Poach or blanch (白灼) is a traditional Cantonese cooking method which is similar to boil. It keeps the dish very light and healthy, and is also very handy. This is also a dish where you can find in the vegetable part of Chinese restaurants’ menus. It’s basically lightly boiling the ingredients in water and then serving them with the sauce based on soy sauce, hot oil and mince garlic.
Ingredient Choices
The poach technique is supposed to highlight the freshness and quality of the ingredients. Use the ingredients as fresh as possible.
They can be vegetables:
- Choy sum: vegetables from Guangdong, which is the classic choice for poaching;
- Romaine lettuce
- Broccoli
- Okra
- Asparagus
Seafood can also be used for this:
- Prawns
- Sliced fish
Poach
Next step is poaching the ingredients. Poaching time is different in terms of type of ingredients:
- Leaf part of vegetables: 1-2 minutes.
- Root or hard part of vegetables: 2-3 minutes.
For example, choy sum can be poached in this way: hold them in a bundle, first dip the root half in the water for seconds, then then place the entire thing. This is to make sure the root part is cooked enough, or the leaf part is overcooked.
Add some oil and salt to the water for keeping the colour of the vegetables.
Sauce
The sauce is usually composed of:
- Spices: spring onion (shredded), ginger (shredded), garlic (minced), pepper (shredded), bird’s eye chilli (sliced).
- Hot Oil: heat the oil till nearly smoking.
- Soy sauce: could add sugar, oyster sauce, cooking wine to enhance the fresh flavour. Better use the steamed fish soy sauce (蒸鱼豉油). Thin it out a bit with water or the boiled water used for poaching.
Steps:
- Pour the hot oil over the solids to stimulate their aroma.
- Add the soy sauce.
Do not mix the soy sauce first with solids as they won’t be in touch with hot oil and stimulated.
The sauce can be served as dipping sauce (often for seafoods), or can be poured over the poached ingredients (often for vegetables).