TracyFood

Recipe: Braised Bok Choi With Asian Flavors 23 May 2007 10:54 pm

Posted by Tracy in : cooking, eating, garden, politics, recipes, school, vegan, vegetarian , trackback

So yesterday at the Urban Farm somebody harvested the biggest bok choi I have ever seen in my life, and I could not resist its power, and took it home. Behold!

I mean, holy cow, look at the size of that thing! It’s bigger than my cats! (For comparison, here is a picture of me with an armful of kitty. See? Iggy is much smaller than the mother of all bok choi.)

So what to do with that much delicious brassica goodness? Well, I had in mind some sort of stir-fry with a hoisin-based sauce, served over brown rice. Healthy! Towards this end, I consulted Moosewood Restaurant New Classics, The New Best Recipe, Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home, New Recipes From Moosewood Restaurant and A Year In A Vegetarian Kitchen (still out from the library for a few more days) and realized that instead of a stir-fry, with some kind of cornstarch-thickened sauce, I really wanted more of a braise, with more liquidy goodness that could be absorbed by the rice, sort of like an Asian-flavored spin on the quick-and-healthy greens I recommended to my friend Ellen a while back. A proper stir-fry, perhaps with tofu to absorb sauce, could wait for another day (because I certainly had more than one meal’s worth of vegetable, oh yes). Here’s what we had for dinner tonight:

Ingredients and Equipment

2 cups brown rice, 3 cups water, and a rice cooker (I’m sure you see where this is going)
measuring cup and spoons
cutting board and knife
large nonstick skillet (I used my big huge 12-inch sauté pan so as to have room for all the greens)
half a big mama head of bok choi, or two regular-size heads, or a whole bunch of baby bok choi, cut into bite-size pieces, white and green parts separated, about 10 cups (mine broke down into about 5 cups of white parts and at least 5 cups of greens, tightly packed and even overflowing a little)
2 TB peanut oil
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
1 inch ginger, grated or minced
2 TB hoisin sauce
1 TB soy sauce
3 TB mirin (sweet rice wine for cooking) or cooking sherry
maybe a little sugar or honey
maybe some more water
1 TB toasted sesame oil
a dash of Worcestershire sauce, or up to 1 TB (note that Worcestershire may contain anchovies but vegan/vegetarian kinds are available)
optional garnishes: fresh cilantro, sesame seeds, Chinese chili sauce or sriracha

What You Do

First things first, start the rice cooking in the rice cooker. Brown rice takes longer but was exactly what I wanted for this dish. Nutty!

Combine the hoisin, soy sauce, mirin, Worcestershire sauce, and sesame oil in a small bowl or liquid measuring cup. Taste it and adjust the seasonings if needed — for more sweetness, add more mirin or a little sugar or honey; for more savory/umami add more Worcestershire sauce, and so on. (When in doubt, go easy on the soy sauce because you can always put more on later when you’re eating.) Add a few tablespoons of water if you want your greens extra-saucy, like I did. (After all my fiddling and adjustment, I had a little under a cup of sauce.) Set the sauce aside for now.

Prepare all the vegetables, starting with the garlic and ginger and moving on to the bok choi, white parts first and green parts last. If you’re using very tender little baby bok choi, you could probably get away with mixing the white and green parts, but otherwise I highly recommend keeping them separate because the greens are much more tender and hardly need to cook at all, whereas the white parts benefit from a little more heat and time to absorb delicious braising liquid.

When the garlic and ginger are ready, heat the peanut oil in the frying pan over medium-high heat. When it’s hot, add the garlic and ginger (instead of watching it and waiting for it, prep some more bok choi!) Let them sizzle and foam for about a minute, until deliciously aromatic. (If you like things spicy, you could add 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes or cayenne at this point, but tonight I wanted to keep things deliciously bland.)

Next, add the white parts of the bok choi and stir until coated with oil and aromatics. Let it cook for a few minutes (say, enough time to finish chopping the green parts). Pour in the sauce ingredients and stir well. When the sauce ingredients are hot and bubbling, add the green parts and cover the pan for a minute or two, long enough for the sauce to boil and steam the greens.

Stir and fry the greens into the braise until just wilted. Serve on brown rice, maybe with a sprinkling of freshly chopped cilantro or sesame seeds or hot sauce or more soy sauce if desired. (If you wanted to go for a really fancy presentation instead of plain brown rice, Jack Bishop suggests a similar dish as a topping for a pancake made of fresh Chinese noodles, first cooked and then fried in a large skillet. Or you could just toss the braise with freshly cooked noodles, and they’d probably absorb the sauce deliciously.)

Makes at least 3-4 very generous servings, maybe as many as 5 or 6 if you’re not super-hungry or increase the amount of rice. The stir-fry takes 30-45 minutes from raw vegetables to finished product, which is conveniently enough about how long it takes to cook brown rice.

Other notes: It took me much longer to write up this recipe than it did for me to invent and cook it, so don’t be fooled by the length of this entry; I’m just in a verbose mood, I guess. The only really time-consuming steps here are chopping the vegetables and measuring and mixing the sauce ingredients. You could make parts of this recipe ahead of time by combining the garlic and ginger and other sauce ingredients into a marinade and storing it separately from the prepared vegetables until you wanted to cook everything, either as a stir-fry or by tossing them together and baking everything in a covered dish in the oven for 15-20 minutes at 350 degrees F or so, with a stir about halfway through. The advantage of the oven method is you don’t have to stand watch over it as much as stir-frying; the disadvantage is it’s very easy to end up with overcooked greens and underdone white parts unless you’re using very tender baby bok choi and setting a timer to check it so often you might as well just stir-fry. Oh, and this would be delicious with marinated, baked, or pan-fried tofu (you could even use the pre-made stuff available at fine hippie stores if you were feeling super-lazy).