Chefs keeping traditional Cantonese cuisine alive the hard way – by evolving dishes while keeping to their roots
- ‘I hate it when restaurants put foie gras or truffle on Cantonese food,’ chef Danny Yip says, who doesn’t like to lose a dish’s spirit when improving on it
- But young people don’t want to learn time-consuming traditional skills, chef Margaret Xu says; modern Western cooking techniques could help
About a year ago, Danny Yip, the chef and owner of The Chairman restaurant in Hong Kong, wanted to create the most minimalist dish using just goose and salt. “I wanted it to have more of a goose flavour,” he says.
First, he made a stock of poultry bones, then marinated the goose in it with some salt to enhance the flavour. Then he steamed the goose for six hours to get rid of the oil, and smoked it for four hours with camphor wood. To finish the dish, he spooned hot oil over it, giving the skin a glossy sheen.
It was four days of work, but Yip says that on the plate, it’s just two ingredients: goose and salt.
“This is the way to keep Cantonese cuisine alive, but not away from its roots. It has to keep evolving,” he says.
Yip, whose restaurant was ranked no. 2 on Restaurant magazine’s 2020 list of Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants, admits his dishes are not traditional Cantonese. Instead, he prefers to think of new ways to improve on classic dishes while not losing the spirit of Cantonese cuisine.
“What is the essence of Cantonese cooking? It’s the freshness of the cuisine – fresh seafood that is swimming – alive, rather than chilled. It’s about presenting ingredients in their natural flavour,” he explains, adding that his camphor smoked goose is one such example.
Cantonese restaurants in Hong Kong fall into one of two camps: stubbornly traditional, though there are fewer of these establishments in the city, or constantly finding new ways to modernise the cuisine, though with mixed results.
Classic dishes including eight-treasure duck, almond and pig’s lung soup, savoury deep-fried custard, and sautéed egg whites with milk are very hard to find on regular menus in Cantonese restaurants in Hong Kong. They are very labour intensive and require a lot of skill to execute well, so are often only known by restaurant regulars, who order these dishes off-menu.
“It’s the cooking techniques that are difficult to keep alive,” she says. “The flavours are easy because it has to do with freshness. Everything is lightly cooked or slowly cooked. But no young people want to come into the business when European kitchens are less messy, and dim sum and [Chinese] pastry are hard work. With pastry you need to pay more for a good pastry chef and there’s a lack of young people interested in it, so restaurants order frozen dim sum from China.”
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One way traditional Cantonese cuisine can be kept alive is by adapting and using modern Western cooking techniques, she says.
“Like slow-cooked soy sauce chicken: the ones you buy in a roast meat store are steamed or boiled and then dunked in soy sauce. When you do it the traditional way, you need to stand next to the stove for 45 minutes and keep pouring soy sauce on the chicken,” she explains.
“It’s not something you can pre-prep – you can’t cook it in the sauce otherwise it will be too salty. But you can employ sous vide – you pour soy sauce over the chicken, add Chinese wine and then put the chicken [in a vacuum-sealed bag] for sous vide. You can also cook abalone this way.”
“You need to steam the pork belly for four hours, but you can use a slow cooker or sous vide instead,” she says. “Then the pork belly is deep-fried, soaked in cold water, fried again, together with mui choy [preserved mustard greens] and then steamed again for another four hours. But I can get a much more accurate result with sous vide or a slow cooker.”
Another dish she loves, but says is hard to find on Cantonese menus, is braised pomelo skin. The dried pomelo skin takes at least five days to soak; the water is squeezed out of the skin and changed every day, before the skin is finally braised.
Xu remembers that a proper lemon chicken dish used to be pan-fried, but these days it’s deep-fried. “It was slowly fried so that the inside was still juicy, and crispy on the outside. But now there’s no time to slowly fry the chicken, so they deep-fry it instead. The problem is that poultry is better when you don’t use high heat.”
Xu says traditional Cantonese cuisine is not just about expensive ingredients such as shark’s fin, something she refuses to prepare. While she understands some chefs value the skill in turning the tasteless shark’s fin into something flavourful, she believes the sign of a good chef is one who can make an ordinary ingredient, like choi sum, taste delicious.
When Theresa Yiu of Dashijie cooks, whether for family meals or for her branded products, she insists on using the best ingredients that are also chemical-free and non-GMO.
“When I make the New Year radish cake, I put dried shrimp in it. People think the ones that have a deep orange colour are good, but actually they have been injected with chemicals,” Yiu says. “I source them from Singapore – they are lighter in colour, but are better because they don’t have chemicals in them.”
Yiu is generous in sharing her knowledge, and shows professional chefs how to make traditional Cantonese dishes and adapt them for their own restaurants. Chinese executive chef Wong Wing-keung of the Mandarin Oriental came to her home to learn how to make savoury deep-fried egg custard.
It’s a delicate dish made with supreme chicken stock, egg and cornstarch, and needs skill and time to prepare, but the results are revelatory in taste and texture. After the custard is made, it is chilled in the refrigerator for six hours to set, then cut into pieces, coated with cornstarch, then deep-fried in peanut oil at 205 degrees Celsius (400 degrees Fahrenheit) for one minute.
“The surface is crispy, but then it melts in your mouth,” Yiu says. “It’s a fine art that needs a very good stock made of chicken and pork.”
Yiu is unimpressed by Chinese chefs who use expensive garnishes such as caviar so they can charge more for the dish. She has a scowl on her face as she recalls eating at a restaurant that served stir-fried lotus seeds with black truffle.
“I don’t want the chef to be lazy,” she says. “New dishes need to have a solid background. Abalone [for example] does not go with rice dumplings [usually served during the Dragon Boat Festival].”
The Chairman is one of her favourite restaurants, she says, as all the ingredients Yip uses are Chinese.
“I hate it when restaurants put foie gras or truffle on Cantonese food,” Yip says. “These are alien to Cantonese cuisine. You need an emotional attachment to the food, which is comfort food for us. Why not dig deep into Chinese ingredients and use a mushroom called ganbajun from Yunnan which is very expensive, only found under pine trees and is very fragrant?”
Yip is keen on creating flavours that set off diners’ nostalgic emotions, but in a modern way. To him, the method of following traditional recipes doesn’t help Chinese chefs evolve the cuisine.
“Chinese food is recipe-oriented. Chefs will try a dish and then ask the chef who made it for the recipe and then they will follow it exactly, so that’s why you see the same dish in other restaurants,” he says.
“Western chefs are very creative. They think of their own menu with creativity. Our philosophy is when we create a new dish, it’s very familiar, but it’s new.”