Sexy Shanghai crab

I really cannot think of a more luxurious cuisine than the delicious trifecta that includes Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang. Just like in last week’s recipe for Clams in Custard, the names for some of these dishes do not scream out sensuality, in either Chinese OR English. But believe me, food just does not get better than this. Something about the area around the Yangtze River Delta manages to bring perfect ingredients, textural nuance, and fresh flavors together in the ways that continually astound and delight.

Take this dish, for example. It is, simply put, insanely easy to put together, and yet I’ve never found it anywhere in the States. You find yourself a crab, have your fishmonger prep it, and then you toss it in a vibrant sauce with some rice cakes. Fifteen, twenty minutes, tops. But the results are incredible: sweet crabmeat contrasts with the salty seasonings, hard shells bounce up against the pillowy rice cakes, and the sauce forms a silky sheet that brings everything together.

Dining on this is also a descent into a more hedonistic realm that you might expect, as you have to slow down as you peel the shells off of the crab, lick your fingers and the shells, dip your crabmeat into the creamy sauce, and then enjoy its fresh sweetness against the puffy rice cakes, that turn soft and chewy in their short braise.

Cracked Dungeness

You can use live or cooked crabs for this recipe. I live in the Bay Area, so our go to variety is freshly steamed Dungeness. But live ones work equally well. Just go with whatever is local and in season. If you get a cooked crab, ask your fishmonger to do the following: save the carapace (top shell), remove the gills and clean the body, but keep any tomalley or roe, and then chop the body and crack the legs. For live ones, ask that they be killed and then prepared as with the cooked ones. You can do this at home, but this is a whole lot easier and makes you enjoy the dish even more.

It’s crab season around here. Get cracking.

Crab in bean sauce with rice cakes

Jiàngbào pángxiè nián’gāo  醬爆螃蟹年糕

Serves 4 to 6

Around 1 pound/450g whole crab or crabs (see headnotes)

Flour, as needed (about 3 tablespoons)

Around 8 ounces/225g rice cakes (batons preferred, but ovals ok)

1 tablespoon regular soy sauce

1 tablespoon sugar

1 tablespoon bean sauce (see Tips)

1 tablespoon catsup

1 cup/240ml water

1 cup/240ml peanut or vegetable oil

3 cloves garlic, chopped

1 tablespoon chopped fresh ginger

2 green onions, whites and greens chopped and kept in separate piles

1 tablespoon Shaoxing rice wine

1½  teaspoons pale rice vinegar

1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil

1. Check over the crab and use the butt of your Chinese knife or cleaver to crack any parts that look too solid, as you want your diners to enjoy the food without wrestling with it. Remove any loose bits of shell and check to see that the gills (feathery bits) have all been successfully removed. Place the crab (including the carapace) in a large work bowl and toss with enough flour to coat it evenly. 

Fried crab

2. Next, shake the rice cakes into another work bowl and separate them as much as possible, since you want them to cook evenly and get a chance to completely soften up in the sauce as fast as possible. Mix together the soy sauce, sugar, bean sauce, catsup, and water. Set a clean, heatproof work bowl, Chinese spider or slotted spoon, and work chopsticks next to the stove.

3. Place your wok over medium-high heat and add the oil when the iron is hot. As soon as a bit of flour sprinkled on the oil sizzles and disappears, pick up small handfuls of the crab and shake off the extra flour before sliding them into the hot oil. Cook the crab in 2 or 3 batches so that you have plenty of room to move them around and toss them in the oil. As soon as the crab is a pale gold and the shells turn pink, use your spider and chopsticks to remove them to the clean work bowl. Repeat with the rest of the crab until it is all fried.

Baton-shaped rice cakes

4. Drain out all but a couple of tablespoons of oil and return the wok to medium-high heat. Add the garlic, ginger, and onion whites to the hot oil and stir them around. Once they begin to take on a slightly golden tinge, scrape them and the oil out onto the crab.

5. Pour the soy sauce mixture into the wok and bring it to a boil over medium-high heat. Add the rice cakes and bring the sauce to a boil before lower the heat to maintain a gentle simmer. Cook the rice cakes until they are soft and pillowy, about 10 to 15 minutes, stirring often so that they do not stick to the wok; add more water, if necessary.

6. When the rice cakes are as soft as you like them, raise the heat to high. Toss in the crab and fried aromatics, as well as the rice wine, vinegar, and sesame oil. Toss these continually until the sauce thickens and the crab is heated through. At the last minute, toss in the onion greens and serve in a shallow bowl or casserole with the top shell perched attractively over the top, along with a bowl on the side to collect the shells.

Tips

Non-spicy bean sauce

Be sure to use a non-spicy bean sauce here, the one called doubanjiang, not la doubanjiang. Har Har brand from Taiwan is very good and comes in both cans and jars. (You can, of course, use a spicy bean sauce here, but it will then turn into more of a Sichuan-style dish. Still very tasty that way, of course!)

If you don't have this type of sauce on hand, sweet wheat sauce (tiánmiànjiàng) can be used instead.

Rice cakes generally come either in batons, which are about 1 inch/2.2cm long and ¼ inch/5mm wide, or as oval discs a little over an inch long. The latter are cut from logs, which occasionally can be found, but these are difficult to slice unless you get them very fresh. Fortunately, rice cakes are easy to find in Korean markets, as well as Chinese ones that cater to more recent immigrants, and they will be stored in the frozen or refrigerated section, usually near noodles and other starchy products.

If the rice cakes are frozen, remove as many as you plan to use and then freeze the rest. Fresh ones should be used up within a week or two, and be sure and discard them if they get black spots or feel slimy. Fresh rice cakes can also be frozen if you are not planning to use them immediately.

This crab dish makes great leftovers. Bring about a cup of water to a boil, and then toss the leftovers in the boiling water until they heat through; add more boiling water as needed to keep the rice cakes and sauce from sticking.

Tip

In the picture at the top of the page you will see that I fried the onion greens first to toast them up. A guest for that particular dinner doesn't care for raw or lightly cooked onion greens, so I fried them to a golden brown, which changed their character enough so that she was very happy. I got some nice green onion oil out of the deal, so I was happy, too.  

The most luscious rice cakes ever. Thanks, Ningbo.

Ningbo on the coast of Zhejiang is the home to these chewy little slices of heaven called "rice cakes" or nian'gao, but I was completely unaware of them until I moved out of my Chinese family’s downtown home and into an apartment on the outskirts of Taipei with two American roommates.

We were within a stone’s throw from the airport, and in a few years the area would become very ritzy, but at the time it was cheap and ever-so-nicely rundown at the edges, making it great for three people on tight budgets.

Around the corner near the bus stop was a little place run by the sweetest man from Ningbo, and he was the one who introduced me to these stir-fried rice cakes. I soon invented all sorts of excuses for stopping in for a simple yet utterly delicious meal, and I inevitably did it when I was alone so that I could revel in all of the flavors and textures and aromas there without any distractions. This nice gentleman understood, and so he would serve me and then leave me alone in order to fully adore his food.

"Rice cakes" is one of those horrible translations that manages to supply all the wrong images, but there really is no equivalent in Western cuisine. Nian’gao like these are made of sticky rice that has been cooked, pounded into a paste, formed into batons, cooled, and then sliced.

If you are fond of mochi (and who isn’t?), you will like nian’gao, although these are firm and unsweetened and meant to be cooked again before being eaten. The name actually means "year cakes" because various forms of these rice pastes are traditionally eaten all over China during the Lunar New Year.

Red-in-snow

Nian’gao is fairly bland and offers only the natural sweetness of rice itself, so it serves as the perfect vehicle for whatever you want to match it with. When it is stir-fried as here, it will remain bouncy and chewy, and so things that are likewise bouncy and chewy are usually matched with it.

My favorite is the recipe here, a very vegan dish that is just amazingly delicious. The seasonings are juuust right, and the textures play off each other in a disarming way: the crisp bamboo shoots and nutty green soybeans getting a wonderful run for their money with the salted mustard greens called “red-in-snow” and good old green onions acting as a luscious backup, with the rice cakes bringing everything together.

Rice cakes with salted mustard greens, bamboo, and green soybeans

Xuělĭhóng sŭnsī máodòu cháo niángāo  雪裏紅筍絲毛豆炒年糕

Jiangsu, Zhejiang
Serves 2 as a main dish

3 tablespoons peanut or vegetable oil

Frozen shoots & soybeans

4 green onions, trimmed and chopped

1 small bamboo shoot, fresh or frozen and defrosted, cut into julienne (about 1 cup)

1 cup shelled green soybeans (edamame), defrosted

6 ounces (about 1 cup) chopped Salted Mustard Greens (xuelihong)

12 ounces (about 2¼ cups) sliced Ningbo-style rice cakes, the slices separated if necessary

2 tablespoons Shaoxing rice wine

1 cup filtered boiling water

1. Heat a wok over high heat and then add the oil. Toss in the green onions and stir them around to release their fragrance. Before they start to brown, add the julienned bamboo shoot and soybeans. Toss these in the hot oil for about a minute to heat them through and then add the pickled greens (be sure and cut up any large pieces you find). Toss these together some more for about half a minute, and then add the rice cakes.

2. After you stir-fry the rice cakes for a minute or so, pour in the rice wine and the boiling water around the edge of the wok, and then continue to toss the rice cakes until most of the liquid has been absorbed. Taste and adjust the seasoning, if necessary. Serve hot in bowls.

Stir-fried Ningbo rice cakes

Many years ago, I lived by myself in an apartment near the Taipei municipal airport. I really enjoyed being by myself for the first time in a foreign country, and heartily recommend this sort of freedom as something that should be experienced. 

Not having any roommates or a Chinese family to contend with meant that I could eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, and in Taiwan this was nirvana, for something tasty was always was no more than five minutes away. I was never at a loss for dinner because tiny one-man and one-woman shops were set up all over the neighborhood. 

Around the corner from my building, for example, was a little place where I first became acquainted with the unique cuisine of Ningbo, a Zhejiang town just south of Shanghai that is famous for its unique take on eastern Chinese cuisine. The chef was also the cashier and dishwasher and waiter and busboy at this hole-in-the-wall, but Mr. Liu did it all with such grace and aplomb that I could swear he had clones.

Almost everything had rice in it, with a couple of appetizers and fish entrees to round out the menu. The chef offered crabs in season, beautiful shrimp that were always sweet and fresh, and a selection of whatever fish looked good that day.

Sliced rice cakes

And that makes sense, because Ningbo is renowned for its seafood. To me, though, the one ingredient that always makes me think of Mr. Liu and that symbolizes this gentle cuisine in my mind is its sliced rice cakes. 

The English name "rice cakes" really doesn't do justice to what the Chinese call niangaopian. Ground rice is mixed with water and steamed into logs with a consistency just a bit harder than that of Japanese mochi. But then the good folks of Ningbo take this one step further by slicing the logs on the diagonal into thin tiles that can be tossed into soup or, my favorite, stir-fried into a savory pile of gently chewy goodness.

There is a secret to stir-frying rice cakes, one that eluded me for years until someone set me straight. In the past, I had simply fried whatever else was going in the pot - meat, ginger, green onions, mushrooms - and then added the rice cakes and a whole lot of moisture in the form of soy sauce, wine, stock, and water. The results were delicious but a bit mushy, for my rice cakes never had that elusive "Q" quality, that slight bit of tooth-resistance that restaurant versions always have.

And then I found out that I should have soaked the rice cakes to plump them up first.

Looking back, this seems pretty obvious, but that is hindsight speaking. Now, when I want to serve stir-fried rice cakes, all I have to do is plan ahead by a couple of hours, and then they have the perfect texture. In China, stir-fried rice cakes are usually eaten as a snack, but you can serve them as the starch component of any meal or even by themselves if you add enough veggies. They are delicious for breakfast or a late night snack, by the way, if you use bacon and eggs instead of pork and salted mustard greens. But I digress.

Rice cakes (L) and salted mustard greens

Today's version also includes an East China element that goes perfectly with pork: xuelihong, a type of salted mustard. This is often written incorrectly in Chinese as 雪裡紅, literally "red-in-snow," but if you want to show off your smarts, remember that its true name is 雪裡蕻, the last character pronounced the same as 紅 here and meaning "exuberant." (This is another one of those cases where I haven't a clue as to where the name came from.) If you want to avoid the conflict altogether, you could just simply call it by its other name, 雪菜 xuecai, or "snow vegetable."

I've used a piece of smoked pork loin in this recipe, which plays off nicely against the sourness of the salted mustard and the bite of the ginger; however, use whatever meat you like or have handy. Simple shredded pork is the traditional meat, but chicken, turkey, and just about everything else can be used. Sliced mushrooms are a good meatless alternative; they add a delicious earthiness to the dish and make it feel even more appropriate for this cold autumn weather. 

Neither sliced rice cakes nor salted mustard greens keep very well once their packaging is opened, so plan on using them up within a week; both are available vacuum-packed, and they will stay fresh a very long time if they are not opened.

A local Zhejiang specialty

Rice cakes stir-fried with pork and snow vegetable - Xuecai rousi chao niangao 雪菜肉絲炒年糕 
Shanghai, Jiangsu

Serves 2 as a snack, 4 as a side dish

12 ounces (2½ cups) sliced rice cakes (niangaopian; see note above)
Filtered water
6 to 8 ounces smoked pork loin, fresh pork, or other meat (or a large handful of Chinese black mushrooms)
6 ounces (½ cup) salted mustard greens (xuelihong; see note above)
4 to 5 tablespoons peanut or vegetable oil
2 tablespoons finely shredded fresh ginger
3 green onions, trimmed and chopped
2 tablespoons Shaoxing rice wine
3 or 4 tablespoons filtered water
Sea salt and freshly-ground pepper to taste

1. Start this recipe at least 2½ hours before you want to serve it. Cover the sliced rice cakes in cool filtered water for 2 to 4 hours to plump them up. (Do not use warm or hot water, as this will make the rice cakes mushy.) 

Dry on left, plumped on right

2. Drain the rice cakes thoroughly. Slice the meat against the grain and into either long shreds (the traditional way) or thin tiles. If you are using mushrooms, remove the stems and slice the caps into thin pieces. Rinse the salted mustard greens under running water in a sieve or colander. Squeeze the salted mustard greens dry and taste a piece; they should be slightly salty and have absolutely no sand or grit. If they are not already finely chopped, do so now.

3. Heat the oil in a wok on high until the oil begins to shimmer. Add the ginger and mushrooms to the wok and stir-fry them for a few seconds to release their fragrance, and then add the meat or mushrooms. Stir-fry these until they are almost done. Toss in the salted mustard greens and stir them around quickly to heat them through.

4. Add the rice cakes, rice wine, and water to wok, and quickly stir-fry them with the rest of the ingredients so that the rice cakes become very hot; they are already cooked, so this is just a matter of heating them well. Some of the rice cakes will stick to the bottom of the wok, but that is all right; just scrape them off as well as you can with your spatula. Taste and add salt as needed, as well as some ground pepper. Serve immediately. (The wok will probably need to soak for a while, so let it do that while you enjoy this Ningbo speciality!)