The Food Canon

If you are familiar with cooking sous vide, you would have experimented by now with slow and low SV cooking of tough but flavourful cuts like short-rib beef. If you have well-marbled cut to start with, your can be sure that the results will be spectacular after 36 or 48 hours of cooking at anywhere between 55˚C to 60˚C. Check out my previous post here.

I use it to make a Japanese Rice Bowl recently for a party of 80. I will share with you my cooking notes.

Estimating at 50gm of beef per pax, we started with about 5 kg of Angus short-rib beef, cooking it at 56˚C for 36 hours. This was of course prepared a few days before.

After it has finished cooking, cut open the vacuumed beef packs and drain the juice into a cooking pot. Heat up the pot and when the juice heats up, the scums will turn solid. Strain and keep the juice.

Fridge the beef. It will be easier to trim and cut if the meat is chilled. To prepare, trim and cut the beef into small blocks.  Some short-rib cuts have tough tendon and fats which you need to trim. And yes, keep the fats (good for "heart attack fried rice", I heard!)! Next, coat it with soy sauce before you pan sear as it will make browning easier. See photo below.


Meanwhile, prepare a the salad of cucumber, tomato, silken tofu and lettuce. Slice it into small pieces for easier eating off the bowl. Prepare a lemon and ginger dressing. Keep chilled and dressed the salads before you serve.

As for the eggs, cook it at 62˚C for 45 minutes. Keep warm till your serve it.

For the sauce, we used the remains beef juices, mirin, soy sauce and cooking sake. We added sugar to sweeten it and beef bouillon to make it more intense. Then we add the slurry of corn flour to thicken it.

Cook the Japanese rice. 6 kg will feed 80 pax nicely.

Nearing the time of the dinner, we started to pan-sear the beef blocks. Season it and then  sliced it at a thickness of about 3-4 mms.

After this, it should be easy. Plate the bowls in this order: rice, beef, egg and drizzle some of the beef sauce. Garnish with furikake - mixture of seaweed, sesame seeds and other flavouring seasonings. Some diced spring onions will be good too.

Then placed dressed salads on the side.

Lay out the bowls on a serving table. Serving dinner in a bento bowl is fast and efficient.

Cost? About $4 per bowl and it looks pretty and taste gourmet :)

Slicing the "twice-cooked" Sous vide cooked and pan-seared beef

The flour:water ratios given in the cookbook (page 213) is wrong. The amount of water is too low.

Below is the correct recipe. Basically, you need to add water. This recipe is just a guide. As long as you add water to flour, you can always adjust the consistency.

This dish is almost unique to our local cuisine (Malay and Nonya).

It should be obvious that the most important piece in Hakka Yong Tofu is the Stuffed Tofu, from which the dish is named.

One challenge with making this is Singapore is that it is difficult to find a kind of tofu which is easily available in KL. The KL version - called 'soi tofu" in Cantonese - has the right texture: silky smooth and taste divine when served stuffed, after a brief pan fry, in soup or sauce. And yet, it is firm enough to hold the stuffing. The local varieties here are either too hard or too soft (thus, it cannot hold the stuffing).

But if you can lay hand on very fresh Tau Kwa which is made to have a softer texture, you can replicate the KL version. This was what I was happy to discover recently when I manage to use some very fresh Tau Kwa. It was imply delicious.

Read this post on how to make the stuffing and for fuller instructions. We used a 1:1 fish-pork ratio, using Batang fish (Spanish Mackeral) and minced pork with some fats in it.

Slice the tau kwa into two tri-angle shaped pieces. Scoop a bit of the center and fill in with the stuffing using a spoon. Smoothen it with a corn flour slurry.

Stuffing the Tau Kwa (Photo credit: Joyce Ho)

Make a fish stock from the fish bones and heads. Wash them first and deep fry briefly to remove the fishy taste. Then heat up some water, add salt to taste and add the fish parts. After about 30 minutes, the stock should be done. Strain. Using the stock, gently cook the stuffed Tau Kwa for about 10 minutes. Be gentle with the handling as the tau kwa can break. Alternatively, you can also steam the stuffed Tau Kwa, which will be my preferred way of cooking this.

Add oyster sauce to the stock and corn flour slurry to create a sauce. The stuffed Tau Kwa is best served immediately after it is cooked or steamed as it is best eaten hot.

You need to serve it with chilli sauce and "tim cheong" (recipe here), garnished with diced spring onions.

Now the challenge is - where can you get very fresh Tau Kwa? Supermarts are out. Try wet market stalls.

Hakka YTF served with Chee Cheong Fun

Alpha Course is starting again and once again, we can expect some good home-cooking from the Cathedral community. More info on the Alpha Course at the Cathedral can be found here.

We made Nasi Lemak again for the 190+ -pax Alpha Intro dinner.

At the Cathedral kitchen, the facilities are more limited. For the rice, we had to cook it using the electric rice cookers instead of steamers, our usual preferred method. I am learning that you can also do some really nice Nasi Lemak Rice without going the "kukus" way.

So, how did it go?

With some care, I will say that it is possible to cook some good NL rice this way. We were pretty happy with the results and I will detail here our cooking notes of what we did.

The Rice
10 kg of Jasmine Rice
Fresh milk from 6 coconuts
Salt
Pandan Leaves

A ratio of rice:water 1:1.1 was used to cook the rice. A tablespoon of salt was used for every kilo of rice. After the rice has cooked (when the switch goes to “warm”), coconut milk and pandan leaves were added. We used freshly squeezed milk which we bought from Tekka Market. Using a spatula, we fluffed the rice. Then we kept the rice cooking on warm till it was served for dinner later.

For good Nasi Lemak rice, the rice should be fluffy, with whole unbroken grains. Too much coconut milk will make the rice greasy and keeping to this ratio is important. Salt - and enough of it - is essential.

You need to imagine how the rice will go with the rather oily sambal and the salty ikan bilis. 10 kilo was barely enough for 190 pax and we could have cooked a kilo more.

I have been encountering folks who have been cooking off my blog. With the released cookbook, users of my Mum's recipes seem to have risen considerably.

I am both amazed and grateful. Already, serving as a pastor since I graduated from Uni, I am grateful that I am of some spiritual use. I never expected to be of some earthly use, given that I have never had  a career apart from pastoring and preaching. The opportunity to connect with new acquaintances is also precious, especially those outside of the church community.

I want to introduce in this post an "old school" recipe which my Mum cooked regularly.  This is one of the classic comfort foods that has stood the test of time. She often cooked this attractive, colourful dish for parties, accompanying the likes of curry chicken, Hakka Deep Fried Pork and rice. I have memories of eating it when I was a child. It is the kind of recipe which you are likely to find in one of Tham Yui Khai cookbooks (see the link here about his cookbooks).

It is also often served as the filling for the traditional fried Yam Ring dish, with steamed yam (taro added of course) It is somewhat similar to the Italian ratatouille. You can omit the chicken and go vegetarian. Once you have prepared the ingredients, the cooking is fast and easy. For this dish, texture is important. So don’t overcook the dish.
Marinade
1 tbsp oyster sauce
1 tsp light soy sauce
1 tsp fish sauce
1 tsp sugar
1 tbsp Chinese wine

Slice the chicken meat into 1-cm (0.4-in) cubes and marinate for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, slice the baby sweet corn into three pieces each. Also slice the peppers and red onions into bite-sized pieces. Rehydrate the chillies and slice them into 1 cm rings.

In a wok, heat 1 tablespoon of oil and fry the dried chillies till they are lightly browned. Remove.

Add another tablespoon of oil and fry the cashew nuts until they change to golden brown color. Note that some oil is necessary when cooking nuts in a wok or they will burn. Remove and set the nuts aside.

Using some of the leftover oil, fry the minced garlic. Then add the vegetables and the marinade sauces and stir fry for 3 minutes. Then add the chicken meat and dried chillies along and stir fry for another 3 minutes. Then add the Chinese rice wine and the cornflour slurry. Fry for a further 1 minute and the dish should be done.

This dish can be eaten atnroom temperature. Garnish with the cashew nuts before you serve it.

I should add that there is an old school restaurant technique used for this dish where oil is used to stir-fry every item. It is called "lai yau" (pull with oil) in Cantonese. I am not recommending this technique here as some may view it as unhealthy. But it is a good technique to use.

Also if you are making a huge batch for parties, it makes sense to cook the items separately first to ensure that the texture stays crunchy and that each item is cooked "just right."