Homemade Cold Appetizers: 365 New Homemade Dishes

Author: Ji Zhaoming
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-01-01
Features:
- Soak fresh loofah in salt before stir-frying to prevent it from turning black.
- Briefly blanch sea cucumber in boiling water to open up the patterns and make it easier to clean sand.
- Add a few drops of vinegar when stewing beef to make it tender.
- Sliced lotus root tends to turn black and change color; soak it in water for later use.
- Fish should be fried in oil first and then cooked in water to turn the broth milky white.
- Chopping spinach with a knife can make it bitter; tearing it by hand is better.
- When making sour and spicy soup, add vinegar just before turning off the heat.
- When deboning trotters, do it while they are still hot.
- Do not overcook yam in the pot, or it will turn black.
- Choose hard-textured sea cucumber to avoid melting when cooking.
This book selects over 100 cold dishes suitable for modern home cooking, providing detailed cooking methods for making cold platters. It highlights key points in each recipe, like "stir-frying," which requires the final dish to be juice-free, with a light flavor that highlights the original color and a rich aroma of Sichuan peppercorn oil; or "pickling," which requires a crisp and tender texture, a mellow and satisfying taste without greasiness, and tight, dry, and fragrant meat from poultry or livestock.