Monthly Archives: March 2012

Richmond 365

365 Days of Dining Richmond, BC

March 31, 2012 – 4:19 pm

There has been a lot of talk about amaz­ing foodie oppor­tu­nity. If you haven’t heard about it, you can find more details here. Rich­mond, BC (my home) is recruit­ing a full-time food blogger!

Today (the last day to apply), I have finally applied to the 365 Days of Din­ing Rich­mond, BC. There are more than a thou­sand appli­cants, but I am still very excited by this dream job so I decided to ded­i­cate my first ever comic strip to my appli­ca­tion! Regard­less of get­ting the job or not, I am proud of sub­mit­ting my appli­ca­tion and post­ing my first comic strip. :)

Best of luck to every­one who entered!

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Eat Out Restaurant Review

Shanghai Morning Restaurant

March 14, 2012 – 5:13 pm

Inte­rior

I am writ­ing another restau­rant located at the Alexan­der Road, oth­er­wise known as the “Food Street” of Rich­mond. Shang­hai food is another one of my favourite Chi­nese foods of all times, I like it because it is mild tast­ing (although Can­tonese dishes are even more mild) and it can be found in many places in Rich­mond! Shang­hai Morn­ing Restau­rant serves Shang­hai style Chi­nese food, as we entered the restau­rant, I instantly saw a famil­iar face. It turns out that the owner is actu­ally the old owner of Chen’s Shang­hai Kitchen located at No. 3 and Buswell. My fam­ily and I fre­quently vis­ited Chen’s so we chat­ted a lit­tle. The owner lady told us that she sold Chen’s and went back to Shang­hai for some time and now back in busi­ness in Rich­mond as Shang­hai Morn­ing. The restau­rant used to be Twin­kle Bub­ble Tea, although I’ve never been to Twin­kle, it seems like the new owner hasn’t changed much in the inte­rior of the restaurant.

Self-serve menu sheet

Menu looks almost exactly like Chen’s.

Beef Roll — $4.75

This is one of my favourite dishes, the flour wrap­per was ten­der and warm. There was also enough flavour­ful beef with the Hoi Sin sauce and cucum­bers. It would have been even bet­ter if there was more brown­ing and crust on the wrap­per though.

Pan Fried Pork Buns — $4.95

Almost all Shang­hai Chi­nese restau­rants serve this dish with the bun usu­ally soft and fluffy, but their style is sort of one-of-a-kind as they have a very crunchy crust on the bot­tom and a chewy exte­rior — just like Chen’s sig­na­ture pan fried buns. You can burn your tongue so eas­ily when eat­ing this because there is so much hot juices inside so I usu­ally wait until the heat man­age­able for me to eat.

“Tan Tan” Noo­dles — $6.25

“Tan Tan” noo­dles is orig­i­nally a Sichuan dish, famous for their spici­ness and bold flavours. It always has peanuts in it, which is why the broth is so tasty. Some restau­rants, though, don’t even serve it in a broth and there is about a mil­lion styles of this noo­dle dish. In all the ver­sions that I have had, it doesn’t con­tain any meats. The noo­dles here were cooked to the right tex­ture and the broth was also rich and deli­cious. How­ever, it was a bit too hot for me, as you can see from the orange colour of the broth. Oth­er­wise, it was tasty.

Spring Rolls with Red Bean Fill­ing — $4.25

Yes, sweet spring rolls. They were quite crispy and had a nice and warm red bean fill­ing. Fill­ing is prob­a­bly house­made because of the tex­ture and the added aged man­darin peel flavour. I am a fan of red beans so I enjoyed it.

Bill

Con­clu­sion:

Ambi­ence: 3/5
Food: 3.5/5
Ser­vice: 3.5/5
Value: 4/5

Shanghai Morning Restaurant ??????? on Urbanspoon

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Baking Macaron Recipes

Matcha Green Tea Macarons with Chocolate Ganache

March 3, 2012 – 4:33 pm

I’ve heard so much about how dif­fi­cult it is to make mac­arons, as a bak­ing enthu­si­ast, I’ve set out to tackle this bak­ing mis­sion. :) It started out, of course, unsuc­cess­ful, I wanted to stran­gle the per­son who invented this evil dessert (just kid­ding). At my fifth attempt, they finally look like good mac­arons. If they turned out right, they should have a slightly crispy shell, a ten­der and slightly chewy cen­ter. I can’t say I am an expert at mak­ing these of course, I am sure I will encounter more problems.

I’ve always liked the flavour com­bi­na­tion of Matcha (Japan­ese high qual­ity green tea) and choco­late, it is the per­fect match of east and west flavours in my opinion.

So this recipe was adapted from My Food Geek’s “Almost Fool­proof Mac­arons” recipe. It uses the Ital­ian meringue method, it requires cook­ing a sugar syrup and com­bin­ing it with whipped egg whites, cre­at­ing a meringue. One of the advan­tages of the Ital­ian meringue is that it is more sta­ble than the French method (whip­ping together sugar and egg whites) because the egg whites are cooked by the hot syrup.

Print
Matcha Green Tea Mac­arons with Choco­late Ganache

Ingre­di­ents

    Mac­aron Shells:
  • 120 grams Egg Whites (room temperature)
  • 35 grams Gran­u­lated White Sugar
  • 150 grams Ground Almonds
  • 150 grams Icing Sugar
  • 2 tbsp. Matcha Green Tea Powder
    • Syrup:
  • 150 grams Sugar
  • 50 grams Water
    • Choco­late Ganache:
  • 115 grams Semi Sweet Choco­late — chopped (I used melt­ing wafers)
  • ½ cup Whip­ping Cream
  • 2 tbsp. Unsalted but­ter, cut into small cubes (room temperature)

Method

    For the mac­aron shells:
  1. In a small sauce pan, cook syrup: com­bine sugar and water and cook until the tem­per­a­ture reaches 230 F/110 C.
  2. In a stand mixer, beat 60 grams of egg whites and 35 grams of sugar until it forms soft peaks.
  3. When the syrup is ready, with the mixer on low speed, slowly pour in hot syrup. *Be care­ful as the syrup is VERY hot.
  4. Slowly increase mixer speed to the high­est set­ting, beat meringue until it cools down and becomes shiny. (10–15 minutes).
  5. Blend ground almonds and icing sugar in a food proces­sor, sift mix­ture into a large bowl, mix in matcha green tea powder.
  6. Add in the other 60 grams of egg whites into the almonds and icing sugar mix­ture — no need to mix together. At this point, you can also add in gel food colour­ing into the egg whites to boost the colour (optional).
  7. When the Ital­ian meringue as cooled down, gen­tly fold it into the ground almonds mix­ture. Mix with a spat­ula until it has reached a “lava” stage. *This is where it might be tricky because it is easy to over-mix or under-mix.
  8. Scoop meringue into a pip­ing bag with a plain tip (10 mm), pipe out 4 cm rounds.
  9. Tap bak­ing sheet to get rid of large bub­bles, let them sit on the counter for 30–40 min­utes so the tops get dry.
  10. Bake at 325 F/160C for 10–15 min­utes. After about 5 min­utes, the mac­arons will start to develop their “feet”.
  11. Let cool and care­fully remove from bak­ing sheet.
    12. For the Choco­late Ganache:
  12. Place choco­late in a small mix­ing bowl.
  13. In a small pan, heat whip­ping cream just until in boils, pour hot cream into choco­late. Let it sit for about 30 sec­onds, untouched.
  14. After about 30 sec­onds, you can start mix­ing it with a spatula.
  15. When it becomes smooth, you can start mix­ing in the cubed but­ter lit­tle by little.
  16. Refrig­er­ate mix­ture until it is the right con­sis­tency so it can be piped.
    17. Assem­bling:
  17. Match the size for each pair of mac­aron shells.
  18. Pipe in the appro­pri­ate amount of fill­ing, care­fully press them together until the fill­ing reaches the sides of the mac­aron shells.
  19. Refrig­er­ate for at least 24 hours (maturation).
  20. Mac­arons are best con­sumed at room tem­per­a­ture so before serv­ing them, take them out of the fridge and leave at room tem­per­a­ture for about 1 hour.
http://​yum​my​work​shop​.com/​2​0​1​2​/​0​3​/​0​3​/​m​a​t​c​h​a​-​g​r​e​e​n​-​t​e​a​-​m​a​c​a​r​o​ns/

Trou­bleshoot­ing from my experience:

These are some of the prob­lems I encoun­tered when
bak­ing macarons.

  • Cracked Tops: oven tem­per­a­ture was too high from the bot­tom, so I had to used 2 stacked bak­ing sheets for these.
  • Pro­trud­ing Feet/Tops Slid­ing Off: I think I under-mixed this batch, they are a bit high in height. The slid­ing tops might be a result of my bak­ing sheets hav­ing an uneven surface.

  • Sticky Bot­toms: I have way over-mixed this batch, it was too liquid-y when I piped it. They also turned out VERY thin and impos­si­ble to get off of the bak­ing sheets with­out destroy­ing them.
  • Uneven Feet: I have no idea what caused this, I think I have over-mixed a lit­tle because they are quite thin as well. I also think I did a bad job of mak­ing the sugar syrup because there were lit­tle chunks of sugar in the meringue.

Notes that I have for suc­cess­ful mac­aron baking:

  • Invest in an oven ther­mome­ter. My oven is prob­a­bly more than 20 years old so the tem­per­a­ture is always off so hav­ing a ther­mome­ter is help­ful in determing the right temperature.
  • Know your oven VERY well. Okay, every oven is a bit dif­fer­ent so you will need to adjust tem­per­a­tures, racks, bak­ing times etc. accord­ing to your oven at home.
  • Don’t over-mix or under-mix. As you can see from my pho­tos above, get­ting the meringue in the right con­sis­tency is one of the impor­tant fac­tors. Too much will make the bat­ter runny and too lit­tle might cause weird feet. I can’t really tell you in words what is “right” so you will need to exper­i­ment a bit.
  • Get good bak­ing sheets. Non-stick sur­face bak­ing sheets are actu­ally very bad in con­duct­ing heat and may warp eas­ily so I got myself alu­minum bak­ing sheets which are much bet­ter in con­duct­ing heat and the sur­face is nice and flat. I also bought sil­pats, it is not nec­es­sary but it saved me a lot of parch­ment paper.
  • Give your meringue a lot of LOVE. Mac­arons are quite del­i­cate so if you treat it with care, they will turn out nicer (It’s TRUE!).

Myths:

    • Pow­dered Sugar vs. Icing Sugar — you don’t HAVE to use pow­dered sugar (100% sugar), icing sugar (con­tains up to 5% corn starch) will work fine.
    • Aged Egg Whites vs. Fresh Egg Whites — I have tried bak­ing with aged and fresh — they both work, just make sure they are at room tem­per­a­ture and isn’t con­t­a­m­i­nated with any yolk, oil or water.

[UPDATE: Mar 6/2012 Food Geek has given some extra help­ful tips located in the com­ment sec­tion below!]

Finally, happy bak­ing! :D

Macarons

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