Cantonese Seafood Lettuce Wraps (生菜包)
San Choy Bau, as you can see them in Guangdong today.
So we wanted to show you how to make the authentic version of Cantonese lettuce wraps, San Choy Bau.
Now, there’s a lot of recipes being thrown around the internet for ‘San Choy Bau’, and a lot of them feature ground beef/pork/chicken. If you like that style that’s cool, but what you’d really be looking for ain’t Cantonese – it’d be Thai/Laotian laab, which has its own intensely complex process (if you just stir-fry ground meat directly it has the tendency get quite dry).
There’s a few varieties of San Choy Bau in Guangdong, but we wanted to show you guys how to make a Shunde seafood style, which is pretty easy and a common weeknight meal for us.
Ingredients
Deshelled Asian Golden Clams (黄沙蚬) or Cockles, ¾ pound. The Asian Golden Clam is usually what’s used here, but I doubt y’all have them at your local supermarket (there’s a discussion on the Asian Golden Clam in the note at the end). The key though is to use the smallest clam that you can find… so we also tested this recipe using cockles. And you know what? Even though it’s not traditional, we thought cockles were really, really good here too. So feel free to play around with whatever miniscule-bivalve-mollusk is cheapest in your neck of the woods (littleneck clams could also be a possibility). A quick note – for cockles we yielded ¾ pound deshelled cockles from around 7 pounds shelled cockles.
Lap Cheong Sausage, 150g (腊肠). The Lap Cheong is a real integral part of this dish. For the unaware, Cantonese lap cheong is a dried, hard sausage that sort of has the texture of pepperoni. The closest western equivalent might be a nice salami, but the soy sauce and the sugar in Lap Cheong give it a real distinctive taste.
Two Full ’Paprika Chili’ Peppers (红辣椒), 120g. I’ve finally been able to zero in on what this chili is called in English – paprika sweet chili pepper! This chili’s not very spicy, so any red chili that’s low on the Scoville scale (e.g. Anaheims) should work great too.
Chinese Celery (芹菜), 120g. Chinese celery is a common aromatic in Chinese cooking – the taste is extremely similar to Western celery, but a bit more assertive. You can use Western celery in a pinch, but because Western celery has a bit more water content you’ll need to sweat them before stir-frying, which we’ll talk about in the process.
White section of the green onion, 50g (葱白). As always, this is used as an aromatic. I’m getting a bit tired of writing out ‘white-part-of-the-green-onion’, you think we could all just agree to start calling them ‘green onion whites’?
Liaojiu, a.k.a. Shaoxing Rice Wine (料酒), 1 tablespoon.
Light Soy Sauce (生抽), 2 Tablespoons.
White Sugar, ½ Tablespoon.
Romaine Lettuce (生菜), 2 Heads. If you’re abroad, your romaine lettuce is gunna be much bigger than our heads, so just use your common sense regarding amount here.
Hoisin Sauce (海鲜酱). A sauce for smearing on the lettuce wraps.
White Rice. Optional, the wraps can also be stuffed with rice together with the filling.
Process
Prep your clams or cockles. Like all shellfish, these guys are a bit of a pain to prep. If you’re prepping clams, refer to the note on clam preparation below. For cockles, what you’ll want to do is rinse them, and put them in a big basin (or maybe two) with a quarter cup of salt and a quarter cup of cornstarch. Massage them a bit to get some of the mud off. Let that sit for about a half hour – the cornstarch will help get the mud off and the salt will make the cockles ‘vomit up’ any impurities. After that, rinse them again until the water comes clean… then boil in your biggest stockpot until the cockles open, 3-4 minutes (you don’t want to crowd them, this might take two batches). From there, there’s two techniques then to remove the shell – you can do it by hand, or you can give a vigorous stir at the later stages of boiling which will cause the cockle to separate from the shell and rise to the top. Personally, with cockles I haven’t had a lot of luck with the latter method, so I’ll just go through the slog of deshelling them by hand.
Remove the lettuce pieces from the head, wash and dry thoroughly, the toss in the refrigerator. After washing your lettuce, a good idea is putting it in a salad spinner to get it nice and dry (as an aside, holy crap I finally bought a salad spinner and now I have no idea how I lived my life before). Toss in the refrigerator to make sure it doesn’t wilt or anything.
Dice the Remaining Ingredients. Dice up your Lap Cheong (we want a nice and small dice here, check the video for a visual), the chili, the celery, and the white-part-of-the-green-onion.
Sweat the Seafood. Over a dry wok on medium heat, toast the clams/cockles to dry them out a bit and remove any excess water content. The reason we’re doing this is because any ingredient that can let out some liquid in a stir-fry has the potential to muff up the stir-fry, transforming a ‘fry’ into a ‘simmer in a little bit of oily water’. Let this toast for about three minutes – and don’t panic if some bits of clams or cockles stick to the bottom of the wok, that’s normal.
If using Western celery, sweat the celery. Western celery has a bit higher water content than Chinese celery, so we’ll need to do the same toasting process. Toast the diced celery in the wok over medium heat for about two minutes.
Pre-heat your wok, then longyau. Get your wok piping hot, then pour some oil in. Swirl it around to coat the wok with oil and get a nice non-stick surface, then drain any excess oil (for this dish, we’ll just need the coating). This technique is called ‘longyau’, and is step one of most stir-frying.
Stir-fry the rest of the ingredients via ‘xiaochao’ Ok, so what we’re doing here is building our stir-fry by adding our ingredients one-by-one. Different ingredients have different cooking times – so longer to cook ingredients get tossed in first, and shorter to cook ingredients get tossed in later. A lot of this is done by instinct - so please don’t attempt to follow these times religiously - but I went through the video and grabbed the cooking times for each ingredient for your guys’ reference (in retrospect, I’m amazed at how similar all of the stirring times were). Over high heat (medium-high on a Chinese stove):
Green onions, in. Stir for 15 seconds.
Red diced chili pepper, in. Stir for 15 seconds.
Lap Cheong sausage, in. Stir for 45 seconds.
Liaojiu, in. Check out the video at 4:28 in the video to see how she does this – she’s adding some to a spatula and pouring it first on the sides of the wok. Because it’ll sizzle and evaporate as soon as it hit the wok, this is gunna help get some more flavor out of the liaojiu and also make sure we’re not adding too much liquid in, which would just screw up the frying. Stir for 45 seconds.
Celery, in. Stir for 45 seconds.
Clams/cockles, in. Stir for 15 seconds.
Soy Sauce, in. Use the same method as you poured in the liaojiu. Because it’s two tablespoons, you’ll likely need to do this a couple times, giving a quick stir in between. Stir an additional 15 seconds.
Sugar, in. Stir for one final minute, and the filling is done!
When eating these, smear some hoisin sauce on the lettuce first, then a bit of rice (if using), then one or two spoonfuls of the filling. This is an awesome dish to go alongside a bigger meal, or as a quick weeknight meal so long as your seafood’s pre-prepped.
Note about the Asian Golden Clam:
I asked /r/cooking a couple weeks ago if y’all could source these, and the answer was a uniform ‘no’. And yet, if you look at a map of where these guys live, the United States and Europe are absolutely crawling with them. We just don’t eat them.
Which is a shame, because they’re (1) an invasive species and (2) pretty tasty. I can’t claim to be the most ecologically sensitive guy, but it kind of feels like common sense to eat the crap out of something we got too much of, yeah?
Now, I wouldn’t bash my head against the wall trying to source these though. The reason they’re used for this dish in Guangdong is that (1) they’re really tiny, perfect for a lettuce wrap and (2) they’re basically the cheapest shellfish you can buy. Suppose you’re living in a place where crawfish are real cheap… go ahead and play around with crawfish and see how that works! It’d stay true-ish to the flavor profile of the original recipe but use local ingredients - that’s how actually inspired fusion is created IMO… not from a CIA graduate backpacking Southeast Asia for a couple months.
Note about Asian Golden Clam Preparation:
Ok, so if you look at 1:57 in the video, this is what the clams we’re working with here in Guangdong look like. I want to be clear here because I dunno if I was in the video – we buy the clams prepped like that straight from the market.
If you’re grabbing these from a lake or a bait shop though, I’d imagine you’d get the whole clams themselves sort of like this in the video. We really wanted to figure out the traditional method to turn the latter into the former, so that you guys outside of China could recreate this exactly. From our research, we’ve found that what people seem to do is: boil them, de-shell, salt them, and sun-dry them for a day.
After trying this a few times, our results were less than ideal. One time they came out alright, another time it had a crazy strong fermented smell, and in another attempt they ended up with bugs crawling all over them. If anyone has any tips we’re all ears. We’re going to keep on trying – we’re thinking about making a Chinese cooking ‘techniques’ playlist with shorter length videos, and if we figure it out we’ll toss it up there.
If you’re like me though and really down with the idea of consuming invasive species, feel free to prep the clams in the same way that you’d do the cockles – wash, boil, deshell, and use them straight. It’s not quite the same as the dried variety but still nice.
A note on ingredients:
So there's one pretty traditional ingredient that we didn't include here that maybe we should've. /u/Flying-Camel rightly points out that the vast majority of restaurants will add dried turnip (萝卜干) - we usually don't include this when cooking for ourselves (we feel it adds a bit too much of a textural contrast), but when testing this recipe we sort of felt compelled to add it in (as it's traditional). If you look real closely in the video at 4:50, there's totally a bit of dried turnip in there... but then when we ate it we both felt we liked it a bit better the way we usually cook it, without. Given that it might not be the easiest ingredient to source outside of China, we kinda felt 'screw it, let's just cut it out'.
But we want to stray as far away from 'adapted recipes' or 'our twist' as possible, and just communicate the real deal recipes for the food you'd get over here. So add in 70g of dried turnip to the ingredient list, and get that into a fine mince. When you're doing the stir-frying, add in the minced dried turnip after the liaojiu and before the celery.