1000 Year Old Egg

We tasted one in class today. It's the food item, so far, that has caused the most negative reaction among my classmates. Chef Rhoda cracked the egg, which had been stored in a styrofoam crate, then peeled it, uncovering an egg that looked like it was made of black jello. She sliced it open to reveal a greyish blue dried yolk, surrounded by the gelatinous "white." She passed it around, and everybody took a taste, and Adam asked if he could have a drink from Silvia's water bottle, even though they don't know each other all that well.

We had a shifting of teams and now Meghan has joined us. Jim didn't come to class today, nor did Mario, so we were pretty short-handed. So Chef only gave us two recipes to prepare: crystal shrimp and chinese spring rolls with pineapple-plum dipping sauce. With most of our dishes today, there was lots of prep work, but the actual cooking took only minutes. In fact, our shrimp became overcooked in the minute it took Derrick to get more cornstarch slurry, as the sauce was not thickening properly.

We also had Lion's Head, big pork meatballs, but Jordan was scolded ("You did not read my recipe correctly!") because he neglected to cook the cabbage that's supposed to accompany them. In fact, the soft curly cabbage is what forms the "mane" underneath the lion's head, so these were really more like Tiger's Head.

Andrew made Chicken in Master Sauce, a cool technique that calls for poaching the chicken in a "master" stock/soy sauce that gets reused and fortified. He also made some marbled hard boiled eggs using the same sauce, and they were far more popular than the 1000 year old version.
Sam made the green onion pancakes, a crispy pan-fried flatbread that you form by covering a rectangle of dough with lard and green onions, then rolling it up like a jelly roll. Then you cut off slices of the roll, and place them on end, and roll them into small disks.

We also had Ja Jiang Mein, spicy pork sauce on noodles, that might have been the inspiration for Italian ragu sauce.

Adam cooked up a terrific fried rice, made from yesterday's perfect white rice, and Alex and Andrea made potstickers.

Chef talked about some other new ingredients today: citrus peel, cilantro (Chinese use the whole stem as well as the leaves), chili paste, plum sauce, wood ear and cloud ear mushrooms, lily buds, preserved vegetables (a plethora of salty treats!), and cellophane noodles. With Andrea's prodding, she also told us a bit about her background, starting sheepishly, "I'm self-taught." She had a long career of teaching and catering even before she joined the CCA as an instructor in 1987 ("The year before I was born," Alex said), and she's written a number of cookbooks, as well.