Cantonese "White-cut" Chicken 粵式白切鷄

My all time favourite Chinese dish is the “white cut chicken” (白切鷄), which comes in many guises, the popular HaiNan chicken being a variation on the same theme.  When I was in my twenties, my roommate and I could easily polish off a whole “white-cut” chicken between us.  Now, I still couldn’t pass the dish by; whenever I go to a new restaurant, if they offer it, I’ll try it to see if it meets the “standard”.

As the name suggests, it is actually a poached whole chicken, chopped up and reassembled, and served with ginger and scallions.  The chicken itself is not hard to make, it’s just difficult to perfect so that the chicken is thoroughly cooked but stays tender. That is not easy because of the anatomy of the chicken and the difficulty of having to cook white breast meat the same length of time as the dark thigh meat.  The true test of a well-made white-cut chicken is in the tenderness of the white meat and the ‘crispness’ of the skin.  There is also a technique to making the ginger-scallion sauce.   A friend of mine, Mr. Anonymous, has the method down pat.   I can vouch for that as I’ve tried his homemade edition - yes, he prepared a takeout special for me last time I visited the west coast!  He had picked up the method from talking to a few experienced chefs.  Here are his instructions:

1.     Cook with the best whole chicken one can get:

Whenever possible, buy a freshly killed, never before frozen, organic, free-range chicken, found in poultry shops that handle their own processing.  The perfect size is a bird between 2.5 and 3 pounds.  Chinese cochin, the so-called “yellow-feather chicken” (a misnomer as the feathers are actually bronze in color) is preferred because it is leaner and has more flavor; the meat is firmer and the bones harder. 

2.     Poaching the “Easy Way”:

Fill a large pot with enough water to cover the whole chicken.  Add a couple of slices of ginger, a stalk of green onion and a teaspoon of “sha-ginger” powder (沙薑粉 more on this powder later).   When the water is boiling, hold the chicken by its neck or feet and dip it into the water in a slow up and down motion a few times to fill and refill its body cavity with hot water.  This brings the inside and outside of the chicken to the same temperature for even cooking.  The water at this point will be below boiling point, so bring the pot to a boil again.  Submerge the chicken, cover the pot, turn off the heat and let it sit for 15 minutes.  Bring the water to a simmer, turn off the heat, and poach for another 15 minutes.  Take the chicken out to cool. 

3.     Alternatively, for the best results, poach with two pots and finish the cooking with a cold bath:

Fill two large pots with water.  Add a couple of slices of ginger, a stalk of green onion and a teaspoon of “sha-ginger” powder into each.  Bring both pots to a boil.  Hold the chicken by its neck and dip it into the first pot in a slow up and down motion a few times to fill and refill its body cavity with hot water.  Bring the water to a boil again.  Submerge the chicken, cover the pot, and turn off the heat.  After 15 minutes, move the chicken to the second pot of boiling water.  Again, submerge, turn off the heat and poach for another 15 minutes.  Violà, the poaching is done. 

While the chicken is being poached, prepare a large body of cold water with some ice cubes and season it with some “sha-ginger” powder.  Drop the poached chicken immediately into the cold water until its skin is cool.  The cold bath (過泠诃) stops the internal cooking, firms up the meat, and crisps the chicken skin.

(Optional step: Rub the chicken all over with some chicken fat from the pot to give it sheen.  For a healthier option, use sesame oil)

Note: a large chicken may have to be poached for another 15 minutes.  Exact cooking time depends on how much water in the pots, the size of chicken, etc., try it out and make appropriate adjustments.

4.     To make the classic Ginger-Scallion Dipping Sauce:

Grate a large piece of fresh ginger.  Chop finely a bunch of scallions.  Mix the ginger and scallions in a bowl.  Add a couple of teaspoons of “sha-ginger” powder and some salt.  “Sha-ginger” is the secret ingredient; it adds a unique aroma and complexity to the sauce.  To finish, pour very hot cooking oil over the mixture and mix it well.  

A few notes on making the sauce:

·       Chop the scallions and ginger by hand instead of using a food processor for better texture.

·       Be careful when pouring hot oil over the ginger-scallion mixture.  It will splatter and can be messy.

·       Another option is to add room temperature salad oil to the mixture and let it steep.  This method works but the sauce will be less aromatic and the scallions stay raw. 

·       Do not use microwave to make the sauce; the ginger and scallion will most likely be burnt.

·       For the brave ones, use rendered chicken fat in place of cooking oil.  Delicious!

·       The proportion of ginger and the white and green parts of scallions affects the color, texture and flavor of the sauce.  Adjust the amount to suit your taste. 

 –  ˜

Finish eating the white-cut chicken preferably on the day it is made.  Chicken spoils quickly even with refrigeration.  That is one reason why so many Chinese bbq delis and restaurants nowadays sell “kwei-fei chicken” (貴妃鷄) instead.  “Kwei-fei chicken” is white-cut chicken marinated in light colored spicy brine (白鹵水) for a savory flavor.  The brined chicken lasts longer.   

So, what on earth is 沙薑粉 (pronounced  Sha Jiang Fen)?

–  ˜

  The Chinese name literally means “sand-ginger”, and according to Google, the spice name is Zedoary. It is a rhizome, ginger-like but not regular ginger, galangal or turmeric.  I have seen it only in powder form in the spice section of Chinese markets.  The Chinese use it for cooking certain chicken dishes besides white-cut chicken. 

Are fathers less special than mothers?

The only reason I asked that question was when I was researching Father's Day meals this past weekend, I found that some restaurants which had Mother's Day menus, don't necessarily do one for Father's Day.  Are fathers less special or are they less picky?  Since this is a food blog, I'm not going to debate that question.  Bottomline is, I had a hard time finding something for a Father's Day brunch in Toronto that is at least a little special.

I checked all the lists like Ten Best Sunday Brunch Places in T.O. but it seems that even restaurants on the same list had great variations in their customer reviews and prices.  I don't see any point in doling out $50 to eat eggs benedict at the King Edward, even if it is the King Edward.  And while there are some attractive deals out there like a $19.99 Sunday Brunch at the Hot House Cafe with live jazz, I worry about some of the comments made by customers and the overall mediocrity they imply.  There are of course plenty of good restaurants in Toronto we could have gone to but I finally picked Le Select because it is not only reputable but they are organized enough to put together a Father's Day menu.  When you really study it, it's a mish mash of its regular brunch menu with a few special items put together for the special day.  So how hard is it, really!  

We were invited to Le Select for dinner years ago and it was the expensive wine that stayed in my mind more than anything.  Seeing the place in broad daylight was quite different - it was in fact quite a charming bistro, reminiscent of the ambiance of the old Parisian restaurants.   When we were shown to our semi-circular booths, we were quite surprised to find ourselves surrounded by young fathers out with their babies, one of them barely a month old.  This is a far cry from our own parenting days when we would never think of taking our babies out to a bistro for Father's Day.  But this is downtown Toronto, in the midst of a condo boom with an influx of young well-off families.  So it was an eye-opener, a social and cultural experience worth the trip.  The food was good but the best one was the dish we didn't order - a two inch slab of French toast stuffed with apples and cranberries which we saw pass us by after we placed our order.  Next time...

I love the booths!

The seared scallops were excellent

This is an interesting ballotine of cornish hen - a lot of work!

Oeufs Forestiers - poached eggs on mushrooms with pollenta and roasted root vegetables - the eggs tasted great with the braised mushrooms

Albertan fillet "supplemeneted" with an egg and frites

Super moist chocolate cake outstarred by the intense passion fruit sorbet

Very smooth Creme Brulee 

The interesting descent to the kitchen

Why do some meals rate mediocre even though the food is good?

I got a coupon from Travelzoo - a $140 value for $69 at the Mix Bistro Bar at the Hyatt Regency on King West.  We had a good three course meal for two, glass of wine included - terrific deal!  But somehow, the dinner rated mediocre in my books (it has nothing to do with the company, I swear) and I'm asking myself "why"?  

Could it be because it was a "coupon dinner"?  Does that immediately discount it as not something special?  And why do these places sell coupons?  Do they not have enough business and why not?  So then you start thinking "what's wrong with this place?"

It was on the main floor of the Hyatt - Mix Bistro Bar, what an odd name anyway.  When we arrived there was a large crowd swirling about in the lobby, and the noise carried through into the restaurant, which is quite small, 10 tables at most.  It actually has a nice ceiling to floor bay window looking out onto the King West scene, which is quite a hub these days, being right next to the TIFF Light box.  We were given a window seat and it was great fun "watching the girls go by" from above.  The noise and the bright room likely detracted from the ambiance.  The fact that we had to have an early dinner because of a concert afterwards already made the dinner not a destination but a "stomach filler" and I think that also detracted from the "specialness" of the event.  And afterall, it's just a hotel bar, not a special restaurant where you have the expectation of good food just based on reputation.

Service was ambivalent and I suspect more from poor training than from attitude.  The waiter came back frequently and asked how the meal was.  But he didn't ask us what kind of red we prefer nor offered us pepper for our seafood salad or fish entree - many points deducted for that!  And yet, when we asked him to put an unfinished portion of pasta in a box, he came back a few minutes later with a piping hot box.  When I looked, he had added more seafood and melted cheese to the leftover - the takeout was hotter than the actual dinner served!  Now that was thoughtful and deserved a good tip.  

So there was really a lot at play when you think about it.  You would go to a special restaurant because you want to taste food prepared by a certain chef, you're already in the mindset to expect something special - therefore it is special.  Of course, high expectations can sometimes work in reverse. In this case though, low expectations didn't help either.

King West street scene -

Two different kinds of mounted police even!

and right next to TIFF 

Delicious calamari salad with heirloom tomatoes

Perfectly done arctic char on quinoa and sweet baby beets

Seafood pasta in an excellent spicy tomato sauce

Berries on a sorbet that actually tastes like mango

Between Spanish Meals in Vegas: Lotus of Siam

Chef Jose Andres has three restaurants in The Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas.  We ate at two of them - Jaleo and é - in March of 2013.  We could have eaten at the third one, China Roblano, but the idea of a Spanish rendition of Chinese-Mexican fusion food was too bizarre for me.  Two weeks later, our friends Arufa and M reported that their meal at China Roblano was excellent.  The steamed BBQ pork buns there had the fluffiest texture, and the taco with deep-fried slow cooked beef tendon and Kumamoto oyster was sublime.  Wow, who would have thought of tendon and oyster together in a taco?  We have missed out on that place, though we did eat two Asian lunches between our Spanish dinners.

*  *  *

Our taxi took us from the Strip and its glam to Lotus of Siam (LOS from here on) in a local area that could not be any plainer.  The driver would have missed the restaurant if I had not spotted its name in green plastic letters bundling up on the back wall of a dreary strip mall.  The Thai restaurant was in plain sight once the taxi pulled into the huge and empty-looking parking lot.  From the outside LOS did not look much.  It was hard to imagine that this was one of the most popular and highly regarded eateries of Las Vegas.

Lotus of Siam

Even though the mall looked deserted, LOS was packed inside.  We were lucky to get a small table right away.  Soon a larger table for four opened up and our friendly waiter moved us over without hassle in spite of people waiting at the reception.  We ordered five items from the menu and two different glasses of German Riesling.  Our waiter warned us that some of our dishes would take a while because the kitchen was busy with making food for the popular lunch buffet.  He also made sure that we knew that the wines were sweet. 

It did not take long for tod mun plar (deep fried fish cake) and pork satay to arrive.  The fish cakes at LOS were seasoned with curry paste and they did not contain chopped long beans.  Their texture was on the firm side.  As my knowledge of Thai food was next to nothing, I had no idea whether the LOS version was any more traditional than the bouncy fluffy turmeric yellow ones that I had in the past.  The pork was marinated with fresh herbs and spices, grilled and served with peanut sauce.  The slightly charred meat was juicy and tender.  We liked both starters and finished them in no time.

tod mun plar

pork satay

 Mrs. A could not resist the classic tom yum koong soup.  The watery clear broth with shrimps and straw mushrooms was packed with flavor - sour (lime), hot (chili), spicy (galangal), aromatic (lemon grass, kaffir lime leaf) and umami (fish sauce, shrimp).  It whetted our appetite for what to come. 

Squid sautéed in garlic, cilantro and chili pepper sauce had a wonderful flavor.  But we were disappointed that the squid pieces were chewy.  They were not the tender Monterey Bay squids that we were used to.  

garlic squid

Our last dish was crispy duck on drunken noodle.  Hidden at the bottom of the plate was a small heap of pan-fried wide flat rice noodle (why the name “drunken noodle” is unclear to me as there is no alcohol involved in its preparation).  The noodle was completely covered by duck slices.  The meat tasted like Cantonese roasted duck, but the skin was crisp from deep frying.  A liberal amount of Thai basil, chili and salad leaves in a refreshing Thai dressing transformed the meat and noodle into a complex and satisfying dish.  The generous portion was also filling.  

crispy duck drunken noodle

Mrs. A finished her meal with an individual serving of fried banana and coconut ice cream.  We could not be happier with our leisure lunch.  Our wines paired well with the delicious food, our efficient waiters were polite and friendly despite the lunch rush, and the price was right. 

I have to mention that LOS has a superb 51-page wine list.  Its cellar has a large selection of German wine (over 150 Rieslings and 14 by the glass) as well as fine Old and New World red and white.  The selection is particularly amazing for an Asian restaurant.  The wines are very reasonable priced.  If I lived in or near Las Vegas, I would go to LOS regularly for its food and wine.

*  *  *

For dim sum lunch I selected a Chinese restaurant based on reviews and photos on the online review website Yelp!   The restaurant, which will remain unnamed, was not quite half filled when we arrived.  That was not bad for a place in a drab area away from the Strip on a weekday.  The four ladies pushing dim sum carts were enthusiastic in selling us their food.  One of them even offered us a taste of the pan fried rice noodle rolls.  Unfortunately the food and the tea were mediocre.  A manager wandered around the dining room the whole time doing nothing and for sure not attending to the diners.  Our anemic waiter was inattentive and impersonal.  Upon paying our bill, he just walked away with the money in silence without any expression.  What a contrast in service between this place and LOS.   The poor dim sum lunch was very inexpensive; the taxi fare to the restaurant and back cost twice as much as the lunch. 

Dragon eel? 盤龍鱔

Eating eel can be an acquired taste.  I can remember being repulsed by the thought of this slithery worm like creature - why would I want to eat it?  And I didn't, not when I was growing up.  The eel my family had was usually served in a hot pot and was considered a specialty dish.  I have since outgrown this distaste and really enjoyed the eel I've tried in sushi houses (not the same kind of eel) and also in Chinese restaurants.  In fact, the highlight of our private room dinner at Delicious was for me, the steamed dragon eel with orange peel 陳皮蒸盤龍鱔.   It was the first time I have tried this dish and it was superb!  The eel meat was tender and tasty, not at all fishy or slithery and the black bean sauce lightly flavoured with orange peel enhanced the eel without overpowering the taste.  I loved it!

So then I became curious - what is this thing?  I'd seen live river eels on our trip to New Zealand when we visited one of the conservation parks near Wellington (Mt. Bruce Wildlife Centre).  As you can see below - these were huge!  I never thought then I'd be eating them!

 I found this video on Youtube that shows you how to cook a dragon eel.  It seems that the most difficult part was slicing up the eel into rings and still managing to keep it whole.  The chef in the video only showed the cut up eel but didn't demonstrate how to do it.  He did emphasize that the stomach should not be cut open in order to maintain the taste.  So the tricky part then is cleaning the stomach without opening it up and not cut through the spine so that the eel remains in one piece.  The rest seems really quite easy to do.

Prepare the sauce (basic ingredients of salt, sugar, oyster sauce, black bean sauce, sesame oil, pepper, etc.), roll the eel in it then arrange the eel curled up on the plate and steam.  The chef in the video also said that the best eel came from Australia near the river estuary as that's where there is a mix of freshwater and salt water giving the eel a distinct flavour and texture.  Have a look:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDCBK4142ww

A Custom Non-traditional Chinese banquet (私房菜)

Typically, banquets at Chinese restaurants have set courses that are pretty standard - two first courses with seafood, shark's fin or other seafood soup, chicken, lobster, fish, rice and noodles.  Some restaurants are willing to prepare custom dinners made up of non-traditional courses with special orders.  And you would order that if you want to try some specialty dishes that you wouldn't normally be able to try if you don't have enough people at the table.  So you organize a group (ten is the magic number) and place a special order for a 私房菜, literally translated as "private room/home dinner".  Historically, the "private home" would sometimes be the home of the cook and not necessarily in a restaurant.*  We did this at Delicious Restaurant, a very small restaurant with only 6 - 7 tables.  All ten courses were prepared by chef Patrick Chuang and they were all consistently excellent! 

We started with a tasty soup that was steamed in a ceramic pot.  There were goji berries, conch, chicken feet, mushrooms and other Chinese herbs in the soup.  Next came the appetizer, three different kinds of fish and taro deep-fried in a light batter.  My favourite was the taro.

This is nappa cooked with Chinese ham - the vegetables soaked up the taste from the ham

Deep-fried prawns and squash - almost like a tempura - cooked just right and so crispy you can eat the shell

Shanghai bokchoy with abalone mushrooms - lots of greens to balance off the fried foods

My all time favourite - the best Hainan chicken in town - even the breast meat is tender

HIghlight of the evening - steamed dragon eel - a really special dish done to perfection (more on this in the next post)

Braised pork trotters with dried vegetables served with Chinese steamed buns (see an earlier post on this melt-in-your-mouth specialty)

Fried dungeness crab - flavoured with lots of fried garlic and shallots

All these followed by home made red bean sweet soup (not the gooey kind standard in most restaurants) and the house special chrysanthemum gelatin.  The most amazing thing was there was hardly anything left over at the end of this - just some rice!

*A contact in Hong Kong indicated that this type of dinner was very trendy when there was an economic downturn in the late 1990's.  Some operate illegally in residential buildings but not much was done about them due to the economy.  They came in different grades, ranging from reasonable to pricey but it was not easy to keep up and many did not last very long.  

This was typical of the traditional 私房菜 which, according to the Chinese Wikipaedia originated from the late Ching Dynasty, again resulting from people falling on hard times and trying to make a living from their home.  Many of these were not chefs by profession (and in fact often came from formerly well off families with high positions in court) but were obviously good enough at it to make a name for themselves.