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A last taste of days gone by

They wont be making black bean sauce like this for much longer.

Hong Kong's sauce industry is in its twilight years, according a family business renowned for the black bean sauce and paste it has made for more than a century in the backstreets of Shamshuipo.
Now, Lau Shing Wo Wine Vinegar Sauce Garden, based in Un Chau Street, is set to close to make way for the Urban Renewal Authority's redevelopment of an area famed for its rooftop streets.

Leung Chi-kit, 47, grandson of Lau Tze, one of the brothers who started the business in 1902, has turned down the Housing Society's offer of HK$382,000 compensation for their site, where they have been for 16 years.

He is still negotiating for a bigger settlement, but has been unable to find premises in which to relocate before the end of the month.

Mr Leung, whose shop relies heavily on local demand, says he has no option but to close, now that Un Chau Street is almost deserted.

"I have no choice. Everyone has moved out, the rooftop streets are empty. Even though some of them still come to the shop, I don't have half the customers I had before," he says.

His shop, and those of many other shopkeepers along Un Chau Street, will be taken over by the government this week, though many have yet to accept the official offer of compensation.

Lau Shing Wo specialises in fermented black bean paste and first soy sauce, the first batch of light soy sauce that usually sells at a premium because of its superior taste.

The company also trades in rice wine and vinegar, and draws customers from across Hong Kong and even further afield.

"Few people do it like we do," says Chau Cheung, 74, a master saucier with 50 years' experience. "We use manpower to produce our sauces, right from the beginning to the end of the process. You won't find any machinery here, like they use at the mass-produced factories.

"You can't cook a sauce of the highest quality with machinery.

"You have to watch the process all the time, adjusting the fire, ensuring the same consistency and adding the ingredients in the correct order and with the right timing, not just chucking them all in at the beginning. We also leave the sauce out in the sun, for the salt to rise, like in the old-fashioned way, not steaming it like they do in the factories.

"The result is that our sauces have real taste. Our customers refuse to go anywhere else because they say such products have no flavour, and Chinese-Americans take suitcase-loads of our sauces home with them when they come to visit."

Shek Fat, 71, in charge of marketing, says many of their products have medicinal qualities.

"We have a Chinese osteopath who buys white vinegar only from this shop," he says. "When you have arthritis it is good for soaking in, to soften the aching bones. Though it can't heal the disease it can numb the pain."

Mr Leung says he does not know what the future holds for him.

"I can't accept the government's compensation; it is not even enough for the renovations that would need to be done," he says. "But now I have nowhere to go; I can't afford paying more rent and I am going to have to close. The sauce business is in its twilight years in Hong Kong."

Siu King-chung, who teaches design education at Polytechnic University and has been taking part in research projects in renewal districts, says it is important to document the history of old districts such as Un Chau Street before they vanished.

"It is important to find out how a business catering for such a small market of connoisseurs has managed to be so successful," Professor Siu says.

"We need to understand this before we throw it all away, before we lose so much of our diversity."

Graduate student Ng Pui-yan, 28, who focused on Lau Shing Wo for her design education project, says it is a sad and unnecessary loss of culture.

"What angers me is that this shop would thrive in most circumstances. It is not market forces that is closing this shop, it is the government and urban renewal driving them away," Ms Ng says.

Source: South China Morning Post

By:       Donald Asprey

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Do Hong Kong School Chefs need a Jamie Olliver?

Hong Kong - Thousands of Hong Kong children returned to school on Monday to find themselves confronted by healthier lunches in a major drive to cut rising rates of obesity in the wealthy city.

Lunch contractors serving meals to 400 000 children in 500 primary schools have been urged by the government to serve up healthier food after studies found nearly one in five children in Hong Kong are now obese.

Obesity levels have risen from 16,4 percent of children in 1997 to 18,7 percent last year, according to department of health figures, and a study earlier this year found only one in 10 snacks eaten at primary schools could be classified as healthy.

The findings reflect a growing obesity epidemic in the former British colony whose population of 6,8 million do little exercise, live in high-rise flats and eat an increasingly Westernised diet.

The growing popularity of fast food as people switch from traditional rice-based diets to hamburgers, fried chicken and French fries has been named as one of the major factors.

 '... we have been seeing a rising trend of obesity'

To counter the trend, a 64-page guidebook featuring 30 low-fat recipes with ingredients such as vegetables, bean curd and leafy vegetables has been distributed to lunch contractors to try to encourage them to serve up healthier food

Department of health assistant director Regina Ching said: "We have been monitoring our primary school students for their body weight and height, and for the past seven or eight years we have been seeing a rising trend of obesity.

"If parents don't pay attention, their children will get fatter and fatter... you may get diabetes and the possibility of an early onset of heart disease and stroke as well as being prone to some forms of cancer."

Ching pointed out that the problem of obesity was a much larger cause of death in Hong Kong than the 2003 Sars epidemic which led to the deaths of 299 people.

The guidelines issued to school contractors are voluntary but Ching said she hoped parents would exercise their power as consumers by demanding healthier food in schools.

The growth in the girths of Hong Kong children coincides with an increasing tendency for parents to have only one child.

The territory's birth rate is one of the world's lowest with women having an average of only 0,9 children

Source: www.iol.co.za

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Everything we eat must die

By Reese Deveaux ( source www.asiansentinel.com )

 

Joel Robuchon serves Shark's Fin with a French flair

and he doesn't see anything wrong with it

Joel Robuchon doesn't let controversy get in the way of haute cuisine. Acclaimed one of the greatest chefs of the 20th Century, the 61-year-old Robuchon was in Macau recently to visit his spectacular restaurant, Robuchon a Galera, and not to just correct the sauce.  He was out to produce as many as 20 new dishes, many based on local ingredients, for his quarterly gala dinner. 

Among those local ingredients, he said in an interview, was l'Aileron de Requin: shark's fin.

Asked if he was aware of the controversy over shark-finning, in which fishermen hack off the animal's dorsal and pectoral fins and toss it back into the sea to die, Robuchon shrugged. As many as 100 million sharks are estimated to be dying every year to feed demand for fins, a fact that drove environmentalists to mount a relentless attack on the Disney Corporation over Hong Kong Disneyland's now-discarded plan to serve shark's fin soup at elite wedding banquets.

"But in order to eat you have to kill one life anyway," Robuchon said through an interpreter. "It is always this way, the fish, viand, the legume."

Asked for the recipe, Robuchon replies, "Ah, no, it is a secret. But it will not be in a soup, it will be cooked in the French way. It will go onto the menu if... I think we will keep the ones that are received best by the guests."

And so, mes cher amis, when the gala dinner was served on May 27, there it was: L'Aileron de Reqin en croustille, petite fleur de capucine et feuelles de coriander en tempura.  Shark's fin served with tiny crusty nasturtium flowers and coriander leaves in a tempura batter.

Everything we eat must die.

Robuchon is expanding his operations in the Pearl River neighborhood. In partnership with Alan Ho, the nephew of casino supremo Stanley Ho, he will open a new restaurant, his tenth, in Hong Kong in October. He won't reveal many details this far in advance of unveiling the new spot in the Landmark office complex in Central, although it is to be another edition of his acclaimed L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon, four of which already exist in Paris, New York, Las Vegas and Tokyo.  The master chef came out of retirement with a drastic change in style from haute cuisine to open the L'Atelier chain, called by Conde Nast Traveler "the world's best coffee shop cum sushi or tapas bar," with counter-only service and no reservations.

"It is very much a family restaurant where the cooking is very much in front of the guests," Robuchon says. "For example you take the fusion cuisine, some people say that fusion is confusion and the concept of this restaurant is quite the opposite. It is la cuisine de verite, mange la verite.  It is a way of cooking that is very fast and very easy, and the product has to be perfect.  The concept will be based on the idea that the consumer will want a kind of proof cuisine, they will want to see the product, they want to taste it, they want to recognize it. They want it to be cooked in a way so that you can feel the very taste of the product. Simplicity and truth."

L'Atelier is about as far away as possible in concept from Robuchon a Galera, which is considered by many to be Asia's finest pure French restaurant and a striking contrast to the Hotel Lisboa, the garish cross between a bird cage and a wedding cake owned by Stanley Ho. A remarkable antithesis  to the rococo gambling palace in which it sits, Robuchon a Galera is all starched napery and damask with only 10 tables seating 55 diners. The draperies are Thai silk. The glassware is Reidel. The cutlery is Cristofle, as are the silver tureens. The porcelain is Bernardaud from Limoges. In a burst of true excess, the fibre-optic lights twinkling in the ceiling are tipped with Swarovski crystal. The wine list is an astonishing 35 pages long and features as many as 3,000 wines, most of them classic French although there is a healthy sprinkling of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Australian and American ones also.  The kitchen is tucked discreetly away and dinner is served by a corps of superbly trained servers.

L'Atelier is to be a long way from that.  "It will not be like this," Robuchon says from the depths of an overstuffed chair in the antechamber to the Macau restaurant. "I think today what is very important for people who go to the restaurants is also the atmosphere, not only what is in the plate but in the context in which you are eating, and this will become much more important in the future."

Robuchon's four other L'Ateliers – literally workshops in French – are open to the world, with Spanish hams dangling from the ceilings and chefs laboring away in full view of  diners seated in black and red Chinese lacquered interiors.  

Despite his disdain for the concept, Robuchon makes his occasional bow toward fusion  but he will make no bow towards la gastronomie moleculaire – molecular gastronomy – the revolutionary method of cooking pioneered by Ferran Adria in his Barcelona restaurant El Bulli. Molecular gastronomy chefs literally tear food apart, using centrifuges and liquid nitrogen among other tools, and reconstitute it in different forms. Although Adria is a friend whom Robuchon helped to promote, and although some food critics believe they can detect an Adria influence on some of L'Atelier's dishes, Robuchon gives a firm non to molecular cuisine.

Adria's cuisine, Robuchon says, "is a very personal one, but today there are a lot of chefs who are trying to copy him and they are making very bad copies and this is not helping Ferran Adria.  I am 200 percent against this cuisine.  I am against it because they are using all products like additives which are used in this molecular cuisines business. All these products which have been prohibited by the health services, the veterinary services, these ingredients have been banned from cuisine.  The molecular chefs use these."

Traditional foie gras, for example, must be very fresh. "But in the molecular cuisine you can have any kind of foie gras, bad quality or not, because you deconstruct it, you freeze it, you transform it into a kind of powder and mix it with a kind of soup or a sauce and you can put it on dishes and you can use very bad products."

Molecular cuisine, he says, "is made for people who know nothing about food or cooking, it is made for people who just want to be amazed.  They say this is wonderful, but they know nothing about taste or products or cuisine in general."

In cuisine as in all fields of life, he says, "there are new passions, new trends, and it is a kind of cycle, you are born, you live and you die.  And it is the same with cuisine.  You always come back to a more traditional way.  There are some positive things about fusion cuisine, the techniques, the products that they use, but what I do not like at all is when you put a dish in front of me and you ask me to guess what I am eating.  The mixing of products so that you do not recognize the taste of anything, this is something which I do not like."

Robuchon displays a refreshing willingness to use local products. Shark's fin is not the only local substance that will appear on his plates, in contrast to virtually every other European chef in Hong Kong, most of whom fly in virtually every ingredient they use. .  Vittorio Lucariello, Neapolitan chef de cuisine at Grissini in the Grand Hyatt, for instance, is so concerned about quality that he even has his eggs flown in from Italy.
But, Robuchon says, "we use local products as much as possible.  Except for very specific things which you cannot find here, for example white truffle, caviar, specialties like vegetables or fish or seafood, we use the local.  For example in Macau, we are proposing dishes with the local crab, which is extraordinary."

The important thing, he says, is the technique, la cuisine de France. "In Japan, I found things which I did not know before, I used them, cooked them, cooked them the French way, and they have a French taste.  White truffle is not French, it is Italian, but it is the way you cook the product.  Here you can find a very small coral of crab, and when you prepare it in a specific way, you would not think it is not a French taste."

He will continue that pattern in Hong Kong with L'Atelier, but it remains to be seen how many of the new-style Robuchon restaurants will eventually emerge. His arch-rival, the nine-starred Alain Ducasse, has become "la Groupe Alain Ducasse", a vast luxury-food corporation, opening restaurants and chateaux across the world with lines of books and ancillary products.  In addition to his top-class three-starred establishments, Ducasse has his own line, Spoon, which has drawn only faint approval from critics and diners alike. When Ducasse appears in Hong Kong to hold court, he is dressed in tweed, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, in contrast to Robuchon's appearance in a full white tunic with the neck rimmed in the French tricolor and toque blanche nearby.

Will Robuchon follow in Ducasse's shoes?  He sniffs.

"The goal is not to make 100 restaurants. We have chosen big cities where we have decided to open, maybe there will be one or two more, and then we will stop.  We will never be a Starbuck's

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The Chefs Catch! A Boat trip to nowhere *Date changed*

Date changed to Monday September 25, 2006

Enjoy a trip around Hong Kong, in early autumn, There will be Wine, food and songs and of course good friendship and camaraderie.

The trip will start in Central (Queens Pier) at 4:30 pm and we will return about 11:00 pm

The cost for the trip every thing inclusive is HK$ 180.- per member.

Hurry up and register! First come first serves. We can take maximum 40 persons on the boat.

It will be an evening to remember.

More info will be given closer to the date.

To join this event please send e-mail to Eddy Leung at chef@eddy.com

Cheating Chefs leave bad taste with fake food

Source: The Times

The table is laid, the waiter has taken the order and the diners are looking forward to an outstanding French meal.

But in the kitchen, the chefs are spraying an omelette with a truffle-flavoured chemical and injecting fake wild-mushroom drops into a duck filet.

Science Fiction? No, this is the reality in many French restaurants, which are “cheating” their customers with a growing range of artificial products, according to gastronomic purists. They say that the use of flavourings to enhance the taste of otherwise ordinary dishes is misleading because they are rarely mentioned on the menu.

For years, secrecy surrounded the products, which come in liquid and powdered form. They were an unspoken ingredient of contemporary Gallic gastronomy.

But their existence has been brought into the open by two leading chefs, Joel Robuchon and Alain Passard, who have both spoken out against what they describe as a “scandal”.

“It is shameful,” said M Passard, who claims to use only natural ingredients at his celebrated Parisian restaurant, l’Arpège. “I don’t know what to call the people who use these chemicals, but they are not cooks. Cooking is about seasons and nature.”

M Robuchon, widely considered to be one of the most talented chefs of the past 20 years, agreed. He said: “I am 200 per cent against the use of artificial flavours and additives.” However, such flavours appear to be an increasingly common ingredient in French cuisine, with chefs looking for quick, cheap recipes.

Jean-André Charial, who runs the Oustau de la Baumanière hotel and restaurant in Baux-de-Provence, southern France, said: “I know chefs around here who have a drawer full of plastic bottles in their kitchens.

“They put a drop of this in here, and a drop of that in there, but they don’t tell their customers they are doing it. You save time and money, but I think it’s a form of cheating.”

Chefsimon.com, a French culinary website, supplies many of the arômes artificiels that have become popular. These include caviar, truffle, prawn, crab, shallot and cep drops.

The site also explains how to inject wild-mushroom flavour into duck, make a “wine sauce” with a violet-coloured powder, add a zest of bottled scallop to scallop tagliatelli, and spray saffron perfume on to a marzipan turnover.

Chefsimon.com says that its products “faithfully reproduce the sought-after tastes”, adding: “Vanilla, coffee and pistachio flavourings are widely accepted and used in kitchens.

“An increased range should logically be tolerated and accepted by everyone in the end. However, the fear of being accused of cheating prevents the chef from using them openly.”

Another supplier to the French restaurant trade is Pierre-Jean Pébeyre, whose family company has been selling truffles for 110 years.

With France’s annual truffle production falling from 800 tonnes to 12 tonnes during that period and prices now reaching €4,000 (£2,700) a kilo, he has developed an artificial truffle oil, which he says is popular

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Smart Eggs

 

The “British Egg Information Service” has developed a new self-timing egg that tells you when it’s cooked — using heat-sensitive ink. No word yet on availability.

The egg has heat-sensitive ink that displays only when the correct temperature is reached, meaning when your egg is done. The eggs come in hard-boiled, medium, or soft varieties, meaning you have to buy the kind you want or else the ink is useless

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Interesting Food Websites

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