THE secret to not cutting yourself with a knife, according to Chinese celebrity chef and the man behind the award-winning restaurant China Blue in Conrad Manila Hotel, Jereme Leung, is by securing your hold on the blade and the bolster in one finger.
He said, “Once you have your grip on the knife, you can do almost anything with it.”
With swift but steady motions, he demonstrated among lifestyle journalists in the banquet kitchen of Conrad Manila how it’s done: the index finger and thumb should be opposite of each other on either side of the blade while the remaining three fingers are delicately curled around the handle.
Not only does this technique lets you take full control of the knife, it also improves your cuts. The lesson seemed apt, given that the specialty dish of the master class was the Hundred Rings Nippon Cucumber Salad.
The dish’s ingredients are sesame oil, dark soya sauce, black rice vinegar and basic seasonings, like pepper, garlic and sugar. The tricky part to preparing it, however, is shaping it to make it look like a slithering dragon by slicing the cucumber in rotating 90-degree and 45-degree angles.
“Its origin comes from the northern part of China, but what’s special about the dish is it combines simplicity and complexity. Simplicity, because the ingredients are the things you will find in your kitchen in a normal day; and complexity, because it’s one of those things that takes a little bit of skill and patience to reproduce,” Leung explained.
Leung has been with the Conrad Hotels & Resorts, the luxury flagship brand of multinational hospitality giant Hilton Worldwide, since 1983. A few years ago he established China Blue, a Hong Kong-born modern Chinese chain of restaurants which now has branches in a number of Asian cities, including Manila. The master class was part of the restaurant’s recent limited engagement offering, called Elegance of the Orient, that ran until the end of October.
International gourmands recognize Leung as one of the pioneers of modern Chinese cuisine because of his extensive research in the field. He spent the most part of 1990s exploring different food materials and cooking skills in the different regions in China.
Today, there are many interpretations and variations of Chinese dishes all over the globe, especially given the country’s culinary scene is being closely scrutinized by international trend observers. With this in mind, it only seemed fitting to ask the person with far more knowledge in food than most people: “What is the real measure of Chinese cuisine authenticity?”
In an exclusive interview with BusinessMirror, Leung answered this and then some more.
Chinese cuisine is one of the world’s most-acclaimed culinary cultures. Can you walk us through a brief history?
Chinese cuisine is one of the oldest cuisines in the world; it’s been around for more than 5,000 years. However, I think the evolvement and the difference of Chinese cuisine from the outside world is in the early days of (our) history, where there are a lot of people from the Southern part of China—Guangdong, Huizhou and the Guan Cantonese, or the early immigrants, that came to Southeast Asia. So generally, the traditional Chinese food that people now know actually has a Cantonese or southern China origin.
What are the essential elements of Chinese cooking?
If there’s one thing that prominently comes up in Chinese cooking, I would say it is temperature.
It’s not about ingredients. Temperature is about having hot food hot and cold food cold. To give you two distinctive examples: the Hundred-Ring Nippon Cucumber will not taste right if it’s not cold. On the other hand, dim sum, siomai and pork buns—these are the kind of food that needs to be hot. The soup with duck consommé needs to be on consistent heat, as well. If I served it lukewarm, like most Western soups would be, it will become so heavy because of its fat component.
Chinese food, throughout the years, have been really popular with Westerners. But how is Chinese food in the US and other parts of the world, different from authentic Chinese cuisine?
From a purely cooking technique perspective, Chinese cuisine is perhaps the most complicated cuisine in the world. Anywhere that you would go from steaming to stir-frying—they’re all a school to themselves. However, I think the impression of take-out food is very much an American culture during the early-1950s and 1960s when early Chinese immigrants built food trucks and ultimately, the Chinatown culture. However, most of these immigrants weren’t chefs before they traveled. Then, that part of American culture became a unique heritage for the American-Chinese, but it certainly does not represent Chinese cuisine.
Has Chinese cuisine already reached its peak of influence in the Philippines?
The Chinese heritage and influence is pretty prominent in Southeast Asian countries. Food is an integral part of the Filipino-Chinese community culture, and I think that there’s a part of Chinese heritage that will always stay with the country. Furthermore, in traditional Filipino cuisine, it’s not just Chinese influences; it’s a melting pot of cultures.