Question for Paul about Chinese spareribs

[Jenise]

Paul, leafing through books this morning asking myself if I should thin out the herd a bit, I pulled a 1999 book by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo called My Chinese Kitchen. Of course this was dangerous and completely backfired on my intentions as I opened it to find only reasons to keep it. One is a recipe for Steamed Spareribs with Preserved Plums. Made me go HUH? Her intro says, "A version of this dish, more familiar, is a staple of the dim sum kitchen where it is made with fermented black beans. In Sun Tak (her Canton province childhood hometown) we made it this way. These were the only spareribs I knew until I moved to Hong Kong."

You and I have bonded on our love of the black bean version. You've explored more Chinese cooking than I have, so have you ever had the plum or prepared it? I am now dying to do this! To give you a sense of it, she calls for five preserved plums pitted and mashed to one pound of spare ribs. From a jar? Dried and soaked? I only know of dried salted plums.

Jenise, I've neither made nor ever tasted the plum variant of Chinese steamed spareribs. The recipes that I've found online call for the salted, dried, preserved plums we're both familiar with. I saw nothing about soaking them in the recipes, but I'd wash any excess salt off them before I used them, just as I do with black beans. One of the recipes call for marinating the ribs in a marinade made from the mashed plums, bean sauce, and sugar. Another used hoisin sauce and the plums.

I'd go with the dried, salted plums and mash them with bean paste and a pinch of sugar, with a bit of water if the mixture looks too thick. Use hoisin sauce if you don't have the bean paste.

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

The dried plums I've had in my hands didn't seem moist enough to mash without some hydration (grind? yes, but not mash). That's why I questioned it.

Also, this recipe also calls for bean sauce. Just put that way I'd tend to presume she means black bean, but I'm suddenly recalling my friend Annabelle making the best Chinese ribs I've ever had, and using a red bean paste (vs. sauce), I think it was. Is there a red bean sauce? Don't know that she used plums, but I do recall that she worked from a book by an east coast Chinese cook, whose first name started with an 'F'. Fay? Fuschia? Something like that.

Fuchsia Dunlop is an author of several excellent Sichuan cookbooks. She trained in Sichuan cooking at the culinary institute in Chengdu. She doesn't do Eastern Chinese cooking to the best of my knowledge. She has just published a revised edition of her excellent cookbook The Food of Sichuan. I highly recommend it.

Here's a web page that offers a very comprehensive survey of Chinese sauces, etc.: https://thewoksoflife.com/chinese-sauces-vinegars-oils/. Search this page for "pickled plum".

Regarding bean sauce, there are a bunch of Chinese ingredients that go by that name.

When I see just "bean sauce", I assume that what's meant is a brown, salty paste made from fermented soybeans. It's similar to Japanese miso and you can use dark miso as a substitute. I buy the Koon Chun brand, which comes in glass jars in two versions. The one labeled "Bean Sauce" has whole split fermented soybeans in it. The one labeled "Ground Bean Sauce" is a pureed version that, in my experience, has a milder taste than the one with the intact beans. I usually use the one with the intact beans in it. This is the principal seasoning ingredient in Beijing meat sauce noodles and is also used in Cantonese-style spareribs and roast pork. I think this is the "bean sauce" you saw in your steamed spareribs with plums recipe.

Black bean sauce is made by soaking Chinese black beans (dried, fermented, salted soybeans) in some liquid (rice wine is typical) and mashing them up. Most recipes I've seen call for soaking and mashing the beans yourself, but there are prepared black bean sauces on the market, such as Lee Kim Kee's "Black Bean Garlic Sauce", which also has garlic added. It's a very good time-saving shortcut, like using Lan Chi "Chili Paste with Garlic" when making fish-fragrant (yuxiang) Sichuan dishes.

Doubanjiang or "broad bean paste" is a Sichuan preparation made from fava beans fermented for a year or more with dried red hot chiles. It is a staple in a lot of Sichuan recipes. The best comes from the town of Pixian in Sichuan. Lee Kum Kee's "Chili Bean Sauce" or Toban Djan (non-Sichuan dialect here) is similar, and can be used as a substitute for Pixian doubanjiang, but it has more ingredients and a different taste. It used to be very hard to find Pixian doubanjiang (I finally ran it down at a local oriental supermarket whose proprietor was from Sichuan), but it's now available on the Internet from The Mala Market.

Red bean paste is made by mashing boiled red (adzuki) beans. Sweetened, it's used as a filling in Chinese dessert and dim sum items. It's also sometimes used, as you noted, in making Eastern-Chinese-style spareribs. There are some Sichuan recipes that call for it.

-Paul W.