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Sugar
Appears in
By Ken Hom
Published 1998
Sugar has been used, sparingly, in the cooking of savoury dishes in China for a thousand years. Excessive sugar destroys the palate, but when it is properly employed, sugar helps balance the various flavours of sauces and other dishes. There are two types of sugar used:
Brown sugar slabs: This type of sugar is layered and semi-refined, having been compressed into flat slabs and cut to resemble caramel sweets. It has the flavour of good brown sugar.
Rock or yellow lump sugar: I particularly like to use rock sugar, which I find to have a richer, more subtle flavour than that of refined granulated sugar. It also gives a good lustre or glaze to braised ‘red-cooked’ Chinese dishes. It imparts translucence to glazes and sauces. You may need to break the lumps into smaller pieces with a wooden mallet or rolling pin.