The ‘Secrets’ of the Chinese Kitchen

4 min read

You must have wondered, when visiting a Chinese restaurant, how it is that you never have to wait long before several dishes, all freshly cooked and piping hot, appear at your table (or for take-away) from a menu listing well over one hundred items.

The secret is all in the preliminary preparations before the actual cooking. As you will see from the detailed instructions for each recipe in this book, the preparation for most dishes takes up far more time than the final cooking time, which often requires no more than a couple of minutes to complete. I shall explain: Take an average-sized Chinese restaurant, say with sixty to seventy seatings. There is usually a staff of six or seven working in the kitchen (the waiting staff can be anything from three to eight, depending on the locality ofthe establishment), most of them working on a ten–twelve hour shift, six days a week. The general routine is as follows: at 10 am each day, the staff start to arrive, and fresh supplies of ingredients are delivered. These have to be given whatever preliminary preparation is necessary. One of the first tasks is to make the stock, which is used as a basis for soup, as well as for general cooking whenever liquid is required.

Then the prawns have to be peeled and the meat cut into slices, shreds or cubes, and marinated. Ducks and chickens are prepared for cooking, and vegetables are cut into various sizes and shapes. The staff have their lunch as early as 11.30 or 11.45 in order to be ready for the opening at noon. When an order comes through, the chef or his assistant doles out the exact amount of pre-prepared ingredients on separate dishes and places them on the work top just behind the stove by which the chef and one or two cooks are stationed, with woks and oils pre-heated to the required temperature, ready for action. The gas cookers have been converted to give extremely high heat, so thinly cut meat like pork and beef can be cooked in one and a half minutes, while chicken and fish can often take less than half that time. During the rush hours, a chef can operate two woks side by side simultaneously, which means that three cooks can turn out six quick stir-fried dishes in two minutes flat!

Apart from the soy-braised and roasted food, almost every item on the menu is freshly cooked from pre-prepared ingredients. Some dishes may partly contain precooked items, but certainly not to the same extent as the mass-produced dishes from a cheap Chinese take-away. You will probably have noticed the difference between the food you get in a restaurant of good standing and that from a cheap take-away. The dishes from the former are always bright, crisp and crunchy as well as delicious, while the food from the latter is usually dull, soggy and often without much flavour. This apparent discrepancy of quality between restaurants and take-away food is a question of resources. Almost all the small take-aways are run by families which usually consist of the father as cook, the mother as the kitchen hand, and the son and/or daughter as the cashier and general helper. They may list some fifty to sixty items on the menu, but on closer scrutiny you willdiscover that more than half of the dishes are variations of the same thing. They almost all consist of the ubiquitous bean sprouts, plus two or three other shredded vegetables (usually carrot and onion), with a small amount of meat or prawns; furthermore, nearly all the ingredients are precooked so it is merely a matter of assembling everything together and warming them through at the last minute. Should you wish to reproduce your favourite Chinese dishes at home, you should have no difficulty in matching or even surpassing the standard of a good take-away; however, in matching the food from a restaurant of high quality, I must warn you not to set your expectations too high, bearing in mind not only the differences in facilities between a professional Chinese kitchen and an average British home kitchen, but also the years of training and experience of the chefs. But all is not lost.

While there are a number of dishes that are beyond the scope of the home cook in a home kitchen, a large number of the most popular dishes can be produced successfully at home by following the instructions in this book. If your first attempt at a Chinese meal from this book turns out to be a triumph – or even a modest success – I take off my hat to you and say: ‘Well done!’, and congratulate both of us.

But if the results are not quite as good as you expected, don’t be down-hearted and give up. Remember the mottoes: ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again’ and ‘Practice makes perfect’. Try and find out where you have gone wrong and then you’ll no doubt be more successful the next time.