International Noodles Incident Party

Following on from the success of the dumpling, pizza pie and gnocchi parties - we're having noodles!

I am a big fan of noodles, most kinds of noodles in fact. See the ramen hunt post as an example of my dedication to noodle goodness. As soon as the theme was announced, I had a fairly good idea of what I wanted to make. We had so much fun making soba noodles in Japan, that I really wanted to make my own noodles - and what better noodles to make than hand pulled noodles?



When Alastair and I were in China years ago, one of our most memorable meals was a bowl of noodles at a street stall. We watched the noodles being pulled in front of us, and five minutes later we were tucking in. Amazing.

I knew that I wouldn't be able to come close to replicating that meal. Hand pulling noodles is a skill that takes lots of practice to develop, but hey - I'm always up for a challenge!

I followed the instructions on this website - How to make hand pulled noodles. The dough is easy to put together - it's basically flour, water, salt, a tiny amount of baking soda, and oil. The dough needs to be kneaded for a long time - to "destroy the gluten structure" according to the website, until it gets to a point where it stretches easily without breaking. I let my mixer do the kneading, but even after 25 minutes my dough didn't reach that point and I couldn't do the first pull without it breaking.


Now panic and freak out!

Finally, I figured out that if I added more water, it made the dough more supple and less prone to breaking. So eventually, after rather a lot more water, YAY NOODLES. I still had a lot of problems with the noodles breaking, and they were all uneven thicknesses, but look!



If you watch the above video, you can see how wet the dough is at the beginning. If I was ever silly enough to want to try pulling noodles again, I would try lots and lots more water. I wish I had started with wetter dough - it probably would've been much easier!



If you're considering trying this, let me tell you. It is HARD. I now have first hand experience of exactly how hard it is, and goodness gracious do I appreciate the skill that is involved in pulling noodles! It is definitely something that takes a lot of practice.



It took me so long to make the noodles (we're talking hours...) that I was exhausted afterwards and couldn't be bothered doing much with them. Fortunately, I had a large pot of chicken stock already made, so I boiled up the noodles and served them in the chicken stock with some enoki mushrooms. They tasted okay, but not amazing.... not like I had spent hours making them! But I'm really glad I gave it a shot.

That's it for my contribution to the International Noodle Incident Party. See Addictive and Consuming for the round up or check out the following links:

Penny aka Jeroxie - Addictive & Consuming – Homemade ban mian with minced pork and mushrooms

Christine – Christine’s Recipes – Spicy Pork Mince and Noodles in Crisp Lettuce Cups

Mardi – Eat, Live, Travel, Write – Ginger scallion & Butter noodles

Trix – Tasty Trix – Summer ‘Noodles’ with yellow and green zuchinni with cool basil oil tomato sauce

Shirley – Enriching your kid – Vermicilli Biryani with Tahini

Natasha – 5 Star Foodie – Homemade Soba Noodles

Joanne – Second Helping

Cherry – Sweet Cherry Pie – Coconut noodles with honey glazed pork belly

Tracey - Tangled Noodle

Evelyne - Cheap Ethnic Eatz – Incidental Noodles

Ms Baklover - Footscray Food Blog – Zha Jiang Mian

Casey – Eating, Gardening & Living in Bulgari

Tamar – Koreanfornian Cooking – Tteokbokki

Billy – Half-Eaten – Pumpkin Miso Noodles in Shitake Dashi Broth

Nina – Consumed Food Love – Vietnamese Noodle Salad

Suresh – 3 hungry tummies – Twice cooked pork with rice noodles

Anh – A food Lover’s Journey – Taco Soba Noodle

International Dumpling Incident Party

It’s time for another International Incident Party hosted by Penny from Addictive and Consuming, and this time we’re bringing dumplings to the table. When I started thinking about what I was going to make, I immediately thought of the mother of all dumplings (imho) – Shanghai soup dumplings / xiao long bao. But after a bit of research on the internet I decided it would be too much trouble and tried hard to think of an easier alternative.

I walk past a butcher on my way to work every day and as well as all the usual cuts of meat they also sell a lot of offal. Last week I noticed they had a tray of pork skin in the window – and since pork skin is one of the components of the broth that goes in the xiao long bao I decided it was a sign that it was meant to be!



For those uninitiated in the magic of xiao long bao, they are dumplings with a meat filling that contains jelly made from a savoury soup. When the xiao long bao are steamed, the jelly turns into a piping hot soup inside the wrapper. They are WONDERFUL. After picking up my pork skin and chicken carcasses, I set to work.

Stage one in making the dumplings was to prepare a broth out of chicken bones, pork skin, ginger and onions. After the broth was ready, I added flavourless gelatine to set it into a jelly.

On Sunday morning I got up early just so I could make them. First I made the dough for the xiao long bao wrappers. The dough had to rest for thirty minutes, so while that was happening I put together the meat filling, which has the jelly mixed into. I wish I had read the filling recipe before I made the jelly, because it turns out only 1 & 1/2 cups of jelly is required - but the recipe said to make 4 cups of jelly. Rah! I was a bit annoyed - maybe because I was up early and hadn't even eaten breakfast yet!

After that it was time to roll out the dough and pleat the dumplings. I started off by rolling out the dough and using a cookie cutter to cut out circles, but eventually found it easier to roll the pieces of dough thinly into circles. The thinner the dumpling dough was, the easier it was to pleat (and the better they are to eat as well). My pleating was not great - but hey it was my first time!



The xiao long bao were steamed and, after giving them a bit of time to cool down, it was time for a taste test. It probably took me about an hour to make forty xiao long bao – but it certainly didn’t take that long to eat them! I thought my wrappers were still a bit thick, but the filling was tasty and, JOY OF JOYS, the steaming hot soup was contained inside. We ate them with vinegar. Nice! I was rather pleased with my effort - they weren't complicated to make, just time consuming. The hardest part was not losing the soup after they had been steamed - the little buggers had a tendency to stick to anything and everything!

I also made har gow / prawn dumplings, apparently because I hadn't spent enough time making dumplings! I found the har gow much harder to make than the xiao long bao. I could tell when I went to roll out the har gow wrappers that it was too stiff. Because the dough was relatively stiff, I couldn't get the wrappers to be as thin as I wanted them, and I also couldn't pleat them nicely. You really want a very thin wrapper for har gow, because the best ones have that translucent, thin skin when steamed.



The har gow were, as I expected, not great. Bro said they were better than the xiao long bao, but Alastair wasn’t a fan. I didn't think they were terribly great, although not THAT bad for my first attempt. However, I don't think I’ll try making har gow again – it's too much effort to master the wrappers.

So that's it for my contribution to the International Dumpling Incident Party. See Addictive and Consuming for the round up, I'll update this post later with links for all the party goers.

Recipes:



For the xiao long bao, I found Steamy Kitchen's post very useful.



For the har gow, I followed this recipe on About.com.

Cookbook Challenge: Week 16, Noodles

Recipe: Chinese mushrooms with cellophane noodles
From: Chinese, the essence of Asian cooking

The theme for this week's Cookbook Challenge is "noodles" and for the recipe I've gone very Chinese. And by very Chinese, I mean - I'm not sure anyone but us Asians would eat this. :p

This week I made Chinese (shiitake) mushrooms with cellophane noodles. This is a very hearty vegetarian dish, that contains shiitake mushrooms, bean curd skins, fermented bean curd and wood ears/black fungus. It's very filling. I ate a bowl of it and felt like I had eaten a seven course banquet!

Left: dried wood ear. Right: rehydrated wood ear

Are you wondering what wood ears are? They're an edible fungus, commonly sold dried, and they're used for their texture as they don't have much flavour on their own. The texture is firm, gelatinous and slightly crunchy and they soak up the flavours of whatever they're cooked in.



I love the strong, meatiness of shiitake mushrooms, so I really enjoyed them in this dish. I've never been a huge fan of dried bean curd though, and I think there was far too much in this recipe. It made it all taste very "beany". I think halving, or even quartering the amount specified in the recipe would be a good idea.

But I'll just have to get over the "beaniness" of the dish since I have rather a lot left over. Alastair tried it and didn't like it, so it looks like it's up to me!

See previous Cookbook Challenge posts here

Update: See the round up at My Food Trail.



Chinese mushrooms with cellophane noodles

From Chinese, the essence of Asian cooking

Serves 4

115g dried Chinese mushrooms
25g dried wood ears
115g dried bean curd, broken into small pieces
30 ml vegetable oil
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 slices fresh ginger, finely chopped
10 Szechuan peppercorns, crushed
15ml (about 1 tablespoon) red fermented bean curd
1/2 star anise
pinch of sugar
15-30ml soy sauce
50g cellophane noodles, soaked in hot water until soft
salt

In separate bowls, soak the Chinese mushroom, wood ears and dried bean curd in plenty of hot water for 30 minutes.

Strain the mushrooms, squeezing out as much liquid as possible, and reserving the liquid. Discard the stems and cut the mushrooms in half if they are vey big.

Drain the wood ears, rinse thoroughly and cut into 2-3cm pieces.

In a heavy based pan, heat the oil, and add the garlic, ginger and Szechuan peppercorns. Fry for a few seconds, then add the mushrooms and red fermented bean curd. Stir and fry for several minutes.

Add the reserved mushroom liquid to the pan, with enough liquid to completely cover the mushrooms. Add the star anise, sugar and soy sauce, cover and simmer for 30 minutes.

Add the chopped wood ears and reconstituted drained bean curd pieces to the pan. Cover and cook for another 10 minutes.

Drain the noodles and add them to the pan and cook for another 10 minutes, or until tender. Add more liquid if necessary. Season with salt to taste and serve.

Footscray Lunar New Year Festival

We went to the Footscray Lunar New Year Festival recently - Chinese New Year is tomorrow, but the Festival was held a couple of weeks ago. It was a hot and windy day, so we showed up at Footscray early in an effort to beat the heat.

We did a quick lap of all the stalls, and then decided we would have yum cha and then return to the Festival. We headed to our usual yum cha haunt - Dai Duong.

We pretty much ate all our usual stuff. The first two things we had were pork buns and radish cake. Alastair ate both the pork buns, so I don't know what they were like, but the radish cake was good.



Bro said yes to a basket of tripe. The tripe was really good - lovely flavour and not too chewy. I know most people don't like tripe, but it's really so good! We also had some pan fried pork dumplings. I love these with red vinegar.



Next up was a basket of steamed dumplings - I think these had prawn and garlic chives. They were fantastic. The wrappers were smooth and thin, and they had big pieces of prawn in the filling. We also had beef cheong fun, which were fine.



Yum cha isn't over until Bro has eaten a basket of chicken feet (normally a whole basket by himself) whereas I don't leave until I've eaten an egg tart. There were only two egg tarts per plate, so we had to get two plates so everyone received one. I got to eat the extra one. Wahoo! Alastair finished off with a bowl of dessert tofu.

Read about a previous visit to Dai Duong here.



After filling up on yum cha, we went on a walk through the festival and took some photos. Unfortunately we were too full to eat anything! Waah! There was lots of grilled stuff going on.



More grilled stuff.



I was full, but still bought a drink - this was a basil seed drink with what I think was grass jelly. It was kind of strange. The seeds sort of looked like tadpoles!




There were lots of dodgy looking rides and games.



Some kids looked like they were having fun on the rides, but I don't know if I'd trust my life on them!



The MFB had a tent, and they were giving out paper models of fire engines - complete with road cones and little paper firemen! Squee!!



We arrived just in time to see the firecrackers being lit, but unfortunately there was a crowd and I couldn't manage to get a photo. Afterwards there was a lion dance. A stall was also selling funky balloons.



Some more drinks on offer.



And more grilled stuff - corn, betel leaves and meat on skewers.



There was also dried squid hanging up for sale.



This was a big pile of betel leaves stuffed with beef.



And egg cakes (I think! Someone correct me if I'm wrong!)



I have no idea what this was, but it was GREEN. And HIGH. How could I not take a photo??



Happy Chinese/Lunar New Year and Valentine's Day! We aren't doing anything for CNY (I haven't even cleaned the house - gasp!) but we are going out tomorrow for a late lunch/early dinner. More later. I hope everyone has an auspicious and love filled day!

Kum Tong

The Parents went home today (awwwww!). Each time they visit, it goes smoother and smoother. I've stopped reverting into a sullen teenager (can't say the same of my Bro though... ahem...) and they give me less lectures... err advice. We must all be mellowing with age! In fact, I don't think I was snappy at them at all this time, and I only received one lecture. Maybe two if you count the advice on eating more fish - they bought us two humongous jars of omega-3 supplements because they were concerned about our fish intake! Rather random, but sweet.

When mum and dad were still here, we went out to dinner on Mother's Day. It's not normally a day we celebrate, being a meaningless commercial invention and all that, but my parents booked it, so off we went.

Mum and dad had seen an ad in a Chinese newspaper for a set menu with crab at Kum Tong. There were different set menus - one for four people, one for six people, and one for ten people. There were five of us, so we paid extra for an additional person and choose the four person menu. Unfortunately we didn't seem to receive extra food, apart from oysters and rice. Mum and dad complained but didn't get anywhere.



We started with a thick clear soup, with scallops, shitake mushrooms and bamboo shoots.



Next were steamed oysters. Everyone received two - one topped with black bean, and the other with a kind of spicy oil. I thought the black bean overpowered the oysters, and found the spicy one more enjoyable. I do prefer my oysters plain though.



After that - CRAB! It was stir fried with spring onions and XO sauce, and sitting on a bed of noodles. The crab was difficult to get out of the shell - I think it needed a bit more cooking time. We made a terrible mess of the table pulling the crab apart.



After the crab came a plate of Chinese vegetables - I think gai lan / Chinese broccoli. I like this vegetable, it has slightly bitter leaves and a sweeter stem. The stem is my favourite part.



A plate of poached white cut chicken came out at the same time. The chicken was really good - very tender and smooth.



Steamed fish is not that hard - and it was good.



A bowl of tong shui (sweet soup). This was red bean and sago (although you can't see the red beans, they were hidden at the bottom). It was sweeter than I would make, but I enjoyed it. Ignore the messy table.



And we finished with some fruit - some rather sour oranges and better grapes.

Kum Tong didn't receive the parental seal of approval (the bar is very high) so probably wasn't worth the trip across town. At least it was a place of their choosing!

Kum Tong
19-21 Andersons Creek Road,
Doncaster East
Phone: 03 9841 8688