Chik's Crib

30 October 2026

Cast Iron Series: Bravetart Skillet Cookies

Cast iron October 30, 2026 0

I say cookies but it's actually just one giant cookie. One that spans 10 inches and weighs over a kilo. If you can only have one cookie before dinner, I guess this is the cookie you should choose?

Welcome to another wonderful recipe (link here) from the inimitable Stella Parks.

This is the most fuss free way to serve cookies, ever. Instead of baking trays of cookies one after another for an entire afternoon, you can just pile the entire dough into a large cast iron and be done within an hour. Even better, the cookie dough can be made ahead of time, cling-wrapped, and kept in an airtight container in the fridge (up to 5 days) or in the freezer. It just has to soften up at room temperature to be pressed into the skillet before baking.

Coming off my newly-seasoned cast iron (sigh.), the cookie continues cooking in the hot pan after you pull it out of the oven. Before serving, I slid it back into an oven - pan and all - for a few quick minutes. You can slice into the cookie with a metal knife directly while still in the pan: metal utensils would not ruin your cast iron.

The cookie dough, nesting in the cast iron pan, develops more of those crispy chewy edges than cookies baked in the usual way.

Served in thin wedges with ice cream, it was an instant hit with both adults and children. Over a kilo of cookie dough, and it disappeared in a single sitting even after all of us had a full dinner. The 10.25” pan can be sliced into 1/16th portions, while the 6.5” pan (pictured here) can be quartered.

Did the novelty of eating such a huge cookie in an aesthetically-pleasing cookware help? Yes no doubt. But when everybody came back for seconds, I'll take my wins where I can get them.

16 October 2026

Four Years of (Avoiding) My Cast Iron Pans

Cast iron October 16, 2026 0

Not shown in this picture, the first two hours of hard scrubbing with steel wool and soap. Despite all that, the soap suds were still turning grey/brown :(

Cast iron is not a piece of crap, but it is a piece of sh*t. There’s a difference somehow.

I remember how excited I was to unbox these. I bought two: one was a respectable 10.25", the second was an adorable 6.5". I scrubbed them clean and seasoned them over the highest possible heat on an outdoor stove. Seeing the outlines of my reflection on my cast iron surface afterwards makes me all kinds of pleased with myself.

I wanted them for a few reasons. One, there's nothing like cast iron for searing meats. The cast iron absolutely smokes stainless steel pans for searing (pun intended). I'd never seen something that could hold and give out heat so much. Once, I (accidentally) touched my hot cast iron with a polyester cotton cloth, and that spot of cloth instantly charred and melted onto the pan. It took a helluva effort to scrub out. It was both impressive and annoying.

Second, cast iron pans fit easily into most ovens. You can sear your roasts first over the stove and then transfer into the oven to finish up, all in one pan.

Third, well, just look at ‘em. They’re gorgeous. You can plunk it down on the table and serve directly out of them.

But over the years, I had used them only for a handful of times. Perhaps to sear steaks, or for a pizza experiment, or to melt provolone. The rest of the time, they’re spent gathering cobwebs (literally) in a cupboard.

So what happened? Well, cast iron is a pain to maintain. Seasoning the pans involves spending a couple of hours rubbing an oil-soaked paper towel into smoking-hot pans set over high heat, with the longest tongs I can find. Not a great way to spend a morning, in all honesty.

Here’s the maintenance process after you cooked with it:

1. You don’t want to wash the pans straight off the stove when they are hot! The resulting thermal shock from cold water can crack the cast iron.

2. But also, you don’t want to wait too long to wash it. Prolonged exposure to water and acidic contents in the food can cause it to rust.

3. Good job if you washed it in a timely manner! Now dry it off properly: first with a dry cloth, then set it over the stove to boil off all traces of water. Or - you guessed it! - it rusts.

4. Remember to store it properly, away from any stray water droplets! But wait for it to cool down first. You had just heated it up, remember?

5. And the pièce de résistance: before storing, you’re advised to rub a thin layer of oil over the surface of the cast iron for additional protection against rust.

No wonder stainless steel pans became the standard in most kitchens. It’s much easier to maintain.

Mac and Cheese

Despite my best high-octane efforts at seasoning, rust spots and carbon still built up. The extreme temperatures of seasoning meant I wasn’t doing a thorough job rubbing oil over the pans, and the intense kitchen burners probably deposited soot onto the pans. Wiping the cast iron with a towel sometimes stains the towel dark, and the cookware seemed … decidedly food un-safe.

Following this gentleman’s demonstrations to prevent sticking on cast iron by using low and slow heat to cook, perhaps cooking on the highest possible heat hadn’t been the correct move after all? When I moved to my new place with induction stoves, I decided to give cast iron another go. I started anew, and bought a steel wool to scrub off the accumulated soot and rust and layers of uneven seasoning.

After several hours of hard scrubbing, the suds began to become less discoloured, turning more brown instead of grey, I took it as a sign that I’ve gotten all the seasoning off, and it’s just the uncoated cast iron getting a bit of a rust from the scrubbing with soap and hot water. The next step is seasoning. This time, I cranked up the oven instead of the stovetop so it became a largely hands-off affair. The results also seemed better: there’s no soot residue on the cookware.

I pan-fried a fish, which still stuck to the cast iron a little, and the seasoning degraded somewhat after I washed the pan thoroughly with soap. Which led to another round of oven-led seasoning, and a bit of oiling of the cast iron pan before storage seemed to have done the trick.

A few weeks after that, a skillet cookie recipe that I made for a family gathering didn’t seem to do any damage. I even have hope that the grease may have fortified the seasoning. (The cookie went like hotcakes. Both adults and children came back for seconds.) But we concurred, as the last of the slices were snapped up, its cast iron-related aesthetics sold the cookie. It would probably be much less appealing if I had served it from a Tupperware or baked them in a baking tin.

If the appearance of the dessert results in greater enjoyment, then who’s to say that the cast iron pan didn’t produce a superior product after all?

The things that we do for aesthetics.

02 October 2026

Roast Potatoes Recipe (Serious Eats)

Miss XS's Seal of Approval October 02, 2026 0

I may catch some flake for saying this, but I love my air fryers.

It’s essentially an amped up convection oven, relying on the same principles of circulating hot air through food to mimic deep frying. But, and it's a big but, it does such a good job of toasting up food, it's taking quite a lot of jobs from both my conventional oven and my toaster. The circulating air does a remarkable job at rejuvenating baked goods, from regular slices of bread to flakey pastries. It also toasts nuts better, faster and more evenly.

It makes real crispy roast potatoes too, crisper ones than from an oven, as I just found out.

Out of all the recipes for roasted potatoes, this one by Kenji is by far the best that we had came across. Like most of my favourite recipes, this one uses kitchen staples (you probably have all the ingredients on hand) to create an extraordinary dish. Months after I first roasted these, my family were still talking about it. (Listen, in my family, if the food I made isn't nice, no one touches it.)

10/10 for taste and texture, and no notes.

18 September 2026

Guangzhou 2026: A Trip Down Memory Lane

Travel September 18, 2026 0

It’s summer time in Guangzhou and it is hot and dry. Stepping into the sun feels a bit like reaching into an oven. I can feel my skin crisping up under the sun, much like Guangzhou’s famous roast quails and geese.

On the bright side… (get it?), it’s lotus season in Guangzhou. If you brave the sun to visit Lotus Mountain at dawn, you can see the many types of lotus flowers in bloom and glowing in the sun. In real life, the glare of the sun diminished the colours that we could appreciate in real life, but the same lighting made the colours glow on camera.

A bee flitting in and out of the tulip flower.

A flock of black swans paddle themselves around the lake; but unlike most wild birds, these are not human-shy and swam over to us.

Part of the mountain includes an ancient quarry which is all the rage on TikTok and likened to Zhang Jia Jie - but we couldn’t really find the spot where the videos were taken.

Here and there, you find bits of ancient architecture and of history, but much of Guangzhou had modernised. Along Beijing Road Pedestrian Street, you can see remnants of the old streets from the Song Dynasty, which was juxtaposed against the storefronts of Huawei selling the latest gadgets, alongside the sports giants of China and the latest bubble tea shops. There are a couple of old towns in Guangzhou, but they’re mainly shopping streets as well.

One of them is Yong Qing Fang Ancient Town 永庆坊, which is located near Shamian Island 沙面岛. It’s a shopping district filled with restaurants and fashion wear. We had dinner in the area, and as night fell, visited the Crescent Moon Bridge.

If you're in the area, there's a popular store Yue Nanxin Milk Desserts Expert 粵南信牛奶甜品专家 for traditional Cantonese desserts: 姜撞奶 (jiang zhuang nai, ginger-milk pudding) and 双皮奶 (shuang pi nai, steamed milk custard). They also make amazing wantan noodles.

Of the two, 姜撞奶 (jiang zhuang nai) is the one that fascinates me. The custard is formed by an alchemy of ginger juice and warm milk, where an enzyme of ginger curdles the milk into pudding. Watch the video above: milk is poured from a kettle into my bowl, and the pudding is formed in a few minutes.

One great point about coming in summer despite the heat: this is the season to shop for summer fashion to your hearts’ content. In a few months time, the summer clothes would give way to cardigans and winter jackets.

The best way to enjoy Guangzhou is to treat it like the shopper’s paradise that it is. It is a bustling metropolis; there really isn’t much sightseeing to do. Take it easy and let the days past by. Sleep in every day and then wake up for dim sum. Shop for as long as you like. Go for dinner and a headspa, or check out one of the bars.

There’s no shortage of shopping districts when you’re in Guangzhou. We stayed in Tianhe, which is conveniently located amongst swanky malls and popular restaurants. The malls are (mostly) interconnected via a sprawling underground mall called Fashion Tianhe Plaza (时上天河), which is a good way to get around in the heat wave.

Other than Tianhe and Yong Qing Fang Ancient Town, other shopping districts would be Beijing Lu, APM Market and Dong Shan Kou. I picked up a couple of running shoes from local brands after reading and hearing good things about their quality.

Dong Shan Kou is a little more sparse compared to the rest, but the popular fragrance shop 观夏 To Summer is here. More importantly, this is ground zero for the bar scene in Guangzhou. The speakeasy Hope and Sesame (Miaoqian Shiduo 庙前士多) sits here along a nondescript street, and it was one of our highlights of the trip.

We didn’t know it at the time, but just a week before we arrived, it had just been newly minted as Number 29 of World’s Best Top 50 bars, and also Asia’s Best Bar. Read that again: Asia's Best Bar. This place isn't just the best in Guangzhou or China; it's the number one spot in Asia, accounting for the bars in Japan, South Korea and Singapore.

Don’t leave Guangzhou without dropping by.

We got a table facing the bar, and I’m glad to report back that there’s no tired showmanship here. There’s no sparklers set into your drink. No one’s setting the bar surface on fire, or spinning a large ice cube in an empty glass for a whole minute to chill the glass down. It’s an air of quiet competency and letting the drinks speak for themselves.

They were wonderful. I skipped reading the menu and ingredients and just asked for what’s popular. The drink, affectionately called Pig Trotter Vinegar, was one of the best cocktails I’d had. It’s something that I wouldn’t have chosen for myself (pig trotter vinegar cocktail???) but it was incredibly tasty. Ditto for everything else we ordered - the Ice Cream Milk Punch and the Lychee Tea Bubble. Every sip was more-ish.

Whatever you feel like buying, you can probably find a district selling that, at a quantity and pricing that’s hard to match elsewhere. We spent a wonderful morning browsing ceramics at 枫艺陶瓷 Fengyi Ceramics in Nantai. The neighbourhood has many ceramics shop, but this is the place that we went to. (You can input 南泰批发市场 to get to the location). We spent a few hours looking through their wares, and ended up buying over 20 kilos of ceramics (Oops).

Fridge magnets. How can you resist these little knick knacks?

Our haul! They all survived the journey back home. The cardboard box was well-packed and cushioned, and we secured it further at the airport with the plastic wrapping services before flying off.

In a similar vein, you may have seen online recommendations for the wholesale kitchenware district in Panyu. Contrary to TikTok opinions, I do not recommend going there. Have any of the influencers actually tried buying things from the wholesale centre? You’ll likely be leaving empty-handed. Each shop is a display shop for their wares. There’s plenty of designs to browse, but don’t expect to have what you like to be in stock. The businesses here are wholesalers: they cater to F&B businesses that place orders by the hundreds and thousands, and the shops place orders with their factories to manufacture the utensils. If you’re after a paltry 6 or 8 sets for home use, you’ll be restricted to whatever leftover stock in whichever odd quantity, and even then, that happened to us in one shop out of the dozens that we had walked into. Skip this location and buy your tableware from departmental stores.

Where you should be spending more time is at Funly Coffee Lab, a third-wave cafe that is just a few minutes’ walk from 枫艺陶瓷 Fengyi Ceramics. We loved this cafe. We stopped by for a drink before going into the ceramics shop. And afterwards, as the ceramic shop was packing up our goods, we came back for a second round.

Yunnan-grown coffee beans was on my list of things to try, but this year was apparently a poor harvest year and they didn’t have any in stock. Woe. But they stock a lot of other beans that were processed in novel ways, including coffee beans with notes of watermelon. The local-favourite is #8 on the menu, which had been steamed with jasmine leaves before roasting, resulting in an incredibly sweet aroma with the familiar scents of jasmine. We ordered our drinks (which wasn’t the jasmine one), but the passionate barista brought some out for us to smell the jasmine notes.

And after we left the shop, the thoughts of the jasmine coffee beans lingered in my mind. I couldn’t let it go, and well, returned to try. How could I have not?

The jasmine-steamed coffee beans taste bright and acidic from the washed process, and a firm jasmine tea accent. It took a while to get used to the flavours, but it tasted better and better as we got to the end of the pot. It was a very interesting pot of coffee.

They also make an incredible frothy iced matcha coconut latte, good for those hot afternoons.

We dropped by 清平中药材专业市场 Qingping Chinese Medicinal Herbs Market one morning. It’s a wholesale market for dried Chinese ingredients. The shops on the first floor is meant for casual consumers, while wholesale sellers take up the second level. We left with several kilos of dried ingredients, including dried scallops and danggui (angelica root). I even saw deer legs 10 years ago when I last visited. These dried foods are bulky (and heavy!), but the prices here make the extra efforts worth it.

We also spent an hour or so around 盛贤鸿运摄影器材城 (Shengxian Hongyun Photography Equipment City), where all things camera-related are stocked and sold. Think third-party lens makers like TTartisan or 7artisans (which lens go for a fraction of other makers’ prices and are quite well-regarded), or anything from tripods to filters to sturdy camera bags.

If you enjoy dim sum and Cantonese food, Guangzhou is the place to be at. (If you don’t enjoy such cuisine, what are you doing in Guangzhou?) Guangzhou is the birthplace of dim sum, and yum cha is a social tradition near and dear to the Cantonese culture. I’ve been coming to Guangzhou to visit my relatives over the years, and it has been a joy every single time. My grandaunts are retired pensioners and would meet daily in the mornings to yum cha together- to drink tea and eat dim sum.

Diandude 点都德, Tao Tao Ju 陶陶居 and Tang Ren Xuan 唐人轩 are popular names for dim sum, with branches across Guangzhou. We couldn’t get enough of them. If you stay in Tianhe Marriott, both Diandude 点都德 and Tao Tao Ju 陶陶居 can be found in the same mall within easy walking distance.

There are some peculiar dining quirks found in Cantonese restaurants. Are you puzzled why the waitress had placed a large empty basin on your dining table? Are the wait staff also giving you befuddled looks when you put food onto your plates?

Well, that's because a Cantonese dining custom is to eat out of a bowl, and only bowls. There is a plate, but it's meant purely for food waste. You do not place food onto the plate to eat from.

The large basin is meant for you to rinse your utensils with hot tea before using them. It's OCD-coded, but I like it. You don't have to follow them, but when in Rome....

Here’s how it’s done:

1. Pour the tea into your teacup. Dip the end of your chopsticks and spoon into the hot tea to rinse.

2. Pour the tea out of your teacup and into your bowl. Dip the rim of the teacup into the bowl to rinse the rim.

3. Swirl the tea around the bowl for a bit, then pour the tea out into the communal basin. Your dining set is now ready to eat with. The plate remains tea-free. You do not have to rinse it, as plates are used solely for discarding food waste.

It’s easy peasy. And a fun pre-meal ritual, it has to be said.

Recognising the tea side-table in Diandude 点都德gave me a jolt of happiness. It’s been over 10 years, and I’m glad some things stayed the same. There’s the golden teapot, with a kettle of boiling water set on a brazier next to it.

Some dim sum restaurants also lets diners brew tea next to your table. This is how people do it (again, it's not rocket science!):

1. Rinse the teapot, the pitcher (known as a gongdaohu 公道壶, literally translates to “fair jug”) and the tea cups with hot water. In most cases, the serving tray should come with a drip tray.

2. Add your choice of tea leaves into the pot, then the hot water from the kettle to rinse the tea leaves. Pour out the water immediately.

3. Pour in more hot water into the teapot, this time to steep the tea leaves for a minute or so.

4. When ready to serve, pour the tea from the teapot to the pitcher. This ensures you’re pouring out homogenised tea over each brew, instead of having the last serving of the tea pot being much more concentrated than the first cup.

We were on a personal quest to eat as many roast geese as we could during our trip. In another trip down memory lane, we returned to 海韵烧鹅海鲜酒家 Minghui Haiyun Restaurant (Address: 广州市越秀区仓边路33号富豪酒店, 3楼), and is located on the third floor of the hotel. The hotel is undergoing some long overdue renovations this year, but the restaurant is still up and running, and looks just the same as ever. It was the same layout, the same carpet, and that same stairwell where smokers congregate. How nostalgic.

The menu didn’t change either. And thankfully, the roast goose was as good as ever. The skin was crisp and meat juicy, and each bite yielded rendered fat from under the skin.

We also had our old favourite 脆皮海珊骨, fried pork slices, which was (mis)translated phonetically into “Saddam Hussein’s bone”. Hmm. Okay. It was delicious though, and thanks for that unsolicited mental image. Other our top favourite was coconut soup with yam and sweet potato, and we were devastated to hear that they just ran out of it (Miss XS went back to ask 2 more times after).

Nearby is Dayang, a stall selling herbal soups of chicken stewed within a coconut. The summer heat, combined with the steam emanating from the steamers, led us to bring the coconuts back to our hotel rooms.

東園·廣州味·點心與燒鵝 is also renowned for their roast goose, but we came on an-off day, because it wasn’t much to write about (we were pre-warned that their standards might be inconsistent).

Tao Tao Ju 陶陶居, the dim sum place mentioned earlier, had shatteringly crisp geese skin. But the meat was dry. We much preferred their excellent roast quails, roast chicken, roast pork belly and char siew. The sweet and sour pork, served on ice, was also terrific, as was the breaded fried tofu cubes.

Another restaurant that we really liked is dagefan 大鸽饭. We scheduled dinner at 3pm one day just to avoid the queue, as the queue is otherwise impossible at regular dining hours. And you know what, I’ll have dinner at 3pm again, if that's what it takes to eat here once more. The roast pigeons served in a claypot were perhaps the most memorable dish that we’d had in Guangzhou.

One of the best meals that we got was at 小炳胜. The roast chicken was perfectly done, with a tinge of black truffle sauce. Their fried eggplant was similarly wonderful drizzled in a sweet glaze.

小炳胜

绿茶餐厅 was recommended to us, and we also liked it well enough. The star was the vermicelli with prawns, and the gently fragrant Longjing Roast Chicken, chicken perfumed with longjing tea leaves.

On our last day, we took a palate cleanser meal, and had clear broth of coconut hotpot from 同仁四季椰子鸡. The broth is lightly flavoured, though it gets richer and richer with more food added to the steamboat.

At the end of our trip, we left sated, and our suitcases were filled to bursting. We tried many new restaurants and went to so many new malls. But as strange as it may seem, what brought the most joy wasn't the newest bars or restaurants. It was in retracing our steps in the Guangzhou that I had known, revisiting many of my old haunts and restaurants and finding them just the way I remembered. It was in the little rituals of pouring hot tea over our utensils, and brewing more tea for ourselves as we eat dim sum.

Nostalgia is a strange thing, isn't it? I'm glad some things stayed the same in this grand, proud city.

Til next time then, Guangzhou.

04 September 2026

Charcoal Series: Smoked Pork Belly Recipe V3.0

Recipe September 04, 2026 0

Over the last few months, I had been smoking slabs of pork bellies for family dinners. Some cooking methods make better pork bellies than others, but regardless, there's been no complaints so far. The beauty about cooking over charcoal is that even the worst results are still going to be fragrant and delicious.

I also used different seasonings for each of the pork bellies. You can do the pork 'Texas-style' (just salt and black pepper) if that's what you prefer. But pork is a blank canvass for seasoning and can take in a lot of flavours. I tried a couple of store-bought pre-mixed rubs, and even made the Memphis Dust Rub blend. Pork uniquely can also stand up to a lot of sweetness, more than chicken and much more than beef, so don't be afraid of the sugar content in some of these rubs.

But the most fuss-free, and delicious version came from a simple combination of mirin, soy sauce and gojuchang, and a light sprinkle of black pepper. It's the version that I'll be sticking with from now on.

Memphis Rub (Left), Mirin/Soy Sauce/Gojuchang with Black Pepper (Centre), Mirin/Soy Sauce/Gojuchang (Right)

Cube the pork bellies to maximise surface area for seasoning, or keep whole to maximise tenderness?

Pork belly can be deceptively hard to get tender. The belly is a fatty cut of meat, but all of the fat lies along the subcutaneous layer and is separate from the meat layer. The meat here is rather lean; with minimal intramuscular fat, it's prone to drying out. The challenge is to keep the meat moist and tender during cooking. I've spent many kilos of pork belly roasting them Chinese-style before I was finally happy with the recipe. Smoking pork bellies too, took a while to figure out what helps to get the tenderness that I want.

Glazed pork bellies: sliced from whole pork belly (front), or cubed for smoking and then glazed (back)

Pink from the smoke. I promise it's not undercooked!

Smoked Pork Belly Recipe V3.0

Adapted from various recipes done by Jeremy Yoder and by Malcolm Reed

Ingredients

2.5kg pork belly, skin-off and halved (each half about 1.2-1.3kg)

120g mirin, plus another 50-80g for braising

100g Japanese soy sauce

2-3 tbsp gojuchang (optional)

Black pepper

Steps

1. Remove the skin from the pork belly with a sharp knife, if not already done. Afterwards, score the fat layer of the pork belly into diamonds. This allows the seasoning to penetrate better, and also prevents the pork belly from curling up on itself during the cook. Place the pork belly in a large ziplock bag.

2. Pour mirin and soy sauce into the ziplock bag. Shake gently to combine. Seal tightly, squeezing out as much air from the bag as you can, and then let the pork marinate overnight in your fridge.

When ready to begin:

3. Remove the pork bellies from the brine. Spread a light layer of gojuchang over the meat, and then season with black pepper on all sides. Set aside as you prepare the grill.

Setting up the grill: Briquettes, Snake Method:
4. Arrange charcoal briquettes in a 2x2 snake along most of the circumference of the Weber grill. Set 3-4 wood chips directly on the charcoal at regular intervals. The top and bottom vents should left entirely open. You are aiming for a grill temperature of 225-275 F.

5. Pour 10 lit charcoals over one end of the snake. (I use a chimney starter for this).

6. Add a disposable aluminium pan over the centre of the grill pit. Fill it up with ~2cm of boiling water for a gentle moist cooking. It'll also collect any meat drippings and make cleaning up easier.

7. Set the metal grill over the charcoal. Oil the grates lightly with a paper towel dipped in neutral oil.

8. Place the pork bellies fat side-up on the grates. Place the lid over the grill and let smoke for 3 hours or so, until to an internal temperature of 145F. Check on the pork belly every hour or so. If parts of the surface of the pork appears to be drying out, you can moisturise those areas with water, either via spritzing or with a wet food brush. Pools of meat juices on the surface of the pork can be tipped out.

9. When pork comes up to 145F, it is food-safe as long as it's been rested for a minimum of 3 minutes. It can be served like this (it's still juicy and enjoyable), though the meat is still be a bit firmer than I like.

Making the Pork Bellies Tender:

10. Place the pork bellies in an heat-proof pan. Add 50-80g of mirin. Seal the pan tightly with aluminium foil, then continue cooking it at 250-275F (~135C) for about 1.5 hours until a probe goes through the meat with no resistance. You can return it to the grill to continue cooking, but at this point, there's no benefit to using charcoal - the charcoal flavours would not penetrate through. I usually transfer it to my oven to complete cooking.

11. The pork is done when a fork goes through with little resistance. Let cool slightly, slice thinly and serve.