15th October 2009
Startes
Guests were presented with visually arresting starters, Calligraphy Brushes and Hedgehog Buns, from the Yu's: pork filled flaky pastries in the form of traditional ink brushes on wooden brush handles served with a spicy sweet tomato sauce signifying red ink; steamed buns with quills formed by delicate snips of the dough filled with red bean paste.
Cold Dishes
The menu then followed then conventional progression of a Chinese banquet which is common amongst most of the regional cuisines. For the progression of cold dishes that began the banquet, we adopted the concept in Chinese gastronomy of transformation of the base ingredient into a ‘better' version of the original as the unifying theme. The extreme bitterness of bitter melon was dissipated by being salted and blanched and incorporated into a crisp salad with ginger and green chilli. The traditional Sichuan seasoning combination for fish (shallot, ginger, garlic, black vinegar and chilli bean paste) was used to cook diced eggplant flesh which was rolled up in the eggplant skin forming our interpretation of Fish Fragrant Eggplant. Shreds of Strange Flavour Chicken garnished this dish and increased the savouriness and lessened any unwelcome bitter taste left in the eggplant. We dipped squares of bible tripe into a hot and numbing hot-pot stock to dispel some of the rankness of the offal and combined it with liang fen (mung bean starch noodle-ettes), red and green chillies softened in hot peanut oil dressed with a sauce of dried chilli, fermented black bean, black vinegar and Sichuan peppercorn. We concluded with slices of tea-smoked duck (marinated, smoked, steamed and deep fried to render fat and to imbue flavour) accompanied by chicken liver glazed in flavoured stock and rolled up in caul fat and then glazed once again.
Hot Dishes
The aim of presenting this set of hot dishes was showcase the heat of ginger, chilli and Sichuan pepper in progressive intensity, with some pause for comfort. We presented a version of Yu Bo's Stir Fry of Pine Nut & Rabbit, innocuous and very tasty in a steamed but with an oil of dried chilli on the side. The next dish presented was Chilli Chicken with a pile of dried chilli camouflaging the treasures of chicken breast dices, scored strips of cuttlefish and pieces of house-made Chinese pork sausage scored to look like tentacles. Green beans were dry fried and put into bundles held together with stir-fried slivers of potato and served on a platter of water spinach fried with Sichuan pepper, chilli and garlic. This dish took its influence from Yu Bo's interest in re-shaping vegetable forms into decorative shapes.
Diners were then offered cubes of Red-Braised Pork Belly which helped to refresh palates with savoury sweet flavours of the dish. And following that, a Superior Chicken Broth accompanied with crisp wafers of shiso with cured tuna paste.
It is customary to round off a banquet with a rice or noodle dish. Our take on this custom was to offer Mapo Doufu with dumpling elements (one being boiled pork and yambean and the other deep fried then braised spanner crab with tofu) in a shellfish based sauce.
Dessert
It would have been remiss of a restaurant that follows French customs of dining not to offer sweet confections. In studying the cuisine of Sichuan, we grew to appreciate the fragrance of chillies and more particularly of the Sichuan pepper as opposed to their hot and/or numbing taste The dessert presented was mango ice cream scented additionally with dried chilli; Sichuan pepper meringue which had a lingering sweet numbing quality; and a soothing marshmallow of jasmine and crisp floweret of cumquat.
The comforting warmth and taste of glutinous rice balls filled with black sesame in rose petal syrup finished our banquet
A Sichuanese Banquet
On 12 October 2009, we celebrated the visit to the restaurant of Yu Bo and his wife, Dai Shuang, of Yu Jia Chufang in Chengdu, with a dinner inspired by their individualistic Sichuanese cuisine. Their visit to Sydney was under the auspices of Fuchsia Dunlop.Startes
Guests were presented with visually arresting starters, Calligraphy Brushes and Hedgehog Buns, from the Yu's: pork filled flaky pastries in the form of traditional ink brushes on wooden brush handles served with a spicy sweet tomato sauce signifying red ink; steamed buns with quills formed by delicate snips of the dough filled with red bean paste.
Cold Dishes
The menu then followed then conventional progression of a Chinese banquet which is common amongst most of the regional cuisines. For the progression of cold dishes that began the banquet, we adopted the concept in Chinese gastronomy of transformation of the base ingredient into a ‘better' version of the original as the unifying theme. The extreme bitterness of bitter melon was dissipated by being salted and blanched and incorporated into a crisp salad with ginger and green chilli. The traditional Sichuan seasoning combination for fish (shallot, ginger, garlic, black vinegar and chilli bean paste) was used to cook diced eggplant flesh which was rolled up in the eggplant skin forming our interpretation of Fish Fragrant Eggplant. Shreds of Strange Flavour Chicken garnished this dish and increased the savouriness and lessened any unwelcome bitter taste left in the eggplant. We dipped squares of bible tripe into a hot and numbing hot-pot stock to dispel some of the rankness of the offal and combined it with liang fen (mung bean starch noodle-ettes), red and green chillies softened in hot peanut oil dressed with a sauce of dried chilli, fermented black bean, black vinegar and Sichuan peppercorn. We concluded with slices of tea-smoked duck (marinated, smoked, steamed and deep fried to render fat and to imbue flavour) accompanied by chicken liver glazed in flavoured stock and rolled up in caul fat and then glazed once again.
Hot Dishes
The aim of presenting this set of hot dishes was showcase the heat of ginger, chilli and Sichuan pepper in progressive intensity, with some pause for comfort. We presented a version of Yu Bo's Stir Fry of Pine Nut & Rabbit, innocuous and very tasty in a steamed but with an oil of dried chilli on the side. The next dish presented was Chilli Chicken with a pile of dried chilli camouflaging the treasures of chicken breast dices, scored strips of cuttlefish and pieces of house-made Chinese pork sausage scored to look like tentacles. Green beans were dry fried and put into bundles held together with stir-fried slivers of potato and served on a platter of water spinach fried with Sichuan pepper, chilli and garlic. This dish took its influence from Yu Bo's interest in re-shaping vegetable forms into decorative shapes.
Diners were then offered cubes of Red-Braised Pork Belly which helped to refresh palates with savoury sweet flavours of the dish. And following that, a Superior Chicken Broth accompanied with crisp wafers of shiso with cured tuna paste.
It is customary to round off a banquet with a rice or noodle dish. Our take on this custom was to offer Mapo Doufu with dumpling elements (one being boiled pork and yambean and the other deep fried then braised spanner crab with tofu) in a shellfish based sauce.
Dessert
It would have been remiss of a restaurant that follows French customs of dining not to offer sweet confections. In studying the cuisine of Sichuan, we grew to appreciate the fragrance of chillies and more particularly of the Sichuan pepper as opposed to their hot and/or numbing taste The dessert presented was mango ice cream scented additionally with dried chilli; Sichuan pepper meringue which had a lingering sweet numbing quality; and a soothing marshmallow of jasmine and crisp floweret of cumquat.
The comforting warmth and taste of glutinous rice balls filled with black sesame in rose petal syrup finished our banquet
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