Category Archives: Chinese food

July 27, 2011

Pork Dumplings

This is the first time that I’ve bought pre-made dumpling wrappers, and sadly I didn’t get the right kind so they didn’t turn out that well! I bought wonton wrappers which are designed for boiling, but I chose to steam them, thinking that the effect would be much the same. Sadly the wrappers are too thick for steaming and I ended up just eating the filling from the dumplings and leaving behind the wrappers. Still, it was so much quicker than making my own dumpling skins that I’ll definitely do it again another time, but next time I’ll pay more heed to the cooking instructions on the packet.

To make the dumpling filling, I took a packet of lean pork mince and added flavours to it, kind of freestyling as I went along. The amounts below are guesses based on the photo, since I either forgot to take notes or forgot to keep the notes that I’d taken…

Pork dumplings (makes about 15):

450g lean pork mince
3 spring onions, thinly sliced into rounds
3 birds eye chilis, seeded and thinly sliced
2 cloves of garlic
equivalent amount of fresh ginger, finely chopped
1 tbsp dark soy
1 tsp light soy
1 tbsp sesame oil
1 dash ground white pepper
pack of dumpling wrappers, fresh or defrosted

I would err on the side of caution when it comes to those ingredients – the best thing to do is use less of everything, mix it all together and then pinch off a tiny bit of the mix and fry it, so you can taste for seasoning and add more to the raw mixture as required. It’s best that you don’t taste the raw pork mixture. Nobody needs that.

Once everything’s mixed through, get your dumpling wrappers opened and drop about a tablespoon of the mix (depending on the size of the wrappers) into the centre of them. Pat the mixture out into an oblong shape, parallel to the top and bottom edge of the wrapper then fold the wrapper over and pinch firmly to seal.

You can see that I had already folded this one over, then unfolded it when I realised I didn’t have a photo of this step.

Once you have all the dumpling wrappers filled, use a scone cutter, pastry wheel or similar to cut round the shape of the dumpling and get rid of the extra pastry at the corners. If you are making wontons, you can fold the pastry differently so it makes a little moneybag shape, and leave the extra pastry on, if you prefer. Once you have finished shaping them, put the dumplings into a bamboo steamer lined with greaseproof paper, or cut squares of greaseproof paper for each dumpling to sit on while it steams. If you are doing all the dumplings at once you’ll need a stack of three steamers, and I usually find it best to swap the top and bottom ones half way through cooking – give the dumplings eight minutes and they should be ready, though you can check by cutting into the centre of one and making sure there is no pinkness.

When the dumplings are cooked, they will be quite wrinkly and look a bit sticky. They also look a bit like brains. This is the approved texture and appearance, but the wrappers remained undercooked while the meat was cooked through, because I was steaming and not boiling them. Had I continued to cook them, the meat would have become dry, so I took them out and just ate my way round the half-cooked dough. Not the most appetising end to what started off as quite a promising endeavour, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Except maybe a deep sense of boredom.

Leave a comment | tags: cooking, dumplings | posted in Chinese food, Dairy free, Original recipes, Snacks

July 20, 2011

Green Eggs (No Ham)

By Rock Salt

I finally plucked up the courage to buy century eggs – I’ve wanted to try them since the first time I visited the Chinese supermarket, but have always chickened out (ahahahahaha geddit? Except actually they’re duck eggs, but you might not have known that and then I would have had to explain the joke… Like I’m doing now.. OK…). Until now! If you’re not familiar with the concept, a century egg is a duck egg that’s been preserved for 100 days, then cleaned off before packing and selling. Here’s a more detailed explanation from Wikipedia:

Century egg (simplified Chinese: 皮蛋; pinyin: pí dàn), also known as preserved egg, hundred-year egg, thousand-year egg, thousand-year-old egg, and millennium egg, is a Chinese cuisine ingredient made by preserving duck, chicken or quail eggs in a mixture of clay, ash, salt, lime, and rice hulls for several weeks to several months, depending on the method of processing.

Through the process, the yolk becomes a dark green to grey colour, with a creamy consistency and an odor of sulphur and ammonia, while the white becomes a dark brown, translucent jelly with little flavor. The transforming agent in the century egg is its alkaline material, which gradually raises the pH of the egg to around 9, 12, or more during the curing process. This chemical process breaks down some of the complex, flavorless proteins and fats, which produces a variety of smaller flavorful compounds.

Some eggs have patterns near the surface of the egg white that are likened to pine branches, and that gives rise to one of its Chinese names, the pine-patterned egg.

So there you have it. Yes, they are technically raw. No, you don’t cook them before you eat them. The G man, who backed out of trying one with me when he saw them out of the shell, was horrified by this notion, until I reminded him that smoked salmon is raw, too. So is prosciutto. Century eggs are no different in theory, but in practise they’re by far less appetising to look at.

Here is the pack of eggs. They look not unlike normal duck eggs, or the salted duck eggs that they’re sold alongside. Except maybe for that ominous looking black patch on one of them…

Here is one peeled egg. No, I really haven’t cooked it. Yes, I am going to eat it. It’s safe, people have been eating them for, well… centuries…

Below is a sliced egg. Now we begin to run into trouble (if peeling the egg to find that it’s a shade of teal wasn’t trouble enough), as the yolk is actually liquid in the centre. The G man really made up his mind at this point that we was having none of it, as the eggs do smell quite strongly of egg. I didn’t think they smelled a lot stronger than your normal eggs – I mean, when someone’s got an egg sandwich on the train, you know about it, preserved for 100 days or not. The G man begged to differ – in fact, there was no begging, only differing. I must say that I was squeamish about trying them myself, but it was more the colour of them that bothered me. As I sliced through the egg, some of the yolk stuck to the knife – as it does when you slice the top off a soft-boiled egg. I decided right then that I’d taste this tiny bit of yolk first, as eating a whole slice seemed pretty daunting. I went for it before I could change my mind.

The yolk tastes like a creamy, well seasoned egg yolk. This shouldn’t be surprising, given that’s what it is, but the fact that it’s a shade of blue-green really can’t be ignored. The first bite is with the eye, after all, and the eye screams ‘DON’T EAT THAT IT’S A BLUE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEGG!’. My eyes can be a bit over dramatic. I was reassured by this first little taste, I really like eggs to be well salted and I enjoy a soft boiled egg, so the soft texture was fine by me. The white, on the other hand, was a different matter.

As you can see, the white is no longer white, but brown. Again, not the colour I expect an egg white to be. The clue’s in the name, really. I had read that the eggs are often served with pickled ginger and soy, so I whipped up a sesame-soy dressing that I thought would complement the eggs well, and served them on a plate with slices of ginger. I only served them to myself, right enough, and I guess in a way to those of you who are still reading and looking at this photo. There was no further procrastinating that could be done, so I picked up a slice of egg, added some ginger and sauce, and put the whole lot in my mouth. I chewed. And chewed some more. The albumen has the consistency of a meat jelly, like you’d find in a terrine or pate. This is not a winning texture for me, personally, and somehow isn’t helped by the crunch of the pickled ginger. It has very little taste, which again goes against what you’d imagine. These eggs are all about being unpredictable, that’s for sure.

I still have four of them in my fridge; the texture of the white is so wrong that I can’t bring myself to eat them, or try cooking them up with congee or anything else I’ve seen as a suggested way to serve them. It seems like a real waste, particularly as they’re not cheap at over £4 for six, but what can you do? Sometimes, the egg, he wins.

6 comments | tags: century eggs, preserved eggs | posted in Chinese food, Dairy free, Gluten free, Snacks

July 13, 2011

Steamed Bun Spirals

By Rock Salt

Well, it’s been a whole year since I made bao, and this time I had special bun flour (that’s actually what it says on the label) to try, to see if that would give an even better result than last time (see my sweet bean filled buns here… no I don’t want to rephrase that…). I had bought a tin of sweet bean paste from Japan Centre rather than getting in a big mess making my own again, too, so the operation should have been pretty smooth. Sadly, it wasn’t really. The cold and rainy weather conspired against the buns rising, for one thing, and steaming them in batches was a right pain – I have three bamboo steamers that I can stack up, but you do have to switch the top and bottom one round to evenly cook everything. I tell you, I got really sick of hearing the oven timer going off.

So the first thing to do was mix some yeast and sugar in with some hand-hot water. The yeast granules did a very cool thing when I tipped them into the water; some sank straight to the bottom and some stayed on top, but then changed their minds and swam down to be with the others. I tried to get photos but it was very tricksy – here’s the best one.

It looked a lot cooler in real life.

Once I’d stirred up the yeast, sugar and water, I added it to the special flour, which contained calcium and a few other ingredients – anti-caking agents and things, probably. I kneaded it into a dough and left for 20 minutes, as instructed on the packaging, then rolled out. I split the dough in two so I could do one lot of buns with sweet bean paste, and one lot of plain flower buns. Once I had half the dough rolled into what the packet described as a flat-long shape (I love translated recipes), I opened the tin of sweet bean paste. It was thinner than I expected – very different to the paste I’ve made myself or tried in things from the Chinese bakery. Still, it tasted good so I went with it.

I spread the paste across the dough, then rolled it like a swiss roll. The consistency of the paste did make this part quite messy, and I had to re-roll every spiral individually to tighten and reshape them, but they looked quite cool once they were done. Again, real life was better – the photos look a bit gory…

I let them rise for about 40 minutes, in front of the oven, then steamed the spirals for about 15 minutes, at which time they looked like this:

They were alright in the end – very chewy and with a hint of yeast, which I blame on the fact that they weren’t the right temperature for the yeast to react and use itself all up before being cooked. Still, it’s something a bit different for people to try, and seasonal what with it having been Chinese New Year last week.

Sadly, the plain flower buns came out too bland to serve up, and I lost the will to do anything with them so they went totally to waste. They look so beautiful though, and they felt like delicate marshmallows before I put them in to steam, really soft and kind of fragile. Next time I’ll know to add more sugar to the dough, or to be ready to try to fill them like doughnuts. Look how cute they are though! I rolled up the plain dough tightly, then sliced into rounds. Then I took chopsticks and pressed in on opposite edges to make a kind of figure eight shape, then pushed in on the top and bottom to give these pretty flowers. The finished texture was still a little too chewy and yeasty to be really good – I should really have put them in a big tupperware, sealed it and left it in a basin of hot water, to aid the rising – that’s what I usually do with yeast baking, as I’ve never lived somewhere that has a suitably warm area for proving dough. I think that’s more to do with living in Scotland than any indictment on the (many) flats I’ve lived in.

That is the end of my tale of bao woe. Sniff. I miss those flower buns.

Leave a comment | tags: baking, bao, steamed buns | posted in Cake, Chinese food, Original recipes, Snacks

July 13, 2011

Year of the Cake Part Five – Chinese Steamed Buns

By Rock Salt

You will probably know that the Chinese Year of the Tiger is upon us, as of Sunday. As it happened, it was also one of my colleague’s birthdays on Friday, so I thought it would be nice to make something to celebrate both events. The colleague in question didn’t want a big fuss made, so while I did find it hard not to mention it to people, I thought I could at least not make a birthday cake and draw a lot of attention to him. I don’t understand about people who don’t get excited about their birthdays - I love mine. I get over excited, like a child, and the past few years have taken the surrounding week off work to spend indulging myself in whatever ways seem right at the time. I usually try to have three nights in or out, too – work, family, girls night and then maybe a fourth, ‘miscellaneous’ night for anyone I havent celebrated with yet. I suppose I find it one of the very few times that people can be paying me a lot of attention and I don’t find it a bit uncomfortable. You may find this hard to believe, but I’m quite shy on the inside. The internet’s different – it’s not real life. Also, on the internet you get to look at what you’re about to say before you say it, and change it around so that it sounds its best, and if you change your mind about something you can delete it afterwards. Real life is not like that and a lot of situations would be infinitely better if it were, or at least if you could hit control-Z now and again. You know you’ve been spending too much time in front of your computer when you try to copy and paste with your eyes… If only.

So, on Thursday night, I set about making some steamed buns to take to work and share round. I had made the dough before and filled it with char siu, or on one occasion with custard, which was pretty good. My favourite Chinese bakery item, though, is the red bean bun, and I wanted to give it a go. Usually for the dough I would use the recipe for steamed flower rolls from Fuchsia Dunlop’s book Sichuan Cookery. What I have always found is that it produces a very moist, sticky and chewy dough, with a sweet but not overpowering flavour. It is good, but it’s not the same as the Chinese supermarket’s products, which are extremely pale in colour and much drier and breadier. I tried a different recipe for the dough this time but got the same result, so I’ll go back to Fuchsia next time and maybe start to make some minor adjustments to see if I can replicate the supermarket product more closely. Maybe they’re baked and not steamed, that would probably give a drier result, and I have suspected that using less yeast might give a less chewy result. If I come up with anything good you can be assured that I’ll probably post it for anyone who’s interested. In the meantime, I’ll tell you about the ones I made last week. If you’d like to try them but don’t want to uy the Fuchsia Dunlop book, which I can’t recommend enough that you buy for all of its great and challenging recipes, the recipe that I tried is here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/steamedbuns. Something that I think is a good tip is that you can create your own excellent warm, yeast proving environment in the kitchen sink. Put your dough in a large bowl – the one you’ve just made the dough in is fine - which has been lightly oiled to prevent the dough from sticking. It’s not the end of the world if it does, but it’s cleaner and easier if you just oil the bottom and sides of the bowl, then put the dough back in. Then seal the top of the bowl with plastic wrap, making sure there are no gaps. Put the bowl in your basin and fill round it with hot water - from the tap, not boiling hot. If the yeast gets too hot it will stop working. Fill the basin until the level of the water is above the level of the dough but make sure that no water can get inside. If the bowl is light and bobs around in there, weigh it down with a chopping board and as many cans, bottles, plant pots, stationary household pets or other items as are necessary, available and agreeable. This provides a really warm place for the dough to rise without you having to put on any heaters or find a sunbeam - here in Scotland, you wouldn’t want to have to find a sunbeam every time you wanted to make bread, you’d never have a sandwich again.

Let’s break it up – here is a photo with a pretty plant in the background:

While I was waiting for the dough to rise, I set about continuing to make the red bean paste. No matter how I try to describe this process, I am sure that I won’t be able to convey the mess and frustration that this caused me. Next time will be easier as the first birth of a recipe is often the most painful. It was the technique to get the texture right that I had to experiment with. The experiment went through many stages, each one adding to the coating of sticky paste that clung to my forearms, clothes, glasses, kitchen utensils, floor and parts of my face. I do it so you don’t have to, or if the truth be known I do it because I like to prove to myself that I can, even if it does take me all night. The first part of making the paste, which I set in motion before mixing the dough for the buns, was fine – I boiled up twelve dessert spoons of adzuki beans, then reduced to a good simmer for about two hours. I did not soak the beans overnight, although the bag did say to. I’m not sure why this step is recommended – possibly to draw out impurities from the beans, or possibly just to soften them up. To be safe, I discarded the water that the beans had been cooking in, just in case it was deadliest poison and I caused a department-wide case of death and ruined everyone’s weekend. Once the beans had simmered and been drained, I let them sit in the colander for half an hour or so, to dry out further. I then added fourteen dessert spoons of granulated sugar, and one of honey, and mixed thoroughly. I made sure to count the spoonfuls of sugar because I knew I’d be writing about them – really I just added sugar till I liked the taste.

Once this was done, I wanted to puree the beans. They were very, very soft after being boiled for so long, but they still weren’t a paste as such. I thought that using my blender might do the trick – I think I can be forgiven for thinking so, too. It did not. The blender is new, I got it for Christmas, and it is absolutely brilliant. It’s very compact but comes with so many attachments and accessories that it’s good for dozens of different uses. However, it didn’t do the job here. The beans were initially too dry, and so just clumped together at the base of the blender. To combat this, I added a little water to loosen the mix. This worked, but then the paste was too wet to be thoroughly pureed, or maybe it’s just the texture of the beans. You don’t have to skin these ones, but there is still a certain fibrous quality to them that was off putting and just not paste-y enough. I tried the attachment on the blender that you use when making smoothies or soups, to strain out seeds and skin. I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s just say that I didn’t read the instructions and just ended up further caked in red bean mush and ready to lock and load on anyone who might inadvertently have got in my way. I am so glad, always so glad, that I live on my own. At any rate, the ultimate decision that I made (not to be confused with the final solution, which is what I nearly wrote and is something very different) was to pass the beans through a fine sieve. This takes a LONG time, and bearing in mind that I’d already gone through quite a lot of time, effort and patience, I think I deserve some kind of medal. I made it in the end though, and had a very passable red bean paste which was sweet with earthy undertones and a pleasing, all natural, purple-red colour. Next time, and if you’re intending to make these yourself I suggest you do the same, I’ll skip to the end.

Now that I’d spent what felt like a lifetime on the paste, the dough was well risen so that I could shape and fill it. This was pretty time-consuming, too, but at least I have my technique down for this part, having done it before. First, I split the dough into 24 equal pieces, as the first picture shows. Then I made each one of those into a wee bowl shape, a the second picture shows. Then I stopped taking ruddy pictures cos I just wanted to get them finished and get cleaned up and to bed…

So, I put a teaspoon of the paste into the wee dough bowl, folded it over and pinched it shut, tucked in the sides of the fold and turned the bun over, so that they looked like the picture at the very top. I put them four to a steamer and steamed for ten minutes – I have three bamboo steamers so I could do it in two batches, although I do find that I have to swap the top and bottom baskets halfway through to make sure everything is even. The buns don’t change much in appearance when they’re cooked, which is quite different to what I’m used to from basically any other method of cooking, where you get colour changes from the heat you’re using to cook, and they look as though they’re going to be wet to the touch when you open up the steamer, but thankfully they are not.

By the time I’d steamed them all I was thoroughly sick of the sight of them – but when I took a bite I felt remarkably more positive about the whole affair. They are something quite different from the baked goods I’ve always made and eaten, and a welcome change at that. I now realise that I don’t have any pictures of the bean paste, or of a torn open bun to show how the paste sits in the middle – it’s kind of like a jam doughnut, but firmer and far less likely to go all down your front, or to blind the person next to you. They were well received at work, even by one of my workmates who is originally from China, so I was very pleased with that. In fact, there were some left over and he took them all home because he liked them so much - I was very flattered (and smug). If you have any inclination to do so, try them – you can buy red bean paste in the Chinese supermarket to make the process a lot easier!

Leave a comment | tags: baking, bao, steamed buns | posted in Cake, Chinese food, Other people's recipes, Snacks

July 8, 2011

Sesame Prawn Pancakes

By Rock Salt

Let us begin at the beginning (and when I come to the end, I’ll stop). Last week I was having a trawl for interesting recipes to help get me out of my ‘meh’ state of mind about food. I remembered this recipe for Thai Basil Pork that I’d made before and found both easy to make and really tasty. It’s fair to say that this recipe makes for strongly flavoured meat, particularly because of the amount of fish sauce; that’s not intended as a warning so much as what you might call friendly advice. I really like this recipe, but I can see how someone else might want to dial down the saltiness a bit. I also remembered this recipe for Savoury Thai Waffles that I’d been really interested in making, but never got round to. I decided to make both of these, with some small adjustments…

For the Thai Basil Pork, I swapped turkey for pork, and used a mix of basil and mint as I couldn’t get Thai basil. There’s a picture of it on the right – it’s really just as simple as it looks, and a great meal if you’re in a hurry. For the waffles, well… I messed around a bit with the recipe, used it as a jumping off point you might say. I don’t have an exact recipe, it was kind of a preliminary experiment to allow me to make my own recipes in future. I know that I used some cocktail prawns instead of the dried shrimp, because that’s what I had in the house, and added thinly sliced spring onion and mostly de-seeded birds eye chilis. I also reduced the amount of sugar and used low-fat coconut milk to reduce the calorie content. Finally, I cooked them in my Wok Party, which I think is an item that Tefal released in parts of Europe but not across the board; I was lucky enough to get one as a gift, and it’s great for making little pancakes, omelettes or for doing small amounts of stir fry. Looking at the picture in the link, I see that you can cook directly on the surface of the item and don’t have to use the mini woks. Next time I should read the instructions more carefully. Anyway, I made these Thai pancakes in the mini woks so they were much thicker than the wafer thin crepe-style pancakes the recipe suggests. I told you it was a jumping off point. By which I mean like a diving board, rather than like the top of a cliff over some pointy rocks.

I had the turkey and pancakes with the suggested dipping sauce (which I found a bit heavy on the fish sauce) and some good old Lingham’s ginger, garlic and chili sauce, which is a good accompaniment to so many things. I didn’t mean my dinner to look like a monkey face, it just turned out that way.

Thai food monkey face

Now, fast forward to today. Except that it is today now, so maybe play is a better word. Or pause, or stop. And possibly by the time you read this, today will have been weeks or months ago, so you’ll have to rewind. Hm. I’m not sure where to go with this, except to try and gloss over it…

I’ve had such a notion for sesame prawn toast this last week, but didn’t want to order a takeaway because a) I am determined to look at my holiday photos and not see a big round face and b) I don’t like ordering takeaway food for just me, I think the people in the shop will JUDGE ME. It’s kind of been an idle craving for most of the week, but on my way home tonight (which is a Friday, for those of you from the future – welcome, by the way. Do you have hoverboards yet?) the craving and the pancake experiment collided in my brain and created the Sesame Prawn Pancake, which deserves the capital letters because it’s such an awesome invention. CERN has nothing on me when it comes to collisions, and mine don’t cost a gazillion dollars either.

My local Chinese takeaway makes this crazy sesame prawn toast, which I was horrified by at first, then loved for a few pieces, then felt like if I ate any more I was going to be extremely sorry. It’s kind of like really egg-saturated french toast stuffed with mashed prawns and topped with sesame seeds, and then deep fried. Certainly not traditional, and not the kind of thing you can eat much of. Some of you will undoubtedly be thinking you couldn’t eat any of it, and are possibly holding perfumed handkerchiefs to your noses to shield yourself from the very idea. In my experience, despite what you might think, this particular kind of sesame prawn toast is oddly satisfying in small doses. I wanted to make something like this, but less nausea inducing and more delicious, for obvious reasons.

The original recipe for Thai pancakes included rice flour in the ingredients. In my version I used wheat free flour, which is a mix of different kinds (yes, that’s another alteration to the recipe) and which made for a strange texture – kind of springy and dense. This time I wanted to use the real stuff, and I had another inspiration (it must be something in the air) – why couldn’t I make my own rice flour? You know, out of rice? A quick Google showed that there was no reason at all that I couldn’t, and in fact I was a dope for not thinking of it sooner. I was reassured to read this post from Gluten Free Girl, in which she says it took her a while to figure it out, too… Gluten Free Girl is ace, by the way, whether or not you follow a gluten free diet you should check her out.

From this revelation, the next step was wondering if brown rice would turn into flour; because brown rice has quite a nutty flavour I thought it might lend itself better to the sesame prawn pancakes. I duly fired some in the blender, with the grinding attachment on, and let it spin for a while until it looked like it might be as fine as it was going to get. The flour was still very coarse and gritty so I passed it through a sieve, then re-ground and re-sieved the leftover portion that wouldn’t go through the sieve the first time. The picture above kind of shows you the final outcome; it was still coarse, kind of like sand, and while it was bone dry, it was kind of sticky. You can see where it’s stuck to the sides of the bowl, which was also completely dry. I’m not sure how else to describe it; it certainly wasn’t like any flour I’d used before. Still, it was a flour of sorts, so I went with it.

I was ready to attempt my Sesame Prawn Pancakes. Here is the recipe:

1/2 tsp shrimp paste
1/2 tsp sesame oil
1/4 cup frozen cocktail prawns, defrosted
1 egg
80 ml oat milk (or any other milk)
another 1/2 tsp sesame oil
1/2 tsp fish sauce
green part of a spring onion, thinly sliced
1 tbsp toasted sesame seeds – half black, half white – plus another tsp for sprinkling
4 tbsp brown rice flour

First, I put the shrimp paste and sesame oil in one of the mini woks and heated, mashing with a spatula, until the paste and oil were mixed into a slightly thinner paste. I added the prawns to the wok and stirred to coat evenly, then set aside.

In a jug, I beat the egg, then added the milk and whisked. To this I added the rest of the sesame oil, the fish sauce, the spring onion, the sesame seeds and the prawns. I whisked this together again, then added the rice flour. The result was a thick but pourable batter, which I at least partially succeeded in photographing. The looming pink blobs are just my fingertips, be not afraid.

I cleaned out the wok I’d used for the prawns and set all six woks on the heating surface till they were very hot. Then I poured in enough batter to cover the basse of each – it was barely enough to make five pancakes, in the end. I sprinkled a pinch more of sesame seeds over the top of each, then left the pancakes to cook for about two minutes, until bubbles were forming on the tops. I loosened them round the edges and flipped them to cook the other side. I do like this particular move, the pancake flip. It makes me feel like an absolute hero every time I get it right, and these little guys are perfect for flipping because they’re so small and quite sturdy.

I cooked for another two minutes, then flipped one back over to see how it looked. It looked good, lightly coloured on top and fully set in the middle, so I turned off the heat and flipped all the pancakes right way up, then slid on to a plate to serve, garnished with spring onion and chili rounds. I also made a fish fragrant dipping sauce, which is yet another recipe from Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sichuan Cookery and is a mix of garlic, ginger, light soy, black vinegar, chili oil, sesame oil and spring onion. It’s just as complex and wonderful as it sounds. It’s not really meant as a dipping sauce, I don’t think; in the book it’s served over cold cooked chicken, and I can attest to the excellence of that combination, too.

I was so pleased with how these turned out, they were just what I wanted and when to nail it first time like that made me feel, once again, like a hero. A kitchen hero. Here are the last few photos (you can always tell when I’m pleased with a recipe, can’t you?).