Jiangnan · Dessert
Gui Hua Nuomi Ou
- Intermediate
- 35 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with a sweet edge rounding the corners.
Ingredients
- 2 sections lotus root (lian ou), about 800 g, fat with short nodes
- 150 g glutinous rice (nuo mi), soaked 2 hours and drained
- 80 g rock sugar
- 60 g dark brown sugar slab (pian tang)
- 6 dried red dates
- 20 g dried osmanthus blossom (gui hua)
- 1.5 L water
The skills inside
Reducing a sauceKeeping the cooking liquid
The words inside
Stainless Clad (Tri-Ply)Lotus Root
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
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
- Cut a 2 cm lid off one end of each root and keep it, then rinse the open channels out under the tap.
- Stand the root upright and push the rice into the channels with a chopstick, tapping the root down on the board to settle it, filling to about nine tenths and no further; replace the lids and pin them with cocktail sticks.
- Lay the roots in a stainless or clay pot, cover with the water, add both sugars and the dates, and simmer covered for 2 hours until a skewer slides in easily and the cut faces have gone deep garnet. 120 min
- Leave them to cool in the liquid overnight, then lift them out and slice 5 mm thick.
- Reduce the cooking liquid to a loose syrup, take it off the heat, stir in the osmanthus and spoon it over the slices.
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.
Keeping the cooking liquid 60 recipes
- It was actually kept: the liquid went into a container rather than down the drain, and the volume saved is enough to be worth using.
- It is clean: strained of solids and grit, and not clouded with the debris of whatever broke up in it.
- It tastes of what it cooked and tastes concentrated rather than washed out, and it is not so salty or so bitter that the only honest use is the bin.
- It was cooled quickly and stored cold, not left standing warm on the stove to be dealt with later.
- Used, it does the job the dish gives it (carrying flavour into a sauce, loosening the dish, or setting when chilled) rather than merely adding water back.
Where it goes wrong The pot was left to cool slowly on the stove and only strained the next day, so it soured overnight: what should have been the best ingredient in the dish goes in the bin, and the recipe gets water instead.
Reducing a sauce 95 recipes
- A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
- Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
- The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
- Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
- Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.
Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Sauternes
- Also Right
- Demi-sec Champagne
- From the Taps
- Belgian tripel
- Zero-Proof
- Jasmine tea
The sweetness rule is absolute: the pour must be sweeter than the plate, and acid keeps it from cloying.
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