Char-Xiu rice flour roll

chashao changfen ????- char siu rice flour roll
Originally uploaded by kattebelletje.

Had a lovely dinner in Cheung Wing in The Hague. This restaurant is kind of tucked away and only accessible from the street by an elevator going upstairs, which is quite a funny way to enter a restaurant. We were celebrating a friend's birthday and made a large order of all kinds of dimsum, and some stir-fry dishes, too. The restaurant's style is Cantonese, so no hot flavours or spicy Szechuan cooking, but tasty Southern Chinese food. The restaurant had a large Chinese clientele, which is always a good sign for a Chinese restaurant. We had a selection of steamed small xiaolong bao in bamboo steamers, those shiny little dumplings with shrimp filling with small neats pleat in the centre, and very flavourful greenish jiaozi-shaped dimsum - showing their true style once bitten into, when again you could taste the Southern style shrimp filling, instead of the hearty Northern style pork and chives. The picture here shows a southern specialty: a roll made of rice flour with a charsiu [Mandarin: chashao] filling. Charsiu or charxiu is the name of barbecued pork, which is served sliced, usually on rice or noodle dishes, or as a dish on its own. But you can also cut it into small pieces and stuff it into a dimsum like this, or inside baozi or bapaos. This roll is very tasty: the outside very soft and slippery, a perfect opportunity to test your chopsticks skills; and inside the roasted BBQ flavoured pork with vegetables and a hint of star anise, soy sauce, and just a little bit of sugar. It was finished in no time - we should have ordered many more! The duck they served was very good, too; succulent meat and crispy skin. Unfortunately, Chinese restaurants in the Netherlands have started to put Cantonese roast duck on the menu under the name of "Peking duck", adding to the already quite large Chinese food confusion.