Beef – Shananigans Blog

Chilli Beef in Black Bean and Yellow Bean Sauce

It’s the first day of autumn and, despite the fact that the weather has warmed up a little after last week’s torrential rain, I’ve begun to yearn for spicier food that will warm me up on the inside when I get in at the end of a long day and that I can prepare and get to the table within 30 minutes of arriving home.
It’s not the only thing I yearn for. At the end of this month Shane, Shan and Dermot will pay us a visit from Beijing. Dermot is nearly 19 months old now and a bundle of fun. On FaceTime at weekends he plays games with us as if he wants to show off his latest Chinese words and even the ones he knows in English like “toe toe” for his Daddy’s toes. He joins in the conversation, reminding us in his inimitable way that he is in on the act too and has things to say, offering smoochy kisses to us on the iPad screen and trying to share his grapes and his Lego across two continents. It will be fun to build Lego robots with him and reciprocate those kisses. It will be a joy to give him a hug, if I can catch up with him that is.
When I’m not visualising the outings I will have with Dermot when he is home, the places I will bring him, the friends I will introduce him to, I am thinking about what I will cook for my little Gao/O’Neill family when they are here in Ireland. There will be Irish food of course, maybe even some Italian recipes, and barbecues cooked on the Big Green Egg but I also want to try out on them some of the Chinese-style recipes that I’ve been experimenting with to see what Shan thinks of my efforts.
The recipe below is one of that I have been working on for awhile. I havve been trying to integrate what I’m learning from my Chinese teacher Wei Wei with the way I cook at home and to produce a healthy variation of the kind of Chinese takeaway you might get in Ireland. I got the inspiration for this recipe from a Chinese Beef recipe in The Fasting Day Cookbook but I have adapted it to bring it closer to the methods of Chinese cooking. I have avoided marinating the beef in a mix of sauces, which tends to lead to the beef being more stewed than stir-fried, but I have added in similar flavours at the end of cooking – the aromatic richness of yellow bean sauce mixed with soy sauces and just enough black vinegar to bring out the flavour.
For the black bean sauce I used Laoganma chilli black bean sauce. My teacher Wei Wei tells me that this one sauce has saved from starvation many a Chinese student overseas who doesn’t know how to cook but for whom a dollop of Laoganma evokes the taste of home. You can pick up a jar in the Asia Market or any Asian supermarket but feel free to susbstitute your own favourite chilli black bean sauce.
For me it is the yellow bean sauce that brings me back in time – to my early attempts at Chinese cooking in a bed-sit in Rathmines when a jar of Sharwood’s yellow bean sauce could transform a common-place meal into what seemed to me then to be an exotic oriental feast. That, of course, was more than 30 years before I realised that China was set to become an important part of my life. Sharwood’s don’t seem to do a yellow bean sauce these days but you can pick up a tin of Amoy crushed yellow bean sauce in any Asian market. While you are there you will also find Chinese black vinegars, such as Gold Plum Chinkiang Vinegar, and Shaoxing Rice Wine – I use the cooking rice wine with the red label but I don’t know the brand name.
This is a relatively low fat, low calorie recipe. It is packed with nutrients from brightly coloured vegetables and the amount of oil used in cooking is modest. Feel free to experiment – it will work well with chicken instead of beef for instance – and add your own favourite vegetables It has a kick from the Laoganma and extra chilli but it is not very spicy. Enjoy,
Chilli Beef in Black and Yellow Bean Sauce

Chillie Beef with Black Bean and Yellow Bean Sauce — Chilli Beef with Black Bean and Yellow Bean Sauce

Serves 2 -3 as a main dish or 4 as part of a multi-course meal
Ingredients

350 – 400g of sirloin or bavette of beef
1 red chilli
1 thumb root ginger
1 small head of broccoli
1 red pepper
1 yellow pepper
2 heads of pak choi
4 spring onions
2 tbs Shaoxing rice wine
1 heaped teaspoon cornflour
2 tbs Laoganma chilli black bean sauce
2 tbs yellow bean sauce
1 tbs light soy sauce
½ tbs dark soy sauce
½ tbs dark Chinese vinegar (or Chinkiang vinegar)
Cooking oil
1 tsp sesame oil

Preparation

Slice the beef against the grain into thin slices about 5 cm long.
Marinade the beef in about 2 tbs of Shaoxing rice wine, adding a heaped teaspoon of cornflour and stirring well. Set aside while you prepare the vegetables.
Break the broccoli into florets and blanche or steam for one minute to soften without losing their bright colour.
Thinly slice the chilli, discarding the seeds. Peel and finely chop the ginger.
De-seed the peppers and cut them into diamond shapes about the size of a large postage stamp.
Cut the root off the pak choi, cut the stems into chunks the same size of the peppers and shred the leaves.
Thinly slice the spring onions at steep angles.
Mix the yellow bean sauce, soy sauces and dark Chinese vinegar.

Cooking

Heat a small amount of oil in a wok over a high heat. Add in the chilli and ginger and stir-fry briefly until the aromas are released.
Add in the Laoganma sauce, including the oil from the sauce. Once hot, add in the beef, little by little, and stir-fry briskly until it has changed colour, then remove it from the wok and set to one side.

Beef set to one side afer cooking
Wipe out the wok with kitchen paper and heat about 1 to 2 tbs oil over a high heat. Stir-fry the spring onions for a few moments to release their aroma. Add in the peppers and pak choi stems and stir-fry for a few minutes until softened.

Stir-frying the peppers
Then add in the broccoli and pak choi leaves. Stir-fry for a minute or two until the pak choi has wilted adding a splash of hot water if necessary to help the vegetables cook.

Shredded pak choi ready to wilt
Add in the mixture of yellow bean, soy sauce and black vinegar and stir to mix well.
Return the beef to the wok with any remaining marinade and mix well until heated through.
Remove from the heat, drizzle over a teaspoon of sesame oil and serve immediately with boiled rice.

Spicy Steamed Beef with Stir-fried Lettuce – a new take on steak and salad

I sometimes day-dream about stepping back in time to visit Chengdu in Sichuan Province as it was when Fuchsia Dunlop learned to cook there, of wandering the narrow alleyways of the old Manchu district where spare ribs and chicken simmered in clay pots, steaming bowls of dan dan noodles were offered to passers by from makeshift snack shops and bamboo steamers towered high under the wooden eaves over huge woks of bubbling water. Fuchsia describes such scenes so vividly I almost feel as if I really have been there as she lifts the lids off the steamers to reveal chunks of beef embraced in a layer of rice meal and scattered with spices, coriander and spring onion – a Sichuanese speciality known as fen zheng niu rou.
My suburban Dublin kitchen with its stainless steel gadgets and appliances is far removed from those atmospheric alleyways but it is still possible to create a meal in well under an hour which evokes the flavours and smells of those original pop up restaurants and in the process to be catapulted back into some global folk memory of a time and place I never knew.
Take last Friday for instance. I arrived home pleasantly exhausted after a very busy week. I was mulling over a discussion at a lunch at PwC to celebrate International Women’s Day where Dr. Brad Harrington of Boston College speculated that the debate about work life balance has moved on from one about conflict to one about integration. That resonated with me – the more we women integrate all the different aspects of our lives into one, the more comfortable we become in our own skins. Cooking is part of that balancing act for me, an age old ritual in which I can lose myself and a way of finding an inner rhythm while I unwind and switch off the busy clamour in my head. Cooking Chinese food calms me when I’m tired, with its emphasis on balance and harmony, yin and yang and maintaining equilibrium in the body.
I had picked up some sirloin steak and a head of iceberg lettuce on the way home and I was tempted to serve up a simple steak and side salad. Instead I decided to try out something new. I’ve had a Miele Steam Oven for over a year now and, while I use it all the time for rice, vegetables and fish, I’d never steamed beef in it. I somehow imagined that meat prepared that way would be grey, anaemic and unappetising. Leafing through my copy of The Food of China for inspiration, I came across a steamed beef recipe that sounded worth a try and I had all the other ingredients in my store cupboard.
It’s a ridiculously simple dish and, with very little added oil, it’s also very healthy. The beef is thinly sliced and marinated in a fragrant sauce of Sichuan chilli bean paste, rice wine and soy sauce then dusted with toasted glutinous rice flour mixed with aromatic spice before steaming. The result is a succulent dish of melting beef with a rich dark colour which just needed a scattering of sesame oil and spring onion to finish it off. While I cooked it in a perforated stainless steel container in my steam oven, I could have just as easily used a bamboo steamer over a wok and been one step closer to those Chengdu alleyways.
My recipe, adapted slightly from The Food of China, is below. It was only later when I started researching the origins of the recipe that I realised that I had actually cooked a reasonably authentic version of fen zheng niu rou. The major difference is that, in the original version, long-grain rice would be dry-fried for 10 to 15 minutes, perhaps with the addition of some star anise and cassia bark for flavour, and then ground down in a pestle and mortar to a texture a bit finer than couscous. This would give a slightly nuttier texture. Cheaper cuts of beef can also be used, cut slightly thicker and steamed for several hours. It’s almost impossible to overcook this dish. You will find some nice variations in Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sichuan Cookery.
Now that I’ve discovered the joys of steaming meat this way, I plan experimenting – grinding the rice myself in a food processor, using ground star anise or five spice powder with pork and ground sichuan pepper with beef or lamb, adding in some chilli flakes, placing some chunks of carrots or butternut squash on top of the meat in the steamer. The possibilities are endless.
As for the iceberg lettuce, I took a tip from my daughter in law Shan – the Chinese always cook their lettuce – and served it hot tossed in oyster sauce and sesame oil as described below, along with some steamed rice.
Steamed Beef with Rice Flour – fen zheng niu rou – 粉蒸牛肉

Ingredients

450g sirloin steak

Marinade

1 tbs light soy sauce
1 tbs dark soy sauce
1 tbs Pixian chilli bean paste*
1 tbs Shaoxing rice wine
1 thumb ginger, finely chopped
1/4 tsp ground white pepper
1 tbs ground nut oil

Rice flour paste

125 g glutinous rice flour*
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp sesame oil
1 spring onion shredded

Method

Cut the steak across the grain into thin slices and each slice into bite size pieces.
Combine the marinade ingredients, mix well with the steak and leave to rest for at least 30 minutes at room temperature.
Dry-fry the rice flour in a non-stick frying pan or a wok over medium heat, stirring frequently until it is brown and smells roasted. Add the cinnamon and mix well.
Drain any excess marinade from the beef slices and toss them in the flour and cinnamon mix.
Place the beef in a bamboo or metal steamer lined with greaseproof paper punched with holes and steam over simmering water for 20 minutes.
Toss with sesame oil and garnish with spring onion. Serve with stir-fried lettuce and steamed rice.

Stir-fried Lettuce in Oyster Sauce – hao you sheng cai – 蚝油生菜

Ingredients

1 head of iceberg lettuce
1 tbs groundnut oil
4 tbs oyster sauce
1 tsp sesame oil

Method

Remove the root from the lettuce, cut it in half and shred into wide strips. If you need to wash it make sure to dry it thoroughly so it will stir-fry rather than steam.
Heat a wok over high heat and add the oil. When the oil is very hot, add the lettuce and stir-fry until wilted. Then add the oyster sauce and stir to heat through. Remove from heat, toss with sesame oil and season to taste.

A word on ingredients
*Pixian chilli bean paste is made with broad beans fermented with chillies and salt to give a rich tangy sauce. It is named for the town of Pixian in Sichuan Province and is know locally as the “soul of Sichuan cuisine”. It is described in pin yin as douban jiang. You will find it in jars or sachets in your local Asia supermarket. Watch out for the four characters on the packets below.

This one is called Pixian Broad Bean Paste

If you can’t find Pixian chilli bean paste, you can substitute Lee Kum Kee chilli bean sauce (also known as toban djan or toban jiang) which is widely available. You can also substitute Laoganma chilli bean paste made with soya (black) beans if you are stuck. Or leave a comment on the blog and I will send a sachet of the authentic version to you by post from my stash of supplies from Beijing.
Glutinous rice flour is not the same as ordinary rice flour. It is made from a particular variety of sticky rice that has a glue-like consistency when cooked. It does not contain gluten. I have included a photo of the brand I use below.

Glutinous rice flour — Glutinous Rice Flour

PS
In other news my grandson Dermot decided to start walking in Beijing last week, just a day or two short of 13 months old. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology he was able to show off his new found skill to me via Face Time five minutes later. Thank you Shan for having the thought to share that special moment with his long distance Nai Nai. It meant more than words can say. I’ve just added a video clip of his first steps below. I’ve watched it over and over and I still get a lump in my throat each time.
Dermot walking

Food Fit for an Emperor – Pine Nut and Beef Stir-fry

My grandson is 7 months old today and I’ve found a good reason to visit Beijing in late October. Not that I need much of an excuse with him growing bigger by the day and a yearning to be with him that is almost a physical ache at times. The other day, as I passed though St. Stephen’s Green in the fading evening light, I spotted a woman of about my own age making cooing sounds at her tiny grandchild, their faces close together, while her daughter looked on with a smile. I felt a rush of envy and empathy as I remembered pushing Dermot past the same spot in a buggy in June, on his brief visit home, proud of my new found status as Nai Nai.
So my ticket is booked, I will stay with Shane, Shan, MaMa and Dermot in their new apartment and attend an event called the Beijing Forum while I’m there. I will get to know Dermot all over again and marvel at how he has grown and how his unique and bubbly personality has revealed itself in the months since I last got to hold him. I can understand how cosseted boy-children in China come to be known as “little emperors” but I’m hopeful that the level-headed rearing provided by Shan, Shane and MaMa will mean that he will avoid the risks associated with that particular label.

If I’m lucky, in between working and Nai Nai duties, I will sneak in another cookery class at Black Sesame Kitchen. I attended a couple of classes there when I visited Beijing to meet Dermot for the first time in March this year. One featured Imperial Chinese Cooking – the complex and sophisticated dishes that were produced within the walls of the Forbidden City, food deemed fit for an emperor. I wrote about the experience here.
Beijing doesn’t have its own clearly identifiable cuisine – it is a melting pot of cuisines from several of the regions of China – but it is influenced most by lu cai, the great regional cuisine of the North, the food of emperors and courtiers, refined, rich and expensive, and by the sweet, soy dark braises of the regional cuisine of the East – huai yang cai. In that north eastern climate, vegetables were in limited supply in years gone by, especially during the winter months, so the emphasis was on enhancing the flavour and texture of food through taking care with the size and shape of limited ingredients, tenderising the meat, adding rich sauces and using dried ingredients when fresh were unavailable. In the cooler north, leeks are still used as a substitute for spring onions to make up the holy trinity of ginger, garlic and onion.
Imperial cuisine lacks the fiery punch of the food from Sichuan and Hunan provinces or the lightness of touch of Yunnan or Canton food from further south, but the techniques I learned that day amazed me with their ability to lock in flavour with a limited number of fairly straightforward ingredients.
With Beijing on my mind, I set about recreating one of the Imperial dishes at home last weekend. The pine nut and beef stir fry below is not a difficult recipe but it is a little time-consuming to prepare. I imagine the Imperial Kitchen had any number of chefs delighted to have the honour of preparing the Emperor’s dinner, even if he was a tiny child. If, like me, you are on your own in the kitchen, make this dish on an evening when you are in the mood for the rhythmic pleasure of the precise dicing and slicing involved – the ingredients are all cut into 1 cm cubes – and for the taking the time to “velvet” the beef.
“Velveting” the beef is an interesting technique. It involves adding a little salt to the meat, then gradually mixing in nearly half its weight in water with your hand until it is fully absorbed and finally mixing in cornflour and egg white. This step takes quite a bit of time. Do it patiently and don’t attempt it when you are in a rush. It wont work. This I know…
The process of “velveting” tenderises the meat which is then deep fried at a low temperature (120C) to lock in the flavour and moisture and leave the beef soft rather than crisp. The result is a delicate, tender texture which absorbs the flavours of the sauce when mixed with the fast-fried vegetables. I find flank or bavette steak ideal for this dish but you could substitute sirloin or fillet if it is unavailable.

Velveting beef — Chef Zhang “velveting” the beef at Black Sesame Kitchen

I had not expected this dish to taste nearly as good as it did. In fact it has that umami quality that leaves you wanting to pick at the leftovers until every last morsel is devoured and, in my case, to jump on a plane to Beijing.
Try it and enjoy.
Pine Nut and Beef Stirfry – Songren Niurou Mi

Beef with peppers served — Pine-nut and beef stir-fry

Ingredients

8 dried shiitake mushrooms
500g flank steak/bavette of beef
¾ tsp salt
200 ml water
2 heaped tbs cornflour
1 egg white
1 small green pepper
1 small red pepper
3 tsp each minced garlic, ginger and leek
3 tbs oyster sauce
90 ml water or stock made with the water drained from the shiitake mushrooms
1 ½ tbs light soy
3 tsp dark soy sauce
1 ½ tsp sugar
½ tsp white pepper
1/2 tsp chicken bouillon
¼ tsp salt
3 heaped tsp cornflour mixed to a paste with water
3 tbs deep-fried pine kernels*
Groundnut, sunflower or rapeseed oil for frying and deep-frying

Preparation

Soak the shiitake mushrooms in hot water for about 20 minutes to reconstitute.
Dice the beef into 1 cm cubes and “velvet” by adding salt, then beating the water in with your hand a little at a time.
Once the water is fully absorbed, add the cornflour to coat all the pieces of meat thoroughly. Finally add the egg white and coat the meat thoroughly.
Dice the red and green pepper into 1 cm cubes. Remove the stalks from the reconstituted shiitake mushrooms and dice into 1 cm cubes. Finely mince the leek, garlic and ginger.

Cooking

Add enough oil to a large wok for deep frying and heat to just 120C. Spread the beef into the oil, separating the cubes with choptsticks or a ladle and cook for about 1 minute until cooked through. Remove the beef from the oil with a slotted spoon and set aside.
Empty all but a tablespoon or two of oil from the wok and, over a medium high heat, add the leek, ginger, garlic and oyster sauce and stir vigorously for 10 seconds.
Turn up the heat to high, add the peppers and shiitake mushrooms and stir-fry for 20 seconds.
Add the cooked beef and toss for 20 seconds.
Add in the pine kernels, reserving some for garnish
Add the water/stock, soy sauces, sugar, pepper and chicken bouillon and let bubble for 20 seconds.
Ladle in a tablespoon at a time of the cornflour mixture, mixing after each addition until the sauce is thick and glossy.
Serve immediately, garnished with the remaining pine kernels and with steamed rice.

Beef with peppers 2 — Final stage of cooking in the wok

*Note:
To deep-fry the pine kernels, put a few cups of oil in a wok, add in the pine kernels, then slowly bring the temperature up to low and then, over the next few minutes to medium low. Keep stirring for about 3 minutes until the pine kernels have turned a light golden colour, then remove with a slotted strainer and drain on kitchen paper. They will continue to cook for a few moments when you take them out of the oil so take them out when they are slightly lighter than done. Alternatively roast the pine kernels in a low oven for about 20 minutes. They will keep in an airtight container for a few days.

Shananigans Crispy Chilli Beef Gets a Makeover

I’ve been going through the blog this weekend to decide which recipes to include in the Taste of China Demo at Donnybrook Fair Cookery School on the evening of Wednesday 3rd July when chef Robert Jacob will cook a selection of Chinese dishes while I talk through the techniques of Chinese cooking and regional variations in cuisine.
Robert is one of the great “foodie” friends I’ve made through the blog and Twitter. He was a fashion designer before he became a chef and has worked with Ross Lewis in Chapter One and Paul Kelly in The Merrion. You can read Marie Claire Digby’s recent True Character profile of him for the Irish Times Magazine here. Before we got to know one another I attended a course he gave in knife skills so I owe any ability I have to dice and slice to him.
It’s a real privilege to team up with Robert for this class which is a first for Shananigans.
It’s less than 11 months since I started the blog and it’s always intriguing to see what recipes readers return to again and again. It gives me particular pleasure when I discover that one of the many lovely people I have met though the blog has taken one of the recipes and given it her own twist.
The crispy chilli beef recipe that I posted last November has been consistently one of the most popular recipes. Before I started the blog I would occasionally order something similar from the local Chinese takeaway but I always regretted it afterwards because it left me feeling heavy and bloated. So I had set out to create a lighter version at home using egg white and potato flour for the batter which makes it suitable for coeliacs and the wheat intolerant.
One of my most supportive readers Marie McKenna has taken the recipe a step further by adding pak choi. Sometimes she substitutes chicken for the beef or adds whatever other vegetables she has to hand. She sent me the two photos below of her results which I have reproduced with her permission.
I made crispy chilli beef for dinner for last night and we really loved the addition of the pak choi so I’ve tweaked the recipe to include it and made a few other minor changes. Thank you Marie for the inspiration and the photos. That’s what these recipes are for – to be shared and adapted.
Shananigans Crispy Chilli Beef – Xiang ciu niu rou pian – 香脆牛肉片

Photo courtesy of Marie McKenna
Serves 3 – 4

Ingredients:

400g sirloin steak or bavette of beef
2 egg whites, beaten
Good pinch of salt
About 4 tbs potato flour
A pinch of baking powder
Oil for deep frying – use good quality sunflower or groundnut oil
2 carrots cut into thin matchsticks
2 heads pak choi, root removed and trimmed (optional)
2 spring onions thinly sliced at steep angles
1 garlic clove, chopped
2 red chillies, de-seeded and thinly sliced at steep angles
About 80 g caster sugar
3 tbs Chinese black vinegar
2 tbs light soy sauce
Roasted sesame seeds (optional) to garnish
Coriander (optional) to garnish
Rice to serve

Preparation:

Cut the beef into slices against the grain and then into thin shreds.
Dip in the egg white and mix with your hand, leaving it to rest for a few minutes.
Mix the potato flour with salt and baking powder.
Drain off any excess egg white and dip the beef strips in the flour mix, shaking off any excess.

Cooking:

Blanch the carrots in boiling water for one minute,
Fill a wok quarter full with oil and heat to 180 degrees (or until a piece of bread fries golden brown in 15 seconds).
Add the beef quickly, stirring using long wooden chopsticks, a Chinese “spade” or a spatula to separate the strands. Cook the beef for 3 – 4 minutes, stirring to keep the strands separate, until it is really crispy.
Remove with a mesh strainer or slotted spoon and drain on kitchen paper.
Pour the oil from the wok leaving about 1 tbs.
Reheat the remaining oil over a medium/high heat. Stir fry the pak choi, if using, for a few minutes until wilted. Remove with a slotted spoon and place on a warm serving dish
Add another small amount of oil to the wok and re-heat over a medium/high heat. Add the spring onion, garlic and chilli and stir-fry for a few moments to release the aromas.
Increase the heat to high, add the beef and carrots and stir to mix and heat through.
Add the sugar, soy sauce and vinegar and stir to combine and dissolve the sugar. When heated through and bubbling, serve on top of the pak choi, if using.
Garnish with coriander and/or lightly toasted sesame seeds, if using, and serve with steamed rice.

Variations:

Photo courtesy of Marie McKenna
You can use almost any steak in this dish. At the start I used to use fillet steak but it is not necessary to have such an expensive cut. I find bavette of beef (also known as flank steak), which is available at good butchers, is a drier cut which responds particularly well to this recipe. It is also much better value. Sirloin works well and last night I used rib eye because I had two left over from a BBQ during the week.
Chicken thigh or breast can be used instead of beef and the chicken strips will take a little less time to cook.
Chinkiang Chinese black vinegar is readily available in all Asian supermarkets here and in some good grocers. It has excellent flavour. Last night I used aged Chinese vinegar – lao chen cu – which I brought back from Beijing. It is the type used as a dipping sauce for dumplings in China. The result was tangy and delicious. If you cant get hold of Chinese vinegar, use aged balsamic vinegar. The result wont be quite as authentic but it will still taste good.
If you are not using pak choi, you could serve this with a green vegetable such as steamed tender stem broccoli, or add a few green beans or broccoli florets to the stir fry.

Stir-fried Honey Sesame Beef

Listen up friends you are going to LOVE this recipe.
When I first visited Australia in the mid-1990s, long before I knew I would have a daughter living there, I was blown away by what was being described then as “fusion cooking”. I felt as if I had discovered a big secret – that Australian cuisine could be sublime – a combination of wonderful fresh ingredients, the best of fish, meat, fresh fruit and vegetables and subtle Asian influences in the flavourings. There was something really exciting going on and I thought the world should know more about it but, at that stage, my own knowledge of good food was limited and my experience of cooking it even slighter.
This Christmas Claire sent me a book from Sydney as a surprise. It is called Fire – A World of Flavour by Christine Manfield and features recipes from Japan, China, Vietnam, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Bali, Sri Lanka, Mexico, France, Italy, the Middle East… 20 locations in all.
Claire came across the book in a bookshop in Sydney some time ago but couldn’t remember the name of it. Then she stumbled on a copy in a “home stay” on the central coast where she and Mike were spending a weekend about 6 weeks ago and knew I would love it.

Christine Manfield is an Australian chef, author, food writer and traveller and has built her reputation through three restaurants – Paramount in Sydney from 1993 to 2000, East@West in Covent Garden, London from 2003 to 2005 and now back in Sydney where Universal Restaurant opened in August 2007. She appeared as a guest chef on Australian MasterChef 2012 and her signature icecream dessert “Gaytime” featured in the finale.
Beautifully bound and illustrated, Fire is a travel guide as well as a cook book. It includes suggestions on where to stay, visit and eat in all the places from which Christine has drawn inspiration for her recipes. I have already identified a few new restaurants to try in Beijing that Shane hasn’t eaten in yet and of course we hope to go to Universal Restaurant the next time we visit Claire in Sydney.

Her philosophy is to prepare food “that crosses cultural boundaries with confidence without being labelled ‘fusion’ and parallels… a culinary freestyle that has enriched our food culture and given it maturity and world renown.” She says in her introduction to Fire: “the sharing of food knows no political boundaries; it is a reminder of remarkable places visited, with tastes that transport me immediately to any given place. It’s as if I can taste the character and essence of a place through its food.” That expresses perfectly my own love of food and travel.
I’ve adopted a rule of thumb that, when I find a new cook book, I will include a few recipes from it in the blog, sometimes with a few tweaks of my own, to give you a taste of what is on offer and in the hope that it will encourage you to get hold of the book yourselves. I’ve chosen two of Christine’s Chinese-inspired recipes to try – this stir-fried honey sesame beef and a one-pot chicken rice, the stock for which is simmering on the stove as I write.
The beef dish below just about sums up the way food can bridge the divide between 3 continents – a Chinese-inspired dish, created by an Australian woman, once a firm favourite in her London restaurant, re-created by me on the night of a full-moon in Duncannon in the south east corner of Ireland and, as soon as I tasted it, I was plunged back into a taste memory of a meal I shared with Shane and Shan in Beijing. Such is the power of food to transport you to another place and time.

Full moon — Last full moon of 2012, Duncannon Ireland

Sometimes the discovery of a new recipe excites me. This dish is one that made me need to start writing at midnight. It has “umami” in abundance with its evocative flavours and is simple to prepare. Christine used beef tenderloin fillet and 3 bird’s eye chillies and added watercress sprigs to garnish. I used the cheaper bavette cut of beef which I find so flavourful and the slightly milder Chinese red chillies. I picked up my beef yesterday from Fintan at Dunnes of Donnybrook in Dublin, Craft Butcher of the Year 2012.
Stir-fried honey sesame beef

Stir-fried honey sesame beef — Stir-fried Honey Sesame Beef

Serves 3 – 4
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Stir-fried Beef with Tianjin Preserved Vegetables and Leeks

A quick post this as my quest continues to find new ways of using lesser known cuts of meat to prepare weekday family meals, Chinese style.
Bavette of beef was one of the cuts I discovered at the Butchery Demonstration given by James Whelan Butchers in Avoca Food Market, Monkstown. It comes from the flank or belly muscle of the cow and I first used it to make Hunan Style Crispy Beef. I was blown away by how well this relatively cheap cut responds to fast stir-frying with minimal marinading and I wondered if it was a fluke.
So in order to test the theory that almost any Chinese recipe requiring fillet or sirloin beef can be made with bavette, I decided to adapt a recipe from Ken Hom for stir-fried fillet beef with Sichuan preserved vegetables which features in Exploring China – A Culinary Adventure. I haven’t yet found Sichuan preserved vegetable in Dublin but I have used Tianjin preserved vegetable – dong cai – as a substitute. This salted mustard green is sold in squat earthenware jars and is readily available in Asian food markets and some speciality stores. It keeps for ages so a jar goes a long way. The 600g jar costs €1.75 in the Asia Market in Drury St., Dublin.

I have used it before in the vegetarian version of fried green beans and I love its crunchy texture. It is very salty and it should be rinsed well and squeezed dry before use. I also had a leek left over from the weekend when I cooked Short Beef Ribs Chinese style. And so the dish below was born.
Stir-fried Beef with Tianjin Preserved Vegetables, Leeks and Noodles

Monday night Stir-fried Beef with Noodles

Serves 2 – 4
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Hunan Style Crispy Chilli Beef

We amateur cooks are very lucky here in Ireland to have so many options if we want to improve our skills. Apart from a great selection of home-grown food programmes on TV, with our very own celebrity chefs, there are places right across the country offering courses to suit all tastes and levels of ability . These include venues like the Dublin Cookery School and Cooks Academy whose courses range from an evening to several months and cookery schools attached to restaurants and hotels where well known chefs share their expertise and secrets. Food Festivals like Savour Kilkenny, which I attended last month, are also a great opportunity to see well-known chefs demonstrate their skills in action.
Over the past month or so I’ve managed to sample a small selection of what is on offer. This included a demonstration of authentic Thai cooking, the Butchery Demonstration I described in the last post, an evening knife skills course (much needed – at least I can now julienne a carrot and finely dice garlic and ginger!) and a two day master class with Chef Paul Flynn at the Tannery Cookery School. I rounded it off last Saturday with a visit to the Miele Gallery for a demonstration of steam cooking by Rozanne Stevens which led to a serious bout of kitchen envy.
Apart from picking up some new techniques and tips, I’ve gotten a number of insights which I’ve begun to distil and integrate into my approach to cooking and which I hope will boost my confidence in the kitchen. I’m especially grateful to Paul Flynn of The Tannery for sharing something of his 30 years of expertise in the kitchen, with good humour and style. The seven most important lessons I’ve learned or had re-inforced are:

Trust your instincts and your tastebuds – stop using a recipe like a crutch, all amounts for ingredients and all temperatures are approximate, taste and taste again until you are satisfied with the balance of hot, sweet, sour and savoury. This is true of all cuisines but is especially the case when cooking Thai or Chinese food and is the way Shan and her mother cook. At very best the recipe should only be used as a guide.
Be courageous and experiment – use your instincts to vary a recipe or come up with new ones, become confident in your knowledge of what foods go well with one another, watch for the marriages made in heaven, know what herbs go with what meats or fish for instance and learn to layer flavour on flavour. When something doesn’t quite work out, reflect on what went wrong and try again.
Most expensive is not always best – this is especially true where meat is concerned. Any part of the animal that moves is likely to be tastier than the parts that don’t move. So chicken thigh will be tastier than breast, pork shoulder more full of flavour than fillet and there are a whole host of tender tasty beef cuts I didn’t even know existed that can outperform the more expensive cuts.
Think local – whenever you can, eat the food of the place prepared by the people of the place. This is the best way of ensuring the quality and freshness of your raw material, sustaining jobs and traditional food producing skills in your local community and is often better value too.
Pay attention to preparation – take the stress out of cooking by getting as much as possible done in advance. Think through all the shortcuts that you can take so that you can enjoy the last minute preparation of your meal for family or friends.
Tidy up as you go – now you wouldn’t think I’d taken that to heart if you saw the state of my kitchen last night but I was struck by the attention all the chefs I’ve seen in action pay to keeping their workstation tidy and to hygiene and food safety. I’m working on being a less messy cook….
Hate waste – plan your shopping ahead for what you intend to cook and see every by-product of your cooking as having potential – left over stock or cooking juices as a base for soup for instance or rice as a base for fried rice the next day. Throw vegetable trimmings into a freezer bag to use the next time you make stock.

So I arrived back from Dungarvan with a head full of ideas, an iPad full of new recipes, buzzing with enthusiasm and longing to get back into the kitchen again. Before I headed to the shops, I grabbed the first of my Chinese cookbooks that came to hand, Exploring China, A Culinary Adventure from Ken Hom and Ching-He Huang’s recent BBC series and I took a quick look at what was left over in the fridge – a few cooked duck legs and some carrots.
This is what I rustled together for a quick and tasty Saturday night supper:

Pancakes filled with shredded duck and a Sichuan-style sauce (recipe to follow)
A sweet, spicy, zesty Crispy Chilli Beef with an orange sauce and peanut garnish – this is based on a Hunan-style recipe from Ching-He Huang but adapted to the method I’ve used to cook Crispy Chilli Beef successfully in the past ,which has proved to be the most popular recipe on the blog so far
A sweet cucumber pickle similar to a recipe Paul Flynn’s showed us but using Chinese white rice wine vinegar rather than ordinary white wine vinegar, and
Beetroot relish (recipe to follow), a Chinese take on a Paul Flynn recipe which I made to go with a lamb dish tomorrow night but sure we couldn’t resist a taste.

The last time I made Crispy Chilli Beef I used very expensive fillet steak. This time I used Bavette of Beef from Dunnes of Donnybrook who were recently awarded the Star Shop of the Year by the Associated Craft Butchers of Ireland. It was Pat Whelan who introduced me to this cut at the Butchery Demo earlier this week. Fintan Dunne tells me it is very popular with his Chinese customers because the cut does not ooze blood and juices. It comes from the flank or belly muscle of the cow and is full of flavour. it is a relatively long and flat cut which makes it ideal for thin slicing across the grain. It was such a cheap cut that I was afraid it would be tough without marinating. In fact it was absolutely delicious – a different texture entirely to fillet or sirloin it worked perfectly in its crispy coating. Sirloin or rump steak can be used as a substitute.
The sweet cucumber pickle was a better foil for the spiciness of this dish than Shan’s Bashed Cucumber which works well as a side dish with some of her milder main courses.
Hunan Style Crispy Chilli Beef – Xiang Wei Cui Niu Rou – 湘味脆牛肉

Crispy Chilli Beef

Every now and again I am about to write a blog post about one aspect of Chinese cooking and I get diverted by another idea. This is one such occasion.

Since we returned from China in early July, Chinese takeaways have been banned in our house but there’s one particular dish I’ve had a hankering for recently. When I used to give in and order takeaway, crispy chilli beef was alway a favourite, because of it’s rich, tangy flavour, but no sooner would I have eaten it than I would regret it as the heavy batter settled on my stomach and my wheat intolerance kicked in. Recently I’ve being thinking of ways to give this takeaway staple a lighter, Shananigans makeover and, after several half-successful attempts, I finally got it right a few nights ago.
I’m not sure of the origins of this dish – I suspect it’s not pure Sichuan or Hunan but a European adapatation. While this may not be as healthy as some of the dishes I cook, I would be confident that it’s a lot lower in fat and carbohydrate content than some of its takeout counterparts and it certainly passes the taste test, with no added MSG or gloopy sauces.
I love shopping in neighbourhood shops and, on weekdays, when I am commuting in and out of the city centre of Dublin, Donnybrook is a perfect staging point on my bus journey home. Dunnes of Donnybrook, recently awarded Star Shop of the Year by the Associated Craft Butchers of Ireland, and Roy Fox Gourmet Food can provide, between them, all the meat, vegetables and condiments I need. Roy Fox is particularly good on stocks of Asian spices, sauces and noodles and carries many of the items I usually have to seek out in an Asian Market – a boon for those daunted by the overwhelming range of stock in those markets.

Credit where due at Dunnes of Donnybrook

So on the way home from town I picked up a few excellent fillet steaks from Fintan Dunne and my vegetables from Roy Fox. This is what I did with them:
Shananigans Crispy Chilli Beef – Xiang ciu niu rou pian – 香脆牛肉片
Serves 3 – 4
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Slow-cooked Wagyu Beef Stew

Shananigans was 3 months old on Friday 27th October. To celebrate we got a new logo, designed by our son Shane at Enter the Panda Ltd.

(update to blog design coming soon to tie in with the logo) and then we took ourselves off to Savour Kilkenny to take part in Foodcamp.
It was a day of firsts – my first presentation to an audience of the story of the blog and my attempts to create authentic Chinese cuisine using the best of Irish ingredients, my first time to have a dish I had cooked tasted by anyone other than my family and close friends and, surely, the first impromptu tasting of a Chinese wagyu stew on live radio in Ireland.

The recipe that follows is for the dish which was tasted live on air on The Sue Nunn Show on KCLR by chef Anne Neary of Ryeland House Cookery. She “stole” a plateful when my back was turned during the interview – all part of the fun at Savour Kilkenny! I also served it at the Foodcamp long-table lunch and about 40 people must have tasted it in all.
Anne made all the appropriate noises (link to podcast to be introduced in evidence!) and I got similar positive feedback at the Foodcamp lunch even though I felt compelled to warn everyone that the dish was spicy and would normally be served with rice and a cooling cucumber side dish, or perhaps with root vegetables through it.
The recipe came about as a result of the on-going challenge from @Pat_Whelan of James Whelan Butchers to come up with Chinese recipes for the Irish wagyu beef from his Garrentemple herd. I have already made a Garrentemple Shabu Shabu hotpot and Wagyu Steak Naoki Style. Pat was keen to show me that wagyu is not just about expensive steaks – there are cheaper cuts to be worked with which could be overlooked. So he sent me a large piece of wagyu chuck beef to experiment with. What better way to spread the Twitter love than to share the results with the enthusiastic food-lovers at Savour Kilkenny.
Long, slow cooking is not all that prevalent in Chinese cuisine but it does exist. The Hui, the ethnic Chinese Muslims who are scattered across China, have traditionally prepared big pots of slow-cooked stew and served it as a topping for noodles. Some of the dishes I saw prepared in restaurants by the Muslim Uighurs, when we visited Shan’s family in Xinjiang Province, were cooked in this way When I was thinking about what I might do with the beef, I was hankering for the flavours of Urumqi with their Turkic and Arabaic influences and the scent of the spices of the bazaars always present in the evening air.
I eventually found the basic recipe I was looking for in Fuchsia Dunlop‘s seminal cookbook on Hunan cuisine, the province Chairman Mao Zedong came from in Southern Central China. Her Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook tackles the cuisine of a region whose people love their food hot and is packed with easy-to-follow recipes and insights into the region. I based my stew on her red-braised beef topping for Changde rice noodles, adapting it to suit wagyu beef and longer, slower cooking.
One thing I’ve noticed is that, for stews and the like, the Chinese always boil their meat in water for a few minutes first. This seems to be based on the belief that this will eliminate impurities and bad odours from the meat but it also has the effect of making it even more tender.
Shan came up with the Chinese name for this dish which translates literally as “Red Slow Cooked Beef. “Men” means “slow cooking, simmering to lock the flavour in”. I like the Chinese character to express this which is the second of the four characters below.
Shananigans Red-braised Wagyu Stew – hong men niu rou – 红焖牛肉

(Serves 8 to 12 people)
Ingredients:

2 kg wagyu chuck steak
Wagyu beef dripping – about 8 tbs when melted
About 3/4 of a jar of Laoganma* chilli bean sauce
2 small red onions, sliced
A chunk of unpeeled fresh ginger – about 4 cms – cut into thick slices
3 large pieces of cassia bark
4 cinnamon sticks
4 star anise
4 tbs Shaoxing wine
4 tbs dark soy sauce
1 tsp Sichuan pepper
1 tsp fennel seeds
1 tsp cloves
10 – 12 cardamon pods
2 – 3 bay leaves
Coriander leaves to garnish

Optional:

2 – 3 carrots and
2 – 3 parsnips or
1 daikon radish/ Chinese turnip

To serve:

Boiled rice
Shan’s bashed cucumber – Pai Huang Gua – see recipe in earlier post

Preparation and cooking:

Cut the beef into large cubes – with wagyu there is virtually no trimming required and no waste.
Place in a saucepan. Cover with cold water. Bring to the boil, skimming off the mucky froth that rises to the surface. Remove the beef with a slotted spoon and leave aside in a colander to cool and lose any excess liquid. Strain the remaining cooking liquid (through muslin if possible) into a jug or pot.
Heat the wagyu dripping in a large, deep saucepan over a medium heat – if there is too much just drain off the excess into a bowl. You can use it again.
Add the Laoganma chilli bean sauce to the dripping and stir, over medium heat, until the sauce and oil have combined. Add in the red onion, ginger, cassia bark, cinnamon, star anise and stir fry until you release the heady aromas of the spices and the onion begins to soften.
Then turn up the heat and gradually add in the beef, stirring constantly until all the beef is coated with the rich red sauce. Swirl in the soy sauce and the Shaoxing wine and stir to mix, then add sufficient of the reserved cooking liquid to barely cover the meat. Reserve any remaining liquid.
Add the bay leaves and the remaining ingredients – Sichuan pepper, fennel seeds, cloves and cardamon – tying them in muslin if you have a small piece or bag to hand, but don’t worry, you can strain them out later if you wish.
Bring to the boil, then transfer immediately to a slow cooker and cook on “low” for about 6 – 7 hours. Check the beef for tenderness after 6 hours, keeping the time you have the lid off the slow cooker to a minimum.
When the beef is cooked to melt in the mouth tenderness, allow to cool then refrigerate over night.
The next day, remove and discard any excess fat that has set on the surface – it will be a bright orange colour.
Remove the meat from the cooking liquid with a slotted spoon and place, along with the larger spices and ginger slices, in a large cast-iron casserole dish or saucepan. Strain the remaining liquid, to remove any smaller seeds and bay leaves, and return it to the pan.
Check the seasoning while it is heating and balance if necessary with soy sauce and Shaoxing wine – I found the rich intense flavour from the long, slow cooking was just right. Reheat thoroughly over a moderate heat and serve garnished with fresh coriander.

*available in all Aisan supermarkets, the Laoganma sauce is made with black beans, chilli and Sichuan peppercorns. The literal translation of it’s name is “old dry mother sauce”. The photo below will help you recognise the label but be careful to get the one that does not contain MSG – the newest bottles have the ingredients listed in English on the rear. If you are unable to find the Laoganma label you could substitute Lee Kum Kee chill bean sauce made with broad beans which may be easier to find but it will not give the same richness of colour or flavour.

Optional:
I love the deep red colour and the rich, spicy flavour and aromas of the beef. But you can lighten the overall effect of the dish, and add variety in colour and taste, by adding in chunks of briefly par-boiled carrots and parsnips or Chinese turnip, also known as daikon radish, for the last 20 – 30 minutes of re-heating, so long as the pot has reached simmering point. You may need to add additional reserved cooking liquid or water to ensure the meat and vegetables remain barely covered with liquid and to adjust the seasoning to re-balance the dish.
Verdict:
This is a special dish with an intensity of colour and flavour which mellows and deepens with the long slow cooking and the overnight rest. It tastes even better on the third day.
Finding the courage to take this dish out for public inspection, at my first ever public presentation of Shananigans, 3 months to the day after starting the blog, means it will always have a special place in my portfolio of recipes.
Variations:
While the use of wagyu beef makes this an exceptional dish, the recipe would work equally well with good quality shin beef as the long slow cooking would melt down the fat. If using shin beef in the slow cooker you may need to allow up to an hour longer to achieve a melt in the mouth texture.
Mashed potatoes can be used as an alternative to rice.
Cinnamon sticks can be used as a substitute for cassia bark.
If you don’t have a slow cooker, simply cook on the hob on a low simmer for about 3 hours. In this case you will need to cover the beef more generously with the cooking liquid and keep an eye on it to make sure the beef is covered with water at all times and doesn’t dry out.
Whichever method you use, I strongly recommend allowing it to rest overnight so that you can remove the fat and ensure there is no oily after-taste in the dish.
The quantity can be halved to serve 4 to 6 people but it may be more efficient to make the larger amount and freeze half if necessary.
Enjoy and if you try this dish or variation of it, please let me know how you get on.
Julie

Notes from a Past Life – Chilli steak with just-cooked greens

Back in the day… Back in January 2004 the Celtic Tiger was still roaring. We had children who had never experienced recession. I was working full-time in a job that meant I rarely got home before 9 pm each evening. My adult children were beginning to spread their wings. Claire was in London working with Jamie Oliver, and Shane was in Edinburgh designing websites, almost overlapping with Shan who studied there and who he was destined to meet in Beijing in 2010. To me they seemed far away but, with hindsight, they were so close, barely across the water. We Irish seemed invincible then, confident, adventurous, the world our oyster… back in the day.
Even then I loved to cook and have friends over for dinner, but there was very little time so I was always on the look out for recipes that were easy and fast to prepare. I used to look forward to the Food and Drink section of the Sunday Tribune magazine and I would cut out and keep recipes that appealed to me. A dinner menu, published in that newspaper on the 18th January, 2004 with the headline “Cold Comfort”, was ideal because it didn’t require much more than an hour to put together a respectable meal. That menu, with its starter of Mango Goat’s Cheese and Parma Melts, a main of Chilli Steak with just-cooked greens and Warm Chocolate Puddings for dessert, became my dinner party menu of choice for most of that year and every friend I have ever entertained has been at the receiving end of that mango and goats cheese starter.

I had forgotten all about it, until last Monday night when my friend Brenda asked me to dig out our old recipe for ginger biscuits and I came upon it in a folder at the back of a cupboard. Nostalgia swept over me and memories came flooding back – of the frantic rush to get a meal on the table for guests, of Green & Black’s chocolate simmering in the pot, of peeling mangoes as the juices ran out of them, of the fragrance of cumin from marinating beef. Ah, those were the days…
And as I amused myself reading the article about dank January days and noted that “Pak choi or Chinese cabbage is now widely available in shops and Asian stores”, I realised that the author was one Catherine Cleary. Could it be “our” Catherine Cleary (@Catherineeats), whose restaurant reviews are now the first thing I read every Saturday in the Irish Times, I wondered. And YES, it was. She tells me she wrote those recipes after their first Christmas as parents when they were in no mood for January denial.
So with her permission and a big thank you to her for many happy dinners with friends, I’m reproducing the chilli-steak recipe below and you can also see my efforts to re-create the other two recipes on the blog.

This is a very simple and light dish with relatively mild flavours. The sour chilli marinade tenderises the beef so that it cooks very fast. What fascinates me is how similar it is to dishes I had in Xinjiang Autonomous Region in China, where Shan’s family live and where the middle eastern influences spill over into the local cuisine and the use of cumin is prevalent. How the world turns full circle…
I made this for dinner today with lovely fillet steak from James Whelan Butchers at Avoca, Monkstown and Irish pak choi and spring onions from Superquinn in Blackrock, Co. Dublin.
Chilli Steak with Just-cooked Greens