Chinese Food That is Very Saucy

Hello. C J here. I read a lot of cookbooks. This is done mostly for fun. I’m currently reading a short but really interesting book about traditional Chinese cooking. The book was written by an Indian author who has clearly researched Chinese food very well but some of the translations of recipes or concepts get a bit strange. I’m currently done the soups and starters section and am onto the section labelled ‘food that is saucy.’ Cool? Is it also savvy?

There’s a surprisingly large amount of ketchup in the recipes. No I don’t think I want a recipe for hot and sour soup that is thickened ketchup water with vinegar and a bit of cabbage. No I also don’t want to take a slice of white wonderbread, roll it into a tube, stuff it with canned corn, deep fry it and then top it with sesame seeds. What in God’s name do they eat in China? And why is it specifically an image of white wonderbread? China? Are you okay?

I managed to take out the vinegar, water and corn starch that makes up most of the hot and sour soup recipe and I got a recipe for what looks like a sauce out of it. I’m calling it Chinese Ketchup. Here’s the list if ingredients I have going into trying it for the first time.

Two Tablespoons Tomato Paste
Two Teaspoons Sugar
One Half Teaspoon Salt
One Half Teaspoon Pepper
One Half Teaspoon Cayenne Pepper
One Tablespoon Garlic

It might end up a bit dry or too thick in which case I’ll add more liquid or tomato paste to it.

The real winner though in terms of recipes is the scratch made chicken spring rolls. It’s made with normal crepes, like the kind you would make for a weekend breakfast. You take them and then put a bit of the chicken filling in them and roll them up. Then you seal them and deep fry them to make them crispy. This seems genius to me. I have a recipe for the filling already on hand. I’ll list it here.

Ground Chicken
Salt
Pepper
Fennel Seeds
Shredder Carrot

I don’t have proportions for those ingredients yet.

And a final idea before I move on to dealing with things that are very saucy, vegetarian dumplings. I don’t quite trust the corn starch based dough the book tells me to use for the outer shell of the dumplings. I think it would be too doughy. I might use my pizza dough recipe for it instead. I just need to roll the dough thin, cut out little squares, fill them with the vegetable filling, seal them and oven bake the lot of them to cook the dough. Here’s my recipe for the filling without the proportions.

Shredded Cabbage
Shredded Carrot
Onion
Garlic
Ginger

Cool. These are my food ideas for now. It might be a while before I try any of them because I’m hunting down a salmon filet next for my grilled fish dish I’m working on.

C J Mcpherson