Chinese Cooking Challenge- Day 4

Wednesday 20th May 2020

There were a number of challenges that we faced while trying to prepare this dish. Firstly, some of the ingredients were difficult to find and secondly, you may remember in our last entry, that we were down to one ring on our hob!

Having had a look at the ingredients for this meal, we once again saw the “Shaoxing rice wine” come up. Curious to see whether we should invest in some, we had a look at the recipes further on. As it turns out, the majority of recipes contain this specific ingredient and “it is a base to Chinese cooking” according to google. After finding out this information “just substituting it for dry white wine” doesn’t really cut it, how will we know we are getting the proper flavour?

So, we started our research (which we probably should have done when starting the challenge), looking into how to purchase this specific ingredient. We had a look through some of the recipes coming up and wrote down a list of other obscure ingredients that reappeared quite often; Shaoxing rice wine, Chinkiang dark rice vinegar, chilli bean sauce and XO sauce. Then we took to our best friend google, to see if we could get some delivered. Online however, we found the rice wine coming up as £20 per bottle. Surely, we thought, it shouldn’t be that expensive!

So our next step was to search for Chinese supermarkets in Aberdeen. This is when we discovered Matthews Foods, a shop I feel we may be revisiting quite a few times in the process of this challenge. We would recommend going there if you ever need any obscure Chinese ingredient, the majority of items we were looking for, we found straight away. It is also just a great experience. Looking around a shop with products you can’t always understand because they are written in Chinese. It’s the closest to feeling abroad as we’re going to get at the moment. We must have stuck out like sore thumbs, tourists in our own city.

Next ingredient which was very difficult to find was the star of the dish “clams”. It shouldn’t be that difficult, I thought. How wrong I was. We went to our local fish mongers but they had sold out of them a few days ago. They suggested scallops as an alternative but since the recipe is all about cooking them with the shells on, we reckoned muscles would be the best alternative. So off we went to about 5 different supermarkets but unfortunately, they had neither clams nor fresh, uncooked muscles. Why did we choose to do this during a pandemic! Eventually, we managed to source some muscles from the fishmonger and we went home triumphant and determined to finally put this recipe to the test.

We got our new cooker installed that day too so decided it would be perfect to christen it with a Chinese challenge recipe. The title of the recipe is “wealthy clams” because the Chinese think the little clams look like old gold bullions, and therefore represent good wealth. According to the book this dish is a common favourite that is often had at Chines new year. This is what it was supposed to look like:

Preparation of this dish was very simple, clean your clams (muscles in our case) and discard any that don’t close when tapped, chop some chilli and garlic and mix some ingredients to make the sauce. Then once all of his was prepared you cook it for 5 minutes and voila! You have a meal! We went a bit continental and had chips with it, I know that’s more French but what can you do. The meal was really tasty and simple to make, however, one of the setbacks we found was trying to find the “star” ingredient. We decided we should include this in the simplicity of the dish and so bearing that in mind, we rated it:

Simplicity to make: 3/5

Tastiness: 4/5

It was definitely a success for us and we will definitely be making it again but probably, again, with muscles instead of clams because they are a lot easier to get around here. We would love to try this recipe again with clams to see if there is much difference between the two shellfish, but for now, we are happy to settle with muscles.

Thanks for taking the time to read about our challenge. Just a reminder that the book is called “Chinese Unchopped” by Jeremy Pang. Join us next time when we attempt to make “Salmon bites in XO onion sauce”!