While some restaurants may have wine sommeliers, the Shang Palace in Kowloon Shangri-La Hotel Hong Kong has, in addition, a tea sommelier.
Thus, our lunch one rainy afternoon in this elegant Chinese restaurant began with the sommelier’s selection of chrysanthemum tea, which was a brew of baby chrysanthemum leaves and wolfberries served in a gleaming cup made of bone
china.
Chrysanthemum leaves are at their best in autumn and are supposed to be good for the eyes, said our host Patsy Chan, the hotel’s director for communications.
The trio of appetizers that came next was a study in composition: a translucent scallop dumpling stuffed with bird’s nest, two neatly cut cubes of roasted pork belly with golden brown crispy skin, and a vegetable spring roll in a delicate wrapping made of red rice flour.
Mok Kit Keung, the restaurant’s executive Chinese chef, has had over 35 years of culinary experience.
For the char siu, he uses Iberico pork, which comes from the most lavishly raised pigs in the Dehesa region of Spain, pigs that are fed only acorns and herbs to assure their tenderness. This makes the char siu at Shang Palace probably the best there is in Hong Kong.
As in most Chinese banquets, our meal ended with rice. But what a rice dish it was. Fried, with minced beef and topped with shredded fried egg yolks, it had the latest ingredient that chefs are going nuts about: black garlic, fermented garlic that has all the sweetness but none of the pungency of garlic cloves.
I’ve tried to recreate chef Mok’s fried rice with black garlic but I just used ordinary garlic cloves. The dish turned out very tasty just the same. With beef and eggs in the mixture, it makes a hearty one-dish meal.
Fried rice with minced beef
120 – 150 g beef
1 tsp cornstarch
2 tsp light soy sauce
4 egg yolks
6 tbsp cooking oil, divided
4 egg whites
2 ½ c cooked rice
20 grams diced black garlic, or 8 cloves diced fresh garlic
¼ tsp salt
¼ tsp sugar
¼ tsp chicken powder
1 tsp dark soy sauce
Cut the beef into bite-size pieces. Combine cornstarch and light soy sauce and marinate the beef in this mixture.
Whisk the egg yolks in a bowl. Heat one tablespoon of the cooking oil in a wok, then add the egg yolks. Reduce the heat to low. Using long chopsticks, stir the egg yolks slowly until they become shredded. Turn up the heat and deep-fry the yolks until crispy. Remove from the pan and set aside.
Pour one more tablespoon cooking oil to the wok then add the egg whites. Stir fry until firm, then remove from the wok and set aside.
Pour in two more tablespoons of the oil to the wok and add the beef. Pan-fry the beef until golden brown, then remove from the wok and set aside. Add the rice to the wok and stir-fry until fragrant. Mix in the cooked beef, garlic cloves and egg whites. Season with salt, sugar, chicken powder and dark soy sauce. Continue stir-frying until the ingredients are well blended. Transfer to a serving dish and garnish on top with the shredded egg yolks.