Adventures with Kake

[Image: Three small, round, crispy deep-fried croquettes sitting in red paper cups on a white plate. The exterior of the croquettes is honeycombed with small holes.]

As promised earlier this week, here's more on taro croquettes! These are small, round croquettes formed primarily of mashed taro, filled with minced pork and prawns. The exterior is wispy and crispy; this gives way to the smooth mashed taro and then the filling in the centre.

The most common Chinese name I've seen these under on Chinese menus is 蜂巢炸芋角 (fēng cháo zhà yù jiǎo). I won't attempt to transliterate the Cantonese pronunciation of the whole thing, but the essential part is 芋角, which in Cantonese is wu gok. 芋 is taro, and 角 means horn-shaped; the latter is a common descriptor for deep-fried dumplings and croquettes, though do note that it also appears on menus in another significant context, as 豆角 (dòu jiǎo), or green beans.

The rest of the name varies between restaurants. The 蜂巢 (fēng cháo) in 蜂巢炸芋角 means "honeycomb", and is a reference to the texture of the crispy exterior of the croquette. 炸 (zhà) simply means "deep-fried". I've also seen a variation of this name, 蜂巢荔芋角, in which 炸 is replaced by 荔 (lì). I have no idea what this is about, since as far as I know 荔 means "lychee", but I've seen it on at least three different menus. Top Of The Town in London Chinatown uses an even more perplexing name: 荔甫炸芋角 (lì fǔ zhà yù jiǎo).

In English, they're usually just called "taro croquettes", or, confusingly, "yam croquettes" — they're definitely made from taro rather than yam (see my post on 芋 for more on this). Some restaurants expand on this, for example "crispy taro croquettes with pork" or "deep-fried yam croquettes", but since they're always deep-fried and they always contain pork (unless marked as vegetarian: 齋芋角/zhāi yù jiǎo), this doesn't indicate a difference from those described simply as "taro croquettes".

There seem to be two schools of thought for making these at home. One, exemplified by a recipe posted on the about.com forums, mixes everything together — taro, filling, and all — before deep-frying. The other, which is more like the versions I've seen in restaurants, mixes the filling and the taro dough separately, and then stuffs the one inside the other; see for example taro dumplings from Edibly Asian. I decided to try the all-in-one method, which unfortunately didn't work out too well — details below. Next time I'll try it the other way.

It started well. I bought my taro frozen from Wing Yip — conveniently, it was already peeled, and in chunks of roughly 300g (the amount I needed for the recipe). I defrosted a chunk, sliced it around 1/2 cm thick, and steamed it for 20 minutes. It was easy to mash then.

The rest of the carbohydrate component comes from a dough made by mixing boiling water into wheat starch. I wasn't really sure what texture I was aiming for here, and I also found it a bit tricky to combine this dough with the mashed taro.

After mixing in the fillings, the dough really was very sticky — I found that unless I kept my hands wet while shaping the croquettes, it would stick to them and make a mess. I'd read different opinions on whether to just fry them straight away or not, so I tried a few experiments.

A few I tried coating with cornflour before frying; these sucked up loads of cornflour and after frying the texture was completely wrong on the outside. I also tried frying some with no coating, immediately after shaping them. The texture was much better and I even got something approaching the characteristic laciness on the outside. They had a tendency to stick to my fryer basket though, and bits still came off to the point where I stopped halfway through to strain the bits out of the oil.

Finally, I tried chilling some in the fridge for an hour before frying — this was a bit of a disaster, as putting them in cold cooled the oil down to the point where they simply disintegrated. (The about.com thread linked above warns that this will happen if your oil's not hot enough.)

So I think I must conclude that these aren't particularly easy to make! (Though I'm not that experienced with deep-frying — maybe others will find it easier.) All the more reason to order them in restaurants...

Today's character is a good example of how it can be helpful to look at the Chinese names of dishes alongside the English ones! 芋 (yù) is the Chinese character for taro; strictly speaking, I believe the full word is 芋頭 (yù tóu; or, as pne points out in a comment, possibly yù tou), but it's often abbreviated on menus to simply 芋.

Taro, as a vegetable, confused me for ages. It's often referred to as "yam"; however, yam and taro are not the same thing. Taro is also not the same thing as sweet potato, even though the latter is also sometimes referred to as "yam". According to Wikipedia, taro is in the Araceae family, yam is in the Dioscoreaceae family, and sweet potato is in the Convolvulaceae family.

This naming confusion extends to menus, too, with dishes that are actually made out of taro referred to as, for example, "yam croquettes" or "stewed yam with chicken". So if you want to be sure, look for 芋 in the Chinese name — this pretty much always indicates taro. One possible exception is when the name includes 香芋 (xiāng yù), which usually means taro but seems to sometimes mean purple yam (which is in fact a type of yam). I don't know the general Chinese word for yam, but sweet potatoes are 番薯 or 蕃薯, both of which pinyinise as fān shǔ.

Here are some dishes with 芋 in the name:

[Image: Four dumplings arranged in a bamboo steamer basket. The skins of the dumplings are translucent, showing the orange-pink colour of the prawns inside. Each dumpling is sealed with several pleats.]

Har gao (蝦餃) are perhaps one of the most iconic dim sum items, so they seem a fitting thing to start off my month of dim sum. The Chinese characters simply mean "prawn dumpling" — 蝦 is "prawn", while 餃 is "dumpling". However, it's understood that this is a particular type of prawn dumpling, with a translucent wrapper made from wheat starch, sealed with several neat pleats and thin enough to show off the colour of the prawns inside.

The pronunciations of 蝦 and 餃 in Mandarin are "xiā" and "jiǎo" respectively, but as I've mentioned before, dim sum is a Cantonese tradition and so in English-speaking countries the dishes are usually referred to by their Cantonese names. Hence: har gao (or har gow, har gau, har kau, ha gao, ha gow, etc, depending on your preferred transliteration). I will be giving the pinyin for all the characters I mention this month, though, for consistency with the rest of my posts.

I've seen har gao listed on menus both simply as 蝦餃 and with more elaborate names. 鮮蝦餃 (xiān xiā jiǎo) is one; 鮮 (xiān) means "fresh", a characteristic you definitely want to find in connection with the prawns inside these dumplings.

晶 (jīng), which means "crystal" or "clear", is another salient characteristic, in this case associated with the translucency of the dumpling skins. It often appears in combination with 瑩 (yìng), meaning "bright" or "lustrous", giving names such as 晶瑩鮮蝦餃 (jīng yìng xiān xiā jiǎo) or 晶瑩蝦餃 (jīng yìng xiā jiǎo).

Finally, you may see reference to the bamboo shoots (筍尖/sǔn jiān) which often form part of the filling: 筍尖鮮蝦餃 (sǔn jiān xiān xiā jiǎo) or 筍尖蝦餃 (sǔn jiān xiā jiǎo).

There are basically two types of har gao that I've come across — the proper type, pictured above, which are wrapped and pleated by hand, and the other type, which are made in some kind of dumpling press with wobbly lines to suggest the folds (see the bottom left hand corner of this photo). This latter type tend to turn up in restaurants that have a small dim sum section on the menu but don't actually specialise in dim sum, and are best avoided — see my dim sum overview for more on this.

Although har gao are perhaps the epitome of dim sum — according to the Discover China documentary Dim Sum Odyssey, there's a saying in the trade that translates as "See how good a chef is, watch how he makes har gao" — I was very pleased to find that it's actually possible to make a decent rendition at home. The ones I made the other week were at least as good as the frozen ones I've bought before, even though it was my first time of making them.

I followed Sunflower's recipe and it was pretty straightforward — much easier than I'd been expecting! The dough for the wrappers held together very well while I was making them; it was easy to knead, and very easy to flatten out into circles (possibly too easy — it got thinner than I was comfortable with at some points). It's worth noting that I found it easier to use the heel of my hand for the flattening out than to use a rolling pin, though it might have been better with a small Chinese rolling pin than with my gigantic British one.

The only thing I was unsure of was the steaming time. Sunflower said to steam them for 4 minutes, while other sources give times of up to 15 minutes. I experimented a bit, and 7-8 minutes seemed to be the sweet spot for me. I suspect the thickness of the wrappers has an effect here; I'll try for thinner wrappers next time as my filling got a little overcooked in the time it took to cook the wrappers through. The filling was also a bit fally-aparty — I'll try marinading the prawns with a little egg white next time.

One thing I learned during this is that it's not a good idea to try to lift the har gao directly after the steaming is finished — the skins will be fragile. They firm up after a minute or so. Serve them in the basket like the restaurants do :)

I also froze some uncooked ones and steamed them a couple of days later for 14 minutes from frozen — this worked fine.

Here are a couple of alternative recipes, using slightly different flavourings and proportions: one from iLearn Culture and one from Rasa Malaysia. Both worth a look.

(Edit, January 2012: See also eatlovenoodles' informative post on har gau.)

[Image: Wobbly-soft white beancurd in a deep white bowl covered with a generous quantity of a thin, dark red/brown dressing finished with a layer of dark red oil. Sliced spring onions are scattered on top along with crisp-fried soya beans and other crispy bits.]

As I noted on Monday, I won't be posting during July (except for today), since I'm busy moving house. I'll be back in August with a month-long celebration of dim sum.

I'm leaving you with a (incidentally vegan) Sichuan dish: 酸辣豆花 (suān là dòu huā). I covered 酸 (suān) earlier this week; it means "sour". 辣 (là) is "hot/spicy", and is often seen in combination with 酸: 酸辣 (suān là), usually translated as "hot and sour".

豆花 is the interesting part of the name. I've covered both characters before; 豆 (dòu) means "bean" and 花 (huā) means "flower". Together, they describe a very soft form of beancurd, "flower" beancurd. In English, I've seen it described as "beancurd jelly" on dessert menus (you can eat 豆花 savoury or sweet).

Fuchsia Dunlop notes in her book Sichuan Cookery that 豆花 is a Chengdu dialect term; according to her, elsewhere in China it's known as 豆腐腦 (dòu fu nǎo), literally "beancurd brains". However, in London I've always seen it as 豆花 or 豆腐花.

Although as mentioned above it also comes sweet, I prefer the savoury version, which may also be listed as 香辣豆花 (xiāng là dòu huā), literally "fragrant spicy 'flower' beancurd". I ate the dish pictured above at Baozi Inn in London, where it's described on the menu as "tender 'flower' beancurd topped with soy sauce, chilli oil, ground roasted Sichuan pepper, roasted peanuts, preserved mustard tuber and deep-fried dough strands". The "mustard tuber" is 榨菜 (zhà cài), which I've mentioned before.

To put 酸辣豆花 together at home, you can either buy your 豆花 from a Chinese supermarket (it may be labeled as 豆花, 豆腐花, doufu hua, or tofu fa), or you can try making your own from scratch (i.e. from soya beans).

Over the past couple of weeks, I've tried making 豆花 four times to slightly different recipes, with varying levels of success (and much patience from bob, as he was presented with bowl after bowl of tofu). It does require a blender, though I found that the little herb chopper that came with my hand-held blender worked fine if I was patient and blenderised the beans in suitably small batches.

I used two sources of instructions: Fuchsia Dunlop's recipe in her book Sichuan Cooking, and Sunflower's recipe. Sunflower's version was most successful for me; I tried it both as written and with the cornflour omitted, and the version with the cornflour had the best texture.

Ms Dunlop's version uses twice as much gypsum as Sunflower's, and says to press the curds gently after they begin to set. I tried this twice, once with less pressing than the other time, but both ended up with a coarser texture than I wanted. I do wonder if this had something to do with the amount of gypsum — we have fairly hard water in London, so perhaps we don't need as much gypsum. (Note added in Oct 2012: Andrea Nguyen's post on tofu coagulants is worth reading.)

Speaking of gypsum, I bought mine from a homebrewing supplier on eBay; £2.75 (including postage) for 100g. As sunflower points out in comments, you can get it more cheaply in Chinese supermarkets, where you should look out for the name 熟石膏粉 (I think the pinyin is shú shí gāo fěn). I also paid £1.25 for a 500g pack of soya beans, and you only need around 1 tsp gypsum and 150g of beans to make enough 豆腐花 for 2–4 people. So it's not too expensive a thing to experiment with until you get it right.

Anyway, once you have your plain 豆花, the topping is quite simple. Ms Dunlop lists two variations. For 豆花 made with 150g beans, the first one is 4 tsp soy sauce, 2-4 tsp chilli oil (including sediment), 1 tsp sesame oil, 1/2-1 tsp ground roasted Sichuan pepper, 2 Tbsp finely-chopped preserved vegetable (榨菜/zhà cài), 2 Tbsp crunchy deep-fried soya beans or Bombay mix or other similar crunchy thing, and the green parts of 4 spring onions, thinly sliced into rings. Her other variation is explicitly labelled as "suan la dou hua", and is roughly the same except that the sesame oil is replaced with 4 tsp Chinese black vinegar.

Most sources say to serve 酸辣豆花 hot, but during London's recent brief heatwave I found that it's also good chilled on a hot day. If you can't be bothered to make the full dressing, just drizzle over some soy sauce, black vinegar, and sesame oil (go easy on the sesame oil). The simplest (though perhaps not quite traditional) sweet topping is a good dollop of honey.

I've had a very busy couple of days, so this week's character post will be up tomorrow (Thursday) rather than today.

On the bright side, I now know how many cubic feet of books bob and I own between us...

[Image: Thin, translucent, shiny noodles in a light brown sauce, threaded through with slivers of kelp and carrot; all piled in a cone shape on a white plate.]

A fairly simple cold dish today — 涼拌三絲 (liáng bàn sān sī). Literally "cold [涼] mixed [拌] three [三] shreds [絲]", this is a tasty noodle salad made with 粉絲 (fěn sī/bean thread noodles) along with two types of vegetable cut into long slivers to mimic the shape of the noodles. Kelp, carrot, wood ear fungus, and lightly blanched spinach are among the vegetable ingredients commonly used for this.

I've also seen this dish listed on menus under other names. 麻辣三絲 (má là sān sī) is literally "numbing-spicy three shreds", with Sichuan peppercorns providing the numbing component. 三絲木耳 (sān sī mù ěr) makes it explicit that wood ear fungus (木耳/mù ěr) is one of the ingredients. 紅油三絲 (hóng yóu sān sī) makes a different ingredient explicit; the chilli oil (紅油/hóng yóu/"red oil") in the dressing. Or you may see it simply as 拌三絲 (bàn sān sī).

One phenomenon worthy of note to the student of the Chinese menu is the use of certain numbers in the names of dishes. Three (三/sān) and eight (八/bā) turn up particularly frequently, for example as 地三鮮/dì sān xiān ("three fresh things from the earth") and 八珍糯米雞/bā zhēn nuò mǐ jī (eight-treasure glutinous rice with chicken).

The frequency with which these numbers appear is not coincidental — in Chinese culture, as in many other cultures, some numbers are considered to be particularly "lucky". There's some information on this on Wikipedia. shuripentu, who has guest-posted here before, tells me:

I'd say the most important numbers in terms of (un)luckiness are 8 (very lucky), 4 (unlucky), and 14 (incredibly unlucky). If the random witterings I've heard on the topic are indeed true, people will go out of their way (sometimes considerably so) to acquire 8s and avoid 4s and 14s (and apparently also 24s, 34s, etc.).

Numerological superstitions do seem to be a lot more common and more deeply ingrained into Chinese culture than most Western cultures I've come across. Not that most people seem to take those superstitions hugely seriously, but they certainly seem to consider them and talk about them more often in general, and it doesn't seem to be so unusual for such considerations to affect people's decisions. For example, if someone here [in the UK] were to avoid buying a house because it's number 13, I would think it somewhat unusual, whereas if someone in Hong Kong were to do the same with a number 14 flat, I would think they were being silly but I wouldn't think it was odd.

According to Slanted magazine, a Chinese wedding banquet should include eight courses, due to the lucky connotations of the number. Relatedly, some people think that a meal should always include an even number of dishes; the ChineseTones website states that an odd number of dishes "would be appropriate only for occasions such as the meal after a funeral."

Below are the Chinese numbers from 1 to 9, along with 10, 100, and 1000. (I've stopped at 1000 because that's the largest number I've ever seen on a menu!) If you know these, and you also know the rules for combining them to make other numbers (see Wikipedia for these), you can count from 1 to 9999.

(NB there's lots more about numbers in the comments to this post!)

To follow up on Monday's post, which was aimed at encouraging other non-Chinese-speakers to learn to read Chinese menus^[1], I thought today I'd go back to basics and cover one of the more fundamental menu characters that I haven't yet discussed: 牛 (niú).

In a general context, and on its own, 牛 means "ox" or "cow", but when paired with the character 肉 (ròu/meat), it means beef: 牛肉. On menus, the 肉 is often omitted, or another character is used to make the specific cut more explicit, as in 牛腩 (niú nǎn/beef brisket), 牛健 (niú jiàn/beef shank), or 牛柳 (niú liǔ/beef fillet)^[2].

However, the presence of 牛 in the name of a dish doesn't always mean that it includes beef per se, as in the muscle tissue of cows; this character is also found in the names of various types of beef offal and other parts. I've collected some in the table below:

牛筋	niú jīn	beef tendon
牛舌	niú shé	beef tongue
牛尾	niú wěi	oxtail
牛肚	niú dǔ	beef tripe
牛柏葉 or 牛百葉	niú bǎi yè	beef tripe from the omasum, i.e. the third chamber of the stomach (leaf/book/bible tripe); the names literally mean "cow's cypress leaves" and "cow's hundred leaves" respectively
牛雜	niú zá	literally "beef miscellaneous"; I think this means assorted beef offal (and eatlovenoodles confirms this in comments); according to this blog post by buddyscottiecadet, it refers to all the offal from inside the abdomen

Note also that 牛油 (niú yóu) is neither meat nor offal, but butter (literally "cow grease")^[3]. You might see this used in the name of a common dim sum item, 牛油馬拉糕/niú yóu mǎ lái gāo (steamed sponge cake).

Here are some dishes with 牛 in the name:

Photo © avlxyz, used under cc-by-sa.

[Image: Wrapped 粽子; three tetrahedral and two cuboid packages wrapped in bamboo leaves and tied with red and white twine.]

As I hinted on Monday, the most obvious Chinese dish for me to cover at this time of year is 粽子 (zòngzi); glutinous rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves, strongly associated with 端午 (Duānwǔ), the fifth day of the fifth lunar month.

Today's post is a fairly brief one, I'm afraid; I had intended to say quite a bit more, and also to provide my own photo, but I've been both overwhelmed and under the weather for the past couple of weeks, so I'll just give you a couple of photos from my newest Flickr acquaintance, avlxyz, along with a few links to recipes and blog posts:

• Chinese bamboo leaf-wrapped dumplings 糉子: my grandma’s recipe (Winkypedia)
• Secret of the zongzi (Red Cook)
• Hong Kong part II: zongzi/bakchang (粽子/肉粽) (Life Is Great)

And finally several posts from the ever-informative Sunflower:

• Savoury zhongzi (五香鹹肉糭)
• Lye zhongzi 鹼水粽
• Five spice, peanut and pork zhongzi 五香花生豬肉粽
• Hakka mochi zhongzi 客家粄粽
• Crystal zhongzi 水晶粽子

(Note that some of these sources use a different word, 糉子; this is pronounced the same as 粽子, i.e. zòngzi.)

Photo © avlxyz, used under cc-by-sa.

[Image: Unwrapped 粽子; glutinous rice formed into shapes and stuffed with cooked pork, peanuts, and other delicious items. They rest on top of the bamboo leaves that were used to wrap them before cooking.]

Today is the fifth day of the fifth month in the Chinese calendar. This marks the day of 端午 (Duānwǔ), one of the most important dates of the Chinese year.

端午 is also known in English as the Dragon Boat Festival, but as pulchritude explains in the post linked below, this name captures only one aspect of what is actually a multifaceted occasion. So it's worth knowing how to pronounce the Chinese name; see Forvo for an example pronunciation.

The main theme of 端午 is health/hygiene/purification, and celebration of the day includes several related customs such as drinking realgar wine, the symbolic destruction of the "five poisons", and the use of various herbs. Dragon boat racing is another custom associated with 端午; teams of paddlers race in long boats, kept in synchronisation by a drummer who sits at the head of the boat. Finally, 粽子 (zòngzi) are perhaps the most famous of the foods associated with the day; these are glutinous rice dumplings filled with various morsels and wrapped in bamboo leaves.

Aside from eating 粽子, the dragon boat races are the only part of 端午 that I've actually experienced (and then only as an onlooker)[see footnote], so here are some links which hopefully give a fuller picture:

• 端午, or the Fifth Day of the Fifth Month by pulchritude
• Duanwu Festival on Wikipedia
• Folk Customs of the Dragon Boat Festival from the Sinolingua Kaleidoscope of Chinese Culture
• Grass Fighting on Dragon Boat Festival (I suspect this may be machine-translated from a Chinese source)

Footnote: [0] Fellow Londoners may wish to note that this year's dragon boat races will be held on Sunday 19 June at the London Regatta Centre (near Royal Albert DLR station on the Beckton branch). I might be going — haven't decided yet.