Steaming – the style of cooking where you cook food using steam. Such a clean, healthy and easy way to cook. The concept is so simple – you place your food in a dish over some boiling or simmering water and cover with a lid, leaving enough space for the steam to circulate. Essentially, that is it!
Steaming has been a method of cooking in China and Asia for centuries, it is such a delicate way of cooking food – hardly any of the nutrients or vitamins are destroyed in cooking, you don’t have to stand in front of the hot wok and burn your eyebrows off keeping everything moving, it is fast, and it really keeps the flavours of the foods intact.
Steaming in China was originally done using a huge pottery pot filled with water and a fire underneath, a dish on top with holes in the bottom (like a colander) where you put your food, and a lid to keep in the steam. Over the centuries the pottery was replaced by bronze, wood and then eventually the bamboo steamer we all know and love!
So many things you can cook in a steamer – all sorts of yum cha delicacies of course, fish, vegetables, chicken, cheong fan and egg. And what is most important to realise is that you don’t HAVE to have bamboo steamer baskets to steam your food (although personally I love them – they look great and the smell of the bamboo when you are using them just takes me straight to yum cha). So I thought I would pop in here some little tips on how to steam without buying them or that expensive steam oven. So if you don’t have the bamboo steamer baskets, all is not lost.
- Use as wide a pot/frying pan/skillet with a lid as you can. I use a wok but you can certainly use any of these things as long as they have a lid and are wide enough for you to be able to get dishes in and out of.
Steam trivet
- I also have a steam rack to place inside the wok (pot or frying pan). If I am not using a bamboo steam basket. If you don’t have one you could also use an empty and cleaned tuna can, or a biscuit cutter ring – anything that is strong enough to hold your dish flat and level in boiling water.
Bamboo steamer baskets. Definitely reminiscent of yum cha restaurants. If you don’t have one, don’t worry, you can just use your steam rack to place your plate over the boiling water and put the lid on to create steam. Remember that you will need to have space around the dish so that the steam can circulate around the plate to cook your food.
It is hard to know how to set up the steamer – for smaller baskets I set the basket on the rim of a pot of the same size. But if I am using the bigger steamers, I will put the basket in the wok – Remember that you need to ensure that the rim is sitting in the water as otherwise the bamboo will burn. You can top up the water with boiling water (to maintain the temperature).
As an aside with regards to steaming with bamboo baskets, if you are using them to steam your bao or dumplings, you can buy paper liners, or you can cut a circle of baking paper or wax paper and cut some holes in it to use (a hole punch works pretty well!) this way the steam can circulate easily.
Another option is to use a cabbage or lettuce leaf to line the basket.
The other option is to use your double steamer saucepan if you have one of those. You can just place your plate or dish in the steamer section and off you go!
If you are using a plate on a rack, don’t forget to make sure your dish is heatproof as it will get hot. One with a rim is also worth considering using as you don’t want to have runaway juices. One of my favourite gadgets I have is this – I’m not sure what you call it – weird tongs to remove hot plates from the steamer! It is super handy when removing your dish from the steamer as it is soo hard to get it out with gloves or a tea towel and not spill any of the delicious sauce or marinade.
There are theories about whether to simmer or boil your water for steaming depending on what you are cooking – for example for fish which is fragile, you would gently simmer your water but if you were cooking cha siu bao you would have it at a rapid boil so as to force the dough to split and open up at the top of the bun. Bao do look like a flower bursting open.
