Jimmy Chou is a Chinese chef who worked for my grandparents on and off starting in the seventies. He threatened to quit periodically, and then finally retired for good (probably) last year.
One day while he was cooking I asked Jimmy to teach me to cook. He gave me this recipe, which I've since done my best to get tired of, with no success.
Buy 1 pound chicken, pork, or beef. Chicken breasts are easier than thighs. Pork chops are great. Throw the meat in the freezer for 10-20 minutes to make it easier to slice.
Meanwhile, thinly slice the holy trinity of Jimmy Choo cooking: garlic, ginger, and green onion (spring onion). Per pound of meat, I use 2-4 cloves garlic, a good cubic inch of ginger, and a bunch of spring onion. Use just the white parts of the spring onions, saving the green tops for garnish. For the garlic and ginger, a fine matchstick julienne is ideal.
Slice the meat as thinly as possible with a sharp knife. This takes some practice. One sixteenth to one eighth inch is good. This helps the meat cook properly in the wok. Consistency is more important than thinness. Slice against the grain of the meat.
Marinade the meat in 1/4 cup soy sauce, 1-2 T sugar, plenty of black pepper, and 1 T peanut oil. I substitute maple syrup for sugar sometimes, especially with pork; brown sugar works too. The sugar isn't entirely essential but it adds a glaze. You can use any old soy sauce, but Jimmy insists upon the Wan Ja Sha brand, which is available in most Asian supermarkets. Marinade at least 20 minutes, preferably a couple hours minimum, longer for beef.
Prepare your wok for frying by heating it on medium-high with a few T of peanut oil and a little garlic, ginger, and spring onion. Cook a minute or so--"just until they start to smell", as Jimmy says. Fry the meat in batches: Pick up a quarter or a fifth of a pound of meat, allow some marinade to drip off, and drop into the wok. Let brown a minute or two before stir-frying each batch. If you sliced thinly, a batch should take no more than a couple minutes to cook. Add more oil between batches if needed. Don't cook with very much marinate or the meat won't brown properly. Don't over-cook--remember that meat continues to cook slightly while sitting.
Stir-fried, steamed, or par-boiled vegetables are often served with this. Bok choi works well. Immediately before serving, the meat and the vegetable are combined in the wok to re-heat. The meat-veggie mixture is often served over rice.
This recipe is a religion and a way of life. One week, I made variations of this for dinner every night by varying the protein and the vegetable. Scale up to feed an army. Go gourmet or go freegan. Make it vegetarian by substituting tempeh. Either way, slice thinly and use good soy sauce.
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
On Making Pasta
I cook pasta rarely, because I try to limit the amount of starch I eat.
I cook pasta like I braze (or rather like I try to braze). Get it hot, get it done, and get out. Don't cook it any longer than necessary.
Salt the water before you even start it boiling. Use plenty of coarse salt. Helps it boil faster. [Maybe. See below.]
Taste the pasta while it's cooking. I do this about three times. Ignore the clock and timer. Take into account that you want it have a little bite when you eat it, and that it will keep cooking a little after you drain it. You want pasta to be about medium-rare when you eat it, so cook it to rare.
Drain the pasta well when you're done, and do it quickly. You want all that hot water out of there so it cools down and stops cooking ASAP. Shaking the colander can help.
Coat the pasta with a little olive oil when it's still in the colander. Keeps it from sticking. Use a light olive oil of the finest quality you can get. Imported from Spain or Italy and Extra virgin for sure. First cold press if possible.
Use the right materials. Good, fresh pasta is great, though usually too rich for my budget. Good olive oil is relatively cheap, and necessary for so many other things. Salt in the water is essential. Likewise a good pot of the right size, depending on how much is being cooked. And plenty of water.
Bad pasta was cooked in too small a pan, with too little water, for too long, then sat in the waer for a few minutes before it was drained, and not coated in oil afterward. It tastes so bad. It tastes like the worst airline food on the worst airline.
I cook pasta like I braze (or rather like I try to braze). Get it hot, get it done, and get out. Don't cook it any longer than necessary.
Salt the water before you even start it boiling. Use plenty of coarse salt. Helps it boil faster. [Maybe. See below.]
Taste the pasta while it's cooking. I do this about three times. Ignore the clock and timer. Take into account that you want it have a little bite when you eat it, and that it will keep cooking a little after you drain it. You want pasta to be about medium-rare when you eat it, so cook it to rare.
Drain the pasta well when you're done, and do it quickly. You want all that hot water out of there so it cools down and stops cooking ASAP. Shaking the colander can help.
Coat the pasta with a little olive oil when it's still in the colander. Keeps it from sticking. Use a light olive oil of the finest quality you can get. Imported from Spain or Italy and Extra virgin for sure. First cold press if possible.
Use the right materials. Good, fresh pasta is great, though usually too rich for my budget. Good olive oil is relatively cheap, and necessary for so many other things. Salt in the water is essential. Likewise a good pot of the right size, depending on how much is being cooked. And plenty of water.
Bad pasta was cooked in too small a pan, with too little water, for too long, then sat in the waer for a few minutes before it was drained, and not coated in oil afterward. It tastes so bad. It tastes like the worst airline food on the worst airline.
cooking vs. brazing [rant]
besides working with metal and wood to make stuff, my passion is cooking.
i learned to cook the only way i can imagine: from watching and cooking with my mom. then i started to experiment on my own when i got my first real apartment a couple years ago. and i worked as a waiter before that, which taught me about how to combine ingredients like a good restaurant does.
a mistake a lot of people make when cooking is that they're scared of undercooking meat, especially chicken. i make chicken so it's undercooked when i take it out of the pan. there's two factors in play: the chicken continues to cook after the heat is turned off (not a lot, but enough that it's noticeable) and chicken tastes best when it's just barely cooked all the way--a little overcooked and it can get tough. so a little pink in the pan is a good thing. it takes a few tries to see how much pink is just enough.
the best way to get a well-cooked thick slab of meat is to brown the outside with high heat (like on a grill) for a just a couple minutes, then turn the heat down to about a medium-low (like in an oven) to fully cook the insides while keeping it tender and juicy. this is how restaurants do it, the good ones at least. i used to always wonder why the cooks always ran between the grill and the oven until i figured this out.
in the same way that a brazed joint can be cut open to reveal how complete the braze was, food can always be tasted or cut open a little to determine both how completely it's cooked and how it tastes. i taste constantly while i'm cooking, and i've learned to associate specific tastes with the way the food looks and cooks. this verifiability is important to me; it makes both processes less daunting.
learning to cook is mostly developing a sense of what's going on inside the food, by extensive trial and error. i sense that the same thing is going on while i practice brazing. i'm at a gross disadvantage because i have nobody to watch and take mental notes from; i would have taken many more years learning to cook without having my mom to emulate. i still call her up for advice sometimes. she's cooked everything, and she gave me a Joy of Cooking so i can look things up on my own. the framebuilding equivalent is the Paterek Manual, although even that doesn't come close to the exhaustiveness of the JoC. here's a blog about a woman cooking every recipe in the JoC
my favorite thing to do is to bring one cuisine in and incorporate it into an unrelated cuisine. this weekend i tried blackened salmon sushi rolls, which was pretty successful. sorta like a cajun version of spicy tuna roll.
i'm very much influenced by other cooks. my grandparents' friend Jimmy Chu used to be a cook at a nice restaurant in Taiwan. he went with me to buy my wok. he showed me how to slice meat thinly, marinade in special soy sauce with sugar and black pepper, then throw it in the wok with garlic, ginger, and spring onion, all sliced super thin. cook on high for about 3 minutes, then throw in some chopped vegetables, and serve over rice. i've been riffing on this structure for a couple years now. i've tried every kind of meat i can get, changed the marinade, used other vegetables, etc.
i still come back to the original quite often. it's an artful way to cook and eat--simple, healthy, pretty cheap, delicious, with plenty of room for variation. and the wok is an incredible tool to use. it requires great care in storage and use, because it's very thin non-stainless steel. a properly heated wok comes to cooking temperature in about 15 seconds. removing it from the heat for 10 seconds to flip things around causes the heat inside to drop significantly--the polar opposite of another of my favorite pans, the cast iron skillet.
anyways, this kind of riffing and influencing is what i find myself doing when i work in the shop as well. a big part is learning the technical side of things, how to use each tool well, learning to cook. but there's always the question of _what_ to make, and for that i always try to pick up ideas from where i work and live, from what surrounds me, or from what i wish surrounded me.
i discovered about a year ago what an amazing culture Ethiopians share. we have a lot of Ethiopians and Ethiopian restaurants here in the Shaw neighborhood in DC. i've asked friends for recipes, figured out the staples of Ethiopian cuisine. it actually has several European influences, Italian and Portugese among them. i've found the markets near me that cater to local Ethiopians. i come in and ask for berbere, the orange-red spice mix, and kibbeh, the flavored butter. i always get funny looks because i'm white but i know a few Ethiopian words, and because i'm usually dressed like a biker.
i learned to cook the only way i can imagine: from watching and cooking with my mom. then i started to experiment on my own when i got my first real apartment a couple years ago. and i worked as a waiter before that, which taught me about how to combine ingredients like a good restaurant does.
a mistake a lot of people make when cooking is that they're scared of undercooking meat, especially chicken. i make chicken so it's undercooked when i take it out of the pan. there's two factors in play: the chicken continues to cook after the heat is turned off (not a lot, but enough that it's noticeable) and chicken tastes best when it's just barely cooked all the way--a little overcooked and it can get tough. so a little pink in the pan is a good thing. it takes a few tries to see how much pink is just enough.
the best way to get a well-cooked thick slab of meat is to brown the outside with high heat (like on a grill) for a just a couple minutes, then turn the heat down to about a medium-low (like in an oven) to fully cook the insides while keeping it tender and juicy. this is how restaurants do it, the good ones at least. i used to always wonder why the cooks always ran between the grill and the oven until i figured this out.
in the same way that a brazed joint can be cut open to reveal how complete the braze was, food can always be tasted or cut open a little to determine both how completely it's cooked and how it tastes. i taste constantly while i'm cooking, and i've learned to associate specific tastes with the way the food looks and cooks. this verifiability is important to me; it makes both processes less daunting.
learning to cook is mostly developing a sense of what's going on inside the food, by extensive trial and error. i sense that the same thing is going on while i practice brazing. i'm at a gross disadvantage because i have nobody to watch and take mental notes from; i would have taken many more years learning to cook without having my mom to emulate. i still call her up for advice sometimes. she's cooked everything, and she gave me a Joy of Cooking so i can look things up on my own. the framebuilding equivalent is the Paterek Manual, although even that doesn't come close to the exhaustiveness of the JoC. here's a blog about a woman cooking every recipe in the JoC
my favorite thing to do is to bring one cuisine in and incorporate it into an unrelated cuisine. this weekend i tried blackened salmon sushi rolls, which was pretty successful. sorta like a cajun version of spicy tuna roll.
i'm very much influenced by other cooks. my grandparents' friend Jimmy Chu used to be a cook at a nice restaurant in Taiwan. he went with me to buy my wok. he showed me how to slice meat thinly, marinade in special soy sauce with sugar and black pepper, then throw it in the wok with garlic, ginger, and spring onion, all sliced super thin. cook on high for about 3 minutes, then throw in some chopped vegetables, and serve over rice. i've been riffing on this structure for a couple years now. i've tried every kind of meat i can get, changed the marinade, used other vegetables, etc.
i still come back to the original quite often. it's an artful way to cook and eat--simple, healthy, pretty cheap, delicious, with plenty of room for variation. and the wok is an incredible tool to use. it requires great care in storage and use, because it's very thin non-stainless steel. a properly heated wok comes to cooking temperature in about 15 seconds. removing it from the heat for 10 seconds to flip things around causes the heat inside to drop significantly--the polar opposite of another of my favorite pans, the cast iron skillet.
anyways, this kind of riffing and influencing is what i find myself doing when i work in the shop as well. a big part is learning the technical side of things, how to use each tool well, learning to cook. but there's always the question of _what_ to make, and for that i always try to pick up ideas from where i work and live, from what surrounds me, or from what i wish surrounded me.
i discovered about a year ago what an amazing culture Ethiopians share. we have a lot of Ethiopians and Ethiopian restaurants here in the Shaw neighborhood in DC. i've asked friends for recipes, figured out the staples of Ethiopian cuisine. it actually has several European influences, Italian and Portugese among them. i've found the markets near me that cater to local Ethiopians. i come in and ask for berbere, the orange-red spice mix, and kibbeh, the flavored butter. i always get funny looks because i'm white but i know a few Ethiopian words, and because i'm usually dressed like a biker.
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