Cumin Lamb Stir-Fry

My favorite Chinese restaurant in the area is owned by people from Chengdu, in the Szechuan province. It has opened my eyes to the variety in Chinese food, bringing in ingredients like homemade pickled bamboo, the increasingly present and always numbing Szechuan peppercorn, and the use of lamb, often with cumin. The first time I had lamb in a stir-fry was at P.F. Chang's, which shouldn't even really count, but it at least helped me realize that Chinese food shouldn't always just be about what sauce you want your chicken or beef swimming in. Savory, wild, and bursting with a rustic flavor that had nothing to do with General Tso or his counterparts, Pork Lo Mein and Wonton Soup, Chinese lamb dishes point out that there's something familiar and "country" about this part of China. So when I saw this cumin lamb stir-fry recipe on the NYT website, I was immediately ready to make it, and went out in search of lamb that same day.  

Naturally, this was a disaster. Somehow, despite watching Melissa Clark's video and following it verbatim, her magic did not translate into my kitchen. The resultant dish tasted almost right, but lacked body, and was a choking hazard when I just threw in a bunch of cilantro because it didn't call for chopping anything. So I had to modify the process to suit the average cook's home stove, which by no means can handle cooking a full pound of meat properly in one go. The second attempt was notably different, with properly seared and juicy lamb, and no choking hazards. It was every bit as good as food from the Szechuan restaurant, and if metering one's oil usage carefully, I would say it's probably more healthy as well. A definite win against the evils of professional recipes made in professional kitchens by people who can be snobby on a professional level.

Sichuan-Style Steamed and Roasted Duck

Here's a crazy duck recipe I've been sitting on for almost a decade before making - Chinese roasted duck, similar to Peking duck but with different seasoning.  An incredibly popular dish in Chinese restaurants, this is similar to the duck you see hanging in windows in Chinatowns around the world.  Making this dish clued me in to what I was actually looking at - a duck par-cooked to start the process, then basted in a sweet syrup and left to air-dry to ensure a crispy skin before being roasted.  This means that those hanging ducks, while edible, are only part of the way done.  While the process of this recipe is very similar, there are a few things I just won't be able to do, such as cook the duck in a traditional hung oven where it can be roasted over a wood fire.  I'll be trying this recipe again with a different recipe, but this was pretty delicious in its own right.  Not quite the lacquered, crispy skin that made the dish famous in Beijing, but it was really good, and a lot of fun to make.

After a bit of digging, I discovered that the flavors used to make this duck recipe are less like that of Peking duck and more like that of a Sichuan dish, Xiang Su Quan Ya.  That dish is very similar to this but fried at the end rather than roasted, and omitting the glaze.  So this recipe is somewhere between the Sichuan and Peking cooking method, but much more like the Sichuan flavorings given the use of Sichuan peppercorns.

If you haven't cooked one before, duck is really fatty.  There are a lot of things that are done to duck to try to get some of the fat out of it.  You can roast it low and slow to render out the fat while cooking.  Or you can do what the Chinese do, blow air under the skin (somehow, I can only conjecture how this is done) to loosen it and then savor every delicious bit of the crispy skin with a hint of the fluffy, roasted duck fat underneath.  I like the pre-steaming method of this recipe, similar to the other typical Chinese step of boiling briefly but done with more of an emphasis on releasing the fat in addition to shrinking and tightening the skin for a better crispness.  Plus, this duck is crammed so full of aromatic herbs, fruits, and vegetables in this step that even if you put nothing on it and ate it steamed, it would be delicious.

My recipe will modify the process slightly from the original recipe, despite my following the original more closely, to fix a few problems I found with the methods.  It also explains how to make your own Chinese 5-spice, which is amazing but POWERFUL.  A little goes a long way.

Chinatown Steamed and Roasted Duck
Recipe adapted from Tyler Florence, "Food 911: Chinese Take-Out"

• 1 whole (4 to 5 pound) duck 
• 2 tsp Chinese five-spice powder, recipe follows (note: very powerful, don't use too much)
• 2 teaspoons sugar 
• 2 teaspoons salt 
• 5 big slices fresh ginger, cut in 1/8" – 3/16” slices
• 4 garlic cloves 
• 1/2 bunch green onions 
• 1 tangerine, peel cut in big strips 
• 1/4 cup rice vinegar 
• 1/2 cup honey 
• 1/2 cup soy sauce

The ingredients, including homemade five-spice powder (recipe follows)

To diminish the fat and produce a crispy skin on your duck, begin by trimming the excess fat from the neck and body - yank out any large pieces from the butt end, basically.  Rinse the duck, inside and out, and pat dry thoroughly with paper towels.  Whether using your own mix or store-bought five-spice, combine the Chinese five-spice, sugar, and salt in a small bowl.  Rub the spice mixture all over the duck, inside and out.  The salt and five-spice powder will draw some of the moisture from the duck so that the spices penetrate.  Stuff the duck cavity with the aromatics: the ginger, garlic, green onions, and tangerine peel.  Fold the wing tips back under the duck and tie the legs together with kitchen string, tucking the tail inside the legs if it's long enough (see picture).  Score the duck breast a few times, piercing the skin but not the flesh.  This scoring step is crucial!

Rub the spice mix inside and out, then toss the aromatics together and stuff them into the duck.  Tell your taste buds to pack a bag, because they're going on vacation.

Score the skin, WITHOUT scoring the flesh.  See how deep I got the cuts?  This lets the fat literally melt out when you steam it.  A really sharp boning knife helps here.

Place a roasting pan on the stovetop over 2 burners and fill with 2-inches of water, turn the heat to medium. Set a V-rack insert inside the pan and lay the duck on the rack, breast-side up. Cover tightly with aluminum foil. Steam the duck for 45 minutes or more, checking the water level periodically. Steaming the duck first melts away some of the fat and shrinks the skin.

Not really captured too well, I wrapped a giant roasting pan in giant aluminum foil, crimping around the edges.  I recommend doing this with the pan cold, for reasons that became obvious to me shortly after starting.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. 

In a small saucepan combine the vinegar, honey, and soy sauce over low heat. Cook and stir for 5 minutes until thick. The duck will be lacquered with the sweet glaze, which caramelizes during roasting, making the skin crisp and brown. 

Whatever you do, don't walk away from the glaze while you're reducing it.  This was seconds after I noticed a near catastrophe and pulled the heat , but you can see along the inside rim of the pot how high up this sticky mess bubbled before subsiding

Take the foil off the duck, remove the rack with the duck, and pour out the water and all the fat that has rendered out (I saved this liquid and ran it through a fat separator, keeping the delicious duck fat, with intentions of making duck fried rice later this week - I recommend you do the same!)  Put the rack with the duck back on a platter or cutting board.  Baste the duck with the vinegar mixture, until all the skin is completely coated in the glaze.  Let it dry to the point that none is dripping off the duck any more - feel free to let this air-dry in the traditional style, hanging if you're creative, for as much as a day!  Now place some parchment or aluminum foil on the bottom of your roasting pan, return rack with duck to pan, and stick the whole thing in the oven.

Baste that bird!  Give it a coat, let it sit for a few minutes, then give it another coat for good measure.

Roast the duck for 1 hour, tenting breast with foil if it gets too dark.  If you're not worried about burning the glaze to the bottom of the pan, feel free to baste periodically with any remaining glaze to set in a deep mahogany color.  I did this, but it ended up making a burnt-on mess that I had to resolve by pouring in liquid, which in turn compromised my duck's crispiness.  The legs will wiggle easily when it's done.  Carve and serve. 

The finished duck.  I ended up pouring a bunch of liquid in the bottom of the pan to prevent dripped baste from burning to the bird, but do as I say, not as I do.  My directions avoid this problem.

Garnish with green onions, and sesame seeds, and serve with rice and some kind of vegetable

Homemade Chinese Five-Spice Powder

• 1 tsp. ground Szechwan pepper
• 1 tsp. ground star anise
• 1-1/4 tsp. ground fennel seeds
• 1/2 tsp. ground cloves
• 1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/4 tsp. ground white pepper

First of all, never mind that there are seven ingredients here.  Apparently salt and pepper don't count.  Use whole ingredients if you can for maximum freshness, and grind in a spice mill or coffee grinder.  Mix all ingredients in an airtight jar and store in a cool place.

If you happen to cook WAY too much like me, you may actually have all of these ingredients on-hand.  So next time you don't have five-spice, you can actually make your own

Grind all ingredients finely, one at a time to get the amounts right, and stir.  That's it!

Szechwan Eggplant and Peppers (Vegetarian)

My housemate delivered a bag of vegetables from a friend's farm, and I had to act quickly before they became one with the earth again.  So I laid them all out on the table and tried to figure out what I could make with them - eggplants, bell peppers, some other chile peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes.  While I'm relatively sure that not much can combine all of those except maybe some kind of curry or an eggplant dip with raw vegetables, I decided to leave out the salad ingredients and use just the eggplant and peppers.  And just as I was about to make a pasta dish, I revectored to a stir-fry, armed with new recipes from my friend (see here).  Thanks, Julia.

This recipe is completely homespun, borrowing some ingredients from this and some techniques from that.  I think the final product came out restaurant-quality - a little spicy, velvety, pungent from the ginger and Szechwan peppercorns, and filling.  Highly recommended if you find yourself with a couple of eggplants about to go bad, and you're sick of simply grilling them.

Don't forget your passport, because your taste buds are going on vacation

Szechwan Eggplant (with Peppers)

• 2 Japanese eggplants, cut into 1” pieces
• 2 small or 1 large bell pepper, cut into 1” pieces
• 1 hot pepper, cut into ½” rings
• 1 tbsp ginger, minced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tbsp Szechwan stir-fry sauce (see this recipe for more detail)
• 1 tsp Szechwan peppercorns, ground (optional)
• 3 tbsp canola or peanut oil
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• 1 tbsp Shaoxing wine
• 1 tsp cornstarch dissolved in 2 tbsp water
• 1 tsp sesame seeds, for garnish

The setup.  Notice what's missing?  That's right - meat!

Chop and gather all ingredients.  Heat wok until smoking over high heat, and add 1 tbsp canola and ½ tsp sesame oil to the pan.  Stir-fry half of the eggplant, stirring frequently to avoid burning, until sticky, about 3 minutes.  While eggplant is cooking, add Szechwan peppercorns, if using.  Remove to a plate, and repeat with remaining half, also removing to plate.

Make sure to have everything at the ready, or this will get screwed up

Cook the eggplant until almost sticky, and set aside.  The eggplant will absorb a lot of oil, so don't get crazy.  Just add what's in the recipe and keep stirring

Reheat wok until smoking.  Add remaining 1 tbsp canola oil to pan, and add garlic, ginger, and Szechwan stir-fry sauce.  Be sure to have the exhaust fan on high, and try not to breathe.  Stir for 10-15 seconds, then add all peppers and cook for 1-2 minutes.  Return eggplant to wok, and deglaze with Shaoxing wine.

Stir-fry the peppers after infusing the oil with the aromatics and stir-fry sauce.  This will basically create a mustard gas-like sinus nightmare, so get the fans going, and try as hard as possible NOT TO COUGH!

Stir in cornstarch and water mixture, and toss to combine.  Cook for another 30 seconds and plate immediately.  Garnish with sesame seeds, if desired.

Deglaze with wine and add some cornstarch (or tapioca starch) and water to thicken it up and provide a bit of a sauce

Szechwan Pork and Chiles

Chinese food is one of those cooking mysteries where I always suspected that I wasn't getting the whole story.  I've browsed cookbooks, watched a ton of shows, and surfed the internet trying to find out how the restaurants can get their food to taste just so.  Until yesterday, I uncovered (and spread) two commonly held beliefs, and one theory:

The beliefs:

1. The reason restaurant Chinese food tastes so good is because of the high-powered burners they use, which we don't have access to at home.
2. The reason restaurant Chinese food tastes so good is the massive amount of MSG they use.

Is this the secret to great Chinese food?

My alternate theory:

• The reason restaurant Chinese food tastes so good is that there are ingredients that nobody ever talks about, like some kind of closely guarded Buddhist secret that you may one day find in a fortune cookie, or learn on top of a very tall mountain.  Like the place Bruce Wayne went to in Batman Begins.

So after years of hard searching, I finally was able to make an awesome Szechwan dish.  The secret: I got insider help at the store and in the kitchen.  And it turns out my theory was right: we used ingredients and methods I've not seen in any of my searches.  Now, as to whether those other beliefs are true or not, I can't say, but all I know is that this dish is phenomenal, and I didn't have to crack into that 100 pound drum of MSG.

There's an adage that says "China is the place for food, but Sichuan is the place for flavor."  And they're right - Szechwan food has crazy ingredients, heat levels, and flavor combinations unlike any of the bland Cantonese food I was used to, so naturally I have developed a healthy addiction to it.  But in searching for Szechwan recipes I came up with little of substance; ingredient lists typically consisted of soy sauce, hoisin, oyster sauce, and other things that I didn't think were quite on the mark.  All I knew is that there are these crazy Szechwan peppercorns which produce a numbing sensation, which I promptly bought the first time I saw them but couldn't figure out how to use.

The mystery remained until I met a friend who said she could help me.  We met at a large Asian grocery store and wandered around, and while I tried to grab at ingredients I knew, she was steering me towards all of those aisles that I've never figured out.  If you've ever been in an Asian grocery store (this is mostly for non-Asian people), you might agree that there are vegetables you've never seen and jars of sauces and liquids with poor English labeling, both of which you tend to breeze right past.  And it turns out that these are the secret to good Chinese food, right under our noses but hidden in a sea of Chinese characters.

The dish (and the following one) presented here are both 'home-cooked' Chinese dishes; this one is Szechwan, the other one I have no idea.  It is basically pork with chiles in a chile sauce, similarly named to a dish which killed all of my taste buds for two weeks at a Thai restaurant in Sydney.  I was having flashbacks about the heat level, but excited to give it a go.  The ingredient list is short, but if you don't know what to look for you won't find it.  So I will try to help.  And as always, if anyone reading this has good suggestions, additions, or substitutions, post them so we can all see.