Sous Vide Recipes: Sambal Salmon with Lime & Thai Basil

After a long hard slog of a year to move into the food industry full time, it's time for a blog post. It's been emotional and exciting but so far so good and there's no looking back. Experimenting with cool foodie gadgets comes with the territory and this week I've been testing out the Sous Vide Supreme, darling of the slow cooking and poaching world.

My mind got thinking to Chinese and South East Asian cooking techniques that sous vide could easily replicate and enhance. Poached, steamed and slow braised dishes would all be wonderful and plunging a bag into a machine that claimed to cook food to perfection whilst I twiddle my thumbs was extremely welcome.

I decided on an easy classic with a twist for my maiden sous vide adventure: juicy salmon smothered in a spicy Malaysian sambal lined with lime slices and plenty of Thai Basil.

Fish Head Rice Noodle Soup 鱼头米饭

Lately I've been hit by desperate cravings for homely noodle soups. I'd like to think my desperation would make me unfussy, that hunger trumps putting myself through inconvenience. Wouldn't it just be fine to make up some soup through stock cubes, toss in noodles and fillings? Nope, that's not how us noodle lovers roll. I of course had to make everything from scratch and traipse around London for the "right" ingredients. But then I wouldn't have discovered some very interesting details about one of my childhood favourites, Fish Head Rice Noodle Soup.

Baozi Inn

Sigh. And that is saying something when one starts a blog post with a sigh. I did so much want Baozi Inn to help me recreate some of those Beijing highlights I had been fortunate to experience last year but alas. For a second I wondered if that was an unrealistic expectation though when somewhere says it serves real “Beijing Street Food” then they’ve talked the talk. Now wok the wok, I say.

Le Gia: The Growing Vietnamese Scene in Deptford

No need to list reasons why one would not venture into Deptford for well, anything. Unless of course one worked round the corner in Greenwich and was offered the chance of a lunch adventure to the local Vietnamese by a foodie colleague. Whilst Deptford is generally an adventure black hole it is strangely home to some quality and destination Vietnamese restaurants, the best known one in the area being Café East.

Colleague S seemed to have uncovered a little gem. Le Gia was very no-frills, harshly stark in fact and we were the only customers at that lunchtime service. Only. Which could have been slightly eerie but S AKA Tomatoes and Radio Wire and I were not once short of food stories to exchange. I always appreciate a spirited companion that is game for good food no matter the surroundings.

Though we were provided with what looked like an ample menu, we still lunged forward at Beef Pho Bo each and Beef Summer Rolls. Yes this was very one-track minded but S here needed an iron shot after giving blood the day before. And when it was this good, gimme that iron!

Two noodles I could eat all the time: Mee Pok & Chilly Pan Mee

Malaysian food-sickness. No, I mean Malaysian food-homesickness. Homesick for Malaysian food. Oh darnnit, I just want these two types of noodles!

Malaysian Midnight Eating: Restoran Damansara Hokkien Mee

I interrupt my Beijing broadcast to bask in the glory of finding black gold in nearby Damansara Uptown. Old to the other residents but new to me, and a find is still a find!

Biáng Biáng Mian

In week 2 of my Mandarin course here at BLCU, we had a cultural lesson to explain the basics of Chinese characters. No prizes for knowing that like many other ancient scripts Chinese characters are pictograms, their current form represents what man thought the word looked like. But what on earth did the Chinese see when they came up with this character…

Silk Road

Am just quite amazed at regional Chinese cooking in London, the scene is much more varied than when I first arrived in the UK nearly 11 years ago. You still get ignoramuses who think Chinese is fluorescent sweet and sour rodents and everything is stir-fried, but on the whole the cuisine's reputation in London has come a long way. So much so that I'm discovering Chinese food from my mother-ship I never knew existed.

My new discovery was Silk Road on Camberwell Church Road, and from the outside you never would have thought anything special. Seating is minimal in a bench and table arrangement, it's pretty humble bare bones stuff. It is regional Chinese food from the Xinjiang province, which Google Maps says borders Russia, Mongolia, all the "Stans" and India, i.e. top left China. How representative it is of that region, I won't know for now, though good numbers of mainland Chinese customers when we visited was encouraging.

So you get dumplings and noodles as you might do from other Chinese regions, but the highlights here are the kebabs. Immediately I could see the neighbouring influences to the region's cooking. What looked incredibly measly on their skewers were deceivingly spicy to which I didn't feel I needed more than my helping. Lots of cumin and chilli on lamb, it could have been Indian for all I tasted.

We tried prawn, egg and chive dumplings which must have been handmade due to their irregular shape. Wonderfully tasty and juicy despite not coming a sauce. And ridiculously cheap. For three Great British Pounds buys you ten nice sized dumplings. A prime example of how the Chinese can undercut at insanely good quality.

And lastly the hand-pulled noodles. We had ours with "Mixed Vegetables" that was really just tomatoes, green chilli and cabbage but with oodles of garlic and onion that made a rather good sauce.

Service was extremely attentive and friendly, which is very un-typically Chinese! What an interesting little place. Long may these small treasures bloom and grow in the unlikely dark lanes of mighty London.

Our rather ridiculously cheap bill!