MY MODEST kitchen feels like a chemistry lab. What are all these scary ingredients? Seaweed, dried chilli flakes, fresh silken tofu ... I know the world has gone Olympics-mad, but the prospect of a masterclass with Chinese chef Ching-he Huang is making me nervous. One, I almost never cook. Two, Chinese takeaway food is my least favourite thing (for a vegetarian, there are only so many noodle dishes a woman can love).
But Huang, 30, billed as the 'Chinese Nigella', is on a mission to make Chinese cooking easy and nutritious, even for novices like me. The takeaway food we often get in Britain – gloopy, oil-laden, full of monosodium glutamate – bears little relation
ship to the food Chinese families eat, she insists. With the right ingredients, Chinese food can be healthy and low in fat.
Delicately pretty and slim, Ching, star of the BBC2 series Chinese Food Made Easy, is a great advert for her own cooking. She aims to create the ideal balance of East and West: although she has lived in London since she was 11, she was born in Taiwan, which has a sophisticated cuisine – a combination of mainland influences from Sichuan, Fujian and Hunan, plus Japanese, Dutch and Portuguese elements.
She genuinely believes anyone can whip up a delicious dinner at home in the time it takes to order a takeaway, and far more cheaply (she can feed a family of four for less than £10). To prove it, she is spending a morning teaching me. If she's appalled by my low-fi kitchen (cats, lots of art, no sharp knives or big saucepans), she's hiding it well. Only my elderly electric cooker throws her slightly (wok cooking is best with gas). "Oh, well ... that's the great thing about Chinese food: you can improvise," she laughs. Huang is one of the brightest stars in modern Chinese cooking in the UK. Her dishes – which include zesty chilli and garlic tiger prawns, wok-cooked cod with sesame soy sauce and Sichuan orange beef – are youthful and fun, with ingredients you could buy from any city supermarket. The holy trinity of ingredients for Chinese food are garlic, ginger and chilli, she explains. And meat-free recipes are not a problem.
"We're not meant to eat that much meat, to be honest. Even in rural china you only have meat occasionally and live on a diet rich in vegetables, because your animals are your prized money earners, they work the field." Ching's major food influences stem from the traditional cooking styles of her farming-community grandparents. Until the age of five she lived in the countryside of southern Taiwan. Her grandparents had a bamboo farm, paddy fields, an orangery, sweet potato patch and mango trees. Ching remembers helping her grandmother prepare a huge banquet every lunchtime. Here she learned the philosophy of Chinese cooking – balancing yin (cooling foods such as cucumber, fruits, radish) with yang (hot ingredients such as chilli, ginger, garlic).
The spotlight that's been cast by the Olympics can only be a good thing, she believes. "It's been a great opportunity to show off so many facets of China, to show off the culture," she enthuses. We are limited in English by just having a blanket term "Chinese food", because there is huge diversity. "You have Imperial Chinese – based on what the emperors would have eaten – you have banquet-style, you have street cooking, you have home cooking and snack food. Then you have all the different regional variations."
You won't find many of Ching's recipes that involve deep frying. The wok is totally versatile, she insists – for braising, smoking, making soups and steaming. It also retains the nutrients in the ingredients. With my bonkers work life I am apparently the perfect candidate for Ching's nutritious, one-pot dishes. She gets me chopping.
First she shows me how to make egg flower drop soup with fresh silken tofu (or dofu, as the Chinese call it). It's one of the first dishes her mother taught her. "Broths are very popular in China because they're very good for you and low-calorie." The genius of the dish is that you pour the beaten egg into the broth as it heats and it instantly turns into fluffy egg flower shapes. I feel a bit like a decorative artist.
Next comes a twist on traditional bean curd: spicy tofu and edamame beans. Ching describes it as "a vegetarian marriage made in culinary heaven" because it combines fried tofu (made from soya beans) with fresh soya in the form of the edamame beans.
To stir-fry ingredients, she heats the groundnut oil in the wok until it starts to smoke. "We call it the breath of the wok," she tells me poetically.
In less than five minutes we have a dish that can be a main course served with jasmine rice – or a substantial vegetable dish. It's delicious. So why isn't it on my local takeaway menu? Part of the problem is that most Chinese takeaway food we have in the UK is Cantonese style (the first generation of Chinese settlers who came here were from Hong Kong) and not truly reflective of China. Plus many dishes have been Anglicised for a Western palate.
Ching's background is more varied. When she was five, her father moved his family to South Africa, where he had a bicycle-importing business. For the first time she visited a supermarket and tasted yoghurt. She also gained a taste for barbecues and biltong (dried meat). In 1989 the family moved to north London. Her mother was often abroad working, so Ching learned to make simple family meals – soups and nutritious stir-fry rice dishes.
After graduating in 1991 with a first-class degree in economics, she set up her own business. Today her own range of cold noodle salads, traditional leaf salads, gourmet pasta salads and health drinks are stocked by Harrods. "For the first three years it was hell," she laughs. "I was working 15-hour days. My staff got paid better than I did." In 2004, she bought a property and set up her own contract catering business. Today, Ching, a committed Buddhist, lives with her partner, actor Jamie Cho, who is half-Chinese. But she eats with her whole family at least once a week.
She is very spiritual and says: "I practise Buddhism at home every day. I don't go to a temple but I have a little altar in my study and meditate every day. I always say a little prayer in the morning and in the evening. I was exposed to Buddhism in my teens, as my family is Buddhist on both sides and my grandmother was very devout, though I never really got into it till my twenties.
A personal and business crisis was the spur to her returning to Buddhism. "In my early twenties I really needed Buddhism. I hit hard times on finishing university when I first set up my business. There was a time when I was working 9am to midnight, six days a week, not paying myself and losing contracts. That would been unbearable without meditation to keep me motivated."
She landed a cookery series on the UK Food Channel in 2005, then her own peak-time BBC2 show – which gives her a platform to promote all things Chinese. "For so long here, I've said, 'Oh, look at Chinese culture, Chinese history, look at all the things that we invented', and there wasn't so much interest. And now, through the Olympics, I think people can see that China is rich in culture, even though it's changing very fast."
Food is changing too. "A society needs to be free to really develop its cuisine, to be able to trade with other countries, whereas obviously China has been closed for many years. But in the past decade things have been very exciting – you have fusion cooking and influences coming in from abroad. I believe Chinese cuisine will evolve further."
As for me, with a fridge full of red chilli, coriander and spinach, I'm almost a convert to Chinese home-cooking. The key is to relax, enjoy the experience and make the dish yours, Ching tells me. I'll probably always cheat and buy pre-made vegetable stock, but I'm in love with no-calorie seaweed. Even if I do end up turning it into a face mask.
• Chinese Food Made Easy (HarperCollins, £16.99). For recipes by Ching-He Huang, visit www.chinghe.com
EGG FLOWER DROP SOUP
Serves Two
Ingredients3 ripe tomatoes, sliced (see step 1)
500ml/18 fl oz hot vegetable stock
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
A dash of sesame oil
pinch of ground white pepper
1 tablespoon cornflour mixed with 2 tablespoons cold water
1-2 sheets nori (dried seaweed), shredded
200g/7oz fresh silken tofu, diced into 1.5cm (1/2 inch) chunks
1 large handful of spinach
2 spring onions, finely sliced
Method1 If you want to skin the tomatoes before slicing, cut a cross at the base of each one. Plunge them into a pan of boiling water for one minute, then drain – the skin will peel off easily. However, most of the nutrients are just underneath the skin so I don't bother – also the dish will be even quicker to prepare. Finely chop the flesh, discarding the hard centre.
2 Add the tomatoes to the hot stock in the pan. Pour the beaten eggs into the broth, stirring gently. Add the soy sauce, sesame oil, pepper and blended cornflour and mix well.
3 Add the nori, followed by the tofu and heat for less than one minute.
4 Add the spinach and let it wilt slightly, then add the spring onions. Serve immediately.
The full article contains 1632 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
