Chinese food in Myanmar

Posted on February 19, 2017 by lla

Last month, while traveling through Myanmar (aka Burma), I received notice of a new post from The Sandy Food Chronicles. The headline read” In Myanmar: Ham Choy in Monnyinjin”. She writes about finding the Hakka salted mustard greens (ham choy) in the Shan state near Inle Lake. What a coincidence, I am in the same area. A few days later I find a dish of pickled mustard greens and radish tops on the table, ready to add to my noodle soup.

I didn’t meet anyone who identified as Hakka but I’m sure they must be here. The Chinese population in Myanmar is roughly 3% and most come from Guangdong, Fujian, and Yunnan. The Chinese have invested in development in this country, so many Chinese have come to work and live here.

Since Myanmar is bordered by China, India, Laos, and Thailand, it’s not surprising to taste those influences in the cuisine. Chinese and Indian flavors strongly show up. Our guide tells us that most restaurants serve Chinese food, because customers prefer it since they can eat Burmese food at home. That was also true 40 years ago when I first visited Burma in the mid-70’s, I came here to report on Burmese food but no restaurants served it, only Chinese food. I could only find Burmese food in homes, not restaurants. Luckily, I had connections and was able to visit a family and eat a home-cooked Burmese meal. For me, there are many similarities in a Chinese and Burmese meal. Both are centered around rice.

Soy-braised pork belly resembles similar Hakka dish in this typical Burmese meal.

My photos show some of the dishes we ate on our recent tour. Lots of meat and vegetable stir-fries, noodles, and stir-fried vegetables show a strong Chinese hand. The soy-braised pork belly reminded me of Hakka stews.

Simple meat and potato curries were less complex and spicy than Indian versions. Light and brothy soups with a few vegetables were present at most meals. Some were thickened with legumes.

The salads boast a distinctive Burmese flavor– vegetables lightly dressed with lime juice, chile, ground dried shrimp, fried shallots, fish sauce, and peanuts. Condiments such as relishes, chile pastes, and pickles allow diners to tailor dishes to their taste.

Burmese tomato salad in back, Chinese noodles in front

Chinese New Year long life noodles

Posted on January 4, 2017 by lla

Happy New Year! Khiung Hee Fat Choy! 恭禧發財! On January 28, 2017 we celebrate Chinese New Year. This year will be the Year of the Rooster.

Food plays an important element of this celebration. Many traditional New Year dishes using ingredients with auspicious symbols and meanings appear on the new year’s table. Many family favorites also appear at the dinner.

I adapted this noodle recipe for the family potluck. The noodles symbolize long life. These noodles can be made ahead, served at room temperature, and are highly transportable. The easy sauce that dresses the noodles is adapted from Fresh Ginger-Onion Sauce on page 66 of The Hakka Cookbook. I have used the zesty sauce on noodles and added a few crunchy vegetables to make a room temperature side dish. This sauce is often served with Steeped Chicken (pages 22, 23), Salt-Baked Chicken (page 64), or Salt-Poached Chicken (page 226). For a festive meal, serve the noodles with one of these Hakka chicken preparations.

Fresh Ginger-Onion Long Life Noodles

If desired, add 2 tablespoons Chinese black vinegar (Chinkiang) or rice vinegar to the sauce for a slight tang.

Makes 6 to 8 side-dish servings

Noodles:

1 pound dried Chinese wheat noodles

3 or 4 stalks celery, thinly sliced on the diagonal

1 red bell pepper, cut in thin slivers

Fresh Ginger-Onion Sauce

1/3 cup minced peeled fresh ginger

3 tablespoons minced green onions, including green tops

1 tablespoon minced garlic

1/3 cup vegetable oil

2 tablespoons soy sauce, or to taste

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, or to taste

1. For the noodles: In a 6 to 8 quart pan over high heat bring about 3 quarts water to a boil. Add noodles, stir to separate and cook until noodles are barely tender to bite, 5 or 6 minutes. Drain and rinse with water well. Drain well and place in a large bowl. Add celery and red pepper.

2. For the ginger-onion sauce: In a 1 1/2 to 2 cup heatproof bowl, mix the ginger, onion, and garlic. In a small pan over high heat cook the oil until it ripples when the pan is tilted and is very hot, 1 to 2 minutes. Pour the hot oil over the ginger mixture (it will bubble vigorously) and mix well. Add 2 tablespoons soy sauce and 1/2 teaspoon salt.

3. Pour Ginger-Onion Sauce over noodles and mix well. Add more soy sauce and salt to taste, if desired. Serve warm or cool.

Holiday gift: The Hakka Cookbook

Posted on December 12, 2016 by lla

large version of cover of The Hakka Cookbook

Best Chinese Cuisine Cookbook 2012 by Gourmand World Cookbook Awards

Need a holiday gift for your Hakka children or foodie friend? Consider The Hakka Cookbook. It’s a perfect and unique gift especially for Hakka who want to learn more about their history, heritage, and cuisine. The book tells the story of the migration of China’s “guest people” known as the Hakka. It follows my journey to discover my own Hakka identity as I travel and interview Hakka throughout the world. These transplanted Hakka share their stories and their food. Through the easy-to-follow recipes, cook your way to the Hakka soul.

Ask your local bookstore to order The Hakka Cookbook for you. Or buy online. Check this link for sources and details. Online retailers such as Amazon (North America, France, Germany, UK, Japan, and Canada) and Kinokuniya Online Store Bookweb (Southeast Asia) have sold the book in the past.

Easy winter melon soup

Posted on December 1, 2016 by lla

Winter melon soup sometimes appears at Chinese banquets, often steamed and grandly served in a whole melon. You don’t need to wait for a banquet to eat this delicious, soothing soup. It’s easy to make a simple version of this Chinese classic at home.

Look for the frosty white-tinged green-skinned melons with snowy white flesh at farmers’ markets and Asian supermarkets. The melon’s size can equal that of a large watermelon so it is often cut and sold in chunks. When simmered in broth the flesh softens into delicate morsels with a mild, soothing, refreshing taste.

This Hakka home-style version uses ground meat for a quick weeknight soup. Feel free to embellish with bits of ham, seafood, or mushrooms.

Easy Winter Melon Soup

Makes 6 servings as part of a multi-course meal

8 cups chicken broth

6 slices fresh ginger, lightly crushed

2 pounds winter melon

1 large carrot, sliced 1/4-inch thick (optional)

8 ounces ground pork, chicken, or turkey

1 tablespoon minced garlic

1 tablespoon cornstarch

1 tablespoon Chinese rice wine (shaoxing) or dry sherry

1 tablespoon soy sauce

About 1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup chopped cilantro

1. In a 4-quart pan over high heat, bring broth and ginger to a boil.

2. Meanwhile, cut skin off melon and scoop out and discard seeds. Cut melon into about 1-inch chunks. Add melon and carrot to broth. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low, cover and simmer until melon is almost tender when pierced and translucent, 10 to 20 minutes.

3. Meanwhile, mix pork, garlic, cornstarch, wine, soy sauce, and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Drop 1/2-inch wide lumps of pork mixture into soup. Bring to a boil, cover and simmer until pork is no longer pink in center of thickest part, about 5 minutes. Remove ginger slices, if desired. Skim off fat and discard. Add salt to taste and cilantro. Ladle soup into bowls.

Hakka stuffed tofu

Posted on October 28, 2016 by lla

I have been following The Sandy Food Chronicles as she explores Hakka heritage recipes. In a recent post, she discovers the complexities of Hakka stuffed tofu (釀豆腐 nyiong tiu fu, yong dau foo) in Singapore.

I remember eating this Hakka classic there in 2004. On our first day, we wandered into a food court and tasted the Singapore style of stuffed tofu. The filling goes into many options besides tofu–chilies, eggplant, bean curd skin, bitter melon. This vendor used the Cantonese filling, a rather bland, smooth fish paste.

A few days later, we ate lunch with a Hakka family. The Hakka version of stuffed tofu appeared on the table. The filling, pebbled with ground pork, boasted a deeper, more robust flavor and coarser texture than what we had eaten a few days earlier. Doreen Ho explained that the Hakka version always contains some pork. Since the Hakka originally lived inland with no access to seafood, they used pork for the filling. As they migrated to coastal areas, some adapted to local ingredients and often added seafood to the filling. There are as many variations to this filling as cooks. Some fillings contain all pork, some add fish, fresh or salted, and some add shrimp, fresh or dried. For recipes in The Hakka Cookbook, see pages 31 to 34, 76, 215, 106. What’s your favorite filling?

In her post, Sandy mentions The Food Canon’s recipe for Auntie Ruby’s Hakka Yong Tau Foo. The recipe looks mouth-watering, as well as authentic and achievable. The blog’s author, Terry Wong, has a new cookbook, Mum’s Classics Revived coming out soon. It is about home-cooking in Singapore and Malaysia. The book looks promising, check it out.

New ways with Hakka pork belly

Posted on September 12, 2016 by lla

Pork Belly with Preserved Mustard Greens at the Hakka Restaurant in San Francisco

One of the most popular Hakka dishes is Pork Belly with Preserved Mustard Greens (扣肉梅菜kiu ngiuk moi choi or kou rou mei cai). In a recent post on The Sandy Food Chronicles, Sandra Lue writes about the version she tasted at The Hakka Restaurant in San Francisco. I also love Chef Li’s version–dark, soft, succulent, salty, and a bit fatty– he captures the Hakka flavor.

In my book research, I found every cook seemed to have their own version of this dish. Lue shares a few recipes she discovers which I am eager to try. Her post reminded me of another version from Fah Liong, a Hakka from Indonesia. I used many of her recipes in The Hakka Cookbook, but did not have room for her variation on Pork Belly with Preserved Greens. She replaces the salt-and- sugar preserved mustard greens (moi choy) with a more natural salt-free option, sun-dried bok choy (also called cole). She layers the pork slices in the center of the greens so the meat juices can travel through the greens more evenly. Since the pork hides in the center, there’s no need to unmold the dish; just dig in. Serve this homey dish with plenty of rice.

Hakka Pork Belly with Dried Bok Choy

Makes 4 to 6 servings as a main course or 8 to 10 servings as part of a multi-course meal

3 ounces dried bok choy (also called cole), about half a package

1 piece (1 to 1 1/2 pounds) boneless pork belly with skin, preferably with a high proportion of meat

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 tablespoons chopped garlic

1 1/2 cups Chinese rice wine (shaoxing) or dry sherry

3 tablespoons dark soy sauce (or 2 tablespoons light soy sauce and 1 tablespoon molasses)

2 teaspoons sugar

1. In a large bowl soak the dried bok choy in hot water until soft and pliable, changing water occasionally, at least 2 hours or up to overnight. Drain and rinse vegetable. Gather the stem ends together, wring out the water, trim off and discard tough ends, and cut the vegetable crosswise into 1 inch pieces.

2. With a knife tip or fork, prick the skin of pork belly all over. Place a 14-inch wok or 12-inch frying pan over high heat. When pan is hot, about 1 minute, add the oil, and rotate the pan to spread. Set the pork, skin-down, in the pan. Cook, pressing down on pork, until the skin is well browned, 2 to 3 minutes. Reduce heat to medium and continue cooking on all sides until well browned. Lift out of pan and cut the pork across grain in 2- to 3-inch sections. Then cut each section with the grain into 1/2-inch wide slices.

3. Remove all the fat from the pan except for 2 teaspoons. Return the pan to medium-high heat. Add the garlic and stir until soft, about 30 seconds. Add the wine, dark soy sauce, and sugar. Bring to a boil. Add the bok choy and pork. Simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until 1/2 to 3/4 cup liquid remains, 15 to 25 minutes.

4. With a slotted spoon, lift out and arrange half the bok choy in a shallow 5- to 8-cup bowl. Arrange pork slices, overlapping slightly, if needed, in an even layer over vegetable. Cover with remaining vegetable. Skim off and discard fat from any remaining pan juices and pour evenly over vegetable.

5. Set the dish on a rack over 2 to 4 inches boiling water in a steamer (at least 1 inch wider than dish) or wok (if bottom is round, place on a wok ring to stabilize). If the steamer lid is metal, wrap the lid with a towel to reduce condensation dripping on the food. Cover and steam over high heat until the pork is very tender when pierced, about 2 hours. Watch the water level, adding more boiling water as needed. Carefully remove the dish from steamer and serve from bowl. Or if desired, set a plate on top of the bowl and invert. Lift off bowl.

Hakka pork-stuffed tofu

Posted on August 9, 2016 by lla

Last weekend, Lorraine Witte, The Chinese Lady and author, invited me to her kitchen to cook some dishes from The Hakka Cookbook. We cooked a famous Hakka classic, stuffed tofu (niong dou fu). This dish was invented as a result of migration. When the Hakka migrated to the south, they wanted to make the dumpling they had eaten in the north. They could not find the wheat flour needed to make the dumpling wrappers so they improvised and stuffed the meat filling into chunks of tofu.

You can watch us cooking pork stuffed tofu here. The full recipe appears on page 33 of The Hakka Cookbook and originally came from Natalie Com Liu who taught me in her kitchen in Lima, Peru.

There are many variations to stuffed tofu. The original filling was pork because the Hakka lived inland. As they migrated to the coasts, they often added seafood. The tofu could be steamed, deep-fried, poached, or pan-browned and braised. This steamed version is one of the simplest. Feel free to embellish the ginger-scented pork filling to your tastes.

Hakka radish dumpling

Posted on July 24, 2016 by lla

At the end of my talk at the Toronto Hakka Conference someone asked me if I had a recipe for Radish Dumplings (lo pet ban ???). She described it as a steamed dumpling filled with shredded daikon radish that her Hakka grandmother had made in Jamaica. She had been trying to recreate it. Unfortunately, I did not know this dumpling.

Later another new friend Sandra Lue, author of the The Sandy Food Chronicles, also asked me about the dumpling. She, too, tried to create the dumpling but had problems with the dumpling skin.

When she mentioned dumpling skin, I recalled that I did develop a recipe for a Hakka steamed dumpling I had seen in Singapore. I could not recall the filling but remember testing it many times but left it out of the final manuscript because I wasn’t sure if it was good enough. It was a long recipe and a bit tricky to make, so I decided to omit it. I promised Sandra I would look for my recipe and perhaps she could make it work. I finally found the recipe and find it isn’t the same dumpling. My version does not contain the key ingredient–daikon radish.

However in my search, I discovered I had saved a couple of links to blog posts with recipes or descriptions of this Hakka Radish Dumpling. I am sharing these links so those who know this dumping can refine these recipes to recreate their grandmother’s dumpling.

http://morethanonemoreday.blogspot.ca/2010/07/jamaican-hakka-chinese-lo-pet-ban.html

http://alittlebitofplumleaf.blogspot.ca/2011/02/hakka-steamed-radish-dumpling-law-pet.html

Please share your recipe if you do!

Hakka in Toronto

Posted on June 3, 2016 by lla

I’m working on my presentation for the upcoming Toronto Hakka Conference. Of course, I will be talking about food.

I will be in Toronto a few extra days and wonder where to eat. Do you have any suggestions for restaurants with Hakka chefs in the Toronto area? Would love to know where you eat and what your favorite dishes are. What’s new? I know many Hakka chefs come from India but have heard there are some with Jamaican roots. Please share your suggestions with me!

Visit Toronto Hakka Conference to register and see the program. From July 1 to 3, participants have a chance to meet Hakka from all over the world. Listen to experts speak about subjects ranging from Hakka genealogy, food, dialects, history, and much more. The Toronto area holds a concentration of Hakka from that spans the globe. At my first conference in 2008 I connected with many Hakka and interviewed them for The Hakka Cookbook, Chinese Soul Food from around the World.

Stir-fried Chinese lettuce

Posted on April 21, 2016 by lla

Last weekend, I saw the whole stalks of Chinese lettuce (? ?) sold in San Francisco Chinatown. With leafy greens sprouting from a long, thick stem, it looks like a little tree. This vegetable goes by many names–A-choy, stem lettuce, Taiwan lettuce, celtuce, won sun, ching woh, qin woh sun. The tops resemble romaine lettuce, which makes a good substitute. The thick stems have the texture of broccoli stems or kohlrabi with a lettuce flavor.

In China, I saw the vegetable sold with leaves attached to the stalk. In America, I find the tops and stems are often sold separately. The thick stalk-like stem resembles a broccoli stem in texture. Peel it deeply reach the tender interior. Slice the stems to use for pickles, stir-fries, and soups. The leaves can be cut and stir-fried or added to soups.

On page 57 of The Hakka Cookbook, try the recipe for Stir-Fried Chinese Lettuce, Garlic, and Black Beans. If you can’t find the Chinese lettuce, use romaine lettuce but cut the leaves in half lengthwise if wider than 3 inches. The process is simple. Cut the lettuce leaves into about 3-inch lengths. Wash and drain well. In a hot wok, stir-fry sliced or small whole garlic cloves, fermented black beans, and minced fresh ginger in oil until aromatic. Then add lettuce pieces, a splash of water, and a little soy sauce to taste. Stir-fry just until leaves are slightly wilted. Enjoy!