The story goes that hurricane shelter dishes have been first created on fishing boats housed in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay Storm Shelter. Mostly made with freshly caught crab, these punchy stir-fries have been served by boat dwellers entertaining clients who’d come to eat and drink on the fishing boats anchored within the cove. At their peak within the Seventies, there have been reportedly greater than 300 such tiny floating eateries, serving an iconic style of recent seafood cooked at excessive warmth.
The vigorous scene pale within the Nineteen Eighties as the federal government ceased issuing licenses for boat eating places and applied schemes relocating a lot of the boat inhabitants to landside public housing. However the boat dwellers took their iconic hurricane shelter dishes with them, organising eating places and cooked meals stalls round Wan Chai and beneath the Canal Street Flyover, thereby incomes the long-lasting stir-fry fashion one other identify: Beneath the Bridge Spicy Crab.
At this time the unique system has gone by many permutations, and the identical dish can style fairly completely different in numerous eating places throughout Hong Kong. For one, “hurricane shelter-style” has turn out to be a way that may be utilized to a myriad of substances, from shellfish to greens and even fried rice. Some cooks add breadcrumbs; others don’t. Some add chile within the type of Sichuan doubanjiang, some chili oil, and others recent chiles. Some, as you see right here, apply this system to greens similar to corn ribs. The widespread denominator, nonetheless, stays the sheer depth of the dish: a whopping quantity of minced and fried garlic, wok hei (the distinctly smoky taste imbued on a dish from wok cooking), and a deep, sustaining, fiery spice that’s frankly uncharacteristic of Cantonese delicacies—a convention mostly identified for its delicacy and clear flavors.
Storm-shelter stir-fries aren’t simple to grasp. A lot of the dish’s success is contingent on the administration of warmth. Undercooked garlic might be acrid but a few seconds too lengthy and it burns. Erratically formed substances could also be arduous to completely prepare dinner and season by. Which is to say that wonderful typhoon-shelter dishes aren’t to be missed on any journeys to Hong Kong; the chef’s mastery of the wok is the important thing ingredient.
To beat these challenges at residence, these corn ribs have to be blanched earlier than they’re stir-fried. On the venerable Oi Man Sang, in Hong Kong, they’re blanched in oil, however at residence water will do. Then the breadcrumb garlic crisp and the seasonings should be measured out earlier than the stir-fry begins to reduce any threat of burning. As you’d see within the Oi Man Sang episode in our Youtube Sequence Avenue Eats, the stir-fry portion of the recipe solely takes a matter of seconds. There isn’t time for fuss.
