Long bean fish nests

One of the most beautiful of all Hakka-style dishes, for some strange reason this also happens to be one of the least well known. But that is certain to change once you realize that these also taste wonderful. 

In fact, they are so unusual and delicious that long bean fish nests will cement your reputation as a great Hakka cook.

The filling is simply homemade fish balls. But these are unlike any commercial fish balls you’ve ever eaten because they are light and fluffy, and yet have a bouncy enough texture to stand up to the long beans. 

Plus, I’ve figured out a way to make these in a food processor, which turns a labor of love into an easy feat.

Long beans are best through late summer and early winter here in California, around the same time that string beans are in season.

Look for thinnish beans, which will be firm and supple. Older beans have pithy insides, and they will often offer you fresh cowpeas inside, which are delicious too, but not what you want here. Select beans that look and feel perfect, as they are the stars of this particular show.

Long bean fish nests

Dòujiăo yúròujuăn  豆角魚肉圈

Hakka cuisine

Serves 6

Beans:

12 tender long beans (also called snake beans, foot-long beans, etc.)

Boiling water, as needed

1 teaspoon fine sea salt

Filling:

12 ounces | 300 g any variety of firm white-fleshed fish filets you like, defrosted if frozen

3 fresh or plumped-up dried black mushrooms

1 piece (about 1inch | 2 cm wide) aged tangerine peel

Boiling water

2 teaspoons ice water

½ teaspoon fine sea salt

½ teaspoon sugar

Freshly ground black pepper

2 scallions, trimmed and finely chopped

Potato starch or cornstarch, as needed

Peanut or vegetable oil for frying

Sauce:

1 tablespoon finely minced ginger

2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil

3 fresh or plumped-up dried black mushrooms

½ cup | 125 ml rice wine or strained mushroom-soaking liquid

½ cup | 125 ml water

2 teaspoons regular soy sauce

1 teaspoon sugar

Finely chopped cilantro or scallion greens for garnish

1. Trim off the stem ends of the long beans. Fill a wide pan with the boiling water and sprinkle in the salt. Add the long beans and blanch them only until they turn bright green. Empty the pan into a colander set in the sink. Rinse the beans to cool them off, as this will stop them from cooking any further. Drain the beans and pat dry.

2. Wind each bean around itself into a 2-inch | 5-cm wide nest as shown in the photos to the right, and tuck the ends inside to secure them. This is much easier than it sounds.

3. Set the fish on a couple of layers of paper towel to absorb excess moisture while you prepare the rest of the ingredients. Remove the mushroom stems and chop the caps finely. If you are using dried mushrooms, reserve the mushrooms’ soaking liquid for the sauce. Place the tangerine peel in a bowl and cover with boiling water. After at least 10 minutes, chop the softened peel into a fine mince.

4. Remove any bones still hiding in the fish by pulling them out with heavy tweezers or needle-nose pliers. Cut the fish into small pieces and place in a food processor with the tangerine peel. Whiz the fish until it clumps up into a pasty ball. Add the ice water and salt to the fish paste and pulse it a bit more. Pulse in the mushrooms, sugar, pepper, and scallions. You should end up with a firm, bouncy, light green paste.

5. Wet your hands and divide the fish paste into 12 balls. Stuff a ball into the center of each nest. Put a couple tablespoons of the potato or corn starch in a bowl and dip the fishy parts in the starch to coat them.

6. Set a frying pan over medium heat and drizzle in a few tablespoons of oil. When the oil is hot, slide in the filled nests. Fry them on each side until golden and then remove

to a shallow serving bowl. Pour off the oil and wipe the pan with a paper towel.

7. Make the sauce by heating the sesame oil and ginger together until they smell wonderful, then add the sliced mushrooms and fry until the mushrooms are golden. Pour in the rice wine or mushroom-soaking liquid and the soy sauce. Add the nests, cover, and

cook until most of the sauce has been absorbed, which will just take a few minutes. Plate the nests. Sprinkle them with the cilantro or scallions, and serve hot.

Hakka smoked chicken chez Huang

My father-in-law’s extended family served this dish only on very special occasions. Being thrifty Hakkas—who are as notorious as the Scots for being penny pinchers—protein was always doled out in small servings and bulked up with lots of vegetables, pickles, and rice. 

Even a dish as famous as this made only a brief appearance on the dining table before disappearing in a flurry of chopsticks. Definitely one of those you snooze, you lose situations. 

This recipe highlights the Hakka love for natural flavors and simplicity. Living as they do in relatively poor lands, the Hakka have developed a true knack for eking out sublime deliciousness from every part of an animal or plant.

A distant in-law's specialty!

Here is one of the more extravagant dishes ever to make its way out of a Hakka kitchen, for the chicken is smoked. Something this luscious would be enjoyed only rarely and in small portions, which perhaps made it taste even better.

My late father-in-law's eldest male uncle, whom we all referred to as Dabofu, was famous for his household's rendering of this dish. He was a man of considerable presence—tall and good-looking, with deep eyes that had a corona of blue surrounding the usual brown irises—and he had three wives. But the one thing my husband always mentions when he talks about Dabofu is his famous smoked chicken.

Dabofu and his wives were never willing to part with the recipe, but I've played around with it over the years, and this seems pretty darned close. My secret? Barley tea in the smoker. You see, rice hulls were the usual smoking ingredient with many Hakka (cheap, plentiful, useful… what’s not to love?), but as they are impossible to find, even in Whole Foods, I figured barley tea might do well, since it’s pretty close, and it does. Perfectly. You can find barley tea in most East Asian grocery stores, where it is usually sold under its Japanese name, mugi-cha, in Chinese stores as 大麥茶 dàmàichá, and in Korean places as bori-cha.

Barley tea and rice

Although nowadays we would say that one chicken serves 6 to 8, in a Hakka family only a quarter of the chicken would be served at a time. And so my husband only was able to savor a tiny sliver that one time he was ever a guest at Daobofu’s place. 

I make up for lost time and opportunity here by serving the whole batch to just the two of us—beer on the side, thank you very much—employing a very American attitude toward putting good chicken on the table. J.H. gets almost teary-eyed with joy at having someone in the kitchen finally get their dining priorities straight.

Hakka Smoked Chicken

Kèjiā xūnjī 客家熏雞

Hakka

Serves 4 to 6

Fan dry the bird

Seasoned salt:

4 tablespoons whole Sichuan peppercorns

2 tablespoons whole white peppercorns

2 tablespoons whole black peppercorns

1 teaspoon fennel seeds

5 tablespoons sea salt

Chicken:

Either 2 pounds | 1 kg chicken wings or 1 whole fryer chicken, preferably kosher and/or free range

Boiling water, as needed

1 tablespoon seasoned salt for the wings, 2 tablespoons for a whole bird

¼ cup | 15 g loose barley tea (see headnotes)

¼ cup | 30 g raw rice of any kind

Spray oil

1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil

1. First make the seasoned salt: Over medium-low heat, dry-fry (meaning don’t add any oil) all of the peppercorns, five-spice powder, fennel, and salt until the salt darkens and the peppercorns start to pop. Cool the salt and spices completely, and then grind them to a fine powder. Sieve the powder, discard any large bits, and store this in a covered jar in a dark area.

Surfaces absolutely dry

2. Start the chicken at least a day before you plan to serve it. Clean the chicken and pull out any pinfeathers. Lightly rub the chicken with a towel to remove any loose surface skin. With the wings, keep them in one piece, although you can remove the wing tips, if you prefer. With a whole chicken, tuck the wings under so that they lie flat against the body, but leave the legs untied so that the chicken can cook through quickly and easily.

3. Bring about 2 quarts | 2 liters water to a full boil in a tall pot that is just wide enough to hold the chicken. Have extra boiled water ready in case you need it. For wings, simply lower them into the pot, and for a whole chicken, lower the chicken into the pot with the breast side up, and add more water as needed to cover the chicken by at least 2 inches | 5 cm. Bring the pot to a boil again and then reduce the heat to maintain just a bare simmer.  Poach chicken wings for 10 minutes and a whole chicken for 15 minutes, then cover the pot and turn off the heat. Remove the wings after around 20 minutes, and the whole chicken after an hour or so, and drain thoroughly. Rub the chicken inside and out with the salt - about 2 teaspoons for wings and 1 tablespoon for a whole bird - paying special attention to the thicker areas. Cover the bird and refrigerate overnight.

Smoked up and ready

4. Set the chicken on a cake rack placed on a platter and air dry it with an electric fan, turning the chicken over every half hour or so to help the skin lose every drop of moisture, as this will allow the smoke to adhere to it later on. 

5. Put the barley tea and rice in the bottom of your smoker. Spray the rack with oil and place it in the smoker. Cover the smoker and set it over high heat. When smoke begins to billow out of the smoker, add your chicken. Smoke the wings for 10 minutes, remove the smoker from the heat, and then turn the wings over and smoke them another 5 minutes before letting the smoker cool down. For a whole bird, smoke it for about 25 minutes total. The good thing about using only barley tea and rice is that you won’t get any sour taste from the burned fuel like you if sugar is involved, so smoke away until the skin is as dark as you like. Remove the chicken from the smoker, cool for about 10 minutes, and then rub the surface with the sesame oil. Cut the wings in half, if you like, and the whole chicken into chunks. Place a small dish of the seasoned salt on the side in case someone would like this saltier.

Hakka braised stuffed vegetables

You will find meat-stuffed 
vegetables and bean curd throughout much of China’s southern regions, but for my money the best version belongs to the Hakka.

Part of this has to do with the emphasis on the vegetables, rather than the stuffing. 

Hakka food is very veggie-centric, and so meat tends to serve as a seasoning most of the time, rather than the main event. And in this dish, the results are superb and perfectly balanced. 

Eggplant becomes soft and comforting, the peppers provide spark and interest, and the mushrooms add their own spin on meatiness. It’s an inspired combination. But what I really love is the eggplant, so there is a preponderance of eggplant in here. 

Rice wine, fish sauce, oyster sauce

My late father-in-law was a master at stuffing bean curd (aka doufu or tofu), and his preferred filling was a mixture of ground dace (a kind of fish) and pork. You often can find dace already pounded into a thick, smooth paste at Chinese markets with a large Cantonese clientele, but I tend to be wary, as who know what’s in there and how long it’s been there.

So, to get a taste of the sea, I use things like oyster sauce and fish sauce to ramp up the xianwei (umami) here. The results are absolutely delicious.

This Hakka dish traditionally has three main ingredients, which almost always includes eggplant, and the other main candidates are bean curd, sweet pepper, chile peppers, bitter melon, and mushrooms. 

Stuffed 'shrooms & peppers

Now that the eggplants and pepper plants are going crazy in my back yard, I feature them here with pleasure. 

This is not at all hard to pull together. In fact, you can do it in stages, if you like. To be honest, this braise is even better if you can manage to get everything done ahead of time so that it can sit in the fridge for a day or two, for it allows the flavors to mellow and mingle, and the sauce to permeate down into the filling and vegetables.  

All you need to do then is simply heat it up and serve it with steamed rice and maybe a green vegetable. 

Hakka braised stuffed vegetables chez Huang

Huángjiā Kèjiā niàngsānbăo  黃家客家釀三寶

Whack until sticky

Hakka

Serves 6 to 8

Filling:

1 pound ground pork (not too lean)

2 tablespoons finely chopped ginger

1 scallion, finely chopped

2 tablespoons oyster sauce

2 tablespoons fish sauce

1 large egg, lightly beaten

½ cup | 50 g cornstarch, or so

Vegetables:

5 to 6 fat Chinese or 4 Japanese eggplants (long, rather than egg-shaped)

1 large or 2 small sweet peppers (any variety), and/or 6 to 12 fat fresh chile peppers (of whatever heat level you fancy)

An eggplant 'sandwich'

8 brown mushrooms, or some other stuffable mushroom

The braise:

Peanut or vegetable oil, as needed

6 cloves garlic, peeled and lightly whacked

6 slices fresh ginger

1 scallion, chopped

1 tablespoon regular soy sauce

¼ cup | 60 ml mild rice wine

1½ teaspoons sugar

Freshly ground black pepper

2 cups | 500 ml unsalted chicken stock plus 1 cup | 250 ml water, or 3 cups | 750 ml water

Garnish:

Chopped cilantro, torn basil, or chopped scallions

Filled sandwich

1. Place the ground pork on a cutting board and whack away at it with the back of a heavy knife, scraping it up and turning it over, until it is light. Place this in a medium work bowl. Add the ginger, scallion, oyster sauce, fish sauce, and egg, and beat these together with your hand (hold it stiff like paddle) to incorporate these fully. Alternatively, you can use a food processor, but what’s the fun in that?

2. Trim off the stem and blossom ends of the eggplant. Cut the eggplant crosswise into pieces about 1 inch | 2.5 cm thick, and then cut each of these almost all the way through the middle, so that they are connected at one side; this will help keep the sandwiches from falling apart. Dust the insides of the eggplant sandwiches with cornstarch.

Dusted sandwich

3. Cut the sweet peppers in half, remove the stems and seeds, and then cut them into pieces about the same size as the eggplant. Cut the chile peppers in half, remove the stems and seeds, and cut them into smaller pieces, if necessary. Wipe the mushrooms clean and remove the stems. Dust the insides of these vegetables with some cornstarch, too.

4. Fill the eggplant sandwiches, peppers, and mushrooms with the meat mixture, patting it in so that it’s glued inside the vegetables. Dust the meaty areas of the stuffed vegetables with cornstarch, as this will help prevent them from sticking to the pan and falling apart, and then knock off the excess. If you have extra filling or vegetables, don't sweat it. Just brown them, too, and toss them into the pot.

Frying up the eggplant

5. Now prepare the sauce. Pour about a tablespoon of oil in a large casserole or sandpot and set it over medium-high heat. Add the garlic, ginger, and scallions. Brown these lightly, and then add the rest of the braising ingredients. Bring the liquid to a boil, simmer for a few minutes, and then reduce the heat to low.

6. Finally, fry the vegetables. Set a large flat pan on medium heat and add a good glug of oil. When the oil is hot, place the stuffed vegetables in the pan and brown all over, adjusting heat as needed. Remove these to the casserole or sandpot as they turn completely golden. You will have to do this in batches, by the way. Be sure and set the peppers and mushrooms meat-side up, as this will help keep the filling in place. The liquid doesn’t need to cover the vegetables, but they all should have at least their feet wet. 

So satisfying

7. Bring the casserole or sandpot almost to a boil, and then lower it to a very gentle simmer. Do not stir the veggies, as this might knock out the filling. Slowly bvraise the vegetables for about an hour, and then remove from the heat. Taste the sauce and adjust the seasoning as desired. This dish should rest for at least 15 minutes, and is even better the next day. 

8. Carefully pour off the liquid into a gravy separator, if you have one, as the eggplant will have dumped most of the oil by now. You can also simply skim off the oil with a spoon. (Keep this oil for stir-frying or eggs – it’s really aromatic.) Boil the sauce in a saucepan until thick. You will have a lot of food here, so you can do what I do: pack it up in containers and either freeze or refrigerate until needed. Microwave or steam the veggies until heated through. Pour the hot, thick sauce over the top. Sprinkle with cilantro, basil, or scallions, and serve hot.

In search of the elusive amber tamale, plus a short story on Life & Thyme

(Note: In addition to the recipe and blogpost below that will help you celebrate the Dragon Boat Festival in style on Thursday, June 9, here is a link to a story I wrote and illustrated for Life & Thyme. It talks about how I was finally able to breach the yawning gap between my forbidding Chinese mother-in-law and a very young [and impossibly white] me. It has nothing to do with the Dragon Boat Festival, but oh well...)

Early in my marriage, I noticed that my Chinese husband became increasingly excited as Dragon Boat Festival approached, spending more time than usual haunting his favorite delis. He was, as I soon found out, stalking the elusive amber tamale. 

A gorgeous amber tamale

Unlike all the other varieties out there — including burrito-sized ones from Hunan with massive centers of braised pork or sweet bean paste, delicate Suzhou versions with date paste and pine nuts, or some simple Beijing rice parcels speckled with boiled peanuts — these were not on everyone’s radar, and so his anxiety would increase the longer the hunt took until he had finally tracked down someone who not only sold them, but made them with the requisite pillowy texture.

The first time I tried amber tamales (that’s my name for them, as the Chinese one, “alkali tamales,” or jiănzòng 鹼糉, is just not very appealing), I was bowled over. For one, they were semitransparent and a beautiful golden color very much like, well, amber. Second, they were cold and topped with some plain sugar. Third, the tamale itself had no filling... it was rice and nothing else. And finally, it was unexpectedly delicious. (By the way, the character for "tamales" can be written as either 糉 or 粽 - they mean the same thing.)

Much like my other favorite type, the one made with sticky rice flour and an assortment of savory things called bănzòng 板糉, this was a specialty of the Hakka, those latecomers to South China who seasoned the food of their neighbors with the ancient flavors of the North China Plain. Even now, jianzong are an integral part of Dragon Boat Festival ceremonies among the Hakka, as they are offered with other seasonal gifts to such deities as the Earth God (Tŭdìgōng 土地公). 

It's tamale time!

Be that as it may, I never really noticed them until I got married, and I probably would never have gotten around to eating one so early in my life if my husband and father-in-law were not dedicated amber tamale fiends. But to their credit, on a hot summer’s day it would be difficult to find something more satisfying to munch on than these little guys sometimes called jiănshuĭzòng 鹼水糉 sprinkled with sugar or honey for a simple snack.

The amber tamale also has a unique flavor courtesy of the alkaline water it simmers away in for around four hours, one that tastes slightly sulfurous, and so it is an acquired taste. Once I realized that it smelled a lot like an egg yolk, my brain stopped protesting, I lifted up my fork, and I took up the amber tamale habit with a passion.

Those first couple of years I found that the best ones were sold in Taipei’s South Gate Market, a food emporium packed to the gills with small stalls selling dried goods and large delis bustling with ladies who turned out some of the finest Chinese snack foods I have ever eaten. Watching them enfold raw rice into stacks of bamboo leaves was also an eye-opener for me because before then I never could get a grip on the secrets to wrapping them perfectly so that they looked beautiful and had the requisite bouncy texture in the center. But one day I stood there for close to thirty minutes, surreptitiously watching their every move while poking around in the bins out front and learned their moves.

Make the cone

As good as those store-bought ones were, making these you at home will give you the chance to taste these at their best. The problem is that most people turn jianzong into hard little nuggets with dry, powdery centers, and that just misses the whole point of these delectable bundles of joy.

The key is to wrap the raw rice so that there is just enough room for it to expand, turning these from raggedy looking parcels into familiar plump balloons. Some people put a green or red bean filling in these, but I like mine like this: plain and delicious.

Amber tamales

Jiănshuĭzòng 鹼水糉

Hakka

Makes 24 tamales

Zongzi:

Use folds to enclose the rice

2½ cups round sticky rice (yuán nuòmĭ 圓糯米)

1½ tablespoons baking soda

24 large, dried bamboo leaves (zòngyè 糉葉)

Large pot of boiling water

Butcher’s twine or dry grass ties

Garnish:

Dark brown or granulated sugar, honey, or osmanthus blossom syrup (guìhuājiàng 桂花醬)

1. Start this the day before you are planning to make the zongzi and two days before you want to eat them. Rinse the rice in a large sieve, drain, and then place in a large work bowl. Toss the damp rice well with the baking soda, cover, and let it sit overnight on a kitchen counter.

2. Either the night before or the day of, soak the bamboo leaves in very hot water, swishing them around now and then so that all of them get evenly soaked. Soak the dry grass too, if you are using it.

3. When you are ready to wrap the tamales, lay a large tea towel on a table and place the bowl of now very yellow rice there, along with a spoon, the twine or soaked grass, and a pair of kitchen shears. (Here is a video I made for instructions on filling and wrapping these.)

4. Next, wash the leaves by carefully sponging off both sides and then rinsing them. The edges of the leaves are sharp, so don’t cut yourself. Drain the leaves, pat them with a towel, and then wrap them in a clean towel so that they do not dry out.

Ready for the pot

5. Use your shears to trim off the stem end of the leaves, as well the point. Use only leaves that have no splits or holes; put any damaged ones to the side, as these can act as bandages (more on that later).

6. Now comes the fun part: wrapping the zongzi.  Hold a leaf at both ends with the shiny side toward you, and then curl the leaf around to make a cone in the center. Here is the first key to success: make sure that there is a little fold at the bottom of the cone that you can bend over, as this will seal in the rice. Scoop about 3 tablespoons of the rice into the cone, and then lightly fold the ends of the leaves over the cone. At this point comes the second key to success: lightly shake the tamale; if it rattles and no rice comes flying out, the wrapping is just right, but if you don’t hear the rice bouncing around, then the wrapper is too tight and you need to loosen it.

7. Wrap twine (or grass) around the center of the zongzi maybe 3 or 4 times, but not too tightly. Imagine that you are tying a string around a baby’s wrist, but you don’t want it to fall off: that is how tight/loose you want it. (The rice will swell up quickly in the boiling water, so don’t worry about the shape too much at this point.) Leave about 10 to 12 inches of twine or grass hanging off of the zongzi so that they can be eventually bundled together, and that’s it. Now do the same with the rest of the rice and leaves. If any of the leaves split, you can cut a piece of the broken ones off and insert it inside of the cone to act as a bandage. You should end up with 20 tamales, give or take.

Chilled & ready to eat

8. When all of these parcels have been wrapped and tied, bundle them in groups of 5 by tying the ends of the string or grass together into a knot. Then, gently lower these bundles into the pot of boiling water; the water should cover the tops of the zongzi by a few inches, as the rice will absorb the water. Reduce the heat to a gentle simmer and cover the pot. Slowly cook the zongzi for 4 hours, adding more boiling water as necessary, and then drain them into a colander. Cool them completely, wrap in a plastic bag, and chill overnight.

9. To serve, unwrap a zongzi or two per person and arrange these on individual plates. Offer any of the garnishes (or all of them, if you are feeling particularly generous) to your diners. These can be eaten with chopsticks, but I’ve found that forks work particularly well here.

(This article originally appeared in more or less the same format in Cleaver Quarterly in 2014)