Confusion

There is a something of a snide joke I have heard in most professional kitchens about “fusion cuisines” - those invented food genera which combine ingredients and techniques from more than one national or cultural cuisine – that goes like this: fusion is just shorthand for “confusion.”

This, in a nutshell, outlines the general distaste in the fine dinning community for chefs who attempt to forge new culinary heights by ramming together, say, Korea and Spain. Lumped into this category are the establishments which claim some sort of blanket culinary knowledge about a vast geographical region (“European Food”). The consensus: most of the time these things are failures. I happen to agree.

I will not, for example, dare set foot inside an establishment which proclaims itself “pan-Asian.” Who could possibly be an expert on Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Indonesian, and a host of other cuisines? Certainly not the questionable shop on the corner. African Restaurant? It's a continent. I once made the mistake of dropping in to a Irish-Persian ice cream parlor, mostly out of overwhelming curiosity. I left just as curious, though this time wondering why I wasted my money.

There are exceptions. A few places get it right. French technique has been successfully applied to Japanese food with interesting results. In Sydney, itself a cultural fusion (a European city erected in Asia), this success is manifest at Tetsuya's, a shining example of what food can be when an innovator manages to combine the flavors from disparate cultures. However, such an achievement is rare.



There is something terribly organic about the foods a given group of people eat.. These diets are the result of a long evolution which is influenced by a multitude of factors. The dishes on offer today in any one cuisine are the culmination of the ingredients available, how those have changed over time, preservation practices, innovations in the use of waste products, farming methods, national wealth (or lack thereof), food processing, legislation, religion, and the ever-shifting winds of local taste.

It is absolute conceit to think you can take good ideas from one cuisine and mash them together with those of another and produce something tasty.

This, however, is precisely what I have done.



I'm combining one of my favorite Chinese dishes with a consumate Japanese ingredient to produce sashimi kingfish sang choi bao (anyone know the proper Pinyin for this one? I've seen it spelled about a dozen ways). I know this is the culinary equivalent of crossbreeding a tomato with a sage hen, but hey, it is tasty. Give it a try.

Sashimi Kingfish Sang Choi Bao

100g sashimi quality kingfish
20g water chestnuts (about 4)
30g beansprouts (small handful)
1 spring onion
1 large head iceberg lettuce

Using a very sharp knife, dice the kingfish into very small squares. This step will take some time; try to slice (rather than chop, which will crush the flesh) the fish into thin strips and then slice these into tiny cubes. The squares in the photo above are about half the size of a pea. Keep chilled.

Chop the water chestnuts into a fine dice and roughly chop the bean sprouts. Slice the spring onion into thin rings. Toss all of the chopped veg with the kingfish.

Prepare about 4 lettuce cups. Gently peel back the leaves of the iceberg lettuce, discarding the outer layer or two. Choose a few leaves and trim them with scissors until they form cups about the size of your hands.

Dress the kingfish mix with the a tablespoon of dressing (below), taste, and add more dressing if necessary. Serve immediately.

Dressing

2 tsp finely chopped ginger
¼ tsp finely chopped garlic
1 Tbsp light soy
1 tsp oyster sauce

Mix all ingredients.