Chik's Crib: October 2023

29 October 2023

David Lebovitz's Tarte Sablée au Chocolat Recipe

Tarts October 29, 2023 0

My usual chocolate tart is a recipe from Alice Medrich, with a smooth velvety chocolate filling made from cream. This makes a different sort of chocolate tart: the filling is also rich, but the texture is fluffy and billowy, with a almost brownie-like crust.

Daily life often gets in the way of baking. I don't always have time to bake when I have a particular dessert craving, or more frequently nowadays, I want to bake something but I'm too full to eat it on the same day. So I channel my baking urges into making dough, which can be portioned and frozen, ready to be baked off on a whim on another day (much like the apple pies that I'm fond of making.) Use a good chocolate, and give this tart a whirl.

Tarte Sablée au Chocolat Recipe
Original Recipe from David Lebovitz

Ingredients
Sablée Dough
100g (3 1/2 ounces) unsalted butter, cubed, at room temperature
75g (6 tablespoons) sugar
pinch of salt
1 large egg, at room temperature
170g (1 cup plus 3 tablespoons) flour

Filling
150g bittersweet (not unsweetened) chocolate, coarsely chopped
100g unsalted butter, cubed
30g sugar
1 large eggs, at room temperature
2 large egg yolks, at room temperature

STEPS
The Tart
1. Using a spatula, combine butter, sugar, and salt. Add the egg and mix until mostly combined, then add the flour.

2. As the mixture comes together to form a dough, shape it into a disc and wrap it with clingwrap. Chill the dough in the fridge for 30 minutes before continuing with the recipe.

3. On a well-floured surface and rolling pin, roll out the dough until it’s 13-inches (33cm) round. Drape it over the rolling pin and transfer the dough onto a 9- to 9 1/2-inch (23cm) tart pan. Patch up any cracks in the dough. Gently press the dough up against the wall of the mold using a spare bit of dough, then trim off any excess. With a fork, prick the bottom of the dough all over. Freeze the dough in the tart pan for at least 30 minutes. (The dough can be frozen as a disc (step 2) or after it had been pressed into a tart pan, to be used at a later date within the month.)

4. Preheat the oven to 190ºC (375ºF). Line the tart pan with foil and fill with pie weights. Bake for 20 minutes, then remove the foil and weights and continue baking until the inside of the tart is lightly browned, about 8 to 10 more minutes. Remove the tart shell from the oven. Any cracks in the tart can be patched up using excess dough scrapes.

The Chocolate Filling
5. As the dough is baking, melt the butter in a small saucepan set over the lowest possible heat. Just as the butter finishes melting, add the chopped chocolate and stir briskly, until the chocolate melts. If the chocolate is at risk of burning, remove the saucepan from the heat and continue to stir, until it is safe to return the saucepan to the heat. You can use a double boiler if you wish. Remove the saucepan from the heat once the chocolate fully melts. Set aside.

6. Using an electric mixer set at high speed, whisk eggs, egg yolks, and sugar together for about 3-5 minutes, until the mixture is thick and can briefly hold its shape.

7. Gently fold the eggs into the chocolate mixture, then pour into the tart shell and bake at 180ºC (350ºF), for 10-12 minutes, until the tart feels almost set in the center when you shake the tart. Err on the side of underbaking rather than overbaking.

8. Allow the tart to cool to room temperature, then slice into wedges and serve.

Tips:
Extra filling can be baked at 180ºC in little ramekins. Excess dough can be rolled out, cut into shapes and baked off as sablés (butter cookies)

22 October 2023

Peanut Butter Chili Dumplings Recipe

Recipe October 22, 2023 0

I was stunned the first time I had such a sauce combining peanut butter with chili. It was in 2016, when Miss XS and I patronised New Shanghai in Melbourne. We quickly became regulars, and even when we left Melbourne, the thought of the sweet-spicy peanut sauce stayed with me. Recently, I’ve seen this sauce served with handmade 拉面 (la mian, hand-pulled noodles) served in a hearty bowl.

Much like the sesame-soy sauce, this sauce also comes together within minutes, in the time while the dumplings are cooking.

Peanut Butter Chili Dumplings Recipe

INGREDIENTS
1 large clove of garlic, minced.
2 teaspoon smooth peanut butter
4 teaspoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon black rice vinegar
2 teaspoon chili flakes and chili oil, such as 老干妈 Lao Gan Ma
½ teaspoon sesame oil
2 teaspoon boiling water, adjust to consistency
Sesame seeds, whole peanuts or chives (for garnish)

STEPS

1. In a medium sized bowl, add everything except for the boiling water and sesame seeds.

2. Adding a spoonful of boiling water at a time and stirring vigorously between each teaspoon, combine the ingredients together. The boiling water helps to emulsify the ingredients into a smooth paste. Continue until reaching desired consistency.

3. Drained cooked dumplings and mix in with the peanut sauce. Plate and garnish with sesame seed, whole peanuts and chives. Serve immediately.

10 October 2023

Huangshan, Anhui (黄山, 安徽) - A Trip in Autumn, 2023 (Part 2)

Travel October 10, 2023 0

On our way back to Shanghai, we detoured to see several attractions along the way. It was raining when we reached Yaowan Village (婺源瑤灣景區). In the cool chill that the rain brought along, the mist rose off from the distant treetops in a cool ethereal glow.

Anhui isn’t a wealthy province. The land is mostly mountainous and the rocky terrain makes for poor farming. Naturally, the cuisine is rougher around the edges compared to other parts of China. As we travelled along villages in the rural areas, we kept our expectation of our meals realistic. But there are still a few interesting food items. Preserved food plays a big role in their diet. We tried the preserved fish 臭鳜鱼 (cou gui yu, or in a direct translation: smelly fish) and the fermented tofu 毛豆腐(mao dou fu, “hairy tofu”). Both are surprisingly mild tasting, and the fish is surprisingly firm-textured and not mushy like I feared. It’s also a common sight to see pork legs hanging from ropes and air-curing in the open air. While not as renowned as the Jinhua ham, this cured pork shows up in the dishes that we eat: sliced and stir-fried alongside vegetables, or found in the midst of a tasty broth.

臭鳜鱼 (cou gui yu)

Pan-fried 毛豆腐(mao dou fu)

Raw 毛豆腐(mao dou fu)

Along our tour through the province, we bought boxes of 微墨酥 (wēi mò sū), pastries made of ground black sesame and baked into slabs. Anhui has historically produced the greatest number of imperial scholars in ancient China, and several of the local pastries reflect this theme. The 微墨酥 resembles ink-stones used for writing. 状元糕 (zhuang yuan gao, Imperial Scholar Cakes) is another dessert here: steamed glutinous rice pastries filled with custard or red bean paste and embossed with a scholar seal. They’re sticky and delightfully chewy.

状元糕 (zhuang yuan gao)

Perhaps the most popular pastries are the spiced 黄山烧饼 (Huangshan baked biscuits), which are traditionally baked in a clay oven. Pre-packaged ones can be found almost anywhere in Huangshan, but along Tunxi Ancient Street, you can also get those that have been baked fresh on-site.

We went to a few restaurants to sample the local hui cuisine, but no meal we had was quite as memorable as the one from the Hui Cuisine Museum. It is a state institution, with all the funding that comes along with it. As we walked into the sprawling complex, we went past an ongoing one-man opera, past a more casual eatery, past a museum detailing the history of the land, past a supermarket selling local delicacies and cured meat, before finally reached the restaurant. The servers appease the customers in most restaurants, our tour guide remarked drily, but in state-run restaurants, it is the other way around. Like all jokes, it had a kernel of truth in it: during our dinner, the server politely declined to exchange our provided coke for another bottle of beer.

We also spent a night in the town of 千岛湖 (Qiandao Hu, Thousand-Island Lake). This area used to be a mountain range, but the mountains and their valleys were flooded with water in the 1950s and the area converted into a hydroelectric dam to provides clean energy to the region. The “islands” that we now see were the summit of mountains. Today, the lake is also a tourist location and used for fish rearing.

Another pun: So how much water is required to create this lake? 一湖的水)

The lake is pretty, and the weather was perfect for a day out on the lake. But the overtly-tourist vibes was a little off-putting. The town employs specialised tour guides to bring us around the lake, and so our regular tour guide skipped this part of the tour. When he met up with us afterwards, he was refreshingly honest as usual and told us the local saying about the lake: 一生没来到千岛湖，终身遗憾。来到了千岛湖，遗憾终身。(If you spend your life without coming to qiandaohu, you will regret this all your life. If you come to qiandaoyu, this you will also regret all your life.) Anyhoo, we were done and headed on to Shanghai.

After over a week of traveling around rural China, I was ready for a change of pace. And stepping into Shanghai was just the thing I was looking for. We have a full day for sightseeing, and we definitely made the most of it.

城隍庙 (cheng huang miao) is a Taoist temple dedicated to the 城隍 deity of the same name. The temple is still around, but due to its central location, a bustling shopping district has grown around the temple. Within the district, 南翔馒头店 (nan xiang man tou dian) is one of Shanghai’s oldest establishment selling 小笼包 (xiao long bao), the thin-skinned, soup-laden dumplings that we all know and love. Shanghai is the birthplace of this dumpling, and coming to this restaurant is definitely number one on my to-do list. We headed over for lunch, where we had baskets upon baskets of freshly steamed dumplings. We also tried the 蟹黄灌汤包, a super-sized version of a 小笼包 xiao long bao (大笼包?), each about the size of a palm. A paper straw is given to drink the fragrant crab soup, and then we feasted on the dumplings.

西湖龙井

Amongst the other restaurants along the district, we were also recommended 宁波汤圆 (ning buo tang yuan, glutinous rice balls). These are filled with sweet osmanthus (桂花, gui hua) and black sesame.

As we walked down Nanjing Lu after lunch, we reached the Bund, also known as Waitan (外滩). It’s the stretch of waterfront along the Huangpu River, land which had been conceded to the various colonial powers in the aftermath of the Opium War. The colonial powers brought their architectural styles to the building that they had built, and today, styles from Romanesque to Baroque can be seen.

Peace Hotel, 上海和平饭店

The Bund

Our exploration of Shanghai also brought us to 小杨生煎包 (Yang’s), where I had some truly spectacular 生煎包 (shen jian bao, or pan-fried dumplings) at teatime.

And later, as night fell, we made our way to the ferry terminal for a night river cruise. The rain was miserable, and fog shrouded the tops of the buildings. But for one brief moment, at the right moment, the rain let up.

It had no doubt been a rough few years for the country. Five years after the start of pandemic, it’s a country that is still trying to find its feet. The economy is floundering after the prolonged lockdown, and even as we travelled around China, many of formerly bustling tourist areas such as Tunxi Ancient Street and Liyang Old Street are a shadow of their former selves. But their march of progress is incredible. Everywhere we look, from first-tiered cities like Hangzhou and Shanghai to rural areas, I see a cleaner, greener future. About half the cars that we saw were electric, and electric scooters and charging points are commonly seen within the cities.

We didn’t have more time than to do just a quick tour of Shanghai, which is a darn shame, because I’m sure there’s so much more to the city than what I saw. It’s a sprawling metropolitan, a city about eight times the size of Singapore. It’s easy to forget that the landmass of China is huge; it’s almost the size of Europe, and contains about 20% of the world’s population (and consumers). So let’s not discount China quite yet.

04 October 2023

Huangshan, Anhui (黄山, 安徽) - A Trip in Autumn, 2023 (Part 1)

Travel October 04, 2023 0

As we landed in Shanghai in mid-September, we thankfully missed the worst of the summer heat, when the temperature can soar as high as 40 degree Celsius. Now, the ambient air sits at a moderate 25-30 degrees; not cool enough to make climbing the famed Huangshan mountain easy, but warm enough such that we don’t yet need to encumber ourselves with extra layers during our trek.

Shanghai is the closest international airport to Huangshan, but it still took us a couple of days to get there. We spent most of the first couple of days moving westward to Anhui, which allowed us to let us tour Hangzhou city opportunistically as we passed through. In Hangzhou, we cruised down the Beijing-Hangzhou canal, and visited the Xiangji Temple, a Buddhist temple that have been standing for over a thousand years. Several deities are worshipped here; and, perhaps most famously, it has a shrine dedicated to the God of Cookery. Wooden charms sway in the wind, each with a wish: some for health, for love, and for happiness.

While in Hangzhou, we also went to the summit of 吴山 (Wu Mountain), for biscuits and a bowl of lotus broth at the tea shop overlooking the 西湖 (West Lake). The experience sounded more impressive than it is. As we left, I was walking alongside a young couple and their spunky child, who remarked cheekily “I know why it’s called Wu Mountain, it’s because there’s nothing to see here.” (Phonetically, Wu can be taken for another word that means “none”). Which perhaps is not that far off from the truth.

Tunxi Old Street

It’s unmistakable that the China of the 1990s that I knew is truly well and gone. No longer will you walk into thick clouds of cigarette smoke as you enter restaurants and hotels, nor will you be shepherded into a building to spend half a day being hard-sold all manners of trinkets midway during your tour. The streets are all cleaned up; the horrid tourist centres have all been shut down; and, street crime had been virtually non-existent in the last twenty years. Solitary pedestrians walk the streets at night with no fear, and Bentleys pass our tour bus on the expressways.

But luckily, one thing didn’t change. Walking into each restaurant, I spotted the customary (tourist) beverages on each table: one large bottle of coke (可口可乐) and 2 bottles of local beer. We usually swop out the soft drink for another beer, which we happily drink for every lunch and dinner. While in Hangzhou, we ate the region’s delicacies: 东坡肉 (Dong puo rou, braised pork belly) and 叫花鸡 (jiao hua ji, Beggars’ Chicken).

Guess what else I found! (And ate some of it). Chicecream, the Chinese luxury ice cream that allegedly doesn’t melt.

But finally, we reached Anhui. With the height of its tallest mountain beyond 1800 metres, Huangshan is China’s tallest mountain range. From the base of the mountain, we first took a shutter bus service, and then switched to a cable car service to bring us deeper into the range across smaller peaks. There, deep in the mountains, lies a burgeoning tourist hot spot. The numerous trails span over 160 square kilometres. Eight mountainous resorts are contained within, each connected to one another through hours-long trek with spectacular scenery along the way.

Stone paved trails lead from one viewpoint to another with precipitously tall and narrow stairs that allow for foot traffic but not motorised vehicles. From the cable car station, our hotel is 40 minutes away by foot, and mostly uphill. We carried our overnight bag with us, and there was no shortage of moaning and groaning. But all of us shut up when we saw the porters, all of them diminutive, lean and elderly, cut through the crowd while carry up crates of produces up the trails to the resorts. They are paid each trip by the weight, and they’re loaded up to the brim. We couldn’t help them even if they wanted us to, and as they huffed and puffed their way past us, the best we could do is get out of their way. I’ve never seen such bulging calf muscles.

We dropped our bags off at Shilin Hotel, and then started our hike. The shortest circuit to the peak is still a good 4-hour walk. All in all, we took close to 20000 steps up and down the stone steps of the mountainside. The view is phenomenal, as promised. We caught the sunset from the mountaintop, watching the sky darken into a purplish hue as the evening mist shrouded the footpaths.

And in the next morning, we watched as the red sun broke through the horizon and cast a yellow glow over the mountains.

Hongcun Village is perhaps the most photogenic location of the entire trip. It’s a UNESCO heritage, and has been a tourist attraction ever since the cult-classic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was filmed here. With its classical white walls and grey shingles, this village is one of the last remnants of the Huizhou-style architecture.

It is also a hot spot for art students to practice their craft. Along the town’s alleyways and down by the river, we see dozens of them hard at work with their easels and brushes.

We also went up Qiyun Mountain, which lies nearby. The area is dedicated to various Taoist deities with altars carved into the rocks and temples built into the mountains, and a small community lives up in the mountain with the temple priests.

The view here is gorgeous, but being up in the mountains isn’t the sanctuary I thought it’ll be. Do not expect fresh mountainous air: the incense and cigarette hangs thick in the air along the temples. It’s a particularly wretched feeling to get out of breath after climbing a mountain, only to breathe in all the incense smoke. I couldn't get down from that mountain fast enough.