Universal Chinese Greens Part 3: Blanching and Dressing

Well, time to go out with a bang. Welcome to part three in this series on "Universal" methods for cooking Chinese greens. For this installment, we're going all in - one technique, three variations, and all the veggies you can eat. If you missed parts one and two and you're wondering what this is all about, click here or here to read more.

Our third and final technique involves two very easy steps - blanching, and dressing with a sauce. This technique has a lot going for it, though at first glance blanching might seem a little unremarkable. But don't be misled - this is no over-boiled asparagus or mushy pot of peas. When executed quickly and with attention to the ingredients, this is a technique that promises bright, crisp vegetables, and flavours limited only by your imagination. Blanched and dressed vegetables land somewhere in between braising and stir-frying in terms of flavour; the veggies are soft and tender, while the sauce is intense and relatively concentrated. Regardless, the results are really easy to love.

Blanched vegetables are incredibly popular in China, which isn't surprising because they really only require that you know how to boil water. Despite this, a lot of Chinese restaurants seem to treat blanched vegetables like an easy cop-out, choosing to slop some oyster sauce on and call it a day. Luckily, you only need to put a little more attention into the sauce in order to end up with something absolutely out-of-this-world.

I've prepared three different green vegetables with three different sauces to demonstrate the versatility of this technique. First up, there's the ultra-traditional gai lan with oyster sauce. A lot of restaurants take the lazy way out with this dish, pouring straight oyster sauce over a bed of greens. For many, this is their first exposure to this cooking style, and the lackluster results can leave many unimpressed. Despite the name, oyster sauce alone is not enough - the key to success is the garlic, which is fried until golden and fragrant and absolutely spectacular. The second dish is adapted (with pretty minimal modification and a bit of optional trouble-shooting) from Fuchsia Dunlop's phenomenal book Every Grain of Rice (I highly recommend any of her books). The scalding, sizzling oil certainly adds a bit of drama to the table, but it remains an incredibly easy dish to put together. Her original dish uses yu choy (choy sum), which would be excellent. I've decided to use tatsoi (rosette bok choy) here instead, but any number of mild greens would work wonderfully. The third dish is something of a Chinese/Vietnamese fusion dish, which I've included to show how you can adapt or invent any number of sauces to go along with blanched greens. The sauce is simply a mix of some of the quintessential Vietnamese pho accompaniments: hoisin sauce, chili sauce, and basil. In this instance, I've used vibrant, incredible Taiwanese spinach, but once again any number of leafy greens would work wonderfully.

These greens and sauces are not only amazingly delicious, they're also these are incredibly easy to prepare. How easy? I cooked all three, one after another, and had them all on the table within about 20 minutes. Admittedly, there was a fair bit of cleaning and measuring (not to mention note-taking and photography, the oft-forgotten time-vampires of food blogging), but once you've prepped your veggies and mixed your sauces, everything comes together in a snap.

So what's the ultimate trick to good blanched and dressed veggies? Timing. I mentioned in my previous post that this technique is time-sensitive. What I meant is that, like stir-frying, you want to work fast and be well-prepared. If you cook your greens too long, they'll end up soft and flavourless. If you dress them or let them sit too long before serving, they'll run together and end up looking a little 'droopy' on the plate. You want to move from pot to plate to table in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. But honestly, it's not difficult to do - in fact I would rank this among the easiest of all cooking methods to master.

So there you have it. Three days, three Chinese vegetable cooking methods. These techniques are delicious and amazingly versatile. If you have a leafy green, you can use one or all of these methods. Other vegetables can work well too, especially those that shine brightest when raw or gently cooked (e.g. peppers). I hope you've enjoyed this little mini-series, and I hope you'll keep coming back as I explore more Asian vegetable cooking and soy-based ingredients this month. To make sure you don't miss updates, Subscribe or follow Diversivore on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

Now go eat your veggies.