Cantonese · Breakfast
Cheung Fun with Sweet Soy (Rice Noodle Rolls)
- Advanced
- 45 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with toasted, nutty warmth throughout, aromatics blooming from the first bite, on a rich, rounded finish.
Ingredients
- 150 g rice flour
- 30 g wheat starch
- 20 g tapioca starch
- 5 g cornflour
- 600 ml water
- 3 g fine salt
- 20 ml groundnut oil, plus more for the tray
- 60 ml light soy sauce
- 5 ml dark soy sauce
- 30 ml water, for the sauce
- 25 g rock sugar
- 2 slices ginger
- 1 spring onion
- toasted sesame seeds, to finish
Equipment
Wok · Sheet pan
The skills inside
Wok techniqueSteaming: basket, leaf and lidSalted water & the float testBlanching & shockingStraining & passing through a sieve
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · peanuts · soy · sesame
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Whisk the rice flour, wheat starch, tapioca starch, cornflour and salt into the water until there is not a lump left, stir in the oil and rest 30 minutes: the batter should run off the whisk as thin as single cream. 30 min
- Simmer the soys, water, rock sugar, ginger and spring onion for 5 minutes until the sugar has gone and the ginger smells sweet, then strain and keep warm. 5 min
- Oil a flat metal tray, sit it on a trivet in a wok of hard boiling water, stir the batter up from the bottom, ladle in 60 ml and tilt to a 2 mm film, then cover and steam 3 minutes until the sheet is translucent, blistered all over and no longer milky in the middle. 3 min
- Slide the tray into cold water for 5 seconds to shock the base, scrape the sheet up with an oiled scraper and roll it into a loose three-fold log: it should feel slippery and slack, never springy.
- Cut into 6 cm lengths, pour the warm sauce over, finish with sesame seeds and eat within a few minutes while the rolls are still soft.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Wok technique 28 recipes
- Everything went in dry and went in in order. Wet protein or wet vegetables drop the wok below the heat that browns, and what follows is a stew in a round pan however hard the burner is working.
- The wok stays loud from the first moment to the last. A wok that falls quiet has been overloaded, and the food in it is now boiling in its own liquid.
- Every piece is coated and glossy with no pooled sauce in the bottom of the dish: the sauce should cling by reduction and starch, not sit under the food.
- Vegetables keep their colour and a bite at the centre. Grey-green greens or a limp stem mean too long in the pan, and nothing later in the dish recovers them.
- It carries the faint scorched note that only comes from food touching metal above about 200C, distinct from bitterness, which means the aromatics were burnt and is a different failure entirely.
Where it goes wrong Too much went in at once, or it went in wet. The wok loses its heat, the food releases water and simmers, the sauce thins instead of clinging, and the dish arrives pale and slack with liquid pooling under it.
Blanching & shocking 76 recipes
- A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
- Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
- The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
- It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
- Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.
Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Mimosa (weekends only)
- Also Right
- Cava, straight
- From the Taps
- -
- Zero-Proof
- Fresh orange juice & café au lait
Morning food wants brightness and bubbles, or honest coffee: nothing that argues before noon.
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