Hot and numbing chicken slices

This recipe is from Fuchsia Dunlop's Sichuan Cookery. It is probably the one dish from all of her books that I have made the most often over the years. It is so easy to make and yields deliciously addictive results every time.

You can use it to spice up shop bought cooked chicken to satisfy a craving, put leftover bits of chicken to exciting new use or throw it together and impress friends, whether they are novices to Sichuan cuisine or not. The dish can be made saltier or sweeter, chilli hot or mild, mouth-numbingly electric or gently tingling.  Served alongside a dish of garlicky smacked cucumbers and salty sour pickles (as pictured above) its a lovely cold starter before a spicy Sichuan feast.

In order to make the ground roasted Sichuan pepper, gently heat Sichuan peppercorns in a dry pan until they start to smoke and smell very fragrant. Be extremely careful not to keep the pan on the heat for much longer or you will burn the delicate spices - you will know this has happened as the ground result will taste bitter and not very nice at all.  I tend to roast and grind small amounts at a time, so it's not too devastating when I do burn my spices and to keep the ground Sichuan pepper powder from becoming stale and tasteless as it loses its flavour over time.

To grind the Sichuan peppers I use a brilliant Braun spice grinder from the Eighties that my mum handed down to me, but a pestle and mortar is just as good. Shake the ground powder through a relatively fine meshed sieve afterwards to get rid of the tougher, woodier bits of the spice and store any unused peppercorn powder in a tightly sealed jar.

The chicken is easier to slice when cold, but I prefer eating the dish at room temperature, or even lightly warmed in an oven on colder days.

Ingredients:
about 350g of cold chicken - a mix of leg and breast meat is ideal
4-6 spring onions, white and light green parts only
4 teaspoons of white sugar
3 tablespoons light soy sauce
3-6 tablespoons of chilli oil with sediment (Lee Kum Kee Chiu Chow Chilli Oil is my favourite)
2 teaspoons of sesame oil
a teaspoon of ground roasted Sichuan pepper

Slice the chicken across the grain of the meat as it will be more tender to eat. So for example with the breast you want to make slices across the breast not down along the length of it. Slice the spring onions thinly but diagonally so that you get relatively large slivers rather than little rounds. These slivers will be more similar to the chicken slices in size, making it easier to pair similar sized pieces of both together when you eat them. Cover the bottom of your serving dish with the spring onions and then add the chicken over the top. At this point I like to either warm the chicken pieces a little or leave them covered for 20 minutes to come up to room temperature before continuing.

In a smaller bowl, add the soy sauce and sugar and stir it will a spoon or a finger until the sugar dissolves. Add the chilli and sesame oils, stir again and taste the result. Adjust the seasoning if you prefer more salt, sweet or chilli.

When you are happy with the dressing, pour it over the chicken and toss everything together. Sprinkle over the Sichuan pepper and serve immediately.

Lobster Night

9 minutes in boiling water salted so it tastes like seawater. Happy Valentine's Day!

Bo London

A bunch of us went to check out Bo London last week.

This is Alvin Leung's foray into the London market following his success in Hong Kong with Bo Innovation - two Michelin starred and 52nd in Restaurant Magazine's 'World's 50 Best Restaurants' listings. In Hong Kong, Alvin Leung as styled himself as a 'Demon Chef', general rock and roller and master of what he calls 'Xtreme Chinese' cuisine. Certainly he may be one of the first to more successfully break down the fundamentals of Chinese cuisine and attempt to build something more modern and different, without the result appearing to be a trite form of cultural cut and paste. But as with all fusion it seems to me that it is hard to judge what true culinary symbiosis should look and taste like. Visually, Leung's cuisine resembles Western fine dining more than Asian banquet, but his dishes use Chinese flavours and are evocative of classic dishes and traditions. His methods appear to employ Asian and Western techniques, although I doubt you would see a wok in his kitchen, and more likely a sous vide machine and a dehumidifier.

Having been, and eaten, and thought, Alvin Leung's food is indeed very good. Pricey. But good. It seems to me he is trying to do two things - in Hong Kong he is trying to dare the conservative Chinese palate to accept new twists on a cuisine that is steeped in history and tradition. And in the West he is trying to demonstrate that a chef serving Chinese cuisine can move beyond Lazy Susans and monkey's brains and into the same space occupied by globally recognised masters such as Ferran Adrià, Thomas Keller and Alain Ducasse. Its a big challenge, and I'll be interested to see if he can achieve it.

We went for the Ode to Great Britain menu, despite some hard selling to opt for the 14 course Chef's Menu, priced at £138 and described as being more representative of his cooking at Hong Kong's Bo Innovation. Comparing the Hong Kong and London menus I found roughly seven dishes that definitely appeared on at least one menu in both cities, but since the 12 course Ode to Great Britain contained three of these, along with some newly developed dishes, it sounded more interesting. And cheaper.

Definitely looked like a dead English winter garden. And a nod to Rene Redzepi's dish at Noma of vegetables planted in malt soil. It was unexpectedly delicious - morel mushroom 'soil' over a foamy, light-as-air avocado and lime purée, littered with dried green onion (a very common Chinese veg) stalks and planted with dehydrated enoki mushrooms. Considering how mildly flavoured enoki are I was surprised to find them were very tasty dried. The savoury tang of dried mushrooms worked well with the lime and green onion flavours.

How could this not be my favourite dish? More Oscietra caviar than I have seen all year, and delicately piled on top of a sandalwood smoked, soft yolked quail's egg, nestled in fried taro like a luxury dim sum. Salty, eggy, smokey and crisp.

Raw mackerel, hint of sesame and salty sour ponzu foam. A lovely bite, though I missed the rose note mentioned in the menu. On the Hong Kong version it's called 'parfum de Hong Kong' - a play on Hong Kong not exactly smelling of roses?

Oops. A very fine take on classic xiao long bao - the steamed buns that contain a liquid soup as well as filling. These were meaty with kidneys and steak, balanced with ginger and fishy reformed herring's roe.

Tomato - part one. Peeled and poached in sweet Chinese Pat Chun vinegar. Sweet and sour, soft and savoury. 

Part two of 'Tomato' - a peeled soft cherry tomato encased in Chinese puff-like pastry, which exploded in your mouth in the same way a ripe summer's tomato does. A shame that tomatoes are not currently at their best, as in season no doubt its flavour would be even more satisfyingly intense. 

And finally (for tomatoes anyway), tomato marshmallow - a puff of tomato air. 

Juicy langoustine, chewy salted yolk, cauliflower-crunch and mild English mustard spike. An unusual composition and faultless.

A surprise extra course, introduced as a dish in development, with our thoughts welcomed. The salmon was too salty but otherwise delicious, cured in salted kumquat and served with firm yet bouncy wasabi noodles

Hawthorn bubble tea, with passion fruit purée, tapioca pearls and dramatic LED uplighting - lights, camera...

Pigeon breast, rich and meaty, with tortellini-esque dumplings labelled as Chinese jiaozi but very different in shape. These were quite stodgy and less impressive than the beautifully cooked pigeon and its accompanying broth. 

A far more elaborate toad in the hole than its original. The Chinese yorkie was a type of Chinese style fried batter which while wonderful in its own environment did not match up to the traditional Yorkshire pud. I enjoyed seeing lotus seed, leaf and root all appear together on a plate, but my Western friends did not appreciate the significance. While the dish was delicious it was hard to see any resemblance to classic Toad in the Hole, or any Chinese equivalent.

Beans on toast as you have never seen them before.

One of the four little dim sum we finished with - a classic glutinous rice ball with black sesame filling.

My favourite little finish - white chocolate with preserved mandarin filling - a really clever take on a classic Chinese preserved snack. Not everyone liked this, I think the flavour of the filling probably seems quite weird if you haven't tried it before.  

Fäviken, Sweden

Pronounced 'Fair-VI-ken', last night was an experience that put Magnus Nilsson and his exceptional approach to ingredients into our group of top four favourite restaurants. Fäviken sits alongside longside Noma, El Bulli and Arzak. But please don't ask me to try to put them in any kind of order!

After an eye-opening evening,  Magnus came to chat, charming his guests table by table. It was the icing on the cake to find him so gentle and personable. He happily explained his methods for each dish when asked, and we had an interesting discussion that included comparing his Swedish ättika vinegar with British non-brewed condiment for fish and chips and how he makes the skin on his squeaky fresh curd cheese.

Magnus' approach to his food seems to me to be similar in some ways to Fergus Henderson's of St John. Most notably in its adherence to a set of self defined fundamental principles. All his ingredients must be sourced locally and available at that time in the season. This resulted in a scarcity of vegetables in our dinner, and any that did appear were generally pickled, fermented or preserved in some other way. And his dishes are not there to appeal to the masses, but instead to give the diner an experience of what lives and grows on the Fäviken estate and to eating, Magnus Nilsson style.

This is what we had:

To start, a succession of little savoury treats while we reclined in the downstairs lounge:

• Thin, transparent crackers with flax seeds and a blue shell mussel emulsion for dipping.
• Warm teacup with whey and a square of freshly made cheese (left to form a skin for about half an hour) and powdered lavender.
• Fresh, unseasoned wild trout roe in dried pigs blood croustade with sea salt flakes.
• A lollipop of pig's head meat dipped in sourdough batter, deep fried and topped with a slice of fermented gooseberry and pine salt.
• Reindeer 'cloud' lichen dusted with dried trout roe and icelandic lichen with dried egg, served with a mild garlic cream.
• Thin slices of cured wild goose.

Then we were invited upstairs to the dining room, decorated with hanging sides of cured pork and bunches of dried flowers, to enjoy:

• Scallop au natural, cooked in its shell over birch coals, cleaned and served in its own juices on moss and juniper wood.
• Hot plate seared langoustine with 'burnt cream' - cream cooked down until it caramalised and thickened.
• King crab leg poached in butter and burnt onion infused 'ättika' vinegar, with lobes of burnt shallots and an emulsion made from burnt onion, egg and king crab stock.
• Cod brushed with honey and pan seared and a quartered preserved carrot, cooked in whey, both served with spruce oil and ättica vinegar jelly.
• Raw blue shell mussel dusted in powdered birch leaf, with raw Brussels sprouts and toasted sunflower seed emulsion.
• Pea flour tart with sea urchin, sea urchin cream and pickled Rowan berries.
• Porridge with fresh and toasted local seeds and grains, a lump of salted butter, fermented root vegetables, dried chives, beef broth and chive oil.
• Cow femur marrow roasted and sawed open in the dining room, served mixed with raw ox heart and grated turnip, to be topped on toast and sprinkled with green lovage salt.
• Seared beef (hung for a month and then aged for four more months), shaved raw vegetables - beetroot, carrot and turnip and soft, shredded sour onions. 

• Blueberry ice, lingon berries preserved in water served with sour cream and sugar.
• Egg yolk preserved in sugar on pine bark flour cake, with meadowsweet ice cream (churned by our table) and preserving liquor.
• Raspberry jam, whisked duck's egg and milk sorbet.

 To finish we were taken downstairs again to drink herbal tea or coffee, and nibble from a wooden box containing:

• Paper twists of raspberry sorbet, freshly baked cake, meadowsweet candy, a salty sweet tart of sticky birch sap with shavings of cured reindeer, sunflower nougat, smoked toffee, pickled gooseberries, pine resin, tar liquorice and dried blackberries.

Here's the photos and comments:

Menu for dinner on January10 2013

Welcoming fire pits on arrival, along with Johan and Sara, who braved minus 10 degree temperatures in only a cardigan.

The downstairs lounge.

An alchemist's dream of pickled and dried ingredients behind the bar, and a reindeer fur coat.

Slightly salty-sour and very moreish, the dip reminded me of unsmoked taramaslata, or the fish roe pastes the Swedish seem to be fond of.

Surprisingly unseasoned except for the sea salt flakes, so you tasted more of the 'fishiness' of the roe, in contrast to the deeply earthy dried pigs blood mixed into the pastry casing.

Warm and comforting, with a thin skin that burst to release the creamy curds inside. Couldn't taste the lavender myself. 

One of the highlights. Fried outside, slightly sour, gooey batter and then soft, fatty meat, gooseberry tang and a floral pine finish. You could eat bowls of these.  

This was pretty weird. I liked the texture of the cloud lichen, but the flatter Icelandic lichen tasted bitter and I couldn't taste the dehydrated egg yolk 

Very dark, strong tasting, blood-rich meat. Reminded me of the elk we have tried. 

Upstairs dining room.

Interior decoration.

Beautiful presentation.

So simple - perfectly cooked and sweet, with salty, smoky cooking juices.

Incredibly seawater juicy and soft. The 'almost burnt' cream was a subtle but well conceived foil for the meat.

Another juicy piece of shellfish, this time buttery and mildly sour, paired with tastes of charred onion. The ättika vinegar used here is apparently historically a uniquely Swedish product - similar to acetic vinegar but made from wood. Ferociously strong, here it was infused with burnt onion and became the dark brown sour note, blended with melted butter. 

The combination of soft, flaky cod, sour slightly chewy carrot and sharp ättika jelly was sensational, all rounded off with the clean, floral taste of the spruce oil.

Interesting...raw shellfish, green, leafy powder, almost cloying sunflower seed paste and raw sprout crunch. Wasn't entirely sure what to make of this - tasty yes, but I wouldn't go for a main course sized portion.

Despite sea urchin being one of my favourite things, this was challenging. Not sea urchin in the Japanese super clean, super sweet sense, but in the Mediterranean earthy, tastes of the sea, slightly bitter sense, with floury almost sandy pastry and sharp pickled rowan berries. 

Absolutely heavenly, another highlight. Different textures of toasted, crunchy, chewy seeds and soft oat porridge, a very light beef stock and the chives only adding a mild note due to being dried.

Oops I forgot to take a photo of the raw ox heart with bone marrow. The heart was an interesting texture, surprisingly tender with  little bounce. I liked the celery-ish lovage salt. Here is Magnus having at the ox leg bone with a hacksaw.

The white, silky sour onions underneath the discs of raw root vegetables were an unusual accompaniment to the beef - looking almost like horseradish cream but tasting sour and fermented instead. The beef was deeply meaty. We realised why it tastes so intense when Sara told us it had been matured for 5 months in total.

Who wouldn't like blueberry sorbet?

A taste from Magnus' childhood - his grandmother would give him thick sour cream with lingon berries preserved in water. A lovely, delicate sweet. 

This tasted overall of liquorice and honey, chewy-sweetish yolk and crunchy crumbs.

Churning the sour milk sorbet.

The whisked duck egg seemed too rich to me, but I find duck eggs almost too...much so this is a personal thing. Sour sweet raspberry jam and cool milk ice. The whole thing reminded me of a cold savarin, sort of.

What a lovely box of treats. The reindeer and birch resin tarts were sensational. We all liked the paper wrapped raspberry sorbets, toffees, nougat wrapped in leaves, sour gooseberries, dried blackberries and golden meadowsweet candies. The tar liquorice was for those liquorice lovers out there and the pine resin that looked like an inviting square of chocolate? Very good for your teeth and breath apparently. Think everlasting Christmas tree chewing gum.

What a dinner!


Magnus has also recently published his cookbook - Fäviken


Fäviken Magasinet
Fäviken 216
830 05 Järpen

Tel: 0647-401 77
Fax: 0647-401 47
email: info@favikenmagasinet.se

Singapore Street Food

Five days in Singapore turned out to be a lively multicultural street food extravaganza. We tried snacks from China, Malaysia, India and elsewhere, along with those that were uniquely Singaporean.

'Uniquely' Singaporean - that's a strange one. A tiny collection of islands on the southern tip of Malaysia, Singapore seemed to me to be a smorgasbord of cultures. For such a small country it boasts four national languages - English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil. And each of these have themselves been morphed into a new, singularly Singaporean form. The place is a multi-lingual mind bender - my daily conversations with everyone from taxi drivers to market stall holders veered wildly from sing-song English to accented Cantonese to modified Mandarin. Trying to understand the locals while not falling into various linguistic potholes created by localised slang and tonal differences was challenging, but also fun in a 'hey look at me, I'm speaking three languages at once!' kind of way.

The food unsurprisingly reflected this crazy blend of cultures. I was bowled over by the huge variety of 'hawker stalls' and how much locals know and love to share with others their favourite places and dishes. Here's some examples:

Oyster omelette at Singapore Food Trail, Singapore Flyer. Bit greasy, and sea salty, and eggy. Hm.

Carrot cake, made from daikon, chopped and fried in an omelette, unlike the cakes studded with Chinese sausage and spring onion eaten in Chinese dim sum restaurants. I prefer my more familiar dim sum version, but this was interesting to try.

Fried oysters stall at Singapore Food Trail.

Bak Kut Teh - a herbal soup with soft pork ribs and soft, slow cooked garlic. Almost ginseng-like in flavour, although it's not one of the ingredients. A lovely, soothing broth that feels like it's good for you.

The Bak Kut Teh soup stall, also at Singapore Flyer.

Geyland Serai wet market - so clean!!

Not a bit of mess anywhere.

The famous Sinar Pagi Nasi Padang stall at Geyland Serai market, which always has a queue.

Sotong Hitam - Squid stewed in a black ink sauce - soft, spicy, rich and full of deep chilli undertones. One of the best things I ate that week. Really moreish and comforting.

The full Indonesian - nasi padang - rice with my choice of fried beef lungs (paru belado), quails eggs in sambal, young tapioca leaves in coconut milk, fried chicken (arum bumbo) topped with fried chicken floss, pickles (atchar) and of course plenty of chilli sauce.

Turtle soup at the Old Airport Road food centre, an enormous, buzzing hive of hungry visitors and frenetic stall chefs. Considered to be a tonic or healing soup, it uses the gelatinous 'skin' under the shell, the legs and the innards. Despite my initial doubts, having never tried turtle before, I was intrigued to find that what I have heard - that turtle is incredibly tasty, seems to be true. The soup was really, seriously delicious. The flavour was complex and almost spicy in its herbal-ness. Again I thought of ginseng, but according to the stallholder there is nothing else in the soup except turtle, red dates and goji berries. If this is true then the taste of turtle is something I would love to learn more about...will have to try some other versions.

Delicious, lightly sweetened beancurd from Lao Ban Soya Bean Curd, which has been so successful they now have four or five outlets and a website. Their beancurd has a lovely, delicate texture. It is not quite the same as Chinese 'flower' bean curd, with its ginger and rock sugar syrup dressing, but it was very refreshing and a welcome palate cleanser.

The ladies at Freshly Made Chee Cheong Fun in action.

Scallop and prawn cheong fun - not bad. The steamed rice rolls are notoriously different to cook as they can easily overcook. The rolls should be steamed until they are soft and slippery, while each layer is still distinct - so you could unravel the roll if you wanted to. Steamed a moment more and they will overcook, melting into a stodgy mush.

Big prawn noodle soup from Whitley Road Big Prawn Noodle - impressively rich and aromatic prawn broth, with bouncy firm noodles - deeply satisfying.

Sliced pig's intestines and trotters from Blanco Court Food Centre, in an offaly gravy and served with a chilli and tamarind sauce for dipping. The sauce made the dish, balancing soft earthy textures with hot spicy tastes.

Roast duck, barbecued pork (char siu) and roast pork belly at Chinatown Complex. The char siu was especially tasty - soft meat, sweet honeyed glaze and chewy charred edges.

Fish slice and fish ball soup with minced pork. The fish balls were handmade - not bad, if more suited to Asian palates and their love of textures.

Satay street outside Lau Pa Sat. The indoor food stalls are busy by day serving central business district workers, where the building is located. Outside the charcoal grills fire up after dark and Singaporeans crowd in to drink beer and dunk meat into peanut and chilli sauces.

Lau Pa Sat - deserted at night.

Charcoal grilled prawns, chicken and beef - smoky, sweet and moreish.

Erm, not exactly street food! A farewell dinner at Waku Ghin - Australian chef Wakuda Tetsuya's Singaporean outpost and an extravagant treat. This dish features two of my all time favourite things in the world (and some deep sea raw sweet shrimp) - sea urchin and Oscietra caviar. Oh. Wow.

Fresh wasabi root grated on shark's skin. Now I want to own a shark skin grater. Oh dear.

And finally, two little rolls of fatty Wagyu beef, seared on the outside, served with wasabi and lightly deep fried garlic chips.

Bye bye Singapore - what an awesome, awesome trip.