friederike's Reviews
8 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 8Sort by: Title 
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Yan-Kit's Classic Chinese Cook Book
By Yan-Kit So
Dorling Kindersley Publishers Ltd - 1987
Extremely delicious! We bought two small trout of 200g each, and used the cooking time the fish monger advised (ten minutes as opposed to 25), and it turned out perfectly cooked! We did have the idea that you really had to try to get both fish and sauce on the same chopstick to taste the together, and we wondered if that would have been different if the fish had been larger and had to be cooked for the full 25 minutes, but in the end, it didn't matter, it was delicious as it was.
We used just a little bit (approximately 1 tsp) of Hot Chilli Oil, but it definitely could have been more.
Served with Gai Lan with Oyster Sauce, a well-suited combination.
Fun fact: If the Chinese title of a dish is given, I always try to translate the title. I didn't manage to make sense of it this time. The first character is given as 'dry; first hexagram; warming principle of the sun, penetrating and fertilizing, heavenly generative principle (male)'. The other three are fairly straight forward: 'to stir-fry before broiling or stewing' 'sea perch, sea bass' and 'fish'.
Edited 22 September 2012:
We used a salmon trout (400g) today - for some reason, it felt like less fish. We talked about how you could scale this dish to serve it to more guests yesterday and considered using larger fish - turns out that any larger fish than this won't fit in our wok.
It tasted very similar, though both of us are pretty sure we had less sauce, which is strange as we didn't change the recipe in any respect. In consequence, it wasn't any hotter, though we used two tsp hot chilli oil as compared to one yesterday.
useful (1)
Clear-steamed Sea Bass : page 205
A very simple yet elegant dish! The balance of flavours was excellent, the fish was cooked just right, and it was easy and quick tp prepare!
The only problem we had was that the fish didn't fit into our IKEA steamer - and that the steamer tilted over because all the weight was placed on one side of the steamer. We cut the fish in half lengthwise so we could balance the steamer with two parts, and that worked very well. Alternatively, just use two fish.
We served this with Stir-fried Baby Bok Choi with Garlic, an excellent match!
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It was very delicious, and deep-frying french beans was definitely new to me, but it took fairly long to prepare (a lot of cutting work). Also, though I'm sure that it's a very interesting dish, in taste it was dwarfed by the strongly-flavoured Stir-fried Squid with Garlic and Chilli. I would suggest serving it with fish.
Edited to add:
I made the same dish using Chinese Cuisine: Szechwan Style and noted several things about both versions.
useful (1)
Fish in a Wine Sauce (酒溜魚片, jiǔ liū yúpiàn) : page 211
So-so. It tasted of salt and little else. And yet, I could see it working if you reduce the amount of salt and serve it as part of a larger buffet with several aromatic dishes to which this dish will serve as a contrast.
Fun facts:
I was a little stumped with the Chinese characters. The first one means 'wine, alcoholic beverage'; the third and fourth mean 'fish fillet'. The second, however, came up as 'slide, glide, slip; to skate, escape' - while I can see why you would use some of these adjectives for a fish dish, the meaning didn't make sense for the title of the dish. That is until I discovered a nearly identical character with the exact same pronounciation that is sometimes spelled like the character above, and means 'to steam / quick-fry / stir-frying, but with cornstarch added'
useful (1)
Hot Chili Oil (辣油, là yòu) : page 225
Very easy to make, and very hot. Very cool! We made this to make Braised Fish Hunan-Szechwan Style and it was great!
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Spiced-Salt Prawns (椒塩蝦, jiāoyánxiā) : page 90
Not impressed. It was quite salty (obviously), but didn't contain enough spices to make it interesting. Also, I would have expected it to be crunchy (probably because of the salt-and-spice association), but that wasn't the case.
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I wasn't really impressed. The ingredients didn't really come together as a dish (yes, this statement keeps lingering around, even though we haven't seen a Master Chef episode in ages). I could imagine that it would help to cut both the mango and the spring onion into smaller pieces. It also didn't help that the beef has turned slightly dry - we'll cook it shorter when we give it another try tomorrow.
Funny enough, it reminded me very much of the Black Pepper Chicken Thighs With Mango, Rum and Cashews we made a while ago.
We served this with Chicken-flavoured Bok Choi, which was equally unimpressing.
My guess is that the Chinese characters for the title of this dish have been turned around. I don't speak (or read) any Chinese language, though I have rudimentary knowledge of Mandarin and Cantonese, and I get by looking up characters in the dictionary. According to the dictionary, the title of this dish is simply 'Mango Beef'. However, mango is given as 'guǒ-máng' although, according to the dictionary, the proper sequence should have been 'máng-guǒ'...
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Very delicious, though on the salty side of things. I'm afraid there's little you can do as it's mainly the black beans that are so salty, but try to cut salt wherever you can, eg. omit the salt in the marinade, use water instead of stock in the sauce, and possibly use just a little less of the black beans.
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