hunan cooking – Shananigans Blog

Gan Guo Tu Duo Pian – Hunan Spiced Potato and an easy Chinese dinner party menu

I’ve started Chinese lessons. Once a week Wei Wei, who was Shan’s bridesmaid, comes to my house. We spend a few hours poring over her notes while I try to get my head and tongue around Chinese phrases, echoing the sounds and tones familiar in Beijing. My dream is to surprise Shan’s Ma Ma, my qing jia mu, with a text message in Mandarin characters and by addressing her in Chinese the next time we meet. I’ve a long, long way to go.
The language lesson finished, Wei Wei and I roll up our sleeves, get out the cleaver, chopping board and wok and she teaches me a new recipe. To start with she is helping me to recreate some of the dishes I came across on my last visit to Beijing. It’s fun, the hours fly by and I am learning at all sorts of levels.
Wei Wei writes her own blog MyChineseKitchen.com and is an accomplished Chinese cook. Her Mum and Dad taught her basic techniques from a very young age in her home town of Tianjin and she has wielded a cleaver for as long as she can remember. Next week her parents are coming to visit her and her husband Oisin in Ireland for the very first time, no doubt bearing a suitcase full of ingredients like Shan’s family did at Christmas.
Last weekend our friends Brenda and Jimmy were coming to Sunday dinner. I wanted to serve a meal like Shan and her Ma Ma would cook, a selection of dishes for sharing, some spicy, some light. Gan guo tu dou pian was on my mind – a potato dish that I had tasted in our favourite Chinese Duck Restaurant XiHeYaYuan in Beijing and which I wrote about here. Gan guo translates loosely as “dry wok”. It is a style of cooking that comes from Hunan Province where the food is rich and spicy and in restaurants in China it is served in a little cast iron pot at your table over an open burner. As well as gan guo made with slices of fried potato and smoked Hunan pork, I had also enjoyed gan gou niu wa, made with bull frog, at our Hunan dinner at Pindian in Wangjng.
As luck would have it, Wei Wei also loves the dish which she and Oisin used to have every time they visited a local Hunan restaurant they called “The Cheap Place” in Beijing . She has come up with her own recipe for gan guo potatoes which tastes exactly as I remember it in Beijing and she has set out the steps for making it in detail here on her own blog. We used her recipe for my first cookery lesson and as we worked she taught me the Chinese words for the ingredients and helped me improve my knife skills and cooking techniques.
The next day I made the dish again working without a recipe, using the instincts Wei Wei had helped me develop to balance the flavours. My proportions were a little different to Wei Wei’s so here is what I did.
Hunan Spiced Potato – Gan Guo Tu Duo Pian

(Serves 4 as a side dish or 2 as a main course)
Ingredients

3 firm medium potatoes
4 slices of Hunan smoked pork or pancetta or smoked streaky rashers, rind removed
1 red chilli
1 green chilli
a small thumb of ginger
4 cloves of garlic
1 leek
½ an onion(red or white)
1 stick celery
1 spring onion
cooking oil
coriander to garnish (optional)

For the sauce

1 tbs hot bean sauce
2 tbs light soy sauce
¼ tbs dark soy sauce
1 tbs shaoxing rice wine
2 tsps sugar
salt to taste

Preparation

Wash and peel the potatoes and slice them about ½ cm thick. Wash the potato slices twice in cold water to rinse out the starch and pat them dry.
Slice the pork or bacon into thin pieces a littler smaller than the potatoes slices.
De-seed and thinly slice the chillies; slice the ginger, peel and slice the garlic.
Slice the leek, onion, celery and spring onion into julienne strips.
Mix all the sauce ingredients and set aside.

Cooking

Heat sufficient oil in a wok to about 140 degrees to fry the potato slices in batches until golden, setting them aside to dry on a dish lined with kitchen roll.
Empty all but just over a tablespoon of oil from the wok. Over a medium-high heat stir-fry the chilli, garlic and ginger for a few moments to release their aromas being careful not to burn them. Add the pork slices and stir-fry until they turn colour.
Add the leek, onion, celery and spring onion and stir-fry briefly before adding the sauce and mixing well.
Fold in the cooked potato slices and keep stirring until the sauce has almost evaporated, being careful not to break up the potato slices. Season with salt to taste. Serve immediately, garnished with coriander if using.

I had some of the very special cured pork from Hunan Province which Shan used in her home-style dinner. It has an amazing umami flavour and adds an extra jolt of authenticity to the taste. But any good quality cured or smoked pork or bacon can be used, even Italian pancetta.

This was just one of the dishes I served at dinner last Sunday. Here is the full menu:

Confit Duck Spring Rolls with Tom Chef’s Chilli Jam

*****

Adam Perry Lang’s Beer Can Chicken

Sichuan Dry-fried Green Beans, Vegetarian Style

Broccoli Stir-fried with Garlic

Bai Cai with Ginger, Dried mushrooms and Oyster sauce

Gan Guo Tu Duo Pian

Steamed rice

*****

Strawberry, raspberry and orange tart

We slow-cooked the Beer Can Chicken to moist perfection on the Big Green Egg. APL’s recipe has enough Asian flavours going on to make it a good foil for Chinese vegetable dishes.

I used the recipe from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice for the vegetarian version of Sichuan Green Beans but you can also use the recipe here on the blog and just omit the pork.

I had picked up some interesting Chinese leaves from the Asia Market with long green stems and delicately flavoured leaves. Wei We said they were a type of Chinese cabbage – bai cai . Shan had given me some wonderful speckled dried mushrooms which are called xiang gu because of their excellent flavour.

Wiang Gu Dried Mushrooms — Xiang Gu Dried Mushrooms

Rehydrate a few dried mushrooms in hot water for half an hour, then slice them thickly and stir-fry them with a few slices of ginger and spring onion (no garlic) until soft before adding the bai cai until it wilts down. Add a dash of oyster sauce, season with salt and the earthy flavour of the mushrooms combined with the delicate cabbage will transport you to MaMa’s kitchen in Beijing.

I worked the way Shan had taught me in Beijing, preparing all the ingredients well in advance and lining them up in separate dishes, cooking the lightest vegetable dishes first and then, a quick wipe of the wok and on to the next one so that I was able to get each bowl to the table in quick succession and join in the conversation.

Dessert was a random find from Twitter – a recipe from Catherine Fulvio’s blog to which I added a few raspberries. This was a great success and has now been included in my limited repertoire of sweet treats. We loved the crunchy, no-bake base, which was made from amaretti biscuits, and the tang of passion fruit, yoghurt and orange zest in the filling.

No bake strawberry, raspberry and orange tart

Now it’s time to start planning my next visit to China in two weeks time. Nai Nai hugs coming up…

Hunan dinner at Pindian Cuisine, Wangjing

I have to hand it to my daughter-in-law Shan. She keeps pushing out the boundaries when it comes to our dining experiences in Beijing – both geographically and in terms of the food. She has been trawling through the Chinese equivalent of Groupon for deals on line and reviews by Chinese diners to find places that might appeal to my ever-broadening tastes but that also serve dinner early and have high chairs for Dermot.
Last night’s excursion took us a 20 minute taxi ride further out of the city to Wangjing, a sub-district of Chaoyang and one of those new suburbs that has sprung up on the ever expanding perimeter of Beijing since the early 1990s. It is in the north east corner of the city just inside the 5th ring road. So many Koreans live there that it is known locally as Koreatown. The name translates as “View of Beijing” but you would be hard pressed to catch a glimpse of the city through the endless rows of sky scrapers. It is an unlikely place to find Hunan food but Shan had tracked down a restaurant called Pindian there that serves an authentic version of the cuisine.
Hunan is one of the steamy inland provinces of China, not as far west as Sichuan province. Its chefs and home cooks produce very hot, spicy, bold and colourful food for a hot and fiery people, with an emphasis on sourness. Local chefs use boiling, roasting and steaming to make dishes that are hot and sour, charred and mouth-numbing, fresh and fragrant, crispy and tender. The recipe for Chairman Mao’s Red-Braised Pork from my archives is a good example as is Hunan Style Crispy Chilli Beef.
Cookery writer Fuchsia Dunlop’s Revolutionary Cookbook is my bible of Hunan cooking and I get lost in the world she depicts of the birthplace of Chairman Mao and the exotic, spicy dishes created there. Ihave tried many of her recipes at home but, apart from a few recipes I learnt at Hutong Cuisine cookery school when I last visited Beijing, such as Hunan Steamed Fish, I have never tasted the food of this region while China.
I plan to get to Hunan Province some day but, like any capital city, Beijing is a melting pot of all regional cuisines and I was delighted to be getting the chance to taste the real thing here. I knew to expect it to be even spicier than Sichuan food but without the same addiction to numbing Sichuan pepper. Apart from that I had an open mind and I have one rule when eating out with Shan – try everything put in front of me at least once without asking questions.
Pindian was on the first floor of a modern block and was a large, well-lit room with tables designed to cater for family gatherings and private dining rooms off to one side. It’s layout with Chinese lanterns and double happiness pendants dangling from the ceiling was typical of thousands of family restaurants through the city and millions throughout the world. A large fish tank filled with enormous goldfish lined one wall and was ideal for distracting Dermot. Our table was at a window overlooking the suburban street as workers made their way home from the city.
The Groupon deal Shan had found included a set menu to which she added two other dishes so that Dermot would have something less spicy to eat.
To start with we were served a jug of warm and rather sweet corn juice and glasses of warm water and we ordered some Yangjing beers to go with them.
The first plate to arrive at our table was gan guo niu wa – a dish made with bullfrog and served sizzling at our table. Shan was surprised I had never eaten frog before, not even frogs legs in France. The meat was very tender with a consistency a little like chicken but lots of small bones to be dealt with. It was scattered with chillies, spring onions and peanuts. The flavour and cooking style was similar to the “drying pot” potato we had at our Peking Duck restaurant, XiHeYaYuan on Saturday night
The dish of wide flat rice noodles stir-fried with Chinese cabbage that was served next was a lovely light accompaniment to this and the other dishes that followed.
Sizzling beef with green chillies was lip-tingling hot and the star of the night. The chillies – hang jiao – used are spicy hot but full of flavour.
Shan had ordered dried radish with smoked pork which is a regional specialty but what was served involved equally tasty dried green beans. I loved this dish. The smoked pork is bought part cooked, thinly sliced and tossed with the dried vegetable, mashed whole garlic, ginger, chillies and spring onion. And the good news is that Shan has ordered some of this smoked pork on line so that we can try out a variation of this dish at home.
Steamed whole fish came in a soy sauce and facing me with doleful eyes. I fear I will never get fond of the appearance of whole fish but the flavour was good. It was served splayed so that you could remove all the flesh from the bones without ever having to turn it over as that would be unlucky – it symbolises a fishing boat turning over in water.
A free range chicken was chopped into pieces and cooked in a rich broth flavoured with ginger, spring onion and other spices. In northern China it is typical to remove the meat from the soup with your chopsticks and eat it boiled rice before drinking the broth at the end of the meal as a soup. It was delicious.
A plate of little deep-fried buns rounded off the meal. I wasn’t sure whether they would be sweet or savoury when I bit into them – one of the hazards of eating out in China. In fact they were like sweet little donuts.
With the Groupon deal the total cost of the meal for the four of us was 242RMB or about €28. By any standards this was excellent value.
And now, if asked about Hunan food, I can say “I’m partial to a bit of bullfrog myself”.

Hunan Steamed Fish – duo jiao zheng yu

There’s beginning to be a rhythm to Sunday mornings since I came back from China. With the arrival of summer time, it’s the best time of the week to catch Claire and Shane on Skype. Today one is returning from a Sunday afternoon swim in Icebergs at Bondi in temperatures of 28 degrees, the other is out catching some fresh air in his local Beijing park in the early Spring sunshine. Hurry up Shane as Sunday morning is also the time for my weekly glimpse of Dermot, noting the changes I cant pick up in photos, watching him react to the sound of our voices and focus on an iPad screen with interest and hoping he still remembers us.

Beijing park — Shan and her MaMa playing pingpong

While I wait for my Skype “slot”, I reflect on the week gone past, revisit notes, photos and memories of China and Australia and write.
Today I’m thinking about the way the chefs in a Chinese kitchen sing out cong, jiang, suan – spring onion, ginger, garlic – like a rhythmic hymn throughout the day, so fundamental are these three ingredients to many Chinese dishes.
When I grew up in Wexford in the 1960s, we used to call salad “lettuce and leeks”. I was embarrassed when I got to Dublin in the early 70s to discover that I was officially a “culchie” and what I knew as “leeks” were actually scallions or spring onions. Leeks were a different thing entirely and a vegetable I had not come across before. (Yes, our vegetable selection was that limited in those years. The most exotic vegetables I knew were carrots, parsnips and cabbage.)
I was amused to discover that in Beijing the terms leeks and spring onions are also used interchangeably. That’s because, until transport systems improved, the colder north had a very limited range and supply of vegetables for most of the year and finely chopped leek works as a good substitute for the more seasonal spring onions used further south – a very handy discovery if, like me, you find spring onions hard to keep fresh at this time of the year. The frugal Chinese will always use the cheapest substitute readily available.
One of the recipes I learnt at Hutong Cuisine which uses this trinity of cong, jiang, suan is duo jiao zheng yu, a simple, healthy way of steaming fish with an added kick from pickled chillies. In Hunan the dish is made with enormous fish heads from a river fish such as bighead carp – yong yu – because these are regarded as a delicacy and the tastiest part of the fish with lots of interesting textures. In her Revolutionary Cookbook, that bible of Hunan Cuisine, Fuchsia Dunlop talks about how this dish was all the rage in Changsha when she lived there. Waiters would emerge from kitchens bearing enormous steaming platters of fish heads flecked with scarlet chilli, black bean and spring onion.
Our cookery teacher in Beijing, Chunyi who trained in Chengdu in Sichuan province, despairs of westerners who throw the fish heads away but she did allow us to make the dish at cookery class with a river fish fillet.

Hutong Cuisine Hunan Steamed fish — Hunan Steamed Fish at Hutong Cuisine

The magic ingredient is chopped salted chillies – duo la jiao – which has a hot, sour, salty taste and a beautiful red colour. I brought some back from Beijing but the good news is that the same brand is available in the Asia Market for just a few euro.

Last weekend we were in Duncannon on one of those rare pet spring Saturdays. We detoured from an 11 km walk to pick up some fish, fresh from the sea, at Fish Ahoy in Arthurstown. Late in the day beautiful, firm cod fillet and haddock was what they had left. I tried the recipe below on the cod and loved the way it enhanced rather than smothered the flavour of the fish. I served it with Sichuan fried green beans and salt and pepper cauliflower.
I baked the fresh haddock fillets on Monday brushed with homemade chilli oil and served them scattered with a little ginger and spring onion. Simple and delicious.
The Hunan steamed fish recipe below is from Hutong Cuisine. Fuchsia Dunlop’s version of this dish is on page 167 of Revolutionary Cookbook and uses whole lemon sole, gutted.
Steamed fish with minced chilli – duo jiao zheng yu

Hunan steamed fish — duo jiao zheng yu Ducannon style

Ingredients
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