Food Notes: 6/3
Kung Pao chicken, Peking ravioli, Venezuelan bakeries, pizza ice cream, and more
Kung Pao is a classic Chinese dish. Jennifer 8 Lee explains in The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, “nearly every self-respecting Chinese chef can make” a Kung Pao chicken. By contrast, a Chinese American dish like General Tso's chicken often left many "scratching their head."
The dish has its origins in the 19th century, and today versions of it can be found in restaurants from Beijing to American mall food courts. Fuchsia Dunlop wrote a solid history of the dish for the L.A. Times, so I’ll skip over the details there. But rest assured, for many Americans, Kung Pao chicken is quintessentially part of Chinese American takeout culture. Open up one of those white boxes and find a tangy, sweet and spicy chicken and vegetable stir fry topped with cashews.
As a kid, the nuts always bothered me. I didn't like nuts in brownies, cookies, bread, or Kung Pao chicken. So I stayed away. Mostly as a kid I ate egg drop soup, but I digress.
My introduction to Kung Pao chicken was not actually Kung Pao chicken, but the Kung Pao pastrami from Mission Chinese. At the first iteration in New York that opened in a tiny, rat-filled basement in the Lower East Side, my friends and I would show up and order a bunch of dishes to share. The Kung Pao Pastrami, along withe Mapo Tofu and the Thrice Cooked Bacon were hit dishes that were must orders.
The Kung Pao Pastrami was one of the dishes I really wanted to make after acquiring the Mission Chinese Cookbook – but after reading through the recipes, my main take away was the recipe collection was intimidatingly complicated. There's a recipe at Bon Appetit that seems a bit less "reference the recipe on page 23, ect".
The original New York City Mission Chinese closed years ago, and other iterations in Brooklyn and Manhattan have come and gone. There's now a new iteration in Manhattan which I'm yet to visit.
My first time eating Kung Pao chicken – at least that I know of – was last summer. Since the pandemic, we've been traveling out to Cape Cod multiple times each year, usually leaving after work and arriving on the Cape around midnight. Sometimes we'd have my parents pickup a pizza or eggplant parm sandwiches for when we arrived. But then we realized there was a late night kitchen at the Double Dragon restaurant in Orleans. The bar is open until 2am, and seemingly so is the kitchen.
The food at the Double Dragon isn't quite as spicy as Chinese food in New York City, but otherwise I have no complaints. We've eaten inside too, and there is a campy mid-century tiki vibe, almost like stepping through a time machine. They even offer pu pu platters.
However, the best dishes on the menu are those that peaked in popularity during that era in the late 20th century when Americans were just getting excited about Asian cuisines. Some of the best are the South Pacific inspired dishes. Another highlight are the Peking Ravioli, a regional variation on potstickers from the greater Boston area with thicker dough and no cabbage in the pork filling.
But this brings us back to Kung Pao chicken. A classic in China, a classic in America, and relatively unknown to me, I suggested we order a pint of it one night. Usually my wife and I split a few things, so there’s a low risk of ending up with a complete disaster. We’ve cycled through a lot of different dishes over the last few years. The Kung Pao chicken was a great decision, and has since become part of our regular late night order.
Over the weekend we were on the waterfront in Brooklyn wondering what we planned on eating for dinner. That's when I suggested making Kung Pao chicken.
I allowed SEO to guide my search, flipped through a few recipes from Recipe Tin Eats, Once Upon a Chef, and Serious Eats, and set to grocery store shopping. I wasn’t entirely sure what ingredients we had in the pantry, and so I made my best guesses while standing in the grocery store aisle with the sesame oil and Kikkoman soy sauce.
I ended up with just a few substitutions: balsamic vinegar for Chinese vinegar; a bottle of old white wine that was in the fridge for Chinese cooking wine, a slightly fancier; Kemushi Umami Soy Sauce in place of dark soy sauce. I also added snap peas to increase the green vegetables we were eating.
What really ended up flavoring this dish though was the sichuan peppers. We keep some in the freezer for just such occasions. I'm not shy with the pepper, and we were really able to capture that tingly tang.
Overall this came together relatively quickly. The most complicated part was measuring out the sauce ingredients, and I think pretty easily this could be eyeballed and by taste with just a few more attempts. Sometimes I impress even myself.
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