www.mosesong.com

After completed my Chocolate project for Valentine’s day, I had to quickly jump to my big cooking project, which is very very intimidating. What is it for? It’s for Chinese New Year!

You see, Chinese New Year fall on the same day as Valentine’s day this year, so I had to juggle two special occasions in the same week. This year I decided to cook a proper Chinese New Year meal and invite my friends over because last year we went out to a Chinese restaurant to have 12 courses Chinese New Year dinner, and it wasn’t great, and the price was a bit high for the quality of food.

The last time I cook a Chinese New Year dinner, I managed to pull it off and sort of keep things under control. But that was two years ago, and I got over about how much work went into it. So my attitude for this attempt is some what positive thinking that I can cook faster, and come out with a more ambitious menu. What’s more ambitious menu? For me, the menu is not highly difficult but more for the quality and adhere to the symbolism of Chinese New Year spirit, as well as bring out the classic of Chinese dishes.

Anyway, it’s common to have a poultry dish in Chinese family style dinner. Cooking chicken is not very difficult, but cooking duck is. Cooking a good duck dish is even more difficult as you could end up with a chewy or greasy duck. Cooking duck do require some extra prep work. Ideally you want to have a very crispy skin, which typically found in some sort of roast duck. This year I found another version of roast duck recipe that’s not difficult to do, after all, I already have all the right tool. The nice thing about this duck dish is, I can prep it the day before and stick it into the oven a few hours before serving.

To prepare the duck, I need to get the duck stand up otherwise I will have to hold the duck for a good 50 minutes, which make your biceps go jello easily. The reason for doing so is that I need to baste the duck skin with maltose glaze. Maltose is similar to honey, which is not too sweet but way sticky and thicker than any form of sugar like honey or glucose. To make the glazing possible, I need to boil the maltose with water, soy sauce and some lemon juice.

After the maltose glaze is boiling, rest the stand up duck on the wok and the next 50 minutes I pretty much stand in front of the stove to ladle and pour the boiling glaze over the duck until the liquid is gone.

The maltose glaze, which has a bit of soy sauce give the duck skin a sticky bronze looking finish. You know once it get roasted property, it will has that nice golden color skin.

Chinese New Year dinner is the time when you bring out some Chinese delicacy, normally it involve some expensive ingredient. Since I have cooked Shark fin soup in my last round of Chinese New Year dinner cook off, I decided to go with a seafood soup that use some sea cucumber.

The sea cucumber cost about $40 a pound and sold in dehydrated/dried form. For my dish, I only need about 5 oz, so it didn’t really cost me a fortune. To make sure the sea cucumber will be ready to consume by the day I need it, I need to prepare it about 3 days earlier. The preparation involve soaking the sea cucumber in simmering water for 20 minutes, changing water, soak in hot water until the water cool, follow by more changing water, de-gut the slug, more hot water bath and overnight soaking etc.

At the end of 3rd day, I got a small plate full of sea cucumber for which each one start out no smaller than half a dried prune when dried.

Taking a close up look, it really make you wonder how on earth people would think of eating this creature? Someone must be hungry to death and decide “heck, it’s dying of hunger or eat these giant slug to survive.” Joking aside, there are some study and believe in the health benefit of consuming sea cucumber, mainly in tissue repair. So, to all the body builder, want to have a sea slug after your tissue tearing hard workout from the gym?

The day of the Chinese New Year dinner started out slow. All I need to do is cut up all the vegetable and prepare my mise en place, then clean the place and set up the dining table. This year I have built a snap on table top that goes on top of my 6 seats dining table, make it possible to seat 10 person now.

Since I don’t have much time to come up with new table setting, and make no sense to invest in new dinner ware, I just set the table up like I did before.

A few hours before the guess arrive, I started to roast the duck and cooked the soup. By the time the guess started to arrive, I wast just getting started to cook my first dish. You see, good Chinese food just can’t be served too late after it’s cook, otherwise you will loose that crispy texture, or aromatic breath of wok, also known as “Wok Hei” in Cantonese. I underestimate some time that need to be spent to cook the dishes, and get distracted by my guess.

Cooking and cleaning together is not easy task, my big kitchen all of the sudden felt like it has shrunk in half because of the amount of dirty towel, pan and dishes laying around. I manage to keep the area close to the stove clear and it that as my main working area, like cutting up the roasted duck, as well as keep all the sauces nearby so I can add them into the wok before the food get burn and the wok get too hot. My 55,ooo BTU burner really shine in this event.

With all the food around, Oreo decided to stop by to check out what’s going on, and may be wishing that I will drop some chopped duck so he can snatch them up.

The cooking was completely done about a little after an hour the guess arrive. I had to put some of the guess to work like cleaning up cooking utensil, as well as taking photos.

So, my dinner menu list is quite overwhelming, not super difficult but do require some proper planing and execution to successfully get them onto the table. Let’s look at the dishes:

For appetizer, I had Spring rolls, which I count at a vegetable dish. To make sure I don’t have too much leftover, I made about 22 pieces for 7 people.

Serving rice for carbohydrate is a bit boring, so I decided to have stir fry noodle. It took me a while to find the right kind of noodle for stirfry application. Once the noodled was cooked and kept warm in the oven, it did dry out on the surface a bit.

A very classic pork dish that is everyone’s favorite is the sweet and sour pork. I created this recipe based on memory of eating them in my home town restaurant. It’s way superior than those westernized version in the Chinese restaurants in the US. The secret is using candied ginger as well as sweet pickled vegetable and fresh pineapple. For a nice presentation a pineapple bowl is the way to go, I feel bad to waste a lot of juice when carving the pineapple bowl, but hey, at least it’s only half a pineapple.

I was a bit concern when cooking this traditional Chinese New Year dish as my family never serve it before. It’s commonly found in a Buddhist household but since my family is Christian, we never cook nor ate it. The dish is call Buddha’s Delight, which is a vegetarian dish consist of various soy bean product like puff tofu, tofu stick, mushroom, fungus etc. Eating this dish for Chinese New Year is a symbolism of cleansing, just like monks who don’t eat living animal. The recipe I used called for dried oyster, so it’s technically not a true vegetarian dish. Regardless, the dish came out well and not too plain.

The roast duck came out well, not too greasy nor too tough. However, because it wasn’t serve right away, the skin was no longer crispy. The seasoning for the duck is very simple, which is just the maltose glace. To fully enjoy the duck, you should dip the duck piece into the pomegranate molasses sauce that I made a few weeks ago and froze until this Chinese New Year dinner event.

Braise pig feet is not a dish that you can find easily in Chinese restaurant around here, mainly because it needs a long time to cook, and there is virtually no demand for it. If you can find some sort of pig feet dish, they normally are very lathery nor not very tender. I cooked this dish two days ahead of time, and let it sit in the fridge for the flavor to age. It’s a five spice pig feet that’s flavored with a lot of garlic and shitake mushroom, as well as star anise and cinnamon stick. I reheat the dish and serve it in the Chinese sand pot, which hold the heat and add some nice touch to the presentation.

I need to add more vegetable dish to the menu, but cooking plain vegetable is boring to me. Therefore I decided to cook it with some delicacy like abalone. I decided to cook the sugar snap pea abalone dish that I grew up eating. The abalone I bought is produced in Mexico, so it only cost me about $12 a can, compare to the $34 a can that my brother brought me a few years ago, which was produced in Australia.

For beef dish, I decided to serve a more dramatic black pepper beef, which need to be finished at table side.

The sizzling way of service a dish can normally found in good Chinese restaurant, and home cook don’t normally attempt it. So having this dish do make the dinner feel a bit special. The aroma of the sauce hitting the dish just blanket the table with appetizing smell, but for some reason, none of my guess feel like seating at the time I’m serving it.

The seafood soup that I made with dried scallop, scallop, shrimp, sea cucumber and crab meat was keep warm in a slow cooker. The chicken stock I used as base did take away the fishiness of the seafood medley.

After a few days of preparation and a few hours of cooking, I got ourselves a Chinese New Year feast that can probably feed two two big family.

So, how many course did I cooked? It was 10, yes, T-E-N. Wait a minute, there were eight dishes on the table and a soup serve on the side, where is the 10th dish? Well, it’s a good gesture to have a fish dish in every Chinese New Year as it symbolize “excess”, which if you have the fish dish, it’s the hope that you will have plenty of excess wealth for that year. I had the fish steam in the steamer while we were eating our dinner. We don’t have room on the table to fit a fish dish yet, and it’s best to serve the fish right after it come out of the steamer for best texture and flavor.

As we started to chow down our wonderful and rich dinner, we became more and more drunk of food, hence become too lazy to take photos or even move our hand to reach for more food! I have to say, the fish was excellent, and you know why? Because it was never frozen and was still swimming the day before I cook it. I had make a special trip to the oriental store the day before to by a live fish, had the fish get hammered by a mallet, all just so we can enjoy its white sweet flesh, ah….. welcome to the food chain.

The Chinese New Year dinner overall was a succesful one, I served some reserved chocolate bonbons that I made to tie to the Valentine’s day function so I didn’t have to sweat for the dessert portion.

The dinner was a good challenge, such that I learned more about my ability in cooking Chinese food eventhough the execution wasn’t perfect that I still had to make my guess wait. However, I did very well in the planning, allowing me to cook so many dishes without staying up late at night, nor spent a fortune for it.

Will I do it again? You bet, just not next year as this type of cooking is really could burn you out, mentally and physically. For now, I’m glad to say that it’s overed, and I can catch my breath and get ready for Spring where my gardening hobby kicks in, and maintain my music hobby as well.

I wish I can say someone gave me a big box of Chocolate for Valentine’s day and I got chocolate overdose from it. But in reality, I’m actually the one that supply all the chocolate to people!

You see, I only make small batches of chocolate here and there in the past two years to practice and learn. It’s difficult to sell small batch of chocolate as flavor variety is not enough to make up a box of chocolate. Since Valentine’s day means chocolate season, I got my act together to put on my thinking hat, thought out a strategy to give the chocolate market a try and push my chocolate making limit.

I don’t think the market here is ready for chocolate with very exotic flavor yet, so I’m trying to stick with some common flavor and probably introduce new unique flavor, and yet stick with the Valentine’s day theme.

Since I don’t have fresh mint in my backyard to infuse mint flavor ganache, I opted for ready made mint candy fondant. The ready center is kind of doughy, but once it’s warm up in the microwave, it can be piped into the chocolate shell. Once set, I can just flatten them with a push of finger.

Making raspberry flavored chocolate is quite labor intensive as each chocolate have to be hand dipped. But before that, I had to make chocolate shells. The shells were made a while back ago but the work that went into it was so time consuming, it still haunt me when I think about making chocolate shells.

The shells do pay off in term of giving the chocolate perfect round shape. The perfectly tempered chocolate also mean a perfect finish like an egg shell.

I know airbrushing color on the round chocolate will be too fine and not that rustic looking, so I gave the brush flickering method a try and it actually work really well!

To me, dark chocolate is the easiest chocolate to work with as you can easily tell if it’s properly tempered or not. But making dark chocolate shell is not that straight forward, it took me 3 attempts to come out with perfect chocolate cups that are not too thin, nor too thick.

This is the first time I work with Milk chocolate, the milk chocolate has very bright sheen when it’s not set. Many pastry chefs said: with experience, you can tell if chocolate is proper tempered or not just by looking at them. I think I started to get what they mean. Properly tempered chocolate should have that oily looking sheen that remind you of motor oil.

Since I have to make many chocolate, with two batches per type, I need to get my kitchen organize and make sure my finished chocolate can be moved around easily. Leaving them on a silpat lined half sheet size pan works really well!

To make sure no white chocolate get tainted  by unwanted color, I separated the dark chocolate into another tray.

Milk chocolate was the last batch I worked on, so they get their own tray.

At the end of my 3.5 days chocolate work, I was some what mentally exhausted, but looking at the trays of chocolate, I can’t help to feel that I really accomplished something.

Taking a closer look at the mint chocolate, they reminded me of fly’s eye.

The half sphere shape is really easy to work with, and the green food safe glitter really pop with the dark chocolate. Of course the tempered dark chocolate is so shiny, I can see myself on them!

I made the pineapple bonbon before, so to me this is quite straight forward. However, the coloring of the pineapple bonbon is not as good as the last time I made them.

The white chocolate doesn’t look as shiny as the other chocolate, I think I didn’t apply enough cocoa butter on the mold.

The gold glitter doesn’t seem to be that prominent on the white chocolate.

The raspberry white chocolate balls are so round and consistent in shape, they just remind me of some sort of alien eggs.

The brush flickered red cocoa butter color really add a nice touch, they just scream “hand made”!

The hazelnut chocolate cups really look rustic and not too intimidating.

I’m glad I didn’t choose to use food processor to chop the toasted hazelnut but hand chopped them. I had better control on how fine the nut pieces should be by doing it manually. I’m also glad that I took time to sieve the chopped nut to get rid of those fine hazelnut powder, once the sieved chopped nut are sprinkle into the cup, they look more clean and natural.

Coloring milk chocolate could be challenging because the brown color can compete with the red spectrum side of the color, and could look too dark with the blue spectrum side of color. I know if I just pain the purple glitter on, the whole piece would just look red brown-yish like a piece of brick. Therefore I decided to do a two tone color by adding some silver into the mix.

Adding the silver do make the milk chocolate more pop because the brown color of milk chocolate doesn’t give enough sheen.

Of all the bon bons I made, the Mint has the best look, it’s shinny like jewel.

The shell of the mint bonbon turned out to be very nice, not too thin nor too thick. The mint center also has nice consistency, too bad I can’t take credit for it as I didn’t make it.

The raspberry white chocolate bonbon doesn’t look that special in term of decoration.

When you cut into the raspberry white chocolate ball, the surprise raspberry jam inside is what makes this bonbon special. I have to say, I did a sloppy job of not making sure the raspberry jam is right in the center of the sphere. Doing as many chocolate as I did, you just have to find some corner to cut otherwise it will consume you and make you sick from lack of sleep and exhaustion.

I still can’t believe the pineapple chocolate doesn’t look as nice as the last time I made them.

The pineapple ganache inside however is much better than last time as I learn that pineapple puree tend to have more moisture, so I reduced the cream and increased the ratio of white chocolate to liquid. The result is a more smooth ganache that doesn’t ooze out.

The hazelnut cup is the easiest to make, but I had to make it as late as possible because the ganache is not enclose in any sort of shell, so they might go stale pretty quickly.

The center of the hazelnut filling is a bit odd looking. It’s not a real ganache in the sense that it’s just melted dark chocolate mixed with hazelnut flavor chocolate spread. I think this combination doesn’t give the filling enough creamy texture, hence it set as if two different ingredient are seperated.

To be honest, the look of the milk chocolate still bother me a bit. Since this is the first time I work with milk chocolate, I guess I can’t complain much as it could be worse.

The passion fruit ganache probably has the best consistency, however, it does feel a bit grainy. I didn’t sieve the passion fruit puree after I cooked it down to concentrate the flavor, I think I better do it next time.

Two weeks before I decide to make chocolate to sell, I manage to find a reasonably priced vendor that sell many variety of candy boxes. Choosing the candy box size was one of the challenges, but once I decided that 15 pieces box is a good size, choosing the design was another challenge. They have more fancy boxes with that size, but the price goes up as you move away from plain design. Therefore, I chose to go with 3 basic design first, after all, I’m just testing out the market, so I better keep the cost of packaging as low as possible.

The easiest way to arrange the bonbons is just arrange them based on design.

After randomly placed the bonbons at different places, I kind of like the randomness of different color, it sort of make you spend more time looking at them, and figure out which is which.

The clear lid box seems to be a good “in your face” kind of presentation, however, since I will put a piece of contact sheet and liner paper, it sort of defeat the purpose to have a clear lid.

I only had one day to market the chocolate box set at work. Luckily many people at work are very supportive of my culinary hobby, so I manage to get 8 order just in one day. I suspect many people will want to get a box once they see them, or tasted the loose pieces I was going to sell, so I packed extra boxes just in case. It didn’t hit me how much bonbons I have made, until I see them in well organized boxes!

Since the clear lid is not a very good choice to use this time, I packed just the gold and red lid. Gold lid seems to be the more popular request, simply because it’s more elegant.

To make sure people know the flavor of chocolate, I enclosed a contact sheet into each chocolate box, the theme is tied to Valentine’s day:

Packing those boxes of chocolate then went to bed at night spelled sign of relief, as it concluded my chocolate making madness, which seem to be exciting when I first started. The chocolate project  turned into really long hours of standing up in the kitchen, staring and stirring chocolate almost every hours all day long to the point that I started to miss my bed, not to mention Oreo probably get upset at me for not playing with him but stay in the kitchen all day long.

So, did I make enough profit for the chocolate? You bet! However, it’s not enough to cover all my equipment and labor cost. For now, I think I’m going to just stick with trying to assess the market, and build my reputation along the way while testing my endurance of how far I can push myself when come to artisan chocolate craft.