Hot Pot at Da Hong Pao

Pic from Da Hong Pao (sorry)

In its simplest form, all you need for hot pot (or steamboat, or Chinese fondue) is stock, or even water, and whatever ingredients you want to (and are able to) cook quickly in soup. It was always something I'd had at home - after all, you can spend less, and buy better ingredients. However, being in Hong Kong, where you can nary do a u-turn in your own apartment, having friends over for hotpot is quite a challenge, let alone having the space to prep everything and spread it all out.

Christmas Cooking Questions - To Brine Or Not To Brine

Should I brine these? (image via South Park Studios)

Around Christmastime, home cooks find themselves cooking larger cuts of meat, whole animals and the like, because we're generally feeding larger groups of people. No-one likes dry meat, and one of the eternal questions about cooking meat is brining.

Harold McGee, everyone's favourite food scientist, says that brining takes away the meat's own juices and flavours (because osmosis), and/but the salt breaks down some of the proteins so the meat will end up more tender (or mushy, if it was already very tender, or it it's been brined too long).

Breaking it down, the pros of brining are:
- Super duper juiciness
- Tender meat
- Meat flavoured with salt (which I suppose can also be a con)

And the cons:
- Meat juices (and thus flavour) lost and replaced with salty plain water
- Potential meat mushiness
- No brown pan juices from roasting

McGee recommends rubbing meat with salt and leaving it for a day or two ("dry brining") instead. With this method, however, it appears that dryness in the meat is a given, as is suggested in his article for the New York Times (he talks about serving turkey like pulled pork, with a ladle of sauce over the top). Question is, is compensating with a good sauce good enough?

Given the horror stories of dry meats at parties (I've sure eaten my fair share), I'm personally still a fan of brining. Your timing has to be right - over-brining can lead to awfully tasteless results, and I've found that lean, white meat in particular do benefit from brining, and when its dry, meat can be horrible to eat, no matter how flavoursome it might be. With calculated, minimal brining time, I've found that a balance of flavour and moisture can be attained*. I guess like most things in life, brining is a delicate balancing act.

Basic brine recipe: 1 litre of water to 4 tablespoons salt.

*Although I did learn from Harold that adding aromatics into the brine (herbs, veggies) etc. is pretty useless as those flavour molecules are mostly too big to penetrate the meat (see point 6 here). I've been using salt, water, onions, leeks, bay leaves and black peppercorns for lean pork chops, and Pioneer Woman's turkey brine for poultry. I'll try just using salt next time to test that theory out.

Happy Holidays!

A Christmas Tipple - Whiskey Infusion

After a whirlwind trip to Toronto last week, I came back with a suitcase full of chocolate and alcohol. I'll be writing about Dillon's, a spectacular new boutique distillery near Niagara Falls, soon (but probably not on this blog). First, though, I'm going to start on the low end - Canadian Club.

Eater Hong Kong Heatmap - 14 hot new restaurants in Hong Kong

It's that time of year again! The second 2013 edition of the Eater Hong Kong Heatmap is out.

The number of restaurants in HK that have opened in the past few months has been astounding. I couldn't include them all in the Eater map. Aside from the ones on the Eater list, others worth noting are: Teppanroom (new teppanyaki room in the Grand Hyatt's Japanese restaurant Kaetsu), Ham & Sherry (Jason Atherton), Prune (new deli by the lovely Grassroots Pantry gals), 85 South (southern BBQ), The Bellbrook (Australian), Sushi Kado, Plat du Jour, La Vache, Zafran, Ginza Iwa, Upper Modern Bistro (ex-chef at St. George at Hullett House), The Boss (Cantonese), Little Burro, The Butcher's Club (butcher, private kitchen, dry-ageing specialists), Locofama, Pez, Opendoor Cafe and La Cantoche.

Eat Turkey and Give to Charity - The Great Big Turkey Feast, November 25, Hong Kong

The Great Big Turkey Feast!

Mark your calendars for Monday November 25, for The Great Big Turkey Feast. Hong Kong's top chefs and food writers (including yours truly) will cook & serve you a Thanksgiving-slash-Christmas feast for charity. It'll be held in Linguini Fini.

Tickets cost $888 - all profits go to the Hong Kong Neuro-Muscular Disease Association.

Get your tickets here.

Attica, Melbourne, and a chef who walks the talk

Deep-fried mussels

I've been procrastinating about this post about Attica, because there is so much to say, and when that happens, I end up like a clumsy teenage nerd on her first date and I ramble and fail to say what I really want to say. This blog post is not going to be anywhere as lyrical as the meal.

Attica

The restaurant is in Ripponlea, an inconspicuous suburb in the south, on what is essentially the suburb's high street, amidst pharmacies, second-hand bookshops and takeaway eateries - basically, it's not where you'd expect to find one of Australia's best restaurants, which is refreshing.

Ronin, Hong Kong, and the search for Wow

Ronin

I love eating out (duh), and just like anything you choose to immerse yourself in, you quickly find yourself in search of "wow" moments. To me, achieving a state of "wow" on the palate is seriously not dissimilar to an orgasm, however cliched that sounds (ok, very). It makes you ecstatic. You come out of the meal fists pumping and gasping for breath because it was, quite literally, taken away.

Anyway, it's a big deal when I am wowed. Lately, I've been very lucky - just in the past month, I've scored 3 wows - big personal record.

One of these was at Ronin. I've been here three times now, but only two for a proper meal. If you don't know that it's the new sister restaurant of Yardbird, you've probably been living under a rock, but it's okay, there's nothing wrong with rocks, especially with whisky.

Banana Matcha Cake - One-pot baking

Banana matcha cupcakes, or tea cakes, I suppose, as there isn't any icing

Two things happened recently.

One, I came home to a shattered glass bottle and half-fermented ginger beer in my cupboard (thanks to G's experiment), and at the back of the cupboard, found a long-forgotten bag of different teas, one of which was matcha (green tea) powder. Two, I got a giant bunch of very ripe organic bananas from a farmer for free (it was the end of the day at the Markets).

Matcha and frozen bananas

I went online to see if I could freeze bananas (yes I could!) and found that the best way to freeze them was to peel, then freeze them whole. (Apparently freezing them in their peels makes them black, but still edible, although it means you always need to defrost them a little and peel them before you can use them). And then I went online again to see what I could do with bananas.

After a couple of days of banana smoothies (awesome, because since the bananas are frozen, you don't need to add ice, but it's a pretty heavy breakfast) I decided to bake with them and found a recipe for matcha banana cake - perfect.

If you're lazy and hate washing up, you could potentially make this in one saucepan. If you do, make sure your saucepan is a little bigger so that the batter won't overflow.