Kitchen Chick

The Chinese Pantry, Part 2: Pickled Mustard

If you've ever stood in front of the vast selection of Chinese pickled vegetables in an Asian grocery store, wondering which one is the right kind for the dish you want to make, I completely sympathize. (If you haven't, you're missing out!) There are almost as many different kinds of pickled and preserved mustard greens and vegetables as there are vegetables, and each region has a different twist on how to preserve them.

Some of the cookbooks I've read lump them all together as "pickled mustard greens" and "pickled vegetables." Dunlop goes to great lengths in her Sichuan and Hunan cookbooks to disguish between zha cai, ya cai, suan cai, and pao cai*, while also mentioning several other variants along the way. I have never located any of the preserved mustard greens in clay jars that she talks about in the Ann Arbor area. (Which doesn't mean they don't exist here, so if you've seen pickled mustard greens in clay jars let me know!)

(* Remember the "pao" character from my chili introduction, which means "pickled." So pao cai is literally "pickled vegetable.")

Dunlop tries to distinguish between them by calling them pickled mustard greens, preserved mustard greens, and preserved mustard tuber (zha cai), and then confuses the matter by translating suan cai as "pickled mustard greens" in her Sichuan cookbook but as "preserved mustard greens" in her Hunan cookbook. This confusion aside, she offers some of the most detailed explanations for the different preservation methods I've found in English language Chinese cookbooks. My main problem is that I can't find jars that use the exact same language she uses. Most of the jars I've looked at come with the characters for suan cai or other characters entirely, and the English translation is almost always "pickled mustard greens," thus making it difficult to tell just which kind of mustard green is actually in the container. So what is a person to do?

When I first went to find "ya cai" (what the recipe I wanted to make called for), I asked one of the store owners at Tsai Grocery. She spoke little English, we spoke little Chinese. I thought if I showed her the characters for ya cai, that would make it a snap. She studied the characters a long time and took her time surveying the shelves before making her suggestions. This one seemed to be her preferred option. She was very clear that these greens needed to be cooked a little rather than eating them straight out of the package. This packaging matches the description that Dunlop gives for pao cai in her Hunanese cookbook. (click on the image to see a larger version)

This jar was the second recommendation from the lady at Tsai Grocery. They are pre-chopped and pickled in a brine of water and soy sauce, sugar, chili oil, and sesame oil. A close inspection will reveal red flecks of chili. (This brand also has MSG and other preservatives.) She told us that these pickled mustard greens can be eaten straight out of the jar, if desired. For example, you can serve a bit on top of a bowl of rice or chopped up and sprinkled as garnish over a noodle dish.  (She says they're great with Dan Dan noodles.  I'd guess she means the kind of Dan Dan noodles with the creamy sesame-peanut sauce, which is not the version of the dish I posted earlier.)

 

This is another jar of pickled mustard greens. The characters are different. While the English is "pickled mustard greens," the Chinese characters say something else entirely which I haven't been able to fully translate. (The first character has to do with the concept of "opening.")  However, the chopped vegetable looks very similar to the second picture above, and the ingredients are nearly identical but with less preservatives (like citric acid) and no MSG. (I like this jar because the brand translates as "Comrade Food," which I find amusing.)

Some final thoughts on shopping for pickled mustard greens:

First, you won't necessarily find all the options in the same section of the grocery store. I saw pickled mustard greens in large plastic tubs in the chilly fresh produce section of Hua Xing, plastic-sealed packages piled in a box near the end of an aisle, and a long stretch of shelf filled with glass jars of pickled mustard greens and other vegetables. So make sure to look not just on the shelves for sealed glass jars, but also in the vegetable section and in coolers for preserved vegetables.

Second, don't be overwhelmed by all the choices. I try not to get too hung up on getting the exact kind of pickled greens for a recipe, otherwise I would never try cooking some dishes for fear of having the wrong item! I suspect that a lot of the different pickled greens can work as substitutes for each other. Perhaps an expert would find them quite different, but so far as I can tell, they all have the salty sour taste characteristic of pickled vegetables. So, until I get better information on how to distinguish the different types, I'm not going to worry about it! The first one pictured above is a very common type of pickled mustard greens that would work for most cooking situations. You can also look for "Tianjin [or Sichuan] preserved vegetables," which can substitute for pickled mustard greens.

I would love to hear others' experiences with and brand recommendations for mustard greens and other Chinese pickled vegetables.

The Chinese Pantry, Part 1: Chilis and Chili Pastes

This section covers some chili basics. This is not an exhaustive list of chilis and chili pastes for Chinese cooking, but rather a short list of some of the items listed in Dunlop's Sichuan cookbook. For each item I'll include an image with key characters circled on the label and an English explanation. Click on the images to see larger versions. There are many brands available, so if any of my readers out there have experience with other brands and can make recommendations please contribute in the comments!

"Facing Heaven" Chilis

You'll find an assortment of dried chilis available in any Asian grocery store. The most common type that I've noticed are the thin pods about 2 inches long. I use those a lot. But if you're looking for "Facing Heaven" chilis, which are commonly used in Sichuan cuisine, this is what you're looking for. Take a note of the circled characters as they say "facing heaven." NOTE:  Always look over dried chili packages carefully for mold. I think these items can sit around a long time before they reach the store shelves. I found some lovely looking dried chilis that looked almost fresh, so supple did their dried skins appear, but upon closer inspection some had become moldy.

Chili Bean Paste

According to Dunlop, Sichuan chili bean paste should be made with fava beans (broad beans), but other regions in China use soybeans instead. These two brands use a mix of fava and soybeans, and will certainly do the trick. The darker the paste, the more "mature" it is. You can also use Lan Chi Chili Paste with Soybeans as an alternative.

Chili Bean Paste Example #2

This brand of chili bean paste uses only fava beans and is imported from Sichuan province. There's no English on the main label, so it helps to recognize the Chinese characters and then confirm (if possible) the English ingredient label. The contents are less paste-like than the others, and instead look more like chopped-up chilis and fava beans (which they are).

Chopped Salted Chilis

Two brands of salted chopped chilis. There are innumerable types of salted chilis available, including some with green chilis. Salted chilis are preserved with salt, but the bottled versions in stores generally also contain vegetable oil and even MSG. Unfortunately, I don't know which brands are considered "the best." And what are chopped chilis preserved in salt? A form of pickled chilis! So I think you can use these as substitutes in recipes that call for pickled chilis... but if you want something that is specifically labled as "pickled chilis," read on to the next item.

Pickled Chilis

Sichuanese pickled chilis are preserved in a brine of salt, sugar, wine or vinegar, and spices. All sorts of chilis are preserved this way. This kind is a long red chili, but you can also find green ones. In a pinch, Sambal Oelek (Indonesian chili paste) can substitute. According to Dunlop, if you find tiny red pickled chilis, they are probably Thai chilis and are viciously hot.

As I said, this isn't intended to be a comprehensive list, but I hope that having bottle labels and a few characters identified will make it easier to spot these items.

Here in Ann Arbor, all of these items are available at Hua Xing, and I've seen some of them at Tsai Grocery as well. And I'm sure they can also be found at the sizable Chinese grocery on Plymouth Rd. in the strip mall near Nixon. At Hua Xing, the bottled and pickled chilis were in the same aisle, but the dried chilis were with the other dried herbs and spices.

The Chinese Pantry: Introduction

When I decided to concentrate on Sichuan recipes from Land of Plenty, I had to refresh my Chinese larder. (And refresh my scanty knowledge of Chinese characters.) This meant spending a good evening scouring the aisles of a Chinese grocery store, squinting at labels, and trying to decide which of the many nearly identical yet somehow different bottles of this or that was actually what I was looking for.

Picture it like this: you're from, say, a non-English speaking country, and you've come to the States. You've been invited to a BBQ and you decide to be helpful by offering to shop for any missing foods. You're handed a list and off you go to a giant American grocery store. One of the items on the list is mustard. You ask around and someone points you to the right place, but to your horror there are several dozens of different products all claiming to be mustard. Do you get the Kraft? Or how about the dijon? There's honey mustard, and stone ground mustard, and German mustard, and what's with that purple one called moutarde violette? Which one is the right one? The answer is, of course, that any of them could be the right one — it just depends on your tastes, and what you plan to do with it.

That's how I view the confusion I can feel in an Asian grocery store. Not only are some of the foods unfamiliar, but each one is often represented by multiple brands, and there may even be brands representing regional variations, such as pickled chiles from Sichuan or Hunan or Thailand... And just like the U.S., different brands may be of higher or lower quality. Oyster sauce is a good example of this. High quality oyster sauce contains oyster extracts, and not as the last ingredient on the list! (Vegetarians look for "oyster" sauces specifically labled as "vegetarian" or "mushroom.") Compare the Lee Kum Kee brand to others to see the difference.

There are a lot of ingredient catalogs out there on the Internet, but not so many that show what the bottles look like or what characters to look for on labels. So to assist my fellow English-speaking cooks who face the same challenge, I have assembled a short catalog with pictures to help identify some of the ingredients. I've left out the common ingredients, on the assumption that most people can find such things as oyster sauce, soy sauce, rice vinegar, and hoisin sauce. As a complete catalog could take a while, I've decided to break it down into sections. My next post will be chiles and chile pastes.

Tuesday is Paczki Day!

Fat Tuesday is just around the corner, and it's not too late to order paczki and have a last big caloric blowout before Lent (or simply take advantage of the day). I'm not a huge fan of jelly doughnuts. Most of the time they are too sweet with very little flavor. I want real fruit, not artificially flavored gel, or a real custard. And a real dough with flavor, not just some fried tasteless bread. A good paczki has both of these.

If you're in the Ann Arbor area and you're looking for authentic paczki — not those American jelly doughnuts slathered with too much frosting repackaged with a new name (I'm not picky at all, am I?) — put in an order at Copernicus European Delicatessen. They will be bringing in paczki from a Polish bakery from Hamtramck.

You can choose from a wide variety, including ones with traditional plum and rose-flavored fillings as well as bavarian cream, lemon, strawberry, and raspberry. This Tuesday they'll be opening an hour early — 8am — for paczki pickup. I recommend placing an order to reserve yours, and your order can be as small as just one or two. (If it's just one, it's a "paczek." And no, I don't know how to pronounce that either.)

Copernicus European Delicatessen
617 S. Main St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
734-222-9633

In past years I got my paczki from Amadeus, but this year I called to check and they are not making them. If anyone knows of other places in the AA/Ypsi area that offer the real deal, please let us know.

Copernicus - Polish Grocery in Ann Arbor

Elisabeth Magiera and Teresa Chajec, owners of Copernicus European Delicatessen

Breaking News... Ann Arbor has a new European grocery!

Thanks to a tip from a friend, Tuesday night we swung by the South Main Market to stop in at Copernicus European Delicatessen. We'd heard that they had paczki -- the real deal and not those jelly doughnuts pretending to be paczki -- from a bakery in Hamtramck (a Detroit-area city with a large Polish community). Coming from Hamtramck they had better be the real thing...

And they do have paczki. And the paczki are the real deal. And they have a whole lot more. Pierogi, breads, Polish meats (a truly dizzying array of Polish meats), canned goods, sweets... the place isn't huge, but the shelves are well-stocked. 

And, as it happens, Tuesday was their first day open. We went back Wednesday for pictures and to try some bread and sausages. The meats are made by a Polish butcher (as in, by people who came over from Poland themselves) in Chicago. The pazcki and some of the other pastries come from Hamtramck. Chajec and Magiera bake their own bread from dinner rolls to multi-grain loaves on premises.  Click on the photo to see a larger image.

In addition to a paczek, we tried a bread stuffed with a poppy seed filling (yum), an egg bread (also yum), and some small ciabatta bread rolls made on the premises (very nice, especially with butter). They are still experimenting with what breads their customers like best, and they're considering adding Russian black bread.

Joe sampled a number of the sausages and meats.  They're good, and different from what you usually see around.  He says more exploration is required.

The shelves are stocked with tinned fish and meats, pickled vegetables, seasonings and spices, pasta, and Polish chocolates and candies.  Click on the photo to see a larger image.

We picked up some pierogis, stuffed cabbage rolls, and a bottle of pickled vegetables as a side salad and had a quick Polish dinner. We'll do Copernicus in more detail once they've been open for a while, but we had to let you know!

Copernicus European Delicatessen
617 S. Main St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
734-222-9633

Monday through Friday 9am - 8pm
Saturday 9am - 6pm
Sunday 11am - 4pm

Fabulous French Pastries at The Croissant Shop

Clockwise from the top: cinnamon roll, almond filled croissant, chocolate croissant, brioche, butter croissant.  Click on the photo for a larger (and even tastier) view.

Ann Arbor has a number of good bakeries, but it's also got a well-kept secret: The Croissant Shop, where CIA-trained (the culinary one) baker Kurt Boyd makes delicious French pastries for restaurants, cafés, bakeries, and caterers by hand. Its existence isn't secret — what's secret is that you don't have to be a restaurant to buy from The Croissant Shop.  You, too, can enjoy these gorgeous fresh pastries at great wholesale prices (that's to say, far less than what restaurants charge). It just requires a bit of advance planning.

We've actually known about this for some years, since before I even started Kitchen Chick. I would order them on occasion when we had house guests, but this holiday season we decided to treat ourselves and family.

The butter croissants were everything you expect a croissant to be. Buttery layers encased within a deliciate flaky outside. (They also make great croissant french toast. Carefully slice them horizontally and soak in whisked egg and milk. The outside crust doesn't absorb a ton of the egg, but the soft insides will soak it right up. We enjoyed them for Christmas Eve brunch dusted with some confectioners sugar and served with maple syrup.)

The almond croissants have a sweet almond filling and are dressed with a bit of glaze and ground almonds on top, and the chocolate ones have a streak of rich dark chocolate filling. Joe loved his brioche. He dived into it as soon we got home [well, actually as soon as she was done taking pictures — Joe] because these breads are best when fresh. It was light and rich, like a good brioche should be.

I really adore the cinnamon rolls. These are not the usual super-sugary, heavy rolls that sit like lead in your stomach. The dough is light and moist, the layers are filled with lots of cinnamon, the glaze delicate and delectable. These rolls really live up to the name of cinnamon rolls. I like to eat them in a deconstructionist manner — unrolling the pastry and eating each layer.

The Croissant Shop also sells pecan diamonds and pecan rolls, several kinds of baguettes and breads, savory-filled croissants, and mini-croissants and mini-filled pastries. We haven't tried those yet, but we will.

There is, of course, a catch: you can't just walk in and buy a couple croissants. You have to order at least 24 hours in advance (no later than 9:00am the previous day) and then you can go get your order on the morning of your pickup day.  He'll need to know the specific time you plan to be by. But these treats are well worth a little planning.

Pastries are best eaten the day you get them, but they'll keep for a day or so in the cardboard box, or you can try freezing them. Storing them in a tupperware will make the flaky crisp outsides go soft, but a few minutes in a toaster oven can help with that.

The Croissant Shop
3660 Plaza Dr # 1A
Ann Arbor, MI 48108
(734) 662-7424
Monday through Saturday

What did Santa leave under your tree?

Gifts in our household are frequently edible. When Joe handed me the wrapped present that contained this bottle I had a pretty good idea what it was. Among olive oils, Pasolivo has a unique and beautiful bottle. Except my guess wasn't quite right...

Joe was shopping for some stocking stuffers at Zingerman's when Solomon, who works the dry goods section, came running up to him to tell him about the new olive oil Joe just had to try.

When he said "new" olive oil, he really meant new. As in, this oil was bottled immediately after pressing a mere two weeks ago!

Although olives were brought from Europe to the Americas in the 1500s, according to some it's only been in the last 5 or 10 years or so that American olive oil producers have started to make great olive oils to rival the best of of Italy, France, Spain, and Greece. Pasolivo is produced in California using organic methods (they are in the process of certification). They hand-pick all their olives. I've had their standard olive oil and think it's a standout.

But I've never had olive oil where the olives were still on the trees a mere few weeks ago.

Joe knew that this was the perfect thing and snatched up one of the last bottles. But if you can't find it at Zingerman's (or your local equivalent), you can look up local retailers on the Pasolivo site or get Olio Nuovo directly from them.

Tasting Notes
The bottle is cloudy, with lots of olive particles at the bottom. I had to give it a good shake to re-mix it. The scent was green, like freshly crushed grass. The texture across my lips and tongue was smooth and buttery. The flavor is a touch green with a blast of bitterness. It's not the "greenest" olive oil I've tasted, but it has this freshness that I found very pleasant. When the oil hit the back of my throat, intense peppery notes came forward. It's got enough of a peppery bite that it's best to sip slowly and in small amounts so that the first hit doesn't shock you. (Some of the "spicier" oil olives can send me into a coughing fit if I take too much at once.) After the pepper dies down, the bitterness evens out and finishes very smoothly.

This is a nice oil for serving with Italian bread.

An olive oil this new is worth savoring repeatedly over the following month or two as its flavor will mellow in the bottle over time. I'm looking forward to seeing how it changes.

The holidays are winding down and in a week it will be 2007. We hope your holiday season has been filled with friends and family, plenty of warm cheer and, of course, good food.

Hua Xing opens in Ann Arbor/Ypsi

A few weeks back Joe and I noticed that there's a new Asian grocery in Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti. Hua Xing is located in the old Toyota dealership on Washtenaw, not far past Cottage Inn (coming from AA).

It's big.

Overwhelming, even.

It's the Meijers'* of Asian grocery stores.

The layout is a bit odd -- it was a car dealership, after all -- and leaves the impression of a semi-maze with delights awaiting the shopper around each corner. The former show car area and another room are dedicated to Asian ceramics and porcelains. Everything from tea sets to five foot tall vases. There's another room of fresh produce and frozen goods. The produce is very nicely displayed and labeled in both Chinese and English, making it easy to identify those unfamiliar greens and tubers. The main room has aisles of the usual Asian shelf goods -- pickled vegetables, pre-made sauces, canned veggies, grains (rice, mung beans, etc.), tea, oils, vinegars, cooking wine, and giagantic tubs of $5 peanut butter (no joke), bags of dehydrated garlic, and coconut soda. Cold cases lining the back wall have fresh noodles and other goods, while dried noodles are near the front.

And then there is the fish and meat room in what was once the car repair shop area. The immediate impression is of... blue and an odd feeling of being in an indoors swimming pool hall. Blue tanks line the walls, stacked several taks high. Most were still empty when we visited, awaiting their temporary residents, but there were a good number of what looked like tilapia and several tanks of different species of eels.

Live eels. Cool.

You can get close and personal with an eel -- stare straight into its piercing eyes and gaping razor-toothed mouth. I was glad there was a wall of glass between me and them.

The meat counter was... foreign. Okay, I recognized some of the cuts, but I wouldn't have an idea of what to do with them (and in some cases, I'd like to keep it that way). Various parts of pig that most Americans would find unappetizing these days, including tripe, along with other items I couldn't recognize, lay on beds of ice. But the thing that really got me was the tanks of live turtles and frogs. Toto, we're not in Ann Arbor anymore.

Except that we are. (Well, in Ypsi.)

I last ate frog when I was about ten. It tastes like chicken -- at least that I can remember. It's not that the turtles and frogs weirded me out -- I'm pretty hard to weird on on the food front -- but just that I think it's very neat that we now can get such things in the Midwest.

Now if only pickled tea leaves were in more demand, my life would be complete.

The store was busy. The Asian community was clearly checking it out. We and an Indian family or two were the only non-Asians there. This is the most ambitious Asian grocery store in Ann Arbor yet, and well worth a visit.

---

*Meijers' is a Michigan based chain store of really huge grocery/general purpose stores. Like Wal-Mart, but without the same labor practices, if you know what I mean.

Blue Eggs & The Cholesterol Myth

In honor of IMBB #16, I want to talk about eggs.  Specifically, I want to talk about egg myths.  Recently, I was picking up my eggs from the "egg lady" at the local farmers' market when a woman walked up and exclaimed, "I want to buy some of your low-cholesterol eggs!"

Now, what's she's talking about are the blue eggs from Araucana or Ameraucana chickens.  Egg shell color is determined by the chicken's genetics, and the Araucana chicken has a dominant gene that creates blue egg shells. There's this myth that Araucana eggs are lower in cholesterol.  They're not. In fact, Araucana eggs are consistently lower in protein and higher in cholesterol than the white eggs from White Leghorn chickens, which is the most common egg sold in the U.S.  (Here's another study.)  The differences are not really enough to matter from a nutritional viewpoint. 

An egg is an egg.  Got it?  Good.

But blue ones sure do look cool.

Everyday Wines in Kerrytown - Wonderful wines paired with exceptional customer service

In preparation for participating in my first Wine Blogging Wednesday, hosted this month by loveSiciliy, I went in search of an red sicilian wine that wouldn't break my bank account, so I naturally turned to the delightful Everyday Wines in Kerrytown. (That's in Ann Arbor, MI, for all you out-of-town readers.)

Mary Campbell, who runs Everyday Wines, has created a delightful shop featuring quality wines from around the world at reasonable prices. She and her staff taste every wine and provide descriptions that include food pairing suggestions.

Everyday Wine's beautiful wine racks

I'm not a wine expert, and I don't drink wine very often, so when I do buy wine I want to feel reasonably comfortable that I'm going to enjoy it. Mary has been fabulous with her knowledgeable suggestions and friendly assistance. (Back in December, she matched a red wine to cantalope for me, and it was wonderful.) She takes a real interest in her customer's needs and goes the extra step to help them find what they're looking for, and her staff is no different. I recently stopped in and asked about a wine, and though Giri, who works for her, couldn't find it for me, he remembered to mention it to Mary, who dropped me an email with information about the wine. In my book, that's exceptional customer service.

everyday wines: 734 827 WINE
direct email: [email protected]