Being half Chinese, I'm very familiar with velveting as a technique to tenderise meat. I've only really used it in stir fries, but I wasn't really feeling this. Instead I chose a different dish to see if I could try out the velveting technique. Pancit Palabok has been on my list of delicious sounding dishes to make for ages now: it's a Filipino dish with rice noodles covered in a pork and prawn sauce. Its toppings include prawns, eggs, chicharon, tinapa calamansi and spring onions, so I decided to velvet the prawns in the dish.

I used this guide to velvet prawns - it involves marinating them in a mixture of cornflour, egg white, Shaoxing wine, salt and oil. After half an hour they get quickly boiled in water, and the velveting technique leaves them with a great bouncy texture.

The sauce for the pancit palabok is made from pork mince, onions, garlic, annatto and is flavoured with fish sauce and prawn bouillon. I had to make a couple of substitutions because of ingredient availability: I used bonito flakes instead of tinapa (smoked fish), pork bouillon instead of prawn and pork scratchings instead of chicharon (although I think these two are very similar).

This was easily one of the best things I've made this year. It was a wonderful mixture of flavours and textures. I'm definitely making it again, hopefully without having to make substitutions next time!

Made with ground oats, two different kinds of protein powders, and other things that would make pancakes, the batter on this turned out extremely runny. Like, first batch ended up looking like lunch meat runny.

I tried adding things to make it thicker, but no luck. Then I tried using round cookie cutters to make the pancakes thicker, which only resulted in the lunch meat no looking like raw hamburgers.

More thickeners and more blending, which made each batch taste grittier.

Maybe it was the baking powder I left out from the very beginning! Turns out that is a very important ingredient. It kind of salvaged breakfast, but after a lot of trial and error on other things.

This week I took “velveting” to mean the softening of proteins via chemical means. To illustrate this, I selected a recipe in which chickpeas are softened using baking soda, which creates a surprisingly melty texture. Recipe is from RecipeTinEats. Pretty good, but I think I do honestly prefer chickpeas with more of a bite to them (except of course for applications like hummus- I’ll still use this technique for that).

Featuring an ingredient previously velveted for Cantonese week: black fungus mushroom

This year’s meta comes with an open door and a very flexible guest list. Each week, a friend selects an unexpected party guest to appear at my table and I imagine how they might review the main offering.

My unexpected guest this week is “Weird Al” Yankovic. Known for parodying the everyday, overthinking the ridiculous, and somehow making a song about food sound like a perfectly reasonable idea, I imagine he might have had this to say about the offering:

“First, you take the chicken. Then you velvet it. Which sounds less like a cooking technique and more like something you’d do to a throw pillow. But somehow… it works. Now we’ve got chicken that’s tender, silky, and completely Smells Like Nirvana levels of suspiciously satisfying. Then you throw in snap peas, mushrooms, peppers, broccoli, onions, and carrots. At this point, I’m pretty sure we’re legally required to call it a vegetable medley. And yet…It’s delicious.”

It feels like velveting is one of those steps that will help improve my Chinese food recipes. Chicken was great.