NAVARRA GOURMET

Typical Chinese vegetables and how to cook them

Jereme Leung “Whampoa Club”, in Beijing and Shanghai

“Water chestnuts, Chinese beans, bamboo and strawberries”

At the Navarre Gourmet Enjoy Vegetables Congress, Jereme Leung, the most famous chef in Peking and Shanghai, presented his personal and contemporary interpretation of Chinese cuisine, showing products and ingredients used in China in the autumn and winter.

He demonstrated how to cook water chestnuts, an aquatic plant which can only be picked in September and which is widely consumed in China, despite the fact that it originated in Europe and Africa, where it used to grow in warm waters before disappearing.

Leung showed how water chestnuts (with a similar shape to the horns of a bull) are boiled in water to remove the skin and then caramelised, to be eaten as an appetiser with other caramelised fruits. He also prepared water chestnut sweets with sugar and sesame seeds. He went on to explain how Dragon sweets are prepared, which are water chestnuts wrapped in a dough which is softened with rice flour.

Beans are also a popular vegetable in China, where they are cooked ,wrapped in a dough, with prawns, corn starch, sugar, salt and sesame oil. Leung showed how to prepare a Chinese sweet made with flaky pastry dough and a bean filling, in the shape of a carrot and which is fried in hot oil.

In addition, this Chinese chef demonstrated two recipes for cooking water bamboo, a plant grown in summer and autumn, the outer part is peeled and the only the heart is eaten. In the first recipe, he stuffed the bamboos with a mixture of prawns and pork, and this was then completely wrapped in intestines and marinated. Fried bamboo is accompanied by a spicy chilli pepper sauce. "It can be consumed from May to July and then in autumn", he stated. Leung also cooked a bamboo soup with chicken, red dates and little Chinese beans, which are put into a container, which is specifically found in China and which recovers the steam and allows soups to be made using very little water.

Finally, he presented a berry, similar to a strawberry, used to make sweet wine.

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