金沙南瓜 Golden Sand Pumpkin
CC#1 here This recipe is inspired from a dish I had with my grandparents at 全聚德烤鸭店, a branch of the most famous Peking Roast duck restaurant in Beijing. Our grandparents lived very close to the restaurant, so my sister and I “drove” over with them in their little retired people cars. We ended up getting a lot of good dishes, among them 小鸭酥, my grandmother’s favorite, and 火燎鸭心, or fried duck hearts with shaoxing wine. This was a sleeper favorite: crispy pumpkin covered with salted duck yolk. The version we had at the restaurant was crispy and savory, but sweet at the same time from the soft pumpkin interior.
I tried to recreate 金沙南瓜 today based off a Youtube recipe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_x2xlgmdPI 。 I chose it for its relatively few steps (no preboiling the pumpkin or removing skin). I may have simplified the recipe a bit more than I should have a made a few mistakes, but the result, albeit not the crispy delight I remembered, was still quite tasty and merits cooking again.
Ingredients and Instructions:
I started by taking a Japanese pumpkin, coreing it, and cutting it into bite-size slabs similar to the video. NOTE: I forgot to salt the pumpkin at this point as mentioned in the recipe, this ended up being a good move. I also did not wash the pumpkin.
I added copious amounts of corn starch to cover the pumpkin, flipping it in the pan to coat. Since the pumpkin was not wet, maybe the cornstarch did not stick as well.
I deep fried the pumpkin (with my new long frying chopsticks :)). The recipe called for re-coating in I did this in my wok, which ended up being not the best choice because you need to stir fry the pumpkin again immediately after and I had a wok full of hot oil. The results were quite crispy and nice. Unfortunately, I had to wait for the oil to cool overnight, so by the time I was ready for the next step the pumpkin was no longer crispy
The next day, I removed the frying oil from the wok with the gelatin method and saved it for future use. I then heated a small amount of oil in the wok and added a copious amount of 新加波蛋黄酱，image below. I used this instead of steamed salted eggyolks as specified in the recipe because it was on hand and is very tasty. I then put in the pumpkin and stir fried until the pumpkin was coated. My temperature may have been too high, since everything turned brown (but still tasted very good).
I then added some cut garlic chives from my back garden, a very nice addition which also added some color.
Ending thoughts: Overall, this dish was very tasty even though it lacked the crisp and pale yellow color of the original. The salted eggyolk sauce is very salty, so not adding salt earlier is a good move. I am curious if this method, when not leaving the pumpkin in the fridge overnight, crisps it up enough. I will update this post the next time I cook this dish, and encourage Mommy to do so as well