was happy with the dish.

Yangchow fried rice is a specialty of the eastern Chinese region, receiving it's name from Yangchow city. The dish requires eight ingredients above and beyond the rice itself, which can generally be adjusted to suit the taste of the cook. We cooked the rice this time with shrimp, pork, duck, sausage, peas, green onion, mushroom, and egg - all cut very small to blend in well with the rice. Chef was happy with the presentation and flavour on this dish from us.