FRIED BEEF HOR FUN IN BLACK BEAN SAUCE

Fried beef hor fun is such a common dish among the Cantonese. It is served either ‘dry’ or bathed in thick savory sauce. To be considered a notch above the others, a hor fun needs to be perfumed with wok hei. Yes, the Cantonese, of all dialect groups, hold wok hei in highest esteem. A good chef must have mastered the advanced stir-fry techniques that allow him to deliver power-packed wok hei to certain dishes. And fried hor fun is definitely one of these.

Wok hei is most effectively achieved when the iron wok is heated to smoking point. Oil is then added to increase the heat as well as to lubricate the food that is to be fried. The contents of the wok are tossed and swirled, the addition of more oil coupling with the intense heat to flambé the ingredients. The fumes and aroma thus created is captured in, and perfumes the dish, producing the prized wok hei.

In the past, Cantonese cze cha stalls would use black bean paste in many of their dishes including braised fish bee hoon, braised pork ribs with bitter gourd, and claypot braised fish head. These dishes were very popular then, but the availability of new sauces such as Kam Heong and Tom Yam have seen them decline somewhat.

 Fried Beef Hor Fun in Black Bean Sauce

Beef                             200 g, sliced about 2 mm thick, across the grain

Oil                                1/3 cup

Chye sim                     2 stalks, julienned

Hor fun                        450 g

Garlic                            2, minced

Bean sprout                 50 g

Salt                                ½ tsp

Dark soy sauce            ½ tbsp

Onion                           ½, sliced thickly

Red chilli                      1, julienned

Chinese wine               2 tbsp

Meat stock                   2 cup

Sesame oil                   ½ tsp

Potato flour                 1 tbsp, mixed with 1 tbsp of water 

Egg                               2, beaten lightly

White pepper             ½ tsp

Fried shallots               2 tbsp

Spring onion               1 sprig, julienned

Marinade:

Apple juice                   2 tbsp, used as natural tenderizer, optional

Light soy sauce            1 tbsp

Ginger juice                  1/3 tsp

Chinese wine                1 tbsp

White pepper              1/3 tsp

Sesame oil                    1 tbsp

Potato flour                  1 tsp

Sauce paste– mixed well and reduced to a paste under low heat

Peanut oil                     2 tbsp

Black bean                    2 tbsp, minced coarsely

Yellow bean paste      1 tbsp, mashed

Sugar                            ½ tbsp

Garlic                            2, minced finely

Red chilli                       1, minced finely

Water                            4 tbsp

Method:

1. Marinate beef and chill for at least one hour.
2. Heat wok or stainless steel pan until hot. Pour 1 tbsp of oil. Swirl. Add another tbsp of oil. Fry chye sim for 30 seconds. Add hor fun. Swirl hor fun with a spatula in a circular movement. Do not lift hor fun high with the spatula or you risk breaking it into small strands. When hor fun turns slightly golden, push it to one side of the wok. Add ½ tbsp of oil and garlic, give it a good toss and stir in hor fun. Add bean sprout, dark soy sauce and salt, and give it a final toss. Divide hor fun into individual plates. The whole process shouldn’t take more than 4 minutes.
3. Using the same wok, add remaining oil. Saute onion and chilli in medium heat until onion turns transparent.
4. Add sauce paste, sugar and mix thoroughly.
5. Increase heat to high. Add marinated beef and toss the pan continuously. Pour Chinese wine along the sides of the wok, allowing them to dribble to the center.
6. Pour in meat stock and let it boil for 15 seconds.
7. Lower heat to medium. Thicken the sauce with potato starch. The sauce should be slightly watery (not too gluey). Turn off the heat and pour egg mixture into the sauce, at the same time using the spatula to stir slowly in one direction.
8. Scoop gravy onto the fried hor fun in their individual servings.
9. Garnish it with white pepper, fried shallots and spring onion.

Note: Instead of boiling the sauce paste, it could be fried until all its ingredients (except water) have caramelized, and then simmer it into paste.

Sin Huat Eating House - A Meal That Left Me Crabby

Do I trust a foreign food personality to tell me what’s good on our local streets? Apparently not! Sin Huat Eating House won Mr. Anthony Bourdain’s heart and he sang praises (loads of it) on his TV series.

I had heard things about this restaurant. Its owner Chef Danny was known as the Food Nazi of Singapore and diners gladly paid through their noses for his superb, fresh seafood. You didn’t order your meals, so much as have the orders dictated to you by the chef, who would then cook your meal personally. And you wouldn’t know the size of your portion, or its price until the receipt arrived.

Because of this, I took a long time to convince myself -- and save enough money -- to have a first-hand encounter with this much talked about chef.

The restaurant was pretty quiet on the day of my visit, save for two tables of eight and five, and ours. One of my eating companions was a regular and the chef knew him well. Chef Danny offered a rather limited menu, and it seemed 90% of his dishes were de-rigueur with the regulars. We were no different.

Chef Danny delivers his food packed full of very strong flavours, especially garlic. A Singapore celebrity chef once told me, “If I boost my stock and flavours to the maximum, customers would be so overwhelmed that few would be able to tell the difference between good and mediocre cooking”. Chef Danny seems to subscribe to this philosophy.

A case in point was the Steamed Frog’s Legs with Essence of Chicken. Eight bottles of Chicken Essence were poured into a plate of eight perfectly steamed frogs, with garlic. With such an avalanche of robust chicken flavour, little culinary skill was needed for the dish to pack a wallop.

There were other instances. The dish of steamed scallops was overdone but the heavy bath of bean paste sauce was enough to mask its faults, along with much of the intrinsic flavour of the scallop. A similar sauce was used on the fried/braised crayfish. Again, I had to rely largely on my sight to discern what meat I was eating.

A few dishes stood out though. The stir-fried kai lan – usually a simple, supporting dish -- was delicious. It had the right amount of garlic, and the vegetable was crisp and flavoursome. Though it wasn’t cheap, I would gladly pay for it. On the other hand, the MOST cut-throat dish of the evening was the blanched dog conch or simply gong gong to the locals, served with a very tasty dip that was most likely a concoction of oyster sauce, garlic, chilli and buckets of processed flavouring. At $25 per kg, the owner of this restaurant could easily have bought a bungalow in a prime district in no time – if he hasn’t already done so.

The steamed squid was well executed and it was my 2^nd favourite dish of the evening. Again the garlic was slightly heavy handed. To his credit, Chef Danny’s handling of the steaming times for the seafood in most of his dishes was near impeccable. However, his main seafood ingredients lacked the flavor of what they were -- they didn't stand out but were buried under his overly strong sauces and dips.  I suspect this is Chef Danny’s trick: to mask and/or distract from his inability to balance his spices and sauces with finesse.

The final dish of braised crab mee hoon was my main purpose for coming to this restaurant; after all this dish made Chef Danny famous in this infamous red-light district. It consisted of two medium crabs and a handful of mee hoon. The mee hoon was very tasty, but lacked the flavour that mattered the most – that of the crab itself. How come? I wondered. Crab imparts a distinctly robust and sweet flavour; and two crabs’ worth of it would certainly have made its presence felt in the dish. Was it buried under heavy MSG or chicken flavouring? I wasn’t sure. But it led to my companions and I consuming ¼ of our national water reserves during the meal and after we got home that night.

Here is my concluding shot: when a foreign food personality or two visits some eatery in Singapore and delivers an encomium, we fall for it hook, line and sinker. Are we so insecure in our own judgments? After all, we, of all people, should know our own food better than anyone. This thought came to me strongly on this occasion. To whip up a tasty dish is not difficult: just load it with MSG and off-the-shelf broths. It's the mastery of precise cooking times that, in my opinion, is Chef Danny's ONLY true achievement. The textures were unfailingly right -- but where were the delicate flavors of seafood? I couldn't detect any of it in all the dishes that I ate. And to me, that's a major letdown.

P.S. I doubted the eight of us could have eaten 3 kg of dog conchs and 3 kg of scallops; but that was what the receipt said.

Sin Huat Seafood Restaurant

659/661 Geylang Road

Singapore

Telephone: 6744 9755

Wonton Mee Redemption

Near where I lived as a little boy in Chinatown was a famous mini noodle factory. On its shop front was displayed all manner of fresh and dehydrated noodles, wonton skins, and other flour-based products. I was fascinated.

And I enjoyed watching the whole process of noodle making too. It looked so well organized and mechanical; everyone had his or her precise role and activity. And they looked comical, with white flour on their faces and bodies, just like in the movies when the actors threw powder at each other.

I remember well my first attempt at making noodles – because I nearly died doing it. Kneading the dough was so tedious that I almost gave up halfway; and I swore I actually had biceps and triceps for the first time in my life after I finished. But that was the easy part. Because then came the rolling. Have you ever tried getting an even thickness on a piece of dough the size of a seat cushion? I finally ended up with a pile of stuff that looked like anything but noodles.

I still see this whole episode in my nightmares.

Now, life is kinder to me. I can borrow a mixer and a pasta machine from a friend and suddenly I feel like Superman. Nothing can defeat me again. With some leftover duck eggs in hand, I was ready to face my demons and conquer my phobia…

Wonton Noodle

Flour                           900 g      

Duck egg                    90 g                         

Chicken egg               270 g       

Potato flour                45 g          

Alkaline water            35 g                          

Method:

1.        On a flat surface, gently form a volcano with ¾ of the flour, with a hole in the center.

2.        Sprinkle salt evenly.

3.        Drop ¾ of egg in the middle of the flour.

4.        Start gently mixing and kneading.

5.        Add the remaining flour and egg bit by bit during kneading.

6.        The dough should be firm and not stick to the fingers.

7.        Once done, wrap dough in a cling wrap and let it rest for at least 30 minutes.

8.        Roll it out by hand or use a pasta machine.

9.        Dust with flour and let it dry.

Note: Duck egg gives a certain degree of elasticity to the noodle texture. If duck eggs are unavailable, just substitute it with the same amount of chicken eggs.

Method of Cooking:

1.        Boil sufficient water for 5 minutes.

2.        Lower water to around 95°C.

3.        Blanch noodle until cooked, for about 3 minutes, in a kitchen sieve.

4.        Remove noodle from the hot water and dip it into a pot of room temperature water and rinse thoroughly. Meanwhile bring the hot water to boil again.

5.        Blanch noodle in boiling water for 15 seconds.

6.        Noodle is ready to be served in soup or tossed dry.

Method of Tossed Dried Noodle:

Wonton noodle       35 g

Lard/oil                      1 tbsp

Sesame oil                 ¼ tsp

Oyster sauce             ½ tbsp

Light soy sauce         ½ tsp

Chilli sauce                1 tbsp

1.        Cook 30 g noodle (follow above instructions).

2.        Meanwhile, mix the rest of ingredients thoroughly in a serving bowl.

3.        Toss noodle well with the sauce.

4.        Serve with meats of your choice.