Times Online - Chinese Food Shopping Made Easy

It's all Chinese to me

Nick Wyke sets about demystifying the Chinese supermarket experience and its Asian ingredients

From Toronto and San Francisco to Rome and Liverpool, many cities have a Chinatown. In fact, China’s surging economy has kick-started a race to build the world’s largest Chinatown, with St. Petersburg, Dubai and Las Vegas all currently vying for the title.

For many Westerners, stepping into a city’s Chinatown still registers a cultural tremor, however small. The glossy ducks splayed in restaurant windows above trays of Day-Glo orange squid and boxes of baton-like root vegetables and spiky fruits feel like a world apart from most food malls. As well as somewhere to eat out, a city’s Chinatown can be a great enclave to shop for exotic, authentic ingredients to add to a stir-fry or to buy a cheap, pukka wok or bamboo steamer.

A new tour of London’s Chinatown, led by food writer Jenny Linford, helps you to do just that. The stroll around Lisle and Gerrard Streets is punctuated by stops at a Chinese bakery for jasmine tea and a restaurant for dim sum, while Linford explores how Chinese food has evolved in Soho over the years, dishes out secrets of Cantonese cuisine, and demystifies the Chinese supermarket experience and its Asian ingredients.

“People come to Chinatown for its restaurants, but it’s often at its best mid-morning when the crowds are few and all the shops are being restocked with fresh produce. There are authentic ingredients in the shops that you won’t find in the restaurants. Mainly because the restaurants cater to the tourists and the shops to the old community,” says Linford, who grew up partly in Singapore and used to shop with her mother in Soho’s supermarkets as a teenager.

The Chinese supermarkets certainly have better names than ours. In the boxes outside the New Loon Moon Supermarket, on Gerrard Street, are piles of fruits and vegetables, all helpfully labelled for the novice shopper.

As well as purple-skinned mangosteens, tropical dragon and star fruits, durian is a yellow, pulpy fruit banned on airlines in South-East Asia on account of its pungent, ripe cheese smell. This Chinese delicacy has a large, thorny shell that is typically cracked open with a machete and shared with friends. Pre-prepared durian fruit can be found in the refrigerated section inside.

Long Kong look like piddly crab apples but when peeled reveal transparent segments of a sweet, grapefruit flavoured fruit. And rambutans resemble dark red sea urchins whose hairy exterior yields a large lychee-like fruit.

“These unusual but delicious fruits make a simple but impressive addition to a dinner party table,” says Linford.

As well as fruit, this is the place to buy fresh, leafy green vegetables. Gai laan, or Chinese broccoli, keeps its crunchy texture when stir-fried with garlic and oyster sauce, and ong choi, or water spinach, has foot-long hollow stalks and neat, lean leaves. The crispy stems and tender foliage contrast well when stir-fried, often with fermented shrimp sauce, shallots and chilli in Cantonese cuisine. Yam bean is a root vegetable that can be eaten raw; it has a sweet appley taste and works well shaved in salads.

“Many people are intimidated by unfamiliar Chinese supermarkets and overwhelmed by the produce,” says Linford. But cosmopolitan diners are not likely to feel completely lost: “The owners are shrewd operators and will stock Japanese and Thai ingredients, too, if they are flavour of the day.”

Inside the brightly-lit stores, highlights for the foreign shopper include fresh ho fun rice noodles which have a slippery texture. “So much of Chinese food is about texture,” says Linford. Some noodles are flavoured with shrimp and peas, but all are ideal for soaking up the flavour of condiments and sauces.

As well as fresh turmeric, thick Chinese chives like reeds and root ginger there are good-value bags of dried shiitake mushrooms that have a rich, almost meaty flavour and are delicious added to Chinese-style hotpots. To use them simply soak them for 10-15 minutes in warm water and snip off any tough stalks.

The fresh bean curd in the chilled section is moist and bright not at all like the long-life stuff found in health food stores. There are starchy fish balls, trays of dim sum like freshly made tortellini with a whole range of fillings ready for steaming or packets of fresh wonton wrappers to create your own dumplings to be poached in soups or deep fried. Stock up the store cupboard with bargain bottles of soy and oyster sauce and 40p boxes of Chinese green tea.

Just as when you’re abroad, there’s some stuff that’s probably best avoided or left to the local community. In this case, instant potted noodles, plastic jars of food colouring, hefty bags of MSG and a bottle of Great Wall Chinese white wine that looked like a relic from the 1970s.

Ching-He Huang, presenter of BBC TV’s Chinese Food Made Easy prefers to shop at a local Asian supermarket or Chinatown rather than a mainstream supermarket to stock up on dried ingredients such as long-life noodles, condiments, tinned ingredients (like mock duck), spices and fresh goods such as tofu, Chinese leaf vegetables and “of course my dose of durian”.

For specialist ingredients, Ching recommends online: try www.wingyipstore.co.uk or Hoohing.com or Waiyeehong.com

Once you’ve gathered the ingredients cooking Chinese is so simple. “Most men that I know love wok cooking, because it’s quite methodical and straightforward (unlike most men!) with great results,” says Ching. “Prep all the ingredients, heat the oil, add the aromatics, ingredients, stir fry and season.”

At the Far East Bakery on Gerrard Street where we stopped for jasmine tea and glossy topped red-bean paste and coconut filled buns brought up in trays, still warm, from the kitchen downstairs, they are serving congee-rice porridge. “It’s a panacea for all ills,” says the woman behind the counter.

It may well be the start of a new trend, too. “Chinese-Asian style breakfasts are the next big thing in America,” says Ching. “Before long we may see oriental breakfasts bars in UK serving congee or you tiao (Chinese fried bread sticks) and hot soya milk instead of the usual coffee and croissant.”

Jenny Linford’s next New Flavours Tour of Chinatown, Soho, London runs on Saturday 22 November 2008; for more information visit www.angelamalik.co.uk

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