New Beijing Cuisine

Jereme Leung

Description

New Beijing Cuisine takes a new approach to Chinese cooking by considering the cooking traditions of Beijing, and reinventing them in a modern way. Chef Jereme Leung reinterprets traditional Beijing recipes with unique and contemporary presentations that have given the Whampoa Club restaurants their fame today.

Sujets

• China

Informations

• Publié par: Marshall Cavendish International
• Date de parution: 02 juin 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9789814893602
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

New Beijing Cuisine
A New Look at Classic Chinese Dishes

J

EREME LEUNG

New Beijing Cuisine
A New Look at Classic Chinese Dishes
with Jarrett Wrisley
Dedication
To Su Ning, my beloved wife. Your support and companionship are the driving forces behind my creativity.
Contents

6 preface
8 introduction
13 appetisers soups
43 dim sum
63 vegetables bean curd
79 rice noodles
95 meat poultry
125 fish seafood
139 desserts
161 basic recipes
167 glossary
170 index
174 weights measures
178 acknowledgements
Preface

Things have changed, mate.
These were the first words uttered to me by Jereme Leung, when we sat down together
to write this cookbook. And they explain much of what drives the talented chef and
restaurateur. Leung has gently pushed the creative processes of Chinese food forward,
matching the demands of a marketplace no longer constrained by orthodoxy.
In the past several decades, the global restaurant business has witnessed unprecedented
change. From the proliferation of fast food restaurants to the advent of the slow food
movement; from the precipitous fall of fusion to the surge of molecular gastronomy, our
global foodscape has been irrevocably altered.
But inside China, all that passes as a fad. For thousands of years, its cuisines have
developed at an unforced pace. From a Western perspective, it may seem almost static.
But when China opened its doors to the world in the early 1980s, the stage was set for
a culinary revolution, and Leung is one of a handful of dedicated chefs that are quietly
setting the table.
Leung has made his way up the culinary ladder in Asia by respecting the cooking
traditions of China, while retaining a creative edge. He infuses his Chinese food with the
consideration, responsibility and dedication of a fine dining chef. After conquering the
cosmopolitan food scene of Shanghai, Leung turned his attention to Beijing-the biggest
homegrown food scene in China.
In this book, I have attempted to distil our many discussions about cooking into useful
anecdotes about the history of Beijing cuisine, and how Leung s own renditions of
northern classics have taken shape. Some recipes are quite challenging, and are the stuff
of fine dining kitchens, while others are well within the grasp of home cooks. But they all
share a common thread-respect for tradition, with a dash of innovation.
In the world of food, the only constant is change. And in China, there are few people
that understand that better than Jereme Leung.
Jarrett Wrisley
Introduction

For most of my life, I bounced back and forth between Singapore and Hong Kong.
Whether I was staring across Victoria Harbour on the edge of China, or wandering past
street hawkers in Singapore, I was always surrounded by food.
I was thirteen when I took my first restaurant job in Singapore. In the Chinese culture,
cooking was not, at that time, something people set out to do so that eventually they
could open a three-star Michelin restaurant and conquer the food world. The Chinese
kitchen was not a place where people used the words genius , creativity or philosophy .
Cooking was work, like farming or collecting trash. It would not get you an invitation to
dinner parties, but it would get you a little money to spend, if you were lucky.
I began working at a restaurant called New Min Ho, but that restaurant soon became
more than just a place to work in. I was a kid that needed cash in my pocket and a bed
to sleep. Cooking was my way to survive, and the kitchen was my classroom.
I don t remember learning how to cook; I just started to do it. But I do remember-
before my time in the kitchen-cleaning the toilets and washing the dishes. At that time,
Singapore was full of hungry young apprentices-youths who would work hard for next
to nothing. It was hotter than hell in those tropical kitchens, with open fires, hot stoves
and wok smoke, and our shifts were long. The only thing worse than any of that work,
was not having any work at all.
Have you ever seen a submarine s barracks? Our living quarters were like that.
We slept in bunk beds stacked together in cramped, poorly lit dark rooms with low
ceilings. At that time, all my possessions were stored in a cardboard box. I had come
from Hong Kong with next to nothing.
After about a year of washing dishes and scrubbing toilets, I got to gut and fillet fish
and chop vegetables-it felt like a breakthrough. At that time, I was not yet passionate
about what I was doing-I did not have the ambition of being more than a cook, moving
out of the dormitory and eating anything other than the slow-moving stuff on the menu.
It was a simple life, and the restaurant was my safety net.
There was a chef whom I occasionally drank beer with. He took me under his
wing and taught me how to make dim sum. This was one of the most valuable lessons
I ever learned. His name was Lam, and as long as I bought Lam a drink, he taught me his
dim sum-making techniques. He was in his late thirties at that time, and I was
fifteen years old.
I worked in the kitchen until I enlisted in the Singapore army, and after two years of
service, I went back to cooking again. The people I served with in the army taught me
to think about what I wanted in life. I finally realised that cooking could take me beyond
roadside restaurants and seafood shacks. That was my breakthrough. I realised that this
life could lead to something better and lead me in new directions, but I had to be the
best to go anywhere. I went on to work in three-star hotels, then four, and then five.
I kept moving up, until I became an Executive Chef in 1995.
One rule that I live by now is that I won t ask anyone to do anything in a kitchen that
I haven t done myself. To understand this business, you need to start at the bottom.
From cleaning toilets, to cutting vegetables, roasting ducks and making stock. By the
time I was at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Surabaya, Indonesia, I had done it all.
I had cooked in Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and Brunei. Then my life changed-
I became an Executive Chef.
Until then, everything I cooked was based on repetition, on discovering a rhythm and
repeating it. Suddenly, for the first time, I found myself with time to think about the food
I was cooking; to explore ways of refining it, and to apply the flavours of the places I lived
in to my strictly Cantonese regimen. This happened fast, and I finally tasted creativity in
the kitchen. It made me who I am now.
I started to tweak the old wrapper recipes for dim sum, adding new ingredients like
squid ink, after I saw the Italians do that with pasta. I thought about cold desserts and
how they could be altered. Once, I fried guiling gao , a traditional herbal jelly and served
it hot and crisp, with honey drizzled on top. I wasn t reinventing, but innovating. All I do
is take a dish and think, can this be different? Can it be more delicious? Can it be more
stimulating when eaten, but retain its character? I appreciate all kinds of food, but I am
a Chinese cook, and so I keep my dishes Chinese. I learnt a lot in those years when
I travelled and did demonstrations in Europe, the US, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.
I started to think about people s palates, how they changed from place to place, and how
to plate food in a pleasing way.
In a world full of Chinese chefs, it s hard to stand out. I discovered how to do that,
and everything changed from that point. In a cuisine that is defined by tradition, I made a
name for myself through small innovations. That was it. I started to win awards and people
began to talk about my food. It was flattering, but there was something missing-that
gaping hole in my resum . I had never cooked in China, my ancestral home and the place
where all my cooking originated from.
Instead, China came to me. I was running the Cantonese restaurant at the Four
Seasons Hotel in Singapore, when three guests asked to see me. They offered me a job
at Three on the Bund in Shanghai. It was touted to be a groundbreaking, new project.
It took a lot of convincing for me to leave the Four Seasons for the Bund, as the
project was still in its infancy. But with the lure of Shanghai, I decided to go-and the
Whampoa Club was born. The first time I saw the Bund, I felt like I d been transported
back a hundred years, and it really looked like the Paris of the Orient, as it was once
called. I guess I m not the only one who feels that way when they see it.
The food in Shanghai was another story. For the first three months, everything was
good-it was my Chinese honeymoon. But after a while, I realised that the food had its
own character, but it wasn t something I enjoyed. So I set myself to work-studying old
recipes and tweaking them into a more refined style of Shanghainese cooking.
I never imagined that news of this restaurant would travel as far as it did, or as fast.
Soon, I was featured in newspapers such as the International Herald Tribune . People
were talking about Whampoa Club as Shanghai was in the limelight all over the world.
We were in the right place at the right time, we were working as hard as we could,
and we did it. Suddenly, we were the most talked-about Chinese restaurant in China.
And it only took two years for that to happen.
After operating Whampoa Club for three years, it was recognised as one of China s
top restaurants. From Shanghai, we went on to open branches in Surabaya, Indonesia,
then Jakarta, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. In 1995, we were the top Chinese
restaurant in Surabaya. I had success. I knew I was doing something right, and I knew how
much research I had to put into cooking this food.
In China, Beijing was a natural progression after Shanghai. The Olympics were coming,
the government was there, the money was there-China was there. We went back to
the drawing board, and we made battle plans. I bought an apar