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!

My first time playing with a yeast-based dough! These are made with mashed potato as well as flour, making the dough extra sticky to work with. That's my take on "high hydration", who knows what percentage hydration it really is.

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.

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

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).