HOUSEMADE

THE SCIENCE BEHIND THREE DISHES AT MISTER JIU’S.

At Mister Jiu’s in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Brandon Jew and his team cure, steam, fry, simmer, confit and roast an electrifying mix of charcuterie, dumplings, rice, vegetables, seafood and large-format meat dishes. Jew’s restaurant is located in a landmark building that previously housed the Four Seas banquet hall, which has a history that dates back to before we landed on the moon.

Jew’s food crackles, creating an atmosphere where a standing ovation could break out in the dining room at any moment, yet a vexing question tends to lurk in the shadows of his glowing reviews: Is this deliciousness aligned with “authentic” Cantonese food, or is it something new, a bold take from a California heretic?

The debate over cultural authenticity in food hinges on the bogus notion that there exists a set of canonical flavors pulled from a single moment in history to which we must compare our cooking. Flavor, however, is moment-specific; it surges up from pulses of real-time information gathered by our senses of taste, smell, touch, hearing and vision, which are amplified and shifted by our mood, memories and attention.

Food culture is a constantly evolving transfer of information, from cook to diner and vice versa, via infinite combinations of ingredients and techniques passed through this sensory hotline. Jew, pastry chef Melissa Chou and their cooks have a massive culinary vocabulary that they execute with poetic precision to articulate ideas more nuanced than just “Cantonese” or “Californian.” Here are the stories they tell with three of their dishes.

SIZZLING RICE SOUP

Blanch and simmer chicken bones. Strain stock, add more blanched bones plus chicken feet. Simmer, re-strain and clarify with egg whites, ground chicken, mirepoix, ginger, white peppercorn and savory. Reserve rendered chicken fat, puree with green garlic. Blanch and chill asparagus, fava beans and water chestnuts. Confit shrimp in garlic oil, cut in half, chill. Brine pork leg to cure, steam and dice. Steam rice, compress into cake and dehydrate overnight. Reheat vegetables, shrimp and ham in hot broth to order. Garnish with green garlic oil, fry rice cake. Table side, drop sizzling rice cake into soup.

Beneath the surface of a simmering stockpot, heat wages warfare on bones. Animal proteins recoil and huddle together in tight clumps when first exposed to heat, but aided by plenty of water and time, heat slowly infiltrates and dismantles those clumpy strongholds to yank strand after strand of succulent gelatin into the watery abyss. A pot full of bones and meat yields a finite amount of gelatin, so the Mister Jiu’s crew simmers a second round of bones and chicken feet in the same liquid to pack it with astonishing quantities of sticky protein.

Even the most carefully tended stock contains undissolved clusters of protein and scraps of fat left over from the battlefield, which cloud the finished product. Jew’s cooks “polish” the broth by whisking egg whites and ground chicken into the hot liquid to gel and form a floating protein refinery. The meshy protein network captures and assimilates any lingering bits, turning rich stock into sparklingly clear consomme.

The first garnishes to land in the consomme are crunchy spring vegetables. Plants derive crispness and stability from a brick-and-mortar foundation of microscopic cell walls in place of bone and muscle. The mortar begins to soften and dissolve when heated, causing crunchy to give way to mushy. Every day, a Mister Jiu’s cook gently blanches, peels and chills asparagus and fava beans, preserving enough spring in their cell walls to stand up to the cascade of hot broth as each order is assembled and delivered to the table.

Next in line are water chestnuts, which don’t require the same level of pampering as the other garnishes. Even in the face of intense heat, a rare and bulletproof fiber reinforcement in their cell walls allows water chestnuts to stay crunchy, making them a favorite of canned-food manufacturers. Jew uses fresh, not canned, water chestnuts punched into the familiar button shapes that diners recognize from their ubiquitous canned counterparts, while delivering a brighter, cleaner aroma than any tuber could ever hope to have after spending years locked in an aluminum prison.

To match the bouncy resilience of the vegetable garnishes, Jew’s cooks add shrimp confited at low temperature in garlic oil and cubes of housemade ham cured in salty brine. Just before each bowl heads out of the kitchen, Jew laces the broth with a green garlic oil made from rendered chicken fat skimmed from the simmering bones. Rather than shambling aimlessly as emulsified droplets in a cloudy haze, this fragrant schmaltz receives a second life as emerald droplets dancing atop the shimmering soup.

To prepare the culminating pyrotechnics, Jew cooks short grain rice, presses it into a cake and dehydrates it overnight. This leaves the rice with just enough residual moisture to puff each grain like a balloon when it hits the spitting hot fryer oil. Once that last gasp of heat-absorbing water vapor is gone, the temperature of the rice skyrockets, turning the block of starchy grains a nutty golden brown.

Table side, a server drops the superheated rice directly into the soup. It sizzles and sears the surface liquid, launching a burst of perfumed steam skyward. This soupy aromatherapy carries the essence of each meticulously prepared ingredient, enveloping the diner in a chemical and physical manifestation of Jew’s jubilant childhood memory as interpreted through the skills and perspective he accumulated as an adult.

SIZZLED ALASKAN HALIBUT

Simmer oyster shells, kombu and dehydrated seafood in water, strain. Trim and cut bok choy in half, sear on one side. Grate and salt summer squash, remove excess juice, saute solids with ginger and garlic until tender, puree with reserved squash juice. Season and cook halibut fillet in a low temperature oven. Remove, top with julienned scallions and ginger, baste with hot peanut oil. Season oil with white soy and lemon, serve with halibut, fresh tatsoi, flowering coriander, green squash puree and oyster shell broth.

In addition to the vibrant green color of this dish, which Mister Jiu’s serves ripping hot, it smells green. Hot food doesn’t usually smell green because grassy, herbal aromas are some of the most heat-sensitive edible compounds in existence. With even mild exposure to heat, honeydew becomes butternut squash, basil transforms into spinach and the subtle cucumber aroma of fresh salmon gets washed away in a storm of fishiness. Jew solves this puzzle by uniting diverse sources of greenness from land and sea.

The fresh scent of the sea, often described as “salty,” actually has nothing to do with salt. That smell comes mainly from tiny wisps of the aromatic fat of marine life, lofted into balmy coastal breezes. By loading the base sauce for the dish with kombu seaweed, oyster shells, and dehydrated clams and squid, Jew captures some of the verdant magic of crisp sea air. Anyone who has ever experienced the smell of low tide as exposed fats languish on scalding hot sand knows these aromas can turn overwhelmingly fishy if not properly tended. By using fresh seafood — oysters shucked in house and leftover trimmings of squid and clams dehydrated at low temperatures — Jew avoids the brunt of the fishiness.

Seared bok choy, fresh tatsoi and flowering coriander also contribute to the green bouquet, but the star of this land-based contingent is the squash puree. Zucchini is about 95 percent water by weight, so rather than attempting to concentrate flavor with prolonged cooking, which would destroy color and aroma, Mister Jiu’s takes a different approach, cooking the solid and liquid components separately. Grating and salting the flesh of the squash ruptures their cells, opening the floodgates to allow easy separation of concentrated pulp from watery juice. Cooks briefly saute the pulp with ginger and garlic before adding back just enough of the squash juice to rehydrate as the freshest puree possible.

All living cells are balloons full of water, and Jew implements a version of his squash trick to build the sauce for the halibut starting from the ground up, with juices from the halibut itself. He and his crew salt and slow roast each piece of halibut in a low oven to prevent escaped juices from evaporating into a burnt crust on the bottom of the pan. They then mound a nest of thinly sliced scallions and ginger on each piece, and pour hot peanut oil over it to order. The peanut oil scalds the vegetables, shepherds their aroma to the flesh and dapples fried blisters across the surface of the halibut without browning or drying it out. Finally, the cooks season the collected scallion, ginger and halibut liquor with white soy and lemon to create a deeply flavorful vinaigrette that rests beneath the fog of the green aromas.

FROZEN WHIPPED HONEY

Juice green pineapples, add sugar and glucose. Freeze. Combine buckwheat honey with cream, egg whites and gelatin, heat to thicken. Freeze. Combine jasmine tea and milk, simmer and steep. Remove jasmine and dissolve gelatin, chill to set. Temper white chocolate, chill, smash to shards. Combine flour, sugar, butter and ground walnuts, bake to form lace tuile. Roast pineapple, dice, chill. Assemble sorbet, jasmine jelly and whipped honey. Top with walnut tuile, white chocolate and roasted pineapple.

Pastry chef Melissa Chou should submit this dish as a dissertation and get a Ph.D. in crystal physics.

As water freezes, water molecules organize into neat rows within perfectly geometric ice crystals. Impurities like sugar, protein, carbs or fat get in the way of these obsessively straight lines to create a spectrum of crystal sizes and textures. Chou skips across this spectrum, summoning a diverse textural landscape of smooth, gravelly, jiggly and jagged experiences within a single dish.

On the creamy side of the continuum lies the whipped honey. She unites pungent buckwheat honey and cream with gelatin, egg whites and technology to get there. She mixes the base ingredients together and heats them until the egg white proteins lash out to thicken the mixture. Lacking the space for a full-size commercial ice cream machine, Chou and the Mister Jiu’s pastry team use a Pacojet to create their frozen desserts. The Pacojet works like a miniature lathe, shaving microscopic layers off a frozen-solid brick of whipped honey with a slowly descending blade whirling at high speed. All but the smallest crystals are obliterated, and the egg whites and gelatin reinforce the sensation of smoothness. In spite of these protein fail-safes, Chou makes sure to spin fresh whipped honey three times a night during service to prevent any rogue graininess.

By comparison, she designed the pineapple sorbet to be slightly coarser. Chou prefers the tang of slightly under-ripe pineapples, so rather than bury that tartness beneath a heap of cream, she simply sweetens juiced green pineapples with table sugar and a small amount of glucose. Glucose is a simple sugar with a greater affinity for reigning in water than table sugar, which affords Chou just enough control to keep the largest crystals in check. The starch from the young pineapples pitches in as well, thickening the sorbet to help it melt evenly in the mouth.

Chou and her team don’t actually freeze the jasmine jelly, but rather, they use gelatin to set jasmine-infused milk into a wobbly gel at room temperature. That gel solidifies further with a gentle chill from the sorbet and whipped honey that rest atop it, inhabiting a delightfully uncanny area between frozen and thawed.

White chocolate shards and Chou’s walnut lace tuile comprise the conclusion of her crystal thesis by pulling shattering crispness from two more sources: fat and glass. Chou tempers the white chocolate by leading it through a series of temperature changes to orient fatty cacao crystals in exactly the right shape to shatter dramatically when cooled and smacked. The walnut tuile is a micdrop ending to the delicious crystal exploration; by melting the sugar-rich dough in an oven and quickly cooling it, she creates edible glass, a molecular logjam that solidifies so quickly that crystals don’t even have a chance to form.

Fifty years from now, people might squabble over whether a new dish fits with the Authentic Sensibilities of the Golden Era of Mister Jiu’s cooking. That new dish probably won’t, which will be awesome.

Illustration by Christina Chung The sizzling rice soup from Mister Jiu’s masterfully keeps its vegetables crisp and verdant while the soup is hot enough to provide pop to the dropped rice.