Don't Judge a Dish by Its Plating

Our friends hosted a Lunar New Year party last weekend, and though they ordered plenty of food themselves, this felt like the perfect opportunity to dig into a few cookbooks and find some interesting things to cook.

I did my best to refrain from making this too difficult for myself - and inevitably Allison. We landed on a whole fish and longevity noodles. More specifically, we cooked up a dry-braised fish with pork in spicy sauce and longevity noodles to be eaten with a pork zha jiang sauce, recipes compliments of Fuchsia Dunlop in her The Food of Sichuan book and the Xi'an Famous Foods cookbook, respectively.

I will save the insights on appearance complexity versus execution complexity - and a bonus Sichuan-infused rye methodology - for after the recipes on this one.

There seems to be a lot going on there, but I promise - for the most part - it is easier than it reads. The hardest part of any of these recipes was dialing in the longevity noodles. I referred this job out to Allison, since I am wholly incapable of working with dough at this point in my career. I broke the very first noodle that I attempted to stretch, so I also cut my life short considerably during this process.

The remainder of the food turned out to be quite simple to cook, including the whole fish. The hardest part was making sure I had the right ingredients on Amazon and at the local Asian grocery stores.

What I found most interesting about this process was the dichotomy between the appearance of these plated dishes and the simplicity of cooking them, especially in contrast to the coconut curry salmon that I wrote about earlier this week. The photograph of the whole cooked fish is far more intimidating to me than that of the salmon.

The latter is essentially salmon on a plate surrounded by a sauce, where the former...is an entire fish. The salmon is cooked in water alongside a sauce that combines a few standard ingredients into a pan, while the fish is - at different points in time - fried, braised, and basted alongside a sauce of less common ingredients that incorporates an additional meat.

But the cooks, specifically the margins for error, were night-and-day. I watched the salmon closely as it cooked from bottom to top, waiting for that exact moment where it was most likely to be the right temperature, with the top barely cooked at all. The coconut curry sauce encouraged me to create a visualization to explain each minute of the cook and the corresponding failure points if handled incorrectly.

The fish? I tossed it in a wok in oil, flipped it when it made itself available to flip, checked the bottom was fried, removed it, tossed in some bean paste and aromatics, then put the fish back in. I flipped it again while braising and basting at what seemed like around eight minutes, then did the same on the other side. The process is almost self-narrating; the crust tells you when to flip, the liquid tells you when it's done, the aromatics tell you when they're bloomed.

Our party host had a "spiced mocha" from Kasama here in Chicago and wanted to replicate the flavors - and the numbing, tingling mala - in an old fashioned, so I thought this would be a fun little experiment. The Kasama coffee is described as having sichuan peppercorn, bay leaf, and white chocolate, so the infusion was basically already written.

All told, this worked quite well, but we did not get nearly enough of the numb and tingle as we'd hoped. The citrus notes from the Sichuan peppercorn came through well, and the white chocolate seemed to provide more from a texture standpoint than a flavor standpoint.

The biggest mistake that I made was straining the butter and white chocolate fat mixture, as I lost a good bit of the steep from the sichuan peppercorn and bay leaf by only including what made its way through the chinois in the fat wash. The second biggest mistake was probably the Sichuan peppercorn weight being too small.

On the next attempt, infusing with a more neutral spirit before implementing with the rye, I will test three different Sichuan amounts, largely keeping the timing of the steep the same to avoid off-notes that might sneak through. It should be fairly clear whether we can get the numb and tingle alongside the Sichuan citrus notes by varying the Sichuan peppercorn amounts while keeping the fat mixture the same - and of course, using it correctly in the wash.

The recipe above includes a centrifuge, only because I used Dave Arnold's Spinzall in my process for better clarification. You can make this without the centrifuge by pouring the alcohol through a strainer while leaving the fat disc in the frozen container. Done this way, the output will be a little less shelf stable than clarifying with the Spinzall, but you could extend the stability some by straining a second time through a coffee filter or a cheesecloth. The stability largely just depends on how much fat remains dissolved or emulsified in the whiskey, as that can go rancid.