Tag: soy sauce

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The Book Vegetables

156. Dry-Cooked String Beans p.523


I couldn’t find a recipe for this one online.

I was in a frying mood the night I made these beans and the onion rings. The combination of a fried appetizer, and a fried main course was just a little too much. This stir fry was more than greasy enough all by itself.

In this dish trimmed green beans are deep fried in a wok for 30 seconds, then drained. You then drain off most of the oil, and build a stir fry starting with garlic, red pepper flakes, and ginger, then add ground pork. Once the pork is browned the beans go back in to reheat. A mixture of sugar, salt, soy sauce, sake, and sesame oil is then poured over top along with a handful of scallion greens and stirred to coat. Put this on a bed of sticky rice and you’ve got dinner.

The stir fry itself was totally delicious, it was an excellent balance of ingredients, just spicy enough, and wonderfully complex and arromatic. However, the stir fried beans were a bit weird and greasy. I trimmed the ends of the beans, so there was an open tube down the middle of them. Some of those tubes filled with oil during frying, and made the dish much greasier than I would have liked. It’s possible that my oil temperature dropped too far, and the pressure of escaping steam wasn’t enough to keep the oil out. If so, more oil, or smaller batches of beans would have taken care of the problem. The recipe says that the point of the deep frying is to lock in the coulour of the beans, but blanching, and shocking them would have done the same thing. The exterior of the beans took on a funny wrinkled texture, but they remained firm and crisp, and nicely green.

I’d happily make an adapted version of this recipe, but I think the deep fried green beans are better left behind. There are lots of recipes for dry-cooked beans out there, so I’ll presume it’s a well respected technique, and suggesting that they kind of suck is probably insulting someone’s Grandmother’s cooking, but they just weren’t my bag. The rest of the dish was excellent, and simply replacing the frying for a blanching would probably solve my only criticism of the recipe. If it had been less oily, it would have earned 4.5 mushrooms, but as it is, I can’t give it more than three.

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Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

139. “La Brea Tar Pit” Chicken Wings p.55


The recipe

I’m really ambivalent about this recipe. My wings were delicious, but the recipe is horrible. Basically you combine soy, red wine, sugar, and ginger and bring it to a boil, then pour it over chicken wings in a roasting pan and bake at 400 for 45 minutes, flip them, and cook for another hour-ish. It’s supposed to result in a thick, tar-like coating for the wings. It actually starts to burn about half an hour into the cooking and completely ruins a baking sheet. I’m not the only one to have run into this problem, the Epicurious comments are full of complaints. However the author of this recipe, Metta Miller, wrote on the boards as well. She says

Hello all, Sorry our kitchen whiz north of the border found these to be vile. If you follow my original instructions (Gourmet altered the recipe) they will be delicious every time…..To the salt sensitive: Use low-sodium soy sauce. To those concerned about burnt pans/sauce: Bake at 375 degrees for 45 minutes; turn and check after another 30-45 minutes. I’ve been making these wings this way for years and haven’t ended up with a single ruined pan — or a single complaint — yet. Good luck!

The recipe as written in The Book is atrocious. The cooking time is way too long, and it’s too hot. The soy-wine-sugar-ginger sauce set up into a lava-rock like caramel that wouldn’t come off my pan despite soaking, scrubbing, vinegar, steel wool, and boiling water. It was also giving off huge volumes of black sticky smoke, and set off the fire alarm.

I was convinced the wings were ruined, but I pulled them out and transfered them to another baking dish. I scraped up the sauce that hadn’t burnt, and diluted it with water, then stuck the wings and sauce back into the oven at a lower temperature, and periodically added more water. After about an hour and half total cooking time the wings were tender with a nice crispy exterior.

I was using some very nice free range chicken wings, which make a huge difference. I’m not in a position to eat free range chicken all the time, but free range wings are cheap, and it makes a world of difference. They’re so much meatier and more flavourful than the other kind. The sauce was probably quite different from what the book intended, because I lost more than half of it, and kept diluting what remained, it never thickened or resembled a tar pit. It ended up as a nice caramelized glaze, with wonderful flavour. The wine worked with the soy and ginger remarkably well. I was surprised that they didn’t particularly taste like Chinese chicken wings, they were just delicious, in fact they were among the best wings I’ve ever had. They were certainly salty enough, and I’m willing to bet that the fully sauced version would have been inedibly salty, I’d definitely follow the authors low-sodium soy recommendation.

I absolutely believe that Metta Miller’s original version of this recipe makes some fantastic wings, and the wings I managed to salvage from this debacle of a recipe were delightful. However the recipe itself is inexcusable. If I was in a more charitable mood I might have considered the potential of the recipe to be great, but I’m feeling spiteful. This recipe ruined one of my favorite baking sheets, and that’s a transgression I’ll not soon forget. If I’d continued to follow the recipe as written it would not have resulted in food, and there’s only one possible rating for not-food. “La Brea Tar Pit” Chicken Wings have earned the first zero mushroom rating of the project.

Categories
Soups The Book

136. Mushroom Barley Soup p.113


The recipe

This soup suffers from a serious branding issue. If it had been billed as barely soupy barley stew, with extra barley, some carrots, and hardly any mushrooms at all, I would have known what I was getting into. The blurb for the recipe talks about all the contrasting mushroom flavours and blah blah blah, but I really had to do some food styling to get any mushrooms in the photo at all. I picked this recipe because I wanted a mushroom soup, and I was looking forward to a little added body from the barley, and a nice background of aromatics. I ended up with a perfectly OK barley stew that I wasn’t at all in the mood for.

The recipe starts by browning garlic and onion in a large pot, then adding sliced white mushrooms, soaked and sliced shiitake’s, soy sauce, cooking out the liquid, then adding sherry and evaporating that too. The liquid is then added in the form of chicken stock, water, and the mushroom soaking liquid. The barley, carrots, and dried thyme and rosemary are added and the soup simmers for an hour. When it’s ready it’s seasoned with salt and pepper, and some parsley is stirred in just before serving.

The texture was very thick and hearty, with most of the flavour coming from the chicken stock and aromatics. It actually tasted a whole lot like my mom’s beef and barley soup, but without the deep beef stock and hearty chunks of meat that made that a satisfying winter lunch. The chicken stock left it tasting thin and whimpy, and seriously overpowered by the mushy barley texture. I should reiterate that for a mushroom barley soup, mushrooms were not a flavour consideration.

Unfortunately this soup was in a rotten in between spot. With less barley and four times more mushrooms it could have been the nice mushroom soup it advertised itself as, or using a more concentrated stock, and adding rich chunks of meat, could have resulted in a thick barely stew worth eating. As it was, it was perfectly edible, but nothing to look forward to.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

85. Bok Choy with Soy Sauce and Butter p.524

The recipe

This is about as simple as side dishes get. Just fry up some bok choy, toss on a mixture of water, soy, oyster sauce, and butter, cook for a minute or two, then eat. I prefer baby bok choy to the gargantuan full grown versions. They don’t taste much different, but I like the finer texture of the smaller ones. Full sized bok choy also leave you with the cabbage and celery conundrum of what to do with the rest of these enormous vegetables?

Bok choy is a prototypically Chinese vegetable, and it’s almost always prepared with that in mind. I don’t think I’ve had it any way but stir fried with some vaguely Asian flavourings tossed at it. I wonder if bok choy really has an affinity for soy sauce, or if it’s just the case that no one has ever tasted it without it? While this preparation isn’t innovative, it is quite tasty.

I liked that this dish is simple, and uses ingredients you probably have on hand. I’m not actually sure that most people have oyster sauce on hand. But, a geometric expansion of condiments is squeezing me out of my fridge, so oyster sauce was no problem to find.

This recipe was reliable, easy, and very quick. Bok choy looks great on a plate, and has a unique and appealingly mild flavour. This is a great side dish, and it could even see myself making these as dinner-for-one after an exhausting day.