Chinese Recipes
273 recipes found
Vegan Ma Po Tofu
Velvet Fish With Mushrooms
Here’s a recipe that takes its flavor inspiration from a dish served at Nancy Xiao’s restaurant China Xiang, in the theater district of Manhattan: a sweet-salty rice wine sauce over velveted fish. Its preparation owes much to the teachings of the classic 1969 cookbook “Chinese Gastronomy,” by Tsuifeng Lin and Hsiang Ju Lin, and the advice of the chef Jonathan Wu. It is what the Lins call “two-passes” cooking, with the fish cooked twice, first to velvet it, then to cover it with sauce. (It’s important, Wu notes, not to think of it as stir-frying with high heat but as gentle, careful cooking that does not break up the fish.) It’s great with flounder as at China Xiang, but also with tilapia, with halibut, with whatever firm-fleshed white fish you can find at the market. You can substitute firm tofu in place of the fish, or go half and half. It’s a dish to fall in love with, to make your own.
Pork Dumplings
This recipe for pork-and-chive dumplings comes from the chef Helen You, who learned to make dumplings from her mother in Tianjin, China. She serves these classic boiled dumplings, along with 100 other varieties, at her restaurant, Dumpling Galaxy, in Flushing, Queens. The filling is a simple mix of ground pork, seasoned with grated ginger, soy and garlic chives, and it works best with slightly fatty ground meat (about 30 percent fat, if your butcher asks). It's traditional to splash the meat with shaoxing, the Chinese rice wine, but You prefers to use sherry.
Duck Sauce
The name "duck sauce" was created in the United States because this sauce was originally served with deep-fried pressed duck, which had no sauce of its own. Duck sauce became popular as a dip for any food — from spareribs and egg rolls to almost anything else imaginable. There are so many versions of duck sauce that it is hard to decide which kind to make. However, I have created and tested the following, which I feel produces the best taste:
Chung Yul Bang (Scallion Pancakes)
The cookbook author Grace Young learned to make these scallion pancakes from her mother, who is from Hong Kong, and first published the formula in her book “The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen” (Simon & Schuster, 1999). In homage to the Cantonese immigrant experience, Ms. Young phoneticized dish names in the same way they appeared on Cantonese-American restaurant menus and titled this recipe chung yul bang. They have the perfect blend of crispy flakiness and tenderness. The trick is a mix of boiling and cold water: The boiling water gives you a soft, malleable dough that is easy to work, the cold water just the right chewiness in the fried pancake. She prefers these served without any dipping sauce: “Hot out of the wok, they don’t need anything,” she said. “They’re perfect the way they are.”
Shanghai Cosmo
Potato Pancakes With Scallions And Prosciutto
Chinese Omelet With Stir-Fried Vegetables In Spicy Sauce
Chinese Wheat Wrappers
These Chinese wheat wrappers are popular in northern China, where they are paired with anything stir-fried in small shreds, such as moo shu pork. The author Carolyn Phillips is a proponent of using Korean flour, which is lower in gluten than American all-purpose flour. Adding a layer of oil between the dough before rolling it into a circle is a trick that allows the layers to be peeled apart after cooking for a thinner wrapper. But even unpeeled, these wrappers are fairly thin.
Smoky Lo Mein With Shiitake and Vegetables
The best kind of restaurant-style stir-fried lo mein is subtle in flavor, with plenty of wok hei, the smoky flavor that results from the powerful flame of a restaurant wok burner licking up and over the back of the wok, singeing the oil and noodles. To create a similar taste at home, you can use a hand-held blowtorch, which you can pass over the noodles after stir-frying them. Either a butane canister with a high-output torch head or a propane canister with a trigger-start head are best. If you do not have a wok, a heavy cast-iron or stainless steel skillet can be used instead.
Moo Shu Pork
This is not your corner takeout's moo shu pork, but it is popular in China, where its northern origins are debated, according to the author Carolyn Phillips. The egg is thought to resemble the flowers of the sweet olive (osmanthus fragrans) shrub, hence its Chinese name, muxi rou, or osmathus blossom pork. The ingredients are stir-fried in batches to cook evenly and retain the vibrancy of the colors. The sauce is intentionally salty, so underseason the stir-fry and add just a dab of sauce to each wheat wrapper.
Caramelized-Scallion Sauce
A twist on the Cantonese classic ginger-scallion sauce, this aromatic purée focuses on the flavor of scallions slow-cooked to draw out their gentle sweetness. Adding more scallions at the end brings a fresh complexity to the sauce, but if you want to keep the whole thing mellow and sweet, feel free to omit that step, and just cook all the scallions at once. It's great as a dressing for noodles, boiled or roasted vegetables and simple meats and fish.
Honey-Roasted-Licorice Tea
Spicy Chinese Mustard Chicken Wings
In Chinese-American restaurants, spicy yellow mustard often appears on the table as a dipping sauce — but you rarely taste it anywhere else in the meal. Jonathan Wu, the chef at the innovative Chinese-influenced restaurant Fung Tu in New York, decided to take that flavor and run with it. The two kinds of mustard (along with cayenne) makes these almost as spicy as Buffalo wings, but the heat is balanced by sweetness. To make a prettier plate, sprinkle with whole cilantro leaves and minced scallions.
Chinese Chili
This version of chili is more Shanghai than Southwest. Serve it with rice, Mexican black beans mixed with some Chinese fermented black beans and Chinese fried noodles.
Simple Spicy Asparagus in a Wok
Asparagus doesn’t have to be treated as a delicate, fragile thing, napped only with butter or creamy sauces, or served plain with olive oil and salt. That’s fine for the first week or two of the season, but then it’s time to dial up the interest factor and add some spice. Asparagus actually stands up quite well to aggressive flavors. A quick toss in a hot wok with garlic, ginger and chiles doesn’t overwhelm it at all, at least if you don’t overcook the spears. Instead, the vegetable’s sweetness becomes accentuated by contrast.
Chinese Pepper Steak
Mandarin Pancakes
These thin pancakes are typically used for wrapping moo shu pork or Peking duck. They’re made with a hot water dough, which makes them very easy to roll out. Stacking two disks of dough, rolling them out, cooking them, then carefully peeling them apart lets you make pancakes that are half as thin as a single pancake would be — and prepared in nearly half the amount of time.
Sichuan Chile Oil
Spicy chile crisp is a versatile condiment. Use it on noodles, over stir-fries, on eggs, with cold leftover meats, or in cold salads. (It’s especially good paired with yogurt and crisp, refreshing vegetables like cucumbers or raw snap peas.)
Siu Yuk (Crispy Pork Belly)
Known as siu yuk in Cantonese, this pork belly features two contrasting textures: a crunchy, crispy skin that crackles and pops and a tender slab of meat underneath. To achieve success with both components, a lot of care and time has to be put into the prep. The pork belly needs to be cooked low and slow to break down the tough sinewy bits, then the skin needs to be dried overnight until leathery and blasted under high heat until crisp. This recipe comes from Hong Kong resident Cherry Tang, who used to make siu yuk in the supper clubs she hosted back when she lived in London. Ms. Tang prefers to broil the meat under direct heat, which guarantees a crackling crust — but do keep an eye on the skin, so that it doesn’t char.
Chinese-Style BBQ Ribs
These are the best oven-roasted ribs ever, and they can also be finished on a grill for extra smoky flavor. Creating steam in the oven is the key to tender meat. The ingredients here are close to the ones used by traditional Cantonese barbecue masters to produce sticky-salty-sweet meat that has a reddish, caramelized crust — with ketchup standing in for Chinese red fermented tofu. (It can be left out if desired.) Although these ribs are presented as an appetizer in many American Chinese restaurants, barbecued meat is traditionally a main course, served with freshly cooked rice and a green side like smashed cucumber salad or stir-fried bok choy.
Shrimp With Red Sauce
Stir-Fried Lettuce With Seared Tofu and Red Pepper
Stir-frying is a great way to use up your overabundance of lettuce. This recipe calls for romaine, but you can try it with whatever you have on hand, as long as it’s sturdy enough to stand up to some heat. In China, where lettuce symbolizes prosperity and wealth, a simpler dish made with the lettuce only is served at New Year’s.
Honeyed Pistachio Mooncakes
Mooncakes are pastries timed to the Mid-Autumn Festival, a holiday that celebrates the commencement of the harvest season. Traditionally, they showcased the best ingredients of a region, like sweet lotus seed paste in Guangdong, China, melon seeds in Hainan or pork in Yunnan, but you can stuff mooncakes with whatever you’d like, as long as the fillings are encased in dough and the exterior is aesthetically pleasing. In her forthcoming cookbook, “Mooncakes and Milkbread,” the Chinese-American baker Kristina Cho has channeled that spirit by stuffing her mooncakes with blitzed pistachios and honey, a combination commonly found in baklava. The blend is enveloped in a classic Cantonese crust that uses lye water to bump up the pH of the dough, giving it a gentle amber hue, and golden syrup, which lends the cake a chewy, soft bite.