Potato noodles

The texture of potatoes is very interesting because of the starch content, it is very soft when baked. Yet when we remove the starch from the potato, the texture is completely different, transforming itself from a mash like texture to a crunchy vegetable.

At the restaurant, we add potato noodles to the noodles for added crunch. Potatoes are shredded finely and then washed in water several times until the starch is removed.

Flavoured Sea Salt

One of the dishes customers love are the Chinese Wine Eggs. To enhance the flavour of these eggs, I added some orange peel sea salt to the eggs. While passing a Chinese candy shop, I tried some traditional sour plum and it struck me to try to make some sour plum sea salt to go with the eggs. This is the best pairing as traditionally Chinese Wine is drunk with a small piece of sour plum in the wine glass.

The Perfect Egg

I was never able to attract customers to try this at Chinese Spoon. I always thought customers didn't like runny yolks. I gave it a second attempt at my noodle shop, making a Chinese mushroom fluid gel to go with it. I topped it with some Serrano ham and put a wonton wrapper on the side and called it the Perfect Egg. This time - everyone loved it.

Instant noodles

It always seemed like it was too gimmicky to play around with making your own instant noodles. But when I served it to friends, it was received vet well. Everyone liked squirting the liquid into their soup and watching it turn to noodles.

Here I used a mixture of hard tofu with water. I added a bit of Metil and voila- instant noodles before your eyes.

Beef tartare

I got hold of a nice piece of beef tenderloin and wanted to know if it worked as tartare. Sprinkled some organic shoots in top, drizzled some extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar and my favourite lemon zest salt. It was good except it lacked some grated Parmesan.

Chinese Soup for noodles

My latest interest is back to making soups. But it's more about east meets west in developing flavors. I got some pork bones and roasted them in the oven. Instead of just soaking the dried scallops and mushrooms, I squeezed all the water out and fried it before putting in the soup. Interesting - the soup does taste more intense than making it traditionally.

Marinated tomatoes

One of the more interesting appetizers I've creating is marinating tomatoes. The idea first came from Thomas Keller's book - Under Pressure where they made tomatoes sweeter by infusing a sugar solution into cherry tomatoes. I tried but didn't like it and so do my first version - edible bloody Mary. A cherry tomato infused with the vodka, tabasco,lemon juice, Lea Perkins. Fabulous but some didn't like the vodka. So I tried infusing a vinegarette. Worked perfectly but then discovered that the concentration of the solution was extremely important in controlling bursting effect of the liquid when tomato was teen. Too high concentration and the tomato goes soggy. Too low concentration, no bursting effect.