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Five Tastes (New Cookbook by Fuchsia Dunlop) *Signed by the Author*
$45
Chinese Flavors, Unbound
Our first shipment of this new book is signed by the author!
For decades now, Chinese-food authority Fuchsia Dunlop has been painstakingly documenting regional Chinese culinary traditions and recipes. But even she doesn't abide by all the rules, conventions and expectations in her own Chinese cooking, where she frequently uses fresh Western ingredients in Chinese dishes as well as Chinese flavors and ingredients in expansive and adventurous ways.
Five Tastes: Delicious Recipes for Chinese Flavors gathers her more improvisational recipes, inspired by Chinese flavors. The "five tastes" refer to the classic sour, bitter, sweet, pungent or spicy, and salty flavors of Chinese food. As always with Fuchsia's books, this is a text you want to read fully, to learn about two additional tastes added to the list in modern times: xian, which is the Chinese word for umami, and ma, the numbing sensation of Sichuan pepper.
These core tastes are combined in infinite ways across Chinese cuisines to create complex flavor profiles—for example, mala, red-oil and "fish-fragrant," just three of Sichuan's many official complex flavors. During her early culinary education in Sichuan, Fuchsia was instructed to master these complex flavors so she could apply them to both traditional and nontraditional dishes. Here she strives to equip us with the knowledge and open our minds to do the same.
A few examples: fried eggs with fish-fragrant sauce; sour-and-hot roasted chicken broth; sweet-sour scorched eggplant salad; green onion oil and porcini noodles.
“I think of the book as a kind of follow-on to Every Grain of Rice [streamlined versions of traditional Chinese dishes], because the emphasis is likewise on simple, fast, economical home cooking—but the recipes are more eclectic and I hope the flavours are more scintillating," Fuchsia told The Mala Market. "Like Every Grain of Rice, it’s also turned out to have a lot of vegetarian and vegan recipes."
While there is a lot of Sichuan influence in the recipes, they are by no means all spicy, and the flavor profiles range across the whole of China. Her recommended essential pantry starts with the most important Chinese ingredient, soy sauce, and expands to 10 basic ingredients she recommends to cook from this book (as well as Every Grain of Rice). We made it easy for you by creating two new pantry collections inspired by the book: a set of Five Tastes and our small-batch, handcrafted Zhongba soy sauce; and a 10-product collection based on her suggested pantry.
Contents
The introductory chapters of Five Tastes are not to be skipped, as it is there that the author introduces classic Chinese flavor combinations and points you toward the recipes that use each one. For example, sweet-and-sour; sour-and-hot; sweet-and-spicy with garlic; spicy-and-savory; green onion oil; numbing-and-spicy, etc.
She takes Sichuan's classic "homestyle" flavor, which is built on Sichuan doubanjiang and fermented soybeans (think mapo tofu), and applies it to dishes you're unlikely to find in China, namely mussels and oven-roasted chicken legs. Similarly, she adds fermented tofu (furu) to a French vinaigrette to spoon over steamed leeks, and whips up a sesame-paste-forward "strange-flavor" sauce for Chinese crudités. She also shows off her love of the combo of green Sichuan pepper and lime, a citrus rarely used in China, for both savory and sweet dishes.
The book includes a very thorough explanation of pantry ingredients, where Fuchsia notes that "more companies are starting to focus on quality Chinese products; it is worth seeking these out if you can." We agree!
