Yeah I know I didn’t post 2020 Christmas cooking, but it was kinda boring lol. This is far more interesting!
Cube time!! I wasn’t planning on using this on Saturday, but I’d found a cheap fish and figured it was the perfect practice object. I already had the coal and firelighters for a situation just like this, so here we go!
I added just one firelighter at first, not knowing exactly how many I’d need since I only wanted a small set of coals. But the first one burned out after a while and I started panicking, because some of the coals were hot and I wasn’t sure I could get in close enough to light a second firelighter as I only have normal length matchsticks. But, I was successful! And so most of the charcoal started turning white. Gosh, the firelighters STINK while they’re heating up the coals. Luckily I’d already closed the balcony door as I’d seen first hand how BBQ smoke outdoors can set off an indoor fire alarm when it happened to my flatmate XD
Here is my fish! I put some garlic in the belly cavity, and seasoned both sides with salt – just something simple, as I decided I would finish it would more salt and lemon juice once it was done. Good simple flavour. Why cabbage? Because there were sugarloaf cabbages at the shops, and a while back a few food people on my feed were posting about them. They’re a conical shape so I find them fascinating. I don’t think they taste that different from an ordinary cabbage, maybe they are a tad sweeter based on the name? Plus it was more expensive than the fish lol. I like cheap meat and expensive veg.
Once all the fire went out and it stopped stinking, I put on my fish! For some reason I figured that meat cooks slower than cabbage, when I should have actually done it the other way around, or put everything on at the same time. Here goes nothing!
Why am I moving my fish all around the bbq? I have no idea lol. The head cooked much slower than the rest of the fish, but my goodness it started smelling good real fast. I attribute that to the garlic! But it was just a good cooking smell in general, and the cabbages actually smelled good grilling away too!
After a while, I felt everything was ready! Hopefully. The fish was already done but the cabbages weren’t, but I figured raw cabbage is fine haha. I had no idea how long everything cooked for, since I’m an instinctive cook so I just wait and hope for the best, but I was tracking it by the look of the belly since i could sort of see inside a tiny bit, and also by poking the back to see how firm it was.
And the final result! Fish, cabbage with kewpie, and a sriracha, vinegar, salt, sugar marinated apple cucumber and tomato salad. Apple cucumbers seem to taste like normal cucumbers? And these were pink roma tomatoes. It was a fun adventure in cooking, I call it a success!
Now for part 2 of cooking adventures – “fake xiao long bao”!
So, I decided to revisit a chef’s Instagram account to see if he’d posted any more recipes, but he hadn’t, so I did my usual scrolling thing and found an image of dumplings. I don’t know why, but I decided that the instructions of “200g flour, 170g boiling water > Filling: ground pork, ginger, chive, pork jelly.” was sufficient for me to give it a go. Am I crazy?! That shouldn’t even be a question!
Ok full disclosure, I actually did look up one of his gyoza posts too and revisited the shallot pancake recipe (that I followed successfully!) to get more understanding about how the dough would work. I did the boiling water thing, and then kneaded it till the gluten activated and then it started sticking to itself, and let it rest. However, the ratio was off? Even though I followed it to within 3g? Either that or the warmth and humidity affected my dough, so after several hours when I was finally ready to use it, it was extremely wet and sticky again :(. I had to compensate by dusting the board heavily which helped a lot!
It turns out you really don’t need a large amount of dough at all per wrapper! This was one of the first wrappers that was way too large.
I did find it extremely easy to roll each one to super thin though! That wasn’t a problem at all. It was very satisfying, albeit very time consuming.
It’s embarrassing just how much size variance there is in this dumpling set haha. The final four were because I wanted to ration out both the dough and the filling, since by some insane miracle I’d portioned it almost perfectly.
Into the steamer they went, and lo and behold, dumplings!! Wow!!! Ahahahaha I can’t believe I managed to pull that off, especially as I was convinced I had messed up at the dough stage and had been thinking about going to plan B (which was “noodles and stir fry, where I’d just spaetzle the dough and then fry up the filling haha, but luckily I didn’t have to execute this plan!). Perseverance pays off!
YAY
So, I originally wanted to do this with the pork filling, but I didn’t have the time to buy the ingredients for, and prepare pork jelly. I wanted to save it for the next long weekend, but at the same time, I figured I should do a test run first to make sure I could at least get somewhat close. So I’m really glad! But, now I’m not so sure I want to make them again. I’m really proud that I managed to make handmade noodles and shallot pancakes using 3-sentence recipes (and maybe I’ll make shallot pancakes again? I bought beef tallow for the next attempt!). But these are all things that are incredibly time consuming. Now I really appreciate the advantages of modern machinery for food making, because even though the raw ingredients are cheaper, the amount of time and experience you need to make these things from scratch is mind-blowing. I remember reading an article about how a Chinese food vendor can’t raise the price of his dumplings for fear of losing out on business as he’s already operating on razor thin margins, but at the same time, it’s not reflective of what it costs him to make them. Man, such a tough situation, since Chinese food is still considered “cheap”. Definitely not. I was fairly confident I could fold up the dumplings to a somewhat passable stage, but I fell well short of my own expectations. It takes a long time to learn how to do this efficiently!
I love cooking!!!