My parents chose Kung Pao Chicken for me, because they knew I would love it. Ten minutes later, the waitress placed my plate in front of me. On it was an alien-looking mix of things that I knew, but together looked completely foreign to me.
“Are these peanuts? With chicken?” I said, not wanting to try it.
“You’ll like it. If you don’t want to eat it you can go hungry,” my father stated quite seriously.
Realizing that I had no other choice, I picked up a piece of chicken with a stray peanut clinging to it, along with a glob of white rice, with my shaky chopsticks and brought it to my mouth. The flavor exploded like nothing I had ever tasted before. The complex flavor of the sauce seemed to have absorbed the flavors of everything in the dish while adding new tastes of its own. The contrasting textures of the tender chicken, crunchy peanuts, and fluffy rice was something that I had never experienced in my time eating simple American foods. I tore into the rest of the plate, eating as fast as my elementary chopstick skills would allow. Before long, I had finished the whole plate, not paying any attention to my parents’ smug looks and “I told you so”’s. (image taken from Anne’s Food annesfood.blogspot.com)
When we got home, I was still raving about the meal, asking my parents when we could go back. Seeing my excitement, my dad, a dedicated cook, told me, “We don’t have to go back to Jasmine. We can make it ourselves.”
So a week later, I sat next to my dad as he looked up a recipe for Kung Pao on the computer. We printed it out and started cooking. At this young age, I wasn’t yet trusted with real knives, so I was relegated to rudimentary tasks such as measuring out peanuts or peeling garlic. I stood to the side, handing ingredients to my dad to put into the pan, but what happened in the pan was a total mystery to me.
When the steaming pan came off of the stove and onto the table, I was literally jumping with excitement. I piled several spoonfuls of chicken, peppers, and peanuts in thick, rich sauce onto a pile of fluffy white rice.
While in reality it may not have been as good as the first dish I had eaten at Jasmine, to me it was the best food I had ever tasted. It was a good meal, yes, but it was the feeling of accomplishment that really excited me.
My father and I kept cooking the dish, making it at least once every two weeks. Over the years, I got more responsibility. After convincing my dad that I wouldn’t cut my fingers off, I was granted access to the chef’s knife, enabling me to chop vegetables and chicken. I could now do everything up to the actual cooking of the food myself.
When I was 13, we cooked Kung Pao for my aunt who was visitng us. Seeing my excitement about cooking. She took me out the next day and bought me my own wok. As we walked out of the store, she told me, “This is yours, not your fathers. You’ll learn to cook in this pan, not just watch.”
The next time I cooked Kung Pao, I convinced my dad to let me be in charge. I was nervous, but I had my dad there to be my training wheels, righting me whenever I started to go wrong, and everything turned out fine.
But just like real training wheels, having my dad there was nice when I was first getting started, but he started to get in the way once I knew what I was doing. One day, when I had just started cooking, he came over and adjusted the flame by a miniscule amount. Angrily, I told him that I no longer needed his help. I told him to sit on the other side of the counter, far enough that he couldn’t touch anything. He was a little angry at first, but eventually obliged, giving me total control over the meal, and it turned out perfectly.
As I got older, my parents cared less about supervising me in the kitchen. My dad was happy to leave me alone to go watch the Met game or get some work done. Without my parents watchful eyes on me, I felt more freedom to experiment and deviate from the original recipe. I started substituting a homemade teriaki sauce instead of a plain soy sauce marinade for the chicken, adding depth, giving the chicken more character, allowing it to stand out against the powerful flavors in the dish. I tweaked ratios in the sauce, upping the vinegar content to balance the richness of the heavy sauce. I even added my own homemade chili paste to bring the spiciness of the dish into the forefront while adding even more flavor.
The dish I first “made” while watching my dad cook was good, but rather plain and straightforward as far as Chinese food goes. The one I make today is not nearly the same. It’s much more complex, more grown up. It has layers of flavor, not fighting each other, but working together in perfect balance. Eating it now gives me the same feeling I got that first time at Jasmine, and I can confidently say that my dish tastes even better.
After eight years, and hundreds of trials, I have finally achieved my goal of recreating that dish, and I have learned a lot along the way. I started by learning from and emulating my father, doing whatever he told me, before revolting against him to develop my own ideas, and succeeding without his supervision.
This is Kyle's post on Hanyu's account.
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