By Pau Ong and Syra Takada
Chinese cuisine is one of the oldest cuisines in the world.
Its cuisine has not only been a great influence on Asian cuisine, but also to
Americans and European. Their dishes are colorful, has a balance blend of
flavors, and it texture is soft and crisp.
Growing up in a Chinese community, I was exposed to varieties
of aromatic and vibrant Chinese food, since I learned how to chew food, weather
it’s a birthday party, or a wedding, the food is always Chinese, which is not
surprising, since banquets we’re started in China. I was so excited to be able
to make Chinese dishes in our Asian Cuisine class.
To start our menu, we have the Hot and Sour soup, which is obviously
a combination of spiciness and sourness. The mouth feel was very delighting,
because you can feel the textures of the mushroom, bamboo shoots and pork.
A challenging experience was making the wrapper of the hakaw,
which should be made of a mixture of tapioca and wheat starch, we had a hard
time making this translucent wrapper because of the wrong starch that we used. The
end product had a delicious filling, but enclosed in a thick wrapper. Another
dimsim is the siomai, a lot of siomai stalls are rising today, and I think it
is because it is fairly easy to do. There are a lot of versions of siomai, now
a days, the siomai that we made in class has ground beef instead of pork, yet
it still tasted like your average siomai, except meatier. In this class, I
learned to use chicken feet as a stock, instead of discarding the chicken feet,
you can make it into the chicken feet dimsum, the chicken feet was cooked in a
dark barbeque sauce, and then steamed, it looked burnt, but it was very tasty.
The pot sticker dumplings are the counterpart of gyoza in
japan, it is first cooked by pan frying, then adding enough water for it to
steam, the challenge in this dish is that the wrapper should not stick to the
pan. It is a texture of crispness and softness in the mouth.
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In Asian cuisines, you must not forget the starch, we made
the Yang Zhou fried Rice, and the pork asado bits in the dish was made from
scratch, it could have been much better it the rice was not sticky, and we used
long-grain rice.
The main entrée of our menu is the Peking duck, In my
opinion, this dish could have rivaled the Peking Ducks, of other restaurants.
The crispness of the skin and the juiciness of the meat was very heavenly.
Desserts should be sweet. The fried chewy red bean cakes were
good, but there was trouble on having the sesame seed stick to the cake while
frying. I loved the orange and lychee dessert, it was so good that I even made
it again at home. The tanginess of the orange blends with the lychee.
