This Chinese street-food sauce spells flavour with a bang bang
A few weeks back, I was ordering lunch at a seafood joint in Alexandria, Va., when I spied a peculiarly named appetizer, “bang bang” shrimp.
As a student of Chinese cooking, I recognized the name, so I gave it a try.
What appeared several minutes later were deep-fried prawns tossed in a creamy mixture of garlic, ginger, ground chilies and mayonnaise.
Sure, the name of this increasingly popular dish evokes an exotic ode to explosive Asian heat, but no matter how delicious the snack may be, Chinese cooks would be confounded. Deep-fried? Mayonnaise? Spicy? Heck, in China, despite its fiery name, “bang bang” doesn’t even refer to flavour!
Sometimes a Chinese dish is named for its evocative appearance (“lion’s head” meatballs), at times for stunning folklore (“barbarian head” buns), and in a few brilliant examples, for the sound made when the food is being prepared.
Bang bang chicken’s name derives from the age-old noise of a baton smacking a whole cooked bird, breaking it into serving portions, where a kitchen cleaver just wouldn’t cut it (evenly).
Chicken busted up in such a fashion is indeed bang bang, with or without a dressing. Over the centuries, however, the legendary name has come to mean the fully dressed masterpiece with a signature sauce.
Traditionally, the five flavours in Chinese cookery are salty, sour, sweet, spicy and bitter.
Where a single meal should present a balance of these elements, it’s remarkable when a single sauce embraces all five, and in a humble street snack at that. Today, where most bang bang chicken vendors sell from name-brand stalls at morning markets, their history runs deep.