improvised gluten-free pear muffins

I remember the time when I was really scared to start gluten-free baking because it seemed so complicated, so many types of flour, so easy for things to go wrong, for the baking to fail. A couple of weeks ago, I baked some muffins (if you can call them that) without following any gluten-free recipe book and amazingly, the product was edible!

All I did was to try a direct substition of wheat flour with a gluten-free flour blend in my original basic muffin recipe. Yes, the very first basic muffin recipe, which I subsequently stopped using when I found basic recipe no. 2 gave better results. Basic muffin recipe no. 1 is so easy that you can easily by heart:

2 cups flour
1 cup milk/liquid
1/4 cup oil/butter
1 egg (2 , if you prefer)
1 tsp baking powder
other ingredients of choice – e.g. 1 chopped apple, handful of nuts/dried fruit etc.

I used exactly those quantities together with a few large chunks of tinned pears, and made up the 1 cup liquid with half milk and half pear juice from the tin. Apart from the pears and pear juice, no added sugar. (If you are avoiding salicylates, remember to choose pears in syrup as commercial pear juice contains the peel which has salicylates. Of course if you are on an anti-candida diet, the syrup is probably worse!)

The gluten-free flour blend is the one I described earlier:

8oz/225g brown rice flour
8oz/225g tapioca starch
8oz/225g soy flour

No xanthan gum, no gelatine.

The batter was extremely wet, but I decided to go ahead without adding extra flour. The consistency (and eventual effect) reminded on a crazy improvisation attempt when I dumped a load of mashed pumpkin into a gluten-free sponge cake recipe, thereby completely altering the ratio of liquid to other ingredients — a crazy attempt which I did not blog about because I can’t even remember exactly what I did (brain must have gone on strike, hence giving rise to the mad improvisation to begin with); started out being utterly disappointed with the result and subsequently very pleased when put aside my preconceptions and realised the texture was quite appealing and the taste pretty good.

The result:

It looked beautiful at the end of baking, but collapsed as it cooled after coming out of the oven, just as this gluten-free bean bread did. I’ve discovered the quick bread gluten-free recipe that doesn’t sink is this one that uses gelatine as well.

Taste-wise, I was very pleased although visitors to my home who tasted a bite responded only with a grimace masquerading as a polite smile :). Texture-wise, I’ll repeat what I’ve said in my other gluten-free baking entries; it reminds me of Southeast Asian kueh or steamed cakes, soft and very close-textured, no ‘crumb’, kind of squishy.

The overall effect of the non-wheat taste and texture is certainly very reminiscent of local desserts, so perhaps if I dropped names like ‘muffin’ or ‘cake’ and called it kueh, people would have different expectations and not react so negatively towards my gluten-free baking!

As long-standing readers here may have noticed, I like the idea of making from scratch at home products which are often bought as ready-made commercial products. I’ve had a reasonable amount of success with soya bean milk, tofu and salted eggs, which are all very easy.

I’ve also considered making soya sauce at home. While it can be done, as I mentioned in my earlier posting, I’ve decided not to try (at least for now) after chatting to a food scientist who used to work at Kikkoman. During the commercial production process at Kikkoman factories, there is assiduous testing to make sure that the fermentation process does not attract toxic microbes instead of the ‘right’ kind of bacteria, which can easily happen. I’ve also heard how difficult it is to make tempeh at home, and I assume it’s partly for those same reasons.

Another type of food I thought of making at home is Chinese pickled vegetables: mui choy, chye poh, kiam chye — all the things that would give the right ‘kick’ to my somewhat bland dishes. Today’s Sunday Times food question column by Chris Tan addressed this precise issue. The bad news is:

They are not as easy to make as they might seem, requiring successive rounds of drying, seasoning, salting, brining or steaming. These methods may look simple or crude but they are very sensitive to the quality of the starting ingredients, the ambient humidity and temperature as well as the microbes naturally present in the immediate environment.Hence, an experienced eye is needed to tell if the fermentation or preservation is proceeding correctly. Doing this kind of multiple-stage preserving at home is very tricky, frequently entailing much trial and error. Therefore, nowadays most people are content to leave it to the specialists.

The good news is that “many Asian cuisines have easy recipes for mildly sour, briefly fermented pickled greens that are designed to be made and consumed within a few days.” Examples of pickled gai choy, which is a kind of mustard green, include Laotian som pak, Filipino burung mastasa and Vietnamese cai chua or dua chua.

The advice from Chris Tan concludes with this advice:

The Japanese pickling tradition also has many quick pickle recipes. For a good introduction to methods and ingredients, I recommend the book Tsukemono: Japanese Pickled Vegetables by Kay Shimizu.

I don’t have that particular title, but have already been pouring over TSUKEMONO―Japanese Pickling Recipes (Quick&Easy) which is part of my collection of food books. Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with how the different types of Japanese pickles taste and I’m not a big enough fan of pickles in general to go all out on experimenting. I wonder if quick pickles will taste more like nonya acar, rather than anything like chye poh…?

For those living in the San Francisco area, I just heard about this event, the Asian Culinary Forum.

Asian Food Beyond Borders
Friday – Sunday, October 10 – 12, 2008

To celebrate our 2008 theme, “Asian Food Beyond Borders,” ACF is presenting an entire weekend of exciting classes, tours, workshops and panel discussions for your enjoyment. Choose your heart’s desire from our extensive a la carte menu of educational events.

To attend any of the Friday and Saturday classes below, register online securely and conveniently. Learn more about our guest instructors, speakers, and presenters on their bio page.

Friday, October 10

The Six Asian Flavors
5:30 – 7:30 pm,  SF Ferry Building

Saturday, October 11

Morning

Chinatown Culinary Walk  *** SOLD OUT ***
9:30 am – 1:30 pm, Chinatown

Chutneys, Kimchi, and Sambal
10:30 am – 1:00 pm, Sur La Table, Maiden Lane

The Politics and Practicalities of Rice
10:00 am – 12:00 pm, SF Ferry Building

Afternoon

Master Wine and Food Pairing
1:30 – 3:30 pm, Le Colonial

Meals, Meaning, and Memory in Asian Diasporas
1:30 – 3:30 pm, SF Ferry Building

What is This? Experts Deciphering the Unfamiliar
1:30 – 3:30 pm, SF Ferry Building

Delights of South India
3:00 – 5:30 pm, Sur La Table, Maiden Lane

Sunday, October 12

ACF 2008 Symposium: Asian Food Beyond Borders
8:30 am – 5:30 pm, Ferry Building

I’ve been trying out dim sum recipes (steamed radish cake, water chestnut fritters and chewy pumpkin cake) from the cookbook by chef, Chan Chen Hei, without any idea who he is.

But I’ve just discovered that he’s opened a new restaurant at the National Museum of Singapore (the same place with this food history exhibit that features traditional coconut graters among other things). Not that I’ll be able to try it out… I’ve stayed far, far away from any kind of Chinese restaurant after single-mouthful tasters left me feeling unwell for an entire week, on more than one occasion.

Anyway, Chef Chan will be co-presenting a lecture at the museum on ‘Ancient Chinese Food’ with Huang Zhuolun 黃卓倫, the food writer from Lianhe Zaobao, on Sat, 20 Sep 08 from 4-5pm. Get the full details at the National Museum website’s section on Lectures on Food & Culture. There are other sessions on tea (16 Aug) and chocolate (29 Aug) as well.

If you’re into learning about food and cooking but relate more to organic, healthy and holistic instead, the hands-on classes on tofu & okara, fermented foods, raw food, vegetarian cooking, baking bread (no oven necessary), traditional Chinese snacks and spreads made from nuts, seeds & fruits, then the sessions at Wholesome Living look quite exciting.

I’ve not been for any food classes before so if have any experiences to share, do leave a comment :).

This homemade tofu thing is getting complicated.

Yesterday, I came across this information from Wholesome Living, an organic shop in Singapore that conducts all sorts of cooking workshops:

Commercial bean curds contain chemical substances such as bleaching agent, de-foaming agent, preservatives and coagulant (calcium sulfate a.k.a. gypsum). Commercial tofu manufacturers usually utilize calcium sulfate as a coagulant and marketing it as high calcium food to mislead consumers that it is a good source of calcium to prevent osteoporosis. In fact, this inorganic calcium will cause various health problems such as renal stone problems and so forth. Furthermore from the TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) perspective, consuming too much commercial tofu will make your body too ‘YING’.

[Wholesome Living conducts a Tofu, Soy Milk & Okara 2-session workshop that teaches tofu-making with non-mineral coagulants.]

Various websites, especially those promoting particular brands of calcium supplements based on water-soluble organic calcium (e.g. calcium aspartate etc.), support these points; see here, here and here.

On the TCM view of tofu, Paul Pitchford’s fantastic book, Healing with Wholefoods, elaborates:

For most people, its yin, cooling quality needs to be altered by thorough cooking; adding warming spices such as ginger is particularly helpful for cold persons. . . . Eating massive amounts of tofu regularly (as some Americans do) can contribute to kidney-adrenal weakness, loss and graying of hair, impotence, frigidity and decrease in sexual sensitivity.

At the same time, calcium sulphate is the oldest tofu coagulant used in China, with 2000 years of history (see here).

According to this Singapore-oriented discussion thread from 2005, Phoon Huat stopped selling gypsum (sometimes mistakenly equated with borax) as it was banned from sale, and therefore began stocking Glucono delta-lactone/GDL instead.

(GDL), which is naturally found in honey, fruit juices and wine, is the coagulant used for making silken tofu. As the Wholesome Living workshop teaches the making of silken tofu, I suspect GDL is the ‘non-mineral coagulant’ being used. The action of GDL is different from nigari & gypsum type coagulants as it works as an acid, not as a salt (see Asian Foods: Science and Technology by Catharina Yung-Kang, Wang Ang, KeShun Liu, Yao-Wen Huang).

Sounds like GDL is the way to go, especially for soft tofu for 豆花 douhua/tau foo fa/tau huay.

Read my previous posts on tofu-making:
Coagulants for homemade tofu
Making tofu at home
Making tofu at home P.S.

Sorry, in the last post, I missed out a whole bunch of great links with more photos, tips and information about making tofu at home.

The first is this super set of photos & instructions from Chow.com. The best thing about this is that it provides a cheap & easy solution to the problem of finding at tofu box & press! I’ve excerpted the instructions on how to make one from a used milk carton:

(See the original Chow.com page here.)
Personally, I would use a fruit juice carton instead as milk smells tend to linger and aren’t easily so washed off the carton.

Here are some others who’ve tried making tofu:
http://www.bryannaclarkgrogan.com/page/page/3009045.htm [excellent step-by-step instructions and tips with photos]
http://www.codecooker.com/veggiewrangler/tofu/step1.htm [great step-by-step pics and tips]
http://mmm-yoso.typepad.com/mmmyoso/2006/09/tofu.html [has photo of a bottle of commercial Japanese nigari]
http://www.selfsufficientish.com/soyamilk.htm [no photos, very detailed write-up]
http://www.burntmouth.com/2007/10/home-made-seasoned-tofu.html [tofu & spicy-foods-fan, Zlamushka, makes flavoured tofu with spices, both savoury and sweet]
http://veganfeastkitchen.blogspot.com/2007/06/gourmet-tofu-from-your-own-kitchen.html [sage, leek & dried wild mushroom tofu]
http://veganfeastkitchen.blogspot.com/2007/07/update-on-mushroom-leek-gourmet-tofu.html [tomato, artichoke, garlic, basil tofu]

What interests me most are these recipes & tips for making the kind of tofu my whole family loves to eat, the Chinese tofu pudding dessert, 豆花 douhua/tau foo fa /tau huay:
http://www.soya.be/forum/viewtopic.php?p=4297
http://chowtimes.com/2006/03/21/sweet-soy-pudding-tou-foo-fa/ [includes photo of commercial packaged gypsum (calcium sulphate) powder from Hong Kong]
http://www.mycookinghut.com/2007/07/02/craving-for-douhuadau-fu-fa/ [a modified version, using gelatine instead of gypsum]

There seems to be less information on the internet about making your own douhua/tau foo fa. My guess is that it’s because it’s not a tofu dish common in the west and most people making their own tofu are those who have difficulty buying it where they live. On the other hand, douhua is easily available in Chinese communities everywhere, and instead of DIY instructions, you’ll find tons of web discussions on where to find the best fresh douhua stall! For the uninitiated, this article and its discussion board is a good primer and discusses douhua in different Asian cultures.

Speaking of douhua stalls, I’ve long wondered what goes into the syrup they serve; why is it always that orange colour? I tend to have as little of it as possible, sometimes none. Singapore douha hawkers don’t bat an eyelid when I ask for no syrup, but in Taiwan, one stallholder engaged me in a prolonged discussion and even customers sitting at the stall joined in to question my strange eating habits!

Some time back I wrote about different types of graters, especially those used for grating coconut. [Also read here how we make coconut milk at home.]

One thing that fascinated me was the various styles of traditional coconut graters used in different cultures, and on a recent trip to the National Museum of Singapore, I was pleasantly surprised to find a display of traditional coconut graters.

You can see here a couple of stool-type graters in the foreground and at the back, handheld versions, one of which looks rather phallic! Partially obscured on the right-hand side towards the back is a suction-style grater similar to the one I described in my previous posting.

This display is found inside the Food gallery, which is one of the four “Living Galleries” and is free entry from 6-8pm daily :).

You may have already seen my earlier posting on natural food colourings here.

Since then, I came across this interesting video podcast from Curbly- DIY Design Community on natural colourings for Easter eggs, which suggests:

• For blue, use red cabbage
• For red, try whole beets (not canned), cherries, or cranberries
• For light green, use spinach or fresh green herbs
• For tan, brew some strong coffee, tea, or a handful of cumin seeds
• For yellow, try turmeric (a spice) and yellow onion skins
• For olive green, use red onion skins (the color is produced by a reaction with the vinegar)
• For purple, grape juice or frozen blueberries.

Moving from American Easter eggs to Japanese lunchboxes, Maki of Just Bento has also written on natural ways to add colour to your food, based on suggestions from the bento-making community via Japanese-language websites such as Bentobako.net.

In summary, some of the foods used are:

Orange: salmon, carrot, paprika
Pink: ume vinegar, sakuraebi (small dried shrimp), red cabbage liquid with lemon juice
Purple: red cabbage liquid, purple potato powder
Blue: red cabbage juice with baking soda, purple potato powder, pickled eggplant liquid
Yellow: mashed kobocha (Japanese pumpkin), curry powder, turmeric, egg yolk
Green: mashed up edamame beans, peas broccoli or spinach
Brown: inarizushi skins, dark soya sauce
Black: nori seaweed
Grey: shirasuboshi (tiny little semi-dried fish)

And also how red cabbage prepared in different ways can produce purple, blue, red and brown colours! For full instructions, go to the original Just Bento post.

Ever since I started experimenting with different foods in an attempt at food rotation, I’ve been thinking of cooking this dish. It’s made from Chinese white radish, also known as daikon (and most confusingly, can be called ‘carrot’ when translated into English, as I’ve noted here).

What held me up was trying to think of substitutes for the usual preserved meats and dried products that usually go into this dish: laap cheong Chinese sausages, laap yok waxed pork, dried shrimps, dried mushrooms. Without the seasoning of oyster sauce, soya sauce and sugar, and no flavourful ingredients I wasn’t sure how this dish would work at all.

In the end I just went ahead and made it absolutely plain and believe it or not, it was absolutely delicious! There are no fillings in this lor bak gou at all, and no seasoning apart from a tiny pinch of salt, but the familiar taste is unmistakably that of lor bak gou ☺.

Everything is in the additional toppings which can be adjusted to suit individual taste, so those family members who want to load up on laap cheong and bottled chilli sauce can do so as well, leaving the rest of us to enjoy this in a more simple fashion.

The toppings shown in the photo are chopped spring onion, homemade fried shallots, sesame seed furikake and sesame oil — my favourite way to garnish this basic lor bak gou.

This dish is suitable for bento, and the toppings can be packed into dedicated bento condiments containers, or even just wrapped up in folded aluminium foil. Personally, I prefer to eat lor bak gou warm and I didn’t try it in any bento this time round.

When I compared different recipes, the interesting thing was that they all used a different combination of flours in very different quantities. For example, for approx. 600g of radish:
a) 450g rice flour + 50g tapioca flour
b) 1400g rice flour + 80g tapioca flour
c) 450g rice flour + 1.5 Tbs corn flour + 1.5 Tbs wheat starch
d) 280g rice flour + 40g cornflour
e) 200g rice flour + 40g wheat starch
f) 150g rice flour

[To find out more about these types of flours, have a look at my info page on flours for Chinese & Japanese snacks.]

I decided to go with the quantities in what appears to be the most reliable of my cookbooks, Dim Sum by Chan Chen Hei, a renown chef who’s worked at top restaurants and hotels in Hong Kong and Singapore. The method was adapted from combining instructions in various cookbooks.
Ingredients

500g-600g white radish
200g rice flour
40g wheat starch
1 litre water
salt to taste

1) Peel and shred the radish (using a ceramic peeler and ceramic julienne slicer, if you have them ^_^). You can also chop the radish into strips, it’s said that these larger chunks give a better texture to the final dish.

2) Mix the flours with just enough water to form a smooth, liquid paste.

3) Pour the remaining water into a pot, put in the radish, season with salt to taste, bring to the boil and cook until it has turned transparent and soft.

4) Reduce the heat to low or turn off the heat completely and stir in the flour mixture. Combine thoroughly until thick and sticky.

5) Grease a container to hold the radish batter for steaming. If you wish, you can line the container with cling film to make it easier to remove the cooked radish cake intact. You can use any dish suitable for steaming, or even a disposable aluminium cake tin (cling film not needed, because you can transport, store and serve the radish cake in it, no need to remove the cooked product from the container) . In my experience, try to avoid anything that’s too thick and heavy or which does not conduct heat well.

6) Pour in radish mixture and smoothen the top. Preheat the steamer and steam on high heat for at least 30 minutes. It could take as long as 1hr, depending in the quantity and shape of the radish cake. Test the middle with skewer or chopstick; if it doesn’t stick, the dish is done.

There will be a watery liquid on the surface. Just leave it as it will be absorbed as the radish cake cools and prevents the surface from becoming dried out and cracked.

7) As the cake cools, it will firm up. You can then slice, garnish and serve.

Optionally, you can pan fry the slices until brown and fragrant, then garnish and serve.

Personally, I think this tastes best when hot. I kept it in the fridge and heated it up before eating. However, I found that it did not microwave very well. The outer edges would be hot and the centre still hard and cold, so I ended up having to reheat by steaming. Which isn’t really a bad thing since we should try to avoid the additional EMF exposure from microwaves — not to mention the questionable effect eating microwaved food (read more here and here), if we weren’t already so addicted to their convenience.

We have an electric stove at home, and it’s slower to heat up and cool down than a gas stove. My personal method to speed up the steaming/boiling is as follows:
1) Boil sufficient water for steaming in the kettle.
2) Whilst the kettle is boiling, heat up the pot on the stove by putting just enough water to cover the base.
3) When kettle has boiled, pour contents into the pot, which should be at boiling point by now.
4) Invest in good quality pots as the heat conduction is noticeably superior and the contents will boil faster.

16/4/08 Update: Just found this video of a cooking show demonstrating how to make traditional Hong Kong-style steamed radish cake, which is characterised by Chinese sausages (in Taiwanese dialect with Chinese subtitles).

13/6/08 Update: see also my steamed Chinese yam cake.

A: When it’s a sweet potato or a taro!

I have recently discovered that I have been using imprecise names, and probably confused some of you in other parts of the world where different words are used.

For example, I learnt from reading this that in America, what are called ‘yams’ are really varieties of sweet potato which have a moist texture.

In contrast, I have been referring to taro as ‘yam’, basically equating anything we call in Chinese yu4tou3 芋頭 with ‘yam’. While one could put it down to a combination of my poor plant-recognition skills and half-baked linguistic ability, I’m not the only person who equates yu4tou3 芋頭 and ‘yam’; so does this bilingual food blog from Singapore. And after all, we call steamed 芋頭糕 yu4tou2gao1 [Mandarin]/ wu tao gou [Cantonese], ‘Yam Cake’ (and I made some Shredded Yam Cake 芋絲餅). Lily’s Wai Sek Hong, a Malaysian writing from America helps to unravel the puzzle with this explanation:

In Malaysia, ‘Woo Tau’ in Cantonese is called YAM but it is TARO here in the States and yam is sweet potato.

Trying to look for bilingual dictionary definitions can be hugely confusing too. On the Chinese-language internet, the most common list of food words provides this translation:

yam — shan1yu4 — 山芋
taro — yu4tou2 — 芋头

On the other hand, my US-produced dictionary follows the American usage:

sweet potato – shan1yu4 — 山芋
yam — shu3 — 薯

［How, er, not helpful: ma3ling2shu3 馬鈴薯 = potato; mu4shu3 木薯 = tapioca; and to Southeast Asian Chinese, fan1shu3 番薯= sweet potato, following Cantonese usage, cf. China, where sweet potatoes are called di4gua1 地瓜].

But back to 山芋 (shan1yu4 in Mandarin). When pronounced in Japanese, it’s yamaimo — that very special ingredient needed to make okonomiyaki! Yamaimo is usually translated into English as ‘mountain yam’.

To get to the root (no pun intended!) of the issue, we’ll have to look at the botanical names:
yam – genus: Dioscorea
taro — genus: Colocasia
sweet potato — genus: Ipomoea

While the Colocasia genus comprises only six to eight different types of flowering plants, there are 600 varieties of Dioscorea, of which the edible ones are known as yams. The genus Ipomoea also has over 500 species, some of which we commonly recognise as the morning glory flower, and others in the form of edible tubers, i.e. sweet potatoes.

Within the Dioscorea family, the species of edible tubers we call yams come in a mind-boggling diversity. From the long, cream-coloured, stick-like Chinese/Japanese mountain yam 山芋, to huge, dark brown, ugly, knobly lumps. But don’t be put off by the external appearance, a yam that looked like a piece of elephant dung on the outside, turned out like this:

Aren’t the variegated colours beautiful? I have no idea what the correct name for this kind of yam is, but here’s a photo of the whole tuber from a Japanese blog that refers to it as murasaki yamaimo 紫山芋, ‘purple yam’. Unfortunately, to me this was rather bland, taste-wise, and too dry and powdery in texture for my liking (think of powdery potatoes, the kind used for baked potatoes, as compared to the smooth, waxy kind used for roast potatoes).

Previously, I was also wasthe misconception that yams are always purple and anything purple is a yam. After all, yam-flavoured ice cream is always purple isn’t it? Of course that’s just food colouring, but it is based on the perception that yams are purple. It was only when I bought purple sweet potatoes for these two-coloured sweet potato balls and this purple soup, did I realise that yams do not have a monopoly on this rich colour.

Here’s a photo from Nakashima Farms, a Californian-Japanese producer of sweet potatoes, showing the four varieties they sell. I was amazed and impressed by the different coloured flesh (yikes! no wonder the sweet potato I bought didn’t look like the one in the recipe book!).

The purple sweet potato shown here is known as the Okinawan variety from Japan. I’m not sure whether the ones I got for the two-coloured sweet potato balls and purple soup were also the Okinawan variety, but they were labelled as originating from Thailand (purchased in Sheng Siong).

Right now, my favourite kind is the Japanese variety, satsumaimo さつまいも, shown on the extreme left (or see photo here). It’s purple on the outside but not on the inside ^_^. The pale yellow flesh is sweet and very smooth. In contrast, the typical local sweet potatoes, which are orange both outside and within, I’ve found are extremely fibrous, making the texture unpleasant when eating them whole, and necessitating a lot of sieving if you want to use them in recipes like the two-coloured sweet potato balls.

Satsumaimo from Japan can be rather pricey, so an alternative is are the ‘Japanese sweet potatoes’ grown in Vietnam. They are usually very small – just the right size for a snack bento – and are often sold in bags at the supermarket. The other day, I bought a full-sized satsumaimo for the first time, and found it much more satisfying than the tiny Vietnamese ones.

Now that we’ve got yam, taro and sweet potato sorted out, what about the difference between roots, tubers, corms and rhizomes? … Maybe another time, my head is spinning already :P.

If you’re dying to pursue this line of inquiry further, do have a look at this page from S. J. Kays at the University of Georgia on Cultivated Edible Root, Tuber, Rhizome, Bulb and Corm Crops of the World, which includes a list of the most commonly cultivated root and tuber crops with their names in sixteen different languages (and botanical name, of course), photographs and even bibliographies of the latest scientific publications on each variety. From a more culinary perspective, the Cook’s Thesaurus on ‘Sweet Potatoes & Yams‘ as well as on ‘Tubers & Corms‘ are a good reference.

P.S. Maybe you’ve guessed already, my favourite rhizome is wasabi (^_*)!

I’ve made soya bean milk at home quite a few times (as mentioned here and here) and written about how one could make soya sauce at home too. Today’s Sunday Times food question column by Chris Tan addresses the issue of making soya bean curd/tofu at home.

The basic process involves setting soya bean milk into a solid form by using a coagulating agent. Chris Tan explains the differences between the types of coagulants, which also helps us to understand the different ingredients used in commercial tofu.

The three main types of coagulants are:

1) Calcium sulphate, a.k.a. gypsum. As this is also one of the ingredients in plaster of paris, the Chinese word is shi2 gao1 石膏, which can also refer to a plaster cast for a broken bone, so don’t be surprised if you see poorly-translated Chinese language cookbooks calling for ‘plaster of paris’. This coagulant is used in Chinese-style tofu, and produces a more soft, moist texture. Available from Chinese provision or medicine shops.

2 ) Nigari. A extract of seawater containing a high proportion of magnesium chloride. Used in Japanese-style tofu, and explains why some Japanese tofu-makers use seawater. A smoother,  subtly sweeter effect is created by using nigari. Powdered or liquid form available at Japanese supermarkets and health food stores such as Nature’s Glory.

3) Glucono delta-lactone (GDL). An organic compound developed a few decades ago, and makes a delicate, pudding-like tofu. Instant tofu kits from Japanese supermarkets use GDL, alongside packets of soya bean milk powder to which you add water. Many years ago, when I visited an aunt who lives in Britain, she made a soya bean curd dessert 豆花 for me using one of these kits; as I remember, the texture was very smooth.

Each type of coagulant produces different textures and subtle flavours, and commercial tofu manufacturers often mix up blends of coagulants. You’ll need to experiment and see which you prefer. Food intolerance sufferers might find they are more sensitive to certain types of coagulants as compared to others.

Read about my experimental attempt at homemade tofu and further information on coagulants:
Making tofu at home
Making tofu at home P.S.
Another word on tofu coagulants

I posted earlier on this subject, and today’s Sunday Times food question column written by Chris Tan provides some useful further information.

As I mentioned before, one way to get rid of gas caused by beans is to blanch the beans, followed by several hours of soaking with frequent changes of water. However, this may also cause a diminishing of flavour.

Chris Tan suggests that traditional methods of cooking beans may provide a solution to the gas problem:

Indian legume dishes almost always include a pinch of asafoetida, a garlicky-tasting powdered dried plant sap with a reputation for reducing flatulence. Mexican bean dishes call on epazote, a green herb, for the same reason. In Japan, cooks simmer beans with a piece of kombu or dried kelp, to help the beans soften and to nullify their gases. Of somewhat lesser fame are spices that combat gases, including cumin, fennel, caraway and ginger.

Only problem is, one might not want the taste of these herbs and spices in a sweet azuki bean dish!

But don’t worry, because gas from beans might not be a problem for everyone. Chris Tan goes on to say,

Anecdotal evidence says that people who eat beans frequently suffer less gas than occasional bean-eaters, perhaps because our intestinal microbe populations evolve to accommodate the situation.

Given the paucity of bento gear outside of Daiso, I was impressed to see on sale in Isetan’s household section bread-slice-shaped sandwich cutters similar to the one used by Lunch in a Box. They’re hanging on a shelf with other fun-shaped cutters underneath a TV playing a promotional video of some Japanese kitchen gadget.

Isetan supermarket always has some kind of Japanese food promotion going on, and up till tomorrow, it’s a ‘Japanese Sweets Fair’ with various kinds of wagashi, such as steamed manju (饅頭) buns and demonstrations of dorayaki pancake making, and ‘teyaki tsugarugi senbei honpo’ (crackers with nuts).

Click on picture for larger image of Isetan flyer.

It was also fun looking at the pre-packaged daifuku, warabi mochi and sakura mochi made from doumyoji as inspiration for future cooking projects ^_^.

However, what excited me the most was seeing fresh wasabi root on sale again! It’s not often they appear on the supermarket shelves in Singapore, which isn’t really surprising considering how difficult it is to grow wasabi, and even in Japan, only five percent of sushi shops use fresh wasabi root, with chefs paying up to ¥1,000 or more for a fresh wasabi root (read all about wasabi here)!

The last time I managed to buy fresh wasabi was when Isetan was having a Shizuoka promotion – Shizuoka being the home of wasabi-growing. The descriptions of wasabi growing in cold, clear mountain streams surrounded in gentle mist (see this photo) only help to enhance my infatuation with this rhizome.

The main reason, however, is the surprising delicate, yet complex, taste of fresh wasabi. A very pale green when grated, its hotness is tempered by a sharp bitter edge and a wonderful sweetness! Aside from using it as a sushi dip with soya sauce, I love wasabi with all kinds of meats, and in sandwiches it tastes so much nicer than powdered mustard which only made my food take on the aroma of rotten eggs :P. I’ve also eaten it smeared thinly over okonomiyaki. Here are my bento which have used wasabi in some way. Check out also this Shizuoka blog for suggestions on alternative ways to enjoy wasabi.

It should be no surprise that fresh grated wasabi tastes quite different from processed wasabi in tubes because the latter is actually made from a mixture with horseradish (a plant only introduced to Japan from Europe in the 19th century), colourings and flavourings etc. as this comprehensive list of ingredients shows. A much better alternative is the powdered wasabi from health food shops, such as Mitoku brand wasabi powder. While this powdered version may not be made from pure wasabi either (horseradish and mustard are commonly mixed in), at least it isn’t full of artificial additives and the unnatural lurid green colour of commercial supermarket powdered wasabi.

4/2/08 update : I experimented with eating wasabi in an alternative manner: by making very fine slices then frying them crisp and eating as topping on noodles. Well, I won’t be doing this again! They were rather bitter, no hint of characteristic wasabi hotness, and were more hard than crisp.

In some Chinese regional customs, glutinous rice balls are eaten on the 15th day of the Chinese New Year (i.e. 21 Feb in 2008). As this is known as the Yuan Xiao 元宵 Festival, the glutinous rice balls eaten at this time are often called yuan xiao rather than tang yuan 汤圆, which are eaten during the Winter Solstice Festival (冬至, Dong Zhi) , although the names are interchangeable, depending on the regional vocabulary.

Hence, a common question is whether yuan xiao and tang yuan are identical, and the answer depends on who is answering. This China news source describes the terms as interchangeable and this site about Guangzhou uses ‘tang yuan‘ for the Yuan Xiao Festival food, whereas my Taiwanese friends certainly recognise a difference. Taipei Travel Net explains how yuan xiao and tang yuan are made in very different ways. The yuan xiao method sounds pretty difficult to me! I wonder if one could use the tang yuan method and pass it off as yuan xiao?!?

Incidentally, I don’t think glutinous rice balls are a typical feature of the 15th day of Chinese New Year in Singapore and Malaysia. Here, tang yuan is much more strongly associated with the Dong Zhi 冬至 Festival for Winter Solstice. Moreover, the 15th day of the Lunar New Year tends to be celebrated not as Yuan Xiao 元宵 – also known as the Lantern Festival in China – but as Chap Goh Meh (十五暝, ‘fifteenth night’), following the Hokkien/Fujianese tradition. Just to complicate things a little more, in Singapore and Malaysia, ‘Lantern Festival’ refers to the Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋节 (15th day of 8th month of lunar calendar).

Well, with family reunions symbolised by round glutinous rice balls on our mind in the run up to Chinese New Year, it’s an opportune time to start experimenting with non-traditional variations again, as I did around Dong Zhi 冬至 last December. My favourite was the five-coloured glutinous rice balls taken from a wagashi recipe book.

Today, I tried making mitarashi dango, shortcutting by adding sugar to some sukiyaki sauce I’d made up ages ago and had sitting around in the fridge. Never having tried genuine mitarashi dango before, I have no idea if mine tasted the way it should have. Nevertheless, I was really surprised how much I enjoyed a dish which didn’t sound very appetising to me from the description :). [26/2/08 update: Read the latest post from Just Hungry about mitarashi dango.]

My mitarashi dango look rather pale. Perhaps my sauce wasn’t thick enough to stay coated on the dango, or quite possibly the surface was still wet from the water the dango were boiled in so the soya sauce just slid off the slippery surface.

Having satisfied my curiosity with this experiment, I probably wouldn’t make mitarashi dango for myself to eat very often, because the sauce is has things that are are simply unhealthy (refined white sugar) as well as those that might cause a food intolerance reaction in me: even if using macrobiotic grade version, soya sauce=fermented, mirin=alcohol (while cheap supermarket versions are made with dodgy additives), dashi=glutamates. Actually, the sauce tastes somewhat like bee cheo! Well they are both types of thick, sweetened soya sauce.

Together with the mitarashi dango, I made up my own variation of green tea glutinous rice balls drizzled with brown rice syrup.

I’d posted my experiences in making glutinous rice balls before (here, here and here) but here’s a quick summary of my top tips:

1) 60g (125ml cup measure) of glutinous rice flour mixed with 1/2 teaspoon matcha green tea powder. This is enough to impart a subtle matcha flavour without being overpowering, but you could add a pinch more if you prefer. The quantity of matcha I used previously was too much. Don’t worry if the dry flour looks very white, after you mix in the water to form a dough it will become a pale green, and the colour will become more intense after cooking as well.

2) Use warm water. I read this in a Chinese recipe book and Commoi from Frank Tastes suggested in the comments here that this is meant to make the dough texture smoother.

3) Amount of water is slightly less than amount of flour. Please remember to mix the water in using your hands so that you can accurately gauge the consistency of the dough. Use just barely enough water for all the dough sticking together. If it is slightly too soft, you won’t be able to shape nicely-formed round balls. If it’s a bit too dry and cracks apart when you try to roll it, then just dab your hands with water.

In the event that you have unfortunately added too much water, you can either try to add in more flour, or simply leave the glutinous rice balls for a while and they will dry out and harden. Today, I left my overly soft green tea dango on the kitchen worktop whilst I went about making another dish, and by the time I was done, the green tea dango were much easier to roll into smooth round shapes.

4) For me, the best way to get even-sized balls is to use a chopping sheet with measurements. 1 cup of flour will produce about 20 glutinous rice balls. I roll the dough into a thick sausage shape and cut it into five pieces, then re-roll each of those pieces into a smaller sausage and cut them into four pieces each. This is easier than trying to make one long sausage, of even diameter throughout, to cut into 20 sections.

5) Once the balls have been shaped, pop them into a pot of boiling water and when they float to the surface they are done.

Do not put the cooked balls onto a flat surface for a prolonged period of time as the bottom will become flat and you won’t have nice round balls any more. So it’s best to cook them just before eating and leave them suspended in water until it’s time to serve them.

Next Tuesday, 5 February, is Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day in Britain, so this seems like an appropriate time for me to write about buckwheat pancakes. Using buckwheat is one way to rotate foods and keep food intolerance reactions at bay.

These aren’t the typical pancakes served in the UK for Pancake Day though, if you want those, check out the recipe here and tips on how to make pancakes here. These basic pancake/crepe skills would also be useful for trying out my mock poh piah suggestion too.

I started with a blini recipe from Pancakes, Crepes, Blintzes & Blinis by Susannah Blake but as I’m too lazy to use yeast (and would also prefer to minimise my consumption of yeast) as usual I adapted the recipe quite heavily and used baking powder instead. Here is what I did:

100g organic buckwheat flour [can use 50g buckwheat flour, 50g plain flour if milder taste is desired]
1/2 tsp baking powder
200ml lukewarm milk
1 egg, separated
Having sifted the baking powder and flour together, I beat in the egg yolk and milk.

Following the original recipe, I whisked the egg whites into soft peaks and folded into the batter. In the final result, I didn’t notice any particular benefit from doing this, but then again, I didn’t stick to the yeasted pancake instructions!

Cooked the pancakes in greased 10 cm pan.

Buckwheat flour has less gluten than regular wheat flour (which is why buckwheat flour is mixed with wheat flour when making soba) so the texture of these pancakes is more brittle and less springy than normal wheat pancakes. The buckwheat also lent a distinctive taste and dark colour, which I can imagine might be very attractive when combined with contrasting coloured foods in a bento.

I ate the pancakes with green apples – sliced and stewed in water with no sugar – plus organic maple syrup. Genuine maple syrup, as opposed to ‘maple-flavoured syrup’, can be rather expensive, and I’ve found that organic maple syrup to be no more pricey if you look around and compare prices.

Also ate the pancakes with this sweetener I’m trying for the first time: brown rice syrup from Lundberg (purchased at SuperNature). The taste takes some getting used to and perhaps it was too ambitious of me to combine two unfamiliar flavours of buckwheat and this brown rice syrup!

I’m not sure to what extent this Lundberg product is different from traditional Japanese brown rice malt syrup. As you can read here, Japanese rice malt syrup is made by combining brown rice with enzymes that break down the rice starch into primarily maltose. The traditional method is to use the naturally-occurring enzymes in sprouted barley, but modern production methods often substitute this with laboratory-produced enzymes. The latter product is identifiable by the label, which will list only brown rice and water as the ingredients (whereas the former type will also include sprouted barley).

Well, the Lundberg brown rice syrup contains only brown rice and filtered water, while the label describes the production method as cooking brown rice with water then evaporating most of the water. ‘The naturally sweet golden syrup that remains in pure whole grain goodness.’ No mention of enzymes -?

Anyway, I think brown rice syrup would taste very nice with wagashi-style sweet snacks. I’m thinking of drizzling it over glutinous rice balls in place of instead of soya sauce syrup to look like mitarashi dango (alternative recipe here) ^_^.

If you want to try some brown rice syrup recipes, you could browse here and here.

Finger foods often work better for me in bento because they can be more easily eaten when one doesn’t have the luxury of sitting down for a long stretch to enjoy a meal at a table. So this was quite a fun bento box to tuck into, apart from the abysmal attempt at making sushi with tuna filling (and making even more of a mess by simply pouring the extra aoi nori over the top because I didn’t want to waste it).

This was also one of the few bento I’ve done that includes enough of a variety to come closer to meeting the five sets of five rules of traditional Japanese cooking (read more here and here), which includes bento.

Although the online bento community frequently discusses what makes a good bento, there’s not much on creating bento that meet the principles of five colors (goshiki), the five methods (goho), the five flavors (gomi), the five senses (gokan); and for now, let’s leave out gokan no mon, a set of Buddhist principles on the appropriate state of mind when consuming food ^_^.

Perhaps the most commonly-known of these principles is that of colour, as this Washington Post article describes. Browsing Japanese bento cookbooks, you’ll often find a section dedicated to side dishes organised by colour to help you select a combination in contrasting colours. Of the five principles, this one is the one most obvious as the visual impact of a bento is the most immediate. (N.B.: Frank Tastes writes a commentary on the aesthetics of bento from a different perspective here.)

Some bento cookbooks lay out the fundamentals of bento-making, and 毎日おいしい!中高生のお弁当 is one that explains how important balance is. A balance of nutritional elements (carbohydrates, protein, vegetables), colours as well as tastes.

On tastes, the book presents a chart listing four tastes: sweet, salty, sour and bitter. This follows the categorisation in Tradtional Chinese Medicine, which also includes a fifth category – pungent, which refers to acrid, spicy, hot and aromatic flavours. As explained in Healing With Whole Foods: Asian Traditions and Modern Nutrition by Paul Pitchford, each of these categories has particular warming/cooling values as well as therapeutic applications. Pungent and sweet flavours are yang, while sour, bitter and salty flavours are yin. The aim is to use these flavours to bring a person into balance with seasonal influences whilst considering the individual constitution.

Although 毎日おいしい!中高生のお弁当 talks about different flavours, and using mild and strong tastes in different proportions, it is from the viewpoint of taste and variety only.

Apart from flavours, the method of cooking also affects the yin/yang value of a food, and that’s where goho comes in, which helps to achieve a better balance within a meal. In this bento, there’s tuna sushi rolled in aoi nori, fried mock poh piah (‘remade’ leftovers), fried sweet potato strips (also leftovers), a hard-boiled egg and raw pear pieces. Maybe not quite five methods, but at least at attempt in that direction.

I’ve personally experienced the importance of balancing yin/yang in bento, and bearing in mind goshiki, goho and gomi are good ways to encourage a variety and balance in this respect.

As for stimulating the five senses through gokan, I see it as a way of making one more mindful of the present by drawing attention to bodily sensations, along the lines of mindfulness practice in Zen Buddhism. Unfortunately, not something I’m able to achieve whilst dashing around and grabbing occasional mouthfuls of finger foods from my bento!

A long while back, I was brainstorming ideas for dishes that would meet the requirements of a Failsafe diet, i.e. free of additives, low in salicylates, amines and flavour enhancers, and yet have an Asian flavour. At that point, my only guide were the recipes in books by Sue Dengate, founder of the Food Intolerance Network, and because they were entirely geared towards an Australian diet, I really wanted to find some flavours closer to home.

During the brainstorming, poh piah was one of the traditional dishes I thought could be adapted. Of course, by leaving out the sweet flour sauce, bee cheo, and chilli, key components of the taste of poh piah are gone, but at least the shape and form of the dish provides variety in what could easily become a very limited diet.

The photograph in the title header of this blog shows the surprisingly successful result of a ‘quick and dirty’ mock poh piah. Forget the time complicated and time-consuming methods of cooking the filling and making the egg skin, this is actually a simple stir-fry of bean sprouts, bamboo shoots, carrots, spring onion topped with hard-boiled egg and wrapped in an eggy crepe (no recipe, sorry, simply made by approximating the batter consistency and using a higher proportion of egg than usual) ^_^.

To imitate poh piah more closely, cut the vegetables for the filling into strips, and use the same basic ingredients for the filling: bamboo shoot and bangkuang/jicama, streaky pork, prawns and taukwa/firm tofu. Fry chopped garlic, add organic miso as a replacement for Chinese fermented bean paste, taucheo, before adding the other ingredients to simmer as per these instructions.

In the end, I guess it’s not really much of a poh piah at all (though closer to the real thing than ‘mock duck‘ is anything like real duck, I’d say!), perhaps more similar to the various types of rolls pictured in Japanese bento cookbooks. However the familiar poh piah-like textures of the vegetable strips and springy egg skin really broke the monotony of my daily rice & stir-fry meals.

[17/1/08 Update: Lunch in a Box often does 'leftover remakes', so check out what happened when leftover mock poh piah went into a bento.]

Canton Pixie had asked in the comments here how on earth one makes soya sauce at home. Well, according to this e-Gullet forum thread, many people did so in the past and it can certainly still be done!

These days people are motivated by the dubious quality of foods from China, which is also what got me started on making salted eggs at home. Check out the e-Gullet thread for a full explanation with photos on making soya sauce.

One of the links from the thread is to a write-up by local star food blogger, Chubby Hubby, who raves about a traditional soya sauce business in Penang, Kilang Kicap Kwong Heng Loong. The family-run enterprise makes

soy sauce by hand, with no extra ingredients, unwanted additives or preservatives. They make their sauce the same way that it had been made for generations before them but which, sadly, is becoming more and more rare today.

The astounding experience Chubby Hubby had when tasting the Kwong Heng Loong soya sauce sounds exactly like my first brush with Mitoku brand macrobiotic grade shoyu. The deep, rich taste with winey, fermented overtones was absolutely unlike any soya sauce I had ever had before. It’s excellent for marinating and cooking flavourful dishes, and just a dash is enough. With my food intolerances, just a dash is all I can have anyway :).

While it’s not all that difficult to make soya sauce at home, it’s probably very very hard to achieve a quality to match that of experienced brewers. I might one day try DIY soya sauce for fun, I think I’m too addicted to Mitoku shoyu to give it up. Or maybe I should try to get my hands on Kwong Heng Loong (which I bet is a whole lot cheaper). Does anyone know if they are still in operation? It might not be for much longer…

After making soya bean milk to go with glutinous rice balls, I had plenty of soya bean fibre, (Japanese: okara; Chinese: 豆渣 , leftover from the process of making soya milk. I’ve only recently learnt that okara is commonly used in Japanese cooking.

One of the Japanese wagashi cookbooks I have, 《和果子．和甘味 (秋冬篇)》, has recipes for Soybean Fibre and Dried Shrimp Cracker as well as Honey Soybean Fibre Cookies. Just Hungry’s instructions on how to make soya bean milk also tell us about okara, and she also has suggestions on how to use okara in savoury foods as well as baking. Zlamushka explains how she makes soy milk, okara and yuba (soya bean skin) and the many ways she uses okara, such as to make breakfast cereal.

This website suggests several ways in which to use okara:

• Use to add body to soups, stews, mashed potatoes, and cream sauces.
• Mix with cottage cheese and chopped vegetables and seasonings to make a spread for bread.
• Stir a little into porridge and weaning foods.
• Use in mashed vegetables and nshima.
• Add to bread dough and other baked goods. Substitute up to 1/3 of the flour in a baking recipe with okara, but be sure to reduce the liquid ingredients to compensate for the moisture content of the okara.
• Use for dips and spreads by adding your favorite herbs and spices.
• Use as a base for making patties, meatloaf, meatballs, sausages, burgers, and polenta. When using okara for patties or meatballs, add the sauce at the last minute, as it does not have the texture to hold up in liquid.

More information on okara:
* Read more about the history and use of soybean fibre in China, Japan, Indonesia as well as Europe and America here.
* Nutritional values of okara here.
* Important tips on using raw or cooked okara in baking here.

Some okara recipes:
* Okara stew, okara rice fritters, okara dumpling soup, okara corn soup, okara oat flakes pancakes, homemade soy noodles

* Soy okara muffins, okara nut bread

* Okara almond cookies, okara rice burger, okara & vegetables, okara waffles

* Okara oat coconut cookies (in Chinese)

* Okara cookies with sesame seeds (in Chinese)

This was the first of my attempts at learning how to make Asian snacks as a way of rotating foods and reducing consumption of wheat flour, as Canton Pixie suggested in the comments here.

This recipe from a Dim Sum cookbook was attractive because I already had the ingredients at home and the instructions seemed very straightforward. In the book it’s called Fried Shredded Yam, or Wu Xi Paeng 芋絲餅 in Cantonese. The original recipe calls for

shredded yam – 800g
minced pork – 150g
cornflour – 75g
salt – 55g
sugar – 55g [can omit]
five spice powder – a pinch
sesame oil – a dash
water
cooking oil

I decided to leave out the pork to make it less of a heavy, savoury dish. And that was the start of my cooking disaster!! I forgot that I would need to reduce the amount of cornflour to accommodate the omission of 150g of minced pork. The result was a rather hard and unpalatable cake.

I also halved the amount of sugar (which I plan to completely omit next time, I didn’t feel it contributed to the taste) and put in about a fifth of the amount of salt, which was just nice.

The preparation method involves mixing the main ingredients together, and adding just enough water to bind the mixture together. Spread thinly in a baking tin and steam over boiling water for 25 minutes.

My steaming also didn’t go so well and took ages. I think it was because I used a pot into which the round cake tin I used fit just exactly, so there wasn’t much room for the steam to circulate around and above the yam cake.

In the final step, the recipe says to let the steamed cake cool down, cut into pieces, then pan-fry until ‘crisp and fragrant’. You can see the result in the photo above – it tasted dry and hard on the outside, rather than crisp, possibly because I didn’t use enough oil. For subsequent pieces, I decided not to fry the yam cake at all (which also means less oil).

Verdict: try again!! *sigh*