Taiwan Today

Chinese people have always had great appreciation for the written word as expressed in graceful calligraphy, and through the ages calligraphers required but a few es­sential tools, traditionally known as the “four treasures of the scholar’s studio”—­the writing brush, inkstone, inkstick, and paper. It is no exaggeration to say that these items, so essential to China’s rich literary and artistic traditions, form the backbone of Chinese culture. But no less important to the Chinese is their culture as expressed through cuisine, in regional dishes of an extraordinary number and variety. Despite their diversity, virtually all of them, sim­ple or complex, can be prepared by using just the “four treasures of the Chinese kitchen”—the cleaver, chopping block, wok, and steamer.

How did so much come to be done with so little? The evolution of Chinese cooking tools and techniques was deeply influenced by scarcity. For millennia, the vast majority of Chinese have spent their lives short of fuel, cooking oil, utensils, and even water. The result: they cut most of their food into small pieces and stir-fried it quickly to save on both fuel and the need for much cutlery, and they adopted four simple but versatile kitchen tools that have proved successful for centuries.

The versatility of the Chinese cleaver, or chopping knife, makes a Swiss Army Knife look like a simplistic toy. It can be used to cut, score, slice, shred, dice, mince, chop, crush, break, and decorate. It can also gut, clean, crack, and tenderize. All this and more is possible with an eight-by­-four-inch rectangular piece of steel attached to a four-inch-long handle.

“When I first saw someone using a cleaver in Hong Kong, I was amazed,” says Michel Sram, a chef with long professional experience in European restaurants and hotels. “I saw this Chinese chef clean­ing bones with a cleaver, and I thought, ‘This isn’t possible’—we have several special knives for cleaning. But here, with a cleaver, the bones were even cleaner than the way we do it in Europe.”

Actually, there are three kinds of cleavers, but the only significant differ­ence between them is their weight. The blade is about the same size for all three, but its thickness varies. The heaviest cleaver is used for cutting through large bones, such as beef and pork leg bones. But most kitchen work can be done with the middleweight cleaver. This can easily clean fish, prepare chicken, and handle smaller cuts of beef and pork, such as short ribs. It can also be used for preparing veg­etables and fruits for cooking, and gar­nishes, although the light cleaver is often preferred for these tasks, as well as for cut­ting a la julienne and delicate slicing.

The cleaver’s cutting edge can be divided into three sections: the heel, at the end of the blade closest to the han­dIe; the toe, farthest from the handle; and the long, main section in between. The heel is used primarily for rough dic­ing and cutting through thicker vegeta­bles. The toe has several uses, including slicing, cutting, scoring, and decorating. The main section of the blade is used for most slicing tasks, including julienne cuts, as well as chopping, fine dicing, mincing, and carving.

Today’s chefs are drawing on thou­sands of years of experience. For example, a text attributed to the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu, who lived in the fourth cen­tury B.C., praises the skill of a cook named Ting, who handled the cleaver “in perfect rhythm,” as though he were performing a complicated dance or keeping time to music. Ting was quoted as saying of his skill, “A good cook changes his cleaver once a year because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his once a month because he hacks. But I’ve used this cleaver for 19 years, and the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone.” How so? Because Ting skillfully found the spaces between the joints and invaribly maneuvered the cutting edge through the spots of least resistance.

It helps, of course, to use only the best­-made tool. One popular local source for cleavers is the offshore island of Kinmen (Quemoy). Chef Eddie Chen, formerly of the Grand Hyatt Taipei, says that the steel used for Kinmen cleavers comes from the remains of mainland Chinese artillery shells fired at the island in decades past. “The metal is especially hard and holds a good edge,” he says.

The top, unsharpened edge of the cleaver, its thickest part, also has several uses. Flip the blade upside down, and its long, blunt edge can break crustacean shells or pound meat to tenderize it. The flat faces of the cleaver can be used to crush garlic and spices, and act as a scoop to lift items off the chopping block. The whole unsharpened front edge of the blade, the part farthest from the handle, is used as a scraper to clean the chopping block at the end of each meal. Other uses for the cleaver have also come down over the generations, such as whittling new chopsticks, sharpening pencils, shaving, and threaten­ing customers who refuse to pay the bill. But the cleaver’s primary function keeps it on the chopping block, ready to perform a huge variety of tasks as the compleat food processor.

Chopping blocks come in many sizes and shapes. The heavy, circular wooden ones used by res­taurants are about four inches thick and eighteen to twenty inches in di­ameter. Home kitchens usually have thin­ner, rectangular boards made of wood or heavy plastic. Until recently, Taiwan chefs preferred using solid blocks made from crosscut sections of ironwood. This tree is now protected, so blocks are imported these days, many made from fir. Some res­taurants have switched to large polyethyl­ene blocks because they are easier to clean, but most chefs still prefer wood.

“There’s no thorough way to clean a wooden block, and the plastic ones save trees,” says Simon Ho, Chinese Kitchen Executive Chef at the Taipei Hilton. Nevertheless, he remembers with fond­ness the sound of cleavers making heavy contact with wood. When cleavers hit the big polyethylene blocks, they make a whacking sound, instead of the familiar deep thunk. It’s like comparing the whine of a line drive off an aluminum baseball bat to the splendid sound made by a wooden one.

Taipei’s Grand Hyatt Hotel still uses wooden blocks in its kitchens, and Frank Liu, chef de cuisine in the Shanghai restau­rant, agrees that chopping block sanitation is an important issue. “We clean ours every night by scraping the top with the [front edge of the] cleaver, and repeatedly wip­ing off the surfaces with clean, damp cloths,” he says. “Once a week, we clean the blocks with bleach, then rinse them with running water for ten minutes or so.” Sometimes salt is scattered on top of the block to absorb excess moisture.

Large wooden chopping blocks have several advantages over plastic. The cleaver cuts through food more cleanly on wood, and the blade’s edge will not dull as quickly. The weight of wood blocks means they don’t jump or slide on tabletops, mak­ing them especially safe when chopping with a heavy cleaver. (For safety’s sake, the Hilton also uses wood blocks with the heavy cleavers for chopping oily, slippery items such as smoked duck and pork.) Sanitation aside, wood presents another problem. Meats and other foodstuffs can flavor the block, no matter how well it is cleaned. To minimize this difficulty, res­taurants use a separate block for each of three tasks: cutting raw meats, preparing vegetables, and chopping oily cooked meats.

How is the cleaver used with the chop­ping block? Hold the cleaver, with the index finger resting along the right face of the blade, and the other three fingers and thumb wrapped around the handle. The index finger helps maintain the correct angle of the blade when performing vari­ous tasks, and it gives a “feel” for the food being prepared. The knuckle of the middle finger of the other hand should touch the side of the blade, acting as a guide. The correct cutting motion consists of repeat­edly forcing the cleaver blade downward and forward. How long does it take a novice cook to learn how to chop well? Frank Liu of the Grand Hyatt says one year is about average. “I can’t tell a good chef by the sound of this chopping,” he says. “There’s a smooth rhythm to it.”

The versatile wok has been used in China for at least two thousand years, as shown by clay models buried in ancient tombs. (Wok is a Cantonese word now thoroughly established in English; the Mandarin word is kuo.) Both a pot and a pan, the wok is used for stir-frying, deep-frying, braising, and steaming. Round-bottomed with sloping sides, it was originally designed to rest on the circular walls of a primitive brazier. Woks for family use are usually ten to fourteen inches in diameter and about four inches deep. Restaurant woks may be twenty inches or more across. They are made of iron, carbon steel, stainless steel, and aluminum, but the best are of iron or carbon steel because they hold intense heat and distribute it evenly. All blacken with use. The shape has remained unchanged for many reasons, including convenience and economy.

The smooth, even distribution of high heat is one of the wok’s most vital and dis­tinctive features. For one thing, this allows a tremendous saving on fuel. Another great virtue is that when food is stewed in a wok, the liquid evaporates very fast. This is be­cause the surface-to-liquid ratio is high, and the smooth curve of the sides allows heat to rise rapidly, smoothly, and evenly through the vessel. And when food is tossed about during stir-frying, the sloping sides ensure that the contents fall back into the wok and not onto the stove. The shape also minimizes the amount of oil necessary for deep-frying foods, because just a small amount makes a pool in the bottom and goes a long way. The wok is excellent for boiling, and a steamer rack and a lid con­vert it to a steamer.

In stir-frying, the cooking method of choice for about three-fourths of Chinese dishes, the wok is heated and a small amount of peanut or vegetable oiI is then poured in. When the oil is hot, the ingre­dients are added in order of their cooking times. Often, a piece of garlic or ginger is cooked in the oil to flavor it and then re­moved before the other foods are added. Because the ingredients must circulate rapidly around the hot center of the wok, best results are obtained with limited amounts. Therefore, if a dish contains many different items, the vegetables may be cooked together first and then removed from the wok. Next, the meat will be fried, and when it is almost done the vegetables will be returned to the wok and reheated briefly with the meat.

All that’s needed to cook with a wok is a flat-bladed metal spatula for stirring, a bamboo-handled wire-net spoon to scoop things out of liquids, a ladle, and a set of long chopsticks. The Chinese spatula is perfectly suited for the wok, especially for stir-frying. It is short and curved slightly to fit the wok’s sloping sides so food doesn’t slip underneath it. Moreover, its leading edge is broader in order to scoop up the maximum amount of food with each stroke of the cook’s hand. The spatula also has a lip round the sides and back, which helps push food forward during stir-frying and hold food better when it is being transferred to a serving dish. The spatula is actually a wok “shovel”—it serves as spatula, scraper, spoon, and stirrer. Its design shows that even secondary tools in Chinese kitchens are designed to be highly versatile.

Companion to the spatula is a ladle, a necessity for serving the soup that is part of every Chinese meal and for other dishes with sauces. The ladle also serves as a small mixing bowl for the cornstarch-and­ liquid thickener that is added to so many stir-flied dishes. The results possible from a wok and these few backup utensils are an impressive lesson in economy.

Bamboo has great functional value. Its strength and durability make it popular for constructing everything from tables and chairs to house frames and roofing. In the kitchen, its strong segmented stems make great handles for ladles and scoops.But one of bamboo’s most important uses has always been in making steamers.

Steamers, called chen lung in Chi­nese, are made from thin layers of wood, narrow strips of vine, and—the key component—bamboo. The bamboo tops and bottoms of steamers are the most important parts, because they direct and regulate the flow of steam. Steamers come in a wide variety of sizes, all designed to be stacked in layers over the source of steam, such as water boiling in a wok. The most common­-sized steamers at home and in restaurants are circular, and eight to ten inches in diameter. The steamers used for such items as Cantonese dim sum or snack foods may be as small as three and a half inches in diameter.

Whatever the size, steamers have the same basic construction, one that has remained fairly constant for centuries. The circular side is made out of four layers of a light, blond wood that is purchased in large thin sheets. These are cut into strips and softened by boiling them in huge pots, a process that makes it easier to bend them into the tight circles that form the steamer’s walls. Four layers are used to give added strength to the main body of the steamer. (Very large steamers may have as many as six to twelve layers.) The end of the outer layer is held in place by a double row of vine “stitching.”

The bottom of each steamer is a row of narrow bamboo strips reinforced by two other strips of the same material placed at right angles. This loose grid is lashed together with thin strips of vine, then fitted about one-fourth of the distance from the lower edge of the steamer frame. A raised Iip made from two layers of wood inserted into the top of the steamer helps hold the grid in place. The side of the lid is also four layers thick, and the top is made from a double layer of woven bam­boo with a small woven vine handle in the center. The top surface is convex and re­inforced underneath by wide, thick bam­boo slats.

Even if used daily, steamers can last several years before needing to be re­placed. The first parts to go are either the vine stitching or the top lips, which can become damaged over time by hurried stacking. If damage is a problem, why not use metal steamers and save money? The suggestion can be brushed aside, accord­ing to Hsiao Hsien-yu, a well-known steamer maker who has a shop in Wanhua, the historic heart of old Taipei. “Bamboo and wood are much better for steamers,” he says. “They hold the steam very well, but enough escapes so there are no puddles to make the food soggy.” He also says that wooden steamers “look better” on the table and, after all, “they’re traditional.”

Dumplings usually come in servings of eight in an eight-or ten-inch-diameter steamer, each one called a lung, for short. For example, an order of three lung will bring twenty-four dumplings in a stack of three steamers. As diners eat from the top layer, the ones underneath hold just enough heat to keep the dumplings hot without overcooking them.

Diners will notice that food items are rarely put directly on a steamer’s bamboo-slat bottom. Usually a lettuce or cabbage leaf—or perhaps a thin cheesecloth—is placed over the slats before putting in dumplings or other foods. This way, food particles don’t adhere to the steam­er’s slats or vine bindings, which means it can be used again without tedious cleaning. A metal plate with holes for the steam can also be used, but it’s still best to cover this with a leaf of lettuce so the steam won’t puddle. “Besides,” says Taipei chef Johnny Chang, “a leafy veg­etable adds a little bit of flavor and aroma, and it’s also cost-effective—it means we can use kitchen trimmings in a construc­tive way.”

Even when cooking food in bamboo steamers, it’s a good idea to rotate the steamers, or the items in the lower ones may overcook. Normally a stack of six or seven steamers is considered the maximum, but it all depends upon how strong the source of steam is. At dumpling shops, it is common to see stacks of ten or more during the busiest times. However many are in use, the sight of a stack of steamers always means that tasty treats are at hand, thanks to creative use of simple wood, vine, and bamboo.

Today’s “minimax” philosophy of using the minimum number of utensils for the maximum benefit in cooking actually has ancient roots in China. Give Chinese cooks a cleaver, chopping block, wok, and steamer, and they have virtually everything they need to prepare almost any Chinese dish. So, want to start up your own restaurant? All that’s needed is the four treasures of the kitchen—plus a few simple tools and a pot to cook rice—and you’re in business.