Week 47: Sichuan Orange Beef

The book: Chinese Food Made Easy (Ching-He Huang)

The recipe: p. 42, "Sichuan Orange Beef"

Age and achievement are a funny thing. While I'm still reeling from my own 38th birthday, Wikipedia informs me that Ching-He Huang was born exactly nine days earlier than me in that fine autumn of 1978. And sure, she may have "become the face of Chinese cookery internationally through her TV shows, books, tableware range and involvement in many high-profile campaigns and causes" - but does she have a blog in which she uses a random number generator for the purposes of wilful culinary self-harm? I think not.

If my memory (OK, my search function) serves me right, we haven't delved into the pages of this book since way back in Week 6, where it delivered a punchy lunchtime treat. This time round we're in main course territory, and Ching introduces her recipe with evocative talk of "dried tangerine peel and the citrusy-numbing hot Sichuan peppercorns" and the delicious flavour they bring to Sichuan cooking. Sounds pretty promising - let's see how it equates to the plate, shall we?

The prep: I'm initially concerned, as the ingredient list suggests that a trip to the local Chinese supermarket might be required - and on the day in question, the local Chinese supermarket is still firmly on the wrong side of this:

Oops.

To my surprise, however, there's nothing that can't be obtained at Lewisham Sainsbury's, including shiitake mushrooms and the "optional" (ahahaha) jasmine rice - though it probably helps that I've still got Shaohsing rice wine in the cupboard from those Week 6 adventures.

Otherwise all I need to do is select my preferred interpretation of the recipe's "frying steak or fillet steak". Fillet seems a bit of an extravagance for a meal like this, plus the previous day's "dinner" was an endless supply of Virgin East Coast sandwiches, muffins, biscuits, muffins, crisps and muffins, so something more substantial seems advisable. As such - and since, dear reader, I like big butts and I cannot lie - I settle on a couple of rump steaks, thin enough to absorb the flavours and allow for quick cooking but thick enough to satisfy.

The making: Being a BBC tie-in, the recipe is available right here, although there are slight differences in terms of both ingredients (white pepper here, black pepper in the book) and method. Since the Random Kitchen is all about my underused cookbooks, I'm sticking with what it says on the printed page, natch.

I start by mixing the rice wine with some light soy sauce, runny honey, orange juice (I'm assuming smooth not bitty) and freshly ground pepper, before adding the beef and leaving it to marinate for what ends up being about 20 minutes.

An absorbing sight

In the meantime, I cook the jasmine rice, dish it up and leave it in the oven on a plate-warming temperature - the recipe will later require me to cover the cooked steaks to keep them warm while finishing off the other ingredients, but I know from bitter experience that cold plates and hot steaks are a disappointing combination, so this seems a more promising approach. (Plus the rice is already sticky by definition, so a few minutes at 100-ish degrees will hardly change much.)

That done, a frying pan is heated until highly hot. I add oil followed by my substantial rump, which I've halved for ease of handling. The meat is cooked as preferred - a couple of minutes on either side in this case, for a medium-rare finish that'll be nicely medium by the time it's been kept warm for a bit.

#gaysteak #instarump #speedomeat

The remaining marinade is added for the last few seconds, bubbling up before reducing down, then I plate up the beef with the rice and pop it back into the warm oven.

The final stage is to cook the shiitake mushrooms in the same pan, so that they soak up all the remaining juices from the marinade. Once the mushrooms are softened, I throw in the "garnish" for a couple of seconds too, since I think it could benefit from absorbing some of the same flavours. The garnish in question is a peeled and segmented orange - the photo in the book suggests that the segments themselves should also be peeled, which I file firmly under "life's too short" - and a sliced spring onion (optional, but duh).

This is then assembled along with the steak and rice to produce a dish that looks uncannily like a chunk of beef smothered by various Asian and not-so-Asian toppings.

Colourful though

The eating: Broadly positive noises all round, though Sam is happier than I am. The impact of the honey/orange marinade is a bit sickly for my taste, failing to really cut through the flavour of the meat, but we're agreed that the mushrooms and spring onions work nicely (and that the orange segments are, well, a bit odd). For the most part, though, the dish seems to work mainly because it's a decent cut of meat cooked just right, and not because of anything Ching's recipe has added to proceedings.

This is when I realise what's missing. The intro to the recipe waxes lyrical about the tang of orange peel and the spice of peppercorns, so why aren't they used here? Anything along those lines - heck, even just some garlic or chilli - would offset the sweetness and give the dish a far more satisfactory kick. I'm not asking for it to be spicy per se, merely something other than only sweet. As it stands, though, it's just a fairly bland and uneventful steak and rice dish with some nice mushrooms on top.

Which is fine in itself - and it's a quick and easy dinner that certainly suits the "Made Easy" claim of the book's title - but I was expecting something a little more interesting after Week 6's taste explosion. I'd say "maybe next time", but time is something this project is rapidly running out of...

One-word verdict: Perfunctory.