Food from your favourite local Chinese takeaway might be comforting and familiar, but due to the speed it’s cooked – with a lot of deep frying – and cost-saving ingredients, it’s not the healthiest.
“Everything’s pretty much deep fried because it’s the speed of cooking,” says chef and restaurateur Kwoklyn Wan. “If people are able to take the time and get some nice ingredients, you can actually make really nice food at home that tastes very similar, if not exactly the same, as their Chinese takeaway flavours. But it’s not got all the horrible nasties in there.”
Wan – who’s brother is fashion consultant and presenter Gok Wan – grew up in his grandfather’s Chinese takeaway (Leicester’s first in the Sixties) and his dad’s Cantonese restaurant in the Seventies.
“It was our playground. Unlike the children on our estate, who were going out to play, we were at the restaurant, hiding under tables and making dens – that was our playground,” says the chef.
In the Seventies and Eighties, even in small villages, there was a Chinese takeaway at the end of the street, says Wan. “And that’s where most people had their first experience of Chinese food.”
So how can we easily create this much-loved cuisine at home?
The basic flavourings
For anyone starting out in Chinese cookery, there are only a handful of ingredients you need, Wan says: a good light soy sauce, a dark soy sauce (used for a little bit of sweetness”), oyster sauce (“a very, very small amount”) and sesame oil.
“Soy sauce is seasoning, it adds a saltiness to the dish but it’s also got that umami,” says the chef, whose latest cookbook is Chinese Made Easy.
“We talk about MSG [monosodium glutamate] in Chinese cookery, and none of my cookbooks actually incorporate MSG at all, for the reason being, is that you get that umami kick from soy sauce, you get it from fish sauce, you get it from oyster sauce. So a lot of the ingredients already have this umami in there. If you learn to season your food correctly, you don’t need MSG.
“In Cantonese food, especially, we always season the dishes at the very, very end with a little bit of sesame oil. And that’s where you’re going to get those authentic Chinese flavours when it comes down to cooking the food.”
Prep everything first
“I always say to everybody, before you start cooking, make sure that everything’s chopped and prepared, and you’ve got your sauces out already. Because we’re cooking in such a hot wok, you don’t really have the time to disappear, go and find that bottle of soy sauce, and then get back before it starts to burn. So just make sure you’ve got everything ready.”
Keep it moving
“Get yourself a wok, and it hasn’t got to be one of these £200 woks. You can go and get a £20 non-stick wok,” says Wan.
“A traditional wok has got a round bottom, purely because of the way that it used to sit on the stove. In UK, our woks have flat bottoms so they sit on top of a gas cooker or electric induction. It’s got high sides, so once that food goes into the wok and the oil is hot, it has to move.
“When you cook your Chinese food, everything is normally done on high heat. So make sure that when you prep the veggies, cut them nice and small, and same with the meat. So everything cooks really, really quickly.
“Make sure that that oil is as hot as you dare take it, so everything actually stir fries. You actually want the food to ever so slightly burn a little bit.
“You want to let it sit long enough to get a little bit caramelisation. But when it starts to get that colour, you have to keep moving it.
“That method is called ‘wok hei’ or ‘the breath of the wok’ and it adds the smokiness to the food.”
Stay away from packet sauces
“They’re very westernised,” says Wan. “And obviously shelf-safe, they tend to have preservatives in there, so will affect the flavours ever so slightly. And chances are, when they were made, they probably weren’t made with authentic Chinese ingredients.
“A packet of black bean sauce – there’s nothing like making your own black bean sauce. If you can get to a Chinese supermarket and get yourself some fermented black beans, it makes all the difference. All you need then is a little bit of stock, a little bit of salt and sugar, a little bit soy sauce, and you’ve got a fantastic black bean sauce that isn’t from a packet.”
“If you really want to achieve authentic Chinese flavours, you have to use Chinese ingredients. Depending on where you live, if you live in a major city, the big supermarkets will have a world aisle where you can normally get Chinese soy sauce, Chinese oyster sources, the sesame oils.
Try the velveting technique
“Velveting is a technique that we use to marinate the meat. When you go to a Chinese restaurant or takeaway and you eat a piece of meat, it’s always juicy, because it’s been velveted.
“If we got a chicken breast and just fried it off, it’d be cooked, but it wouldn’t have those flavours, it wouldn’t be juicy, whereas, because we velveted it, it’s smoother and velvety when you eat it, and makes it really tender. It breaks down those muscle fibres and the proteins. So when you actually cook the meat, it stays really juicy. It melts in the mouth.
“Always put on a pair of disposable plastic gloves and really massage the meat. The more that you handle that meat at this stage, the more tender [it will be].”
Chinese Made Easy by Kwoklyn Wan is published by Quadrille, priced £22. Photography by Sam Folan. Available now
