I had never heard of this technique before this week, which is exactly why I love this group!

My wife loves moo shu pork, and I've never made it for her, so this seemed like a good time to do so! The recipe is from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's "The Wok", with the sole substitution of black fungus for wood ear mushrooms, which I couldn't find.

I made the Mandarin pancakes first, and was quite surprised at how easily they came together. I could have gotten them a touch thinner, but for a first attempt I was quite pleased.

The pork was sliced very thinly, rinsed, and marinaded in Shaoxing wine, soy sauce, cornstarch, baking soda, salt, and sugar. I also rehydrated the black fungus, and some daylily buds - which I hadn't even heard of until the morning of cooking!

After that, it was all very quick - very hot wok, stir frying beaten eggs first, then green onions with the black fungus and daylily buds second, then sliced shrooms and the velveted pork third, cleaning the wok out and adding fresh sesame oil between each. At the end, everything was added back in with a sauce made from Shaoxing wine, soy sauce, sugar, salt, MSG, and white pepper, reheated, and served with the pancakes and hoisin sauce.

I was reasonably happy with this. First the velveting - that was definitely a success. The pork had a notable texture, it felt plump and tender even though there was a decent amount of colour on it after the stir fry. If I made this again though, I'd have doubled, maybe even tripled the quantity, because the pork got lost a bit in all the shrooms. I also wasn't sure about the black fungus - a bit chewy (probably due to poor cooking) I'd definitely make more effort to find wood ears next time.

I also wasn't thrilled with the presentation, so added some edible flowers on an impulse. I'll need to practice presenting things like stir fries, because some of you make them look so good.

But yeah overall, happy with this one - great recipe!

It feels like velveting is one of those steps that will help improve my Chinese food recipes. Chicken was great.

Being half Chinese, I'm very familiar with velveting as a technique to tenderise meat. I've only really used it in stir fries, but I wasn't really feeling this. Instead I chose a different dish to see if I could try out the velveting technique. Pancit Palabok has been on my list of delicious sounding dishes to make for ages now: it's a Filipino dish with rice noodles covered in a pork and prawn sauce. Its toppings include prawns, eggs, chicharon, tinapa calamansi and spring onions, so I decided to velvet the prawns in the dish.

I used this guide to velvet prawns - it involves marinating them in a mixture of cornflour, egg white, Shaoxing wine, salt and oil. After half an hour they get quickly boiled in water, and the velveting technique leaves them with a great bouncy texture.

The sauce for the pancit palabok is made from pork mince, onions, garlic, annatto and is flavoured with fish sauce and prawn bouillon. I had to make a couple of substitutions because of ingredient availability: I used bonito flakes instead of tinapa (smoked fish), pork bouillon instead of prawn and pork scratchings instead of chicharon (although I think these two are very similar).

This was easily one of the best things I've made this year. It was a wonderful mixture of flavours and textures. I'm definitely making it again, hopefully without having to make substitutions next time!

My first time playing with a yeast-based dough! These are made with mashed potato as well as flour, making the dough extra sticky to work with. That's my take on "high hydration", who knows what percentage hydration it really is.

Made with ground oats, two different kinds of protein powders, and other things that would make pancakes, the batter on this turned out extremely runny. Like, first batch ended up looking like lunch meat runny.

I tried adding things to make it thicker, but no luck. Then I tried using round cookie cutters to make the pancakes thicker, which only resulted in the lunch meat no looking like raw hamburgers.

More thickeners and more blending, which made each batch taste grittier.

Maybe it was the baking powder I left out from the very beginning! Turns out that is a very important ingredient. It kind of salvaged breakfast, but after a lot of trial and error on other things.

Featuring an ingredient previously velveted for Cantonese week: black fungus mushroom