You don't have to go to school to learn the art of Chinese cooking from a professional teacher if you just want to know how to cook for your own family or to entertain friends. In fact, almost without exception, Chinese women learn the skill by watching and working together with their mothers or grandmothers.
By the time they have become wives or mothers themselves, the most diligent ones will try to improve their techniques by consulting cookbooks and exchanging experiences with their neighbors and friends. In this way they eventually become as skilled as the best chefs in the established restaurants. It should be noted, of course, that most of the well-known chefs in famous restaurants are men, because many men in Chinese homes are just as good at cooking as their wives.
This set of Learn to Cook Chinese Dishes has been compiled by master chefs. They have used simple explanations to introduce the ingredients, ways of cutting, and cooking procedures for each Chinese dish. Readers can follow the directions and before long they are sure to become skilled in the art of Chinese cooking. The total set consists of ten volumes, covering freshwater and seafood dishes, meat dishes, vegetable dishes, courses made from soy beans, soups, cold dishes, pastries, dishes of eggs and poultry meat, food carving techniques and family banquet dishes. This particular volume presents more than forty dishes all made of aquatic roducts.
The major aquatic products in the book include fish, shrimp, crabs and shelled fish, and the first three categories include both freshwater ones and those from the sea.
The ways of cooking aquatic foods vary according to the size of the ingredients. if the sea item is small, as in the case of shrimps, maintaining tenderness should be the top priority. Consequently, quickly stir-frying with different sauces or steaming techniques should be adopted. Typical examples are steamed fish, stir-fried shrimps and quick-fried shrimps with distilled grains sauce. In the case of a large fish,
either part of it such as the head or the tail or the whole fish can be cooked in short time. Braised fish in soy sauce is one example.
Shrimps can be cooked in different ways with the shells on. Or the shells can be taken off and the shrimps are wrapped with egg white and/or cornstarch to stir-fry in lukewarm oil. This way their fresh tenderness can be preserved. Otherwise the longer they are cooked, the tougher they become.
All aquatic products carry a fishy smell. To remove this, cooking wine, scallions, ginger and similar fish-smell removing ingredients are essential.
Bony and fine-meat fish can be used to make soup so that, after cooking, it will be easier to remove the bones. Small sized fish can be deep-fried so that the bones become crispy and edible.
Large fish that have thick meat can be cut into different sized chunks, slices, shreds, cubes, etc. Or they can be made into fish fluffing as an ingredient. Such methods of cooking allow the meat to fully absorb the contributing ingredients.
Before they are cooked, fish must be killed, the scales removed, the fins cut off, and the gills taken out. The fish must also be opened with a cut along its belly or on its back in order to clear out the inside parts, including the dark membrane inside the belly. To use the fish to make shreds or long and thin slices, the bones must also be removed. To do this, I first cut of f the head, and then hold the knife flat to cut one side of the fish from the bone, starting from the neck and going down to the tail. Half of the fish meat is thus obtained. Now use a chopper to cut sideways along the ribs to take out all the rib bones. Do the same to the other side of the fish. In cooking shrimps, their legs should be cut off, the back tendon pulled out and the intestine removed.
* All pages double-side coated for easy removing of any stains (Hardcover)
