Get your dumpling on
Ingredients:(makes 30 to 40 dumplings):
1 kg all-purpose flour Water 500g lean mince 50g fatty mince
2 tbsp Sichuan pepper infused oil
2 tbsp sesame oil
2 tbsp Chinese wine
2 tbsp dark soy sauce
2 tbsp light soy sauce
1 whole Chinese cabbage
1. Prepare the dough by adding enough water to the flour to get a soft ball. Knead until silky smooth and pliable and keep aside for 30 minutes under a damp cloth.
2. Combine the minced meats in a large bowl and add all the seasoning. Stir in one direction until well mixed.
3. Finely slice the Chinese cabbage and add a generous sprinkling of salt. Leave for 5 minutes to draw out the juices. Then, place the chopped cabbage in a muslin bag and squeeze as much water out as possible. Add the cabbage to the minced meat mixture and combine well.
4. Divide dough into halves and knead until very pliable. Poke a hole in the center of each dough ball, and slowly enlarge it by rolling it around your wrists to get a very skinny doughnut with a huge hole.
6. Break the doughnut to get a long strip. Pinch off regular segments (walnut-sized) and roll into little circles. Flatten with a rolling pin, keeping the center of the wrapper slightly thicker than the edges.
7. Fill the wrappers with the meat mixture.
8. Bring a pot of lightly salted water to the boil. Add about 20 dumplings to the boiling pot. When the water comes back to a boil, add some water. Again bring it to a boil and repeat the adding of water. After the second boiling, the dumplings should be cooked.
9. Drain and serve with ginger julienne or minced garlic in black vinegar. Or, with pickled flowering chives, if you can get some!
Place a spoonful of filling in the middle of a wrapper.
Fold the wrapper in half and pinch the mid-point of the semi-circle together.
Pleat the jiaozi on one side only, so it gets its traditional concave ingot shape.
Make sure the edges are pinched tightly if you are boiling them, otherwise you may get a pasta soup.
Fillings:
Long beans and pork
Substitute cabbage with long beans (snake beans) or French beans. Top and tail the beans and blanch to soften. Finely slice and add to meat filling.
Celery and pork
Blanch tender celery stalks and finely dice before adding to the meat mixture.
Seafood dumplings
Substitute half the minced pork for an equal amount of minced prawns, or shredded dried scallops.
1. Place raw dumplings neatly in a lightly oiled non-stick pan. Place them slightly apart so there is room to swell as they cook.
2. Heat up the pan and let the bottoms of the dumplings crisp. When you shake the pan, they should sound “hollow”.
3. Add half a cup of stock or water to the pan and bring to the boil. Cover and simmer.
4. When the water dries up, lower the heat and allow the dumplings to crisp up.
5. Carefully turn the cooked dumplings over a plate so the crisp bottoms face up. Serve with the usual dips.
Growing choice of health food
Like many other Net-savvy Chinese, Beijinger Wu Songzhi has been shopping online for four years. Since March, the human resources manager of a multinational company has been adding something extra into her online shopping cart – organic food.
“My family likes to eat fresh tomatoes and potatoes, so it’s safer to buy organic ones,” said Wu, in her 30s. “They are also clean and I don’t have to wash them so many times.”
Every month, Wu spends about 600 yuan ($87) on organic vegetables, meat and other produce on online organic shop tootoo.cn. Her orders are delivered to her workplace.
Wu has joined a growing number of people in Beijing who are becoming more aware of what they are eating and choosing to buy organic food because it is free of chemical pesticides, fertilizers, hormone or genetic modification.
A survey conducted by environmental group Greenpeace in January last year showed that 93 percent of 300 respondents said they chose organic food primarily for safety and health reasons, while 68 percent said they bought organic food and 80 percent said they would definitely buy organic food in the future.
Safety- and health-conscious consumers in Beijing also have growing access to a variety of organic choices offered by supermarkets, franchised stores and home delivery services.
Tootoo.cn, which started its online order and home delivery service in March this year, currently has more than 2,000 members including entrepreneurs, lawyers, TV hosts and movie stars, according to Liu Jingdan, who works with the company’s marketing department.
“They are better-off and care about food safety. They are interested in knowing about their food and more and more people are joining them,” Liu said.
While organically grown food is being made available in more and more supermarkets, experts believe China’s organic food industry still has huge potential.
China produces 3 billion yuan ($438 million) worth of organic food every year, with $200 million being exported.
Organic food accounts for only 0.02 percent of the total domestic food market, while the global average is 2 percent, according to Jiang Gaoming, a professor with the China Academy of Science’s institute of botany.
Jiang said that, based on their salary, urban consumers can afford organic food with a price three times that of non-organic food, but they have little agricultural knowledge and can only distinguish organic and non-organic foods by label.
“They are unlikely to choose less-attractive, pricier organic food,” he said.
Many consumers also remain skeptical about certification.
Veronica Zhao, who works with a consultancy in Beijing, is one of these. “I can afford it, but I’m not sure if they are real or not. I don’t believe in organic food certification,” she said.
Similarly, Jiang said organic food certification is “useless”.
“Some producers run small, tightly controlled organic operations of about 2 hectares in order to gain organic certification, then package their non-organic produce as organic for more profit,” he said.
“The key is to go to organic farms themselves to check.”
American Liora Pearlman is head of the Beijing Organic Consumer Association (BOCA), which is an online group of about 600 members, mostly foreigners who live in Beijing.
Pearlman said the level of awareness and education on organic food is low.
“Most of the information in organic food is in English,” she said.
“Visits to organic farm help people know more about organic food.”
Beijing cafes booming not because of coffee, but space
While it is no surprise that many Beijingers have taken to coffee since foreign companies arrived on the scene nearly 10 years ago, customers are hanging out at cafes not for the coffee – but the environment.
Ren Yue, 31, is the face of the Chinese coffee drinking generation. As a successful banking consultant, drinking a cup of Joe became part of her daily routine more than six years ago. Her doctor even recommended she started drinking coffee to aid digestion.
While she is a coffee lover, most of her friends are not – but that has not stopped them from being part of Beijing’s emerging cafe culture.
A decade ago, Starbucks opened its first store on the Chinese mainland, looking to shake up the long-standing tea drinking culture with a jolt of caffeine. A few years later, Yue had her first sip of coffee and she was soon hooked.
Starbucks now runs about 700 outlets on the mainland. Martin Coles, president of Starbucks Coffee International Inc, told Bloomberg news agency in July that “China clearly is a huge opportunity for us, today and into the foreseeable future”.
Starbucks is not the only foreign coffee chain doing business in China. Popular United Kingdom company Costa Coffee started serving Chinese customers in Shanghai in 2006 with the opening of their first Chinese store, and has opened 33 stores in China since.
However, its President Paul Smith says the business model is different from that in the UK because it is not about the product people are buying, but the place that it is offered in.
“It’s not just coffee that you’re selling in China, it’s 20 minutes’ of personal space, in a country of 1.3 billion people and you only have to sit and watch the seats that fill up first to really understand how important that factor is,” Smith said.
Yue herself first stepped into a Chinese cafe called Sculpting in Time, near her home in Wudaokou several years ago. She soon found herself bringing piles of books into the outlet on the weekend and camping out for hours until it closed, soaking up caffeine and reading novels cover to cover.
“At home, I always think about watching TV or cooking, or doing something else,” she explained. “But at the coffee shop, I have nothing else to do except reading.” For her, the coffee shop was a stress-free place to relax.
For college students in the Wudaokou area, four-storey coffee shop The Bridge has become the ultimate hangout.
Close to Tsinghua University and several other schools, the place remains packed throughout the day with Chinese and foreign students. Many of these students share small dorm rooms with several roommates, so The Bridge offers a place to get some space.
Yue hangs out there with several girls dragging on cigarettes and sending cellphone messages to friends. While Yue likes her coffee black, her friends do not actually like the taste of the drink. They say they are there to enjoy the environment.
One of the most popular expat cafes in the capital is The Bookworm in Sanlitun. The establishment brings in its customer base by encouraging customers to build communities in their space, Bookworm’s events coordinator Jenny Niven said.
In the last two years, more Chinese people have started attending the cafe’s events, she said.
“There are people whom you see every single morning. They use it like an office,” she said.
Niven said it is not just the sophistication of the coffee that is bringing people in. “If it was coffee, they would all just be going to Starbucks,” she said. “We invite people to make it a home.”
Harvard researcher: coffee poisoning not accidental
One of six Harvard Medical School researchers who became ill after drinking coffee on Aug. 26 said on Monday the poisoning was not accidental, according to media reports.
Matteo Iannacone, postdoctoral fellow, 33, said he immediately noticed a “weird” taste after sipping an espresso he poured from a coffee machine in an eighth-floor lounge near his research lab.
After taking a second sip to make sure he wasn’t imagining the foul taste, he began feeling dizziness and a rapid heartbeat, but said the symptoms passed quickly.
“It was too strange for me to be an accident,” he was quoted by the Associated Press as saying in an interview Monday.
Toxicology results, Iannacone said, showed the coffee contained a “very high concentration” of sodium azide, a powerful chemical preservative used in many research labs in the building and can be fatal in high doses, causing respiratory failure.
Iannacone was one of six people who became ill after drinking coffee from the communal espresso machine.
Two of the researchers who drank coffee earlier in the day had fainted, but officials did not immediately connect their illnesses to the coffee machine, Iannacone said.
An ambulance carried Iannacone to nearby Brigham and Women’s Hospital for treatment. Doctors could find nothing wrong, he said.
David Cameron, spokesman for Harvard Medical School, said the coffee machine is not connected to the water supply. The eighth floor coffee machine also served researchers and students on the 9th floor, he said, about 200 people total. The machine has since been removed.
“I have no idea who might have done this thing,” he said. “To me it doesn’t look like a joke, obviously, because we were not far from a lethal dose.”
Harvard police were looking into “every possible, conceivable option as to how this could have occurred,” said Cameron, a spokesman for Harvard Medical School.
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration said it was looking into the incident to determine if there were any violations of health or safety standards in the workplace.
Yao Restaurant closes unexpectedly
Yao Restaurant, which gets its fame from people believing it is connected with Chinese NBA star Yao Ming, closed last Friday, leaving dozens of unpaid, stunned employees standing around outside.
The restaurant is behind in its obligations nearly 100,000 yuan ($15,000), local media reported.
Some 17 employees of the restaurant have applied for arbitration, said a deputy chief of Jing’an District Labor and Social Security Bureau surnamed Ge. He would not give the exact amount of money involved.
The restaurant opened in 2006 as a flagship restaurant called Yeeha Texas BBQ & Sports Bar and Yao Restaurant in Chinese.
The business was initiated by Yu Di. Yu and Yao are both shareholders of Yao Restaurant and Bar in Houston, Texas.
Yao Ming and his agent denied they get any profit from the Shanghai restaurant.
“Yao Ming and his family members didn’t get a penny from the restaurant and didn’t get involved in the operation,” Zhang Mingji, who is in charge of Yao’s management team, was quoted by National Business Daily as saying.
Yao and his family did not invest directly in the restaurant. The restaurant uses the name of Yao because Yu is a friend of Yao’s family, according to Zhang.
Fei Yunsheng, an employee who worked for two years at the restaurant, said more than 20 employees didn’t get their salary on time.
“The restaurant owes me a half-month’s salary,” he told China Daily Wednesday. The restaurant’s chef is owed more than 10,000 yuan, Fei said.
The restaurant was closed Wednesday, with a note hanging on the door saying that the business is closing temporarily for interior decoration, and it will reopen on Nov 1.
“The restaurant was just decorated this August,” said Xu Liang, a cook who has worked at the restaurant for more than two months and has never been paid. He claimed the employer owes him 5,100 yuan.
Xu said one employee found the note on the wall last Friday. “We were surprised to find that the most valuable equipment in the dining hall, such as the LCD TVs and computers, had disappeared,” he said. “None of us were told the restaurant would close.”
Zhao Yue, the contractor for the restaurant who took over its operation in August, denied there were disputes between the restaurant and employees.
He told China Daily over phone that the restaurant will reopen soon. “The restaurant doesn’t owe any salary to employees,” Zhao said.
Craftworks carved from fruit and vegetables
The photo taken on Oct. 10, 2009 shows a craftwork carved from a watermelon on a cooking contest held in Taipei of southeast China’s Taiwan Province. The 2nd Taipei Cooking Competition and 2009 Taipei International King Cook Invitational Championship were presenting super cooking skills to the audience from Oct. 9 to 12. (Xinhua/Wu Ching-teng)
Delicious Salon du Chocolat held in Paris
A chocolate fountain is displayed during the Salon du Chocolat (Chocolate Salon) in Paris, capital of France, Oct. 17, 2009. The salon runs from 14 Oct. till 18, Oct. 2009.(Xinhua/Chu Wen)
Let’s taste delicious wafu grill saury fish!
Two men pose with their grill saury fish on a street during a saury event in Tokyo, capital of Japan, Oct. 11, 2009. Some 2,000 saury fish, a popular seafood used in Japanese cuisine, will be distributed to people during the autumn event.(Xinhua/Hua Yi)
Food festival held in Suzhou, E China
Visitors take pictures during a food festival held in Suzhou, east China’s Jiangsu Province, Sept. 12, 2009. The 4th China Suzhou Food Festival, which was also the 1st China “Su Style” Moon Cake Cultural Festival, was opened at the gymnasium of Xiangcheng District in Suzhou on Saturday. (Xinhua/Hang Xingwei)
“King and Queen Crabs” selected in Jiangsu
The raiser shows the “Queen Crab” just selected out during a “King and Queen Crabs” selection activity held in Hongze County of east China’s Jiangsu Province, Oct. 10, 2009. About a hundred fishermen and raisers in the surroundings of Hongze Lake in Hongze County took part in the activity with hairy crabs on Saturday. A 533-gram male crab and a 441-gram female one won the “King and Queen Crabs” in the end.(Xinhua/Chen Liang)
