winter melon in broth - 冬瓜湯

One reason I want to blog is to share Chinese dishes that are under-represented in the West. Most ethnic cuisine suffers from being narrowed and most often altered to suit the taste of foreign societies.

I actually don't dine that much in Chinese restaurants in North America cities, except when I travel to cities that has very large Asian population like Toronto, Vancouver, and New York. I at time travel to Phoenix, AZ for work and I would go to an unassuming Chinese restaurant there that serves Cantonese food at very reasonable price. This restaurant do most of the business with regular customers, especially dinner. Each time I go there for dinner I invariably see 1 or 2 non-Asian parties dinning there.


I always like to survey all the tables to see what people order and it is easy enough to tell they are frequent customers.What is really striking is the dishes the non-Asian parties tends to order - I could not even find them in the bilingual menu. There are a lot of deep fried and a totally different fried rice or fried noodle that are closer to the early days of "Chinese food" often prepare in chapsui fashion.

In recent time the restaurant has not fair so well. It has been hit very hard by the economic down turn. It is located in a neighbor that has very high foreclosure rate.

See, the dishes Chinese folks eat on daily bases are very different what you find the the restaurants even in Hong Kong. They tends to be much less fancy, less oily, and would be considered to be quite bland for most Western's notion of Chinese food. These dishes typically are prepared with very economic ingredients. In the hands of a good home cook, the dishes are no less delicious if you learn to appreciate and explore them.

While I mention bland before, it is not entirely true. Depends on the meal and occasion the the number of dinners, a bigger meal typically would have a good assortment of dishes. Some are rather plain while others can be very flavor packed and oilier.

This brings to the dish in the topic - winter melon (冬瓜 in Chinese means exactly as winter melon) in pork bone broth. I deliberately not wanting to call it a soup because the wrong connotation the word suggests.

Of all the gourd-like vegetable winter melon is amongst the most bland. It has very subtle and delicate taste to it. The best way to appreciate it is to cook it in a good broth. Pork bone broth is the most common way to cook this vegetable.

I came across it this weekend shopping and decide to buy it because it is quite infrequent to see and especially fresh and good. It rots quite fast in storage. I made a pork shoulder bone broth which takes a few hours for the meat to be quite tender and one can easily separate them from the bone, but not cooked too long that the meat loses the flavor.

first shave off the tough skin - i just slice them off with a sharp knift

i cut them somewhat artfully into trapezoidal shape instead of the boring rectangles

i only cooked the melon after the broth is ready as it take much less time to cooked

i added a small pinch of dried shrimp more for visual effect and in keeping of tradition of this dish

a small dish of good soy sauce to dip the delicious pork

The broth is very tasty because I use less than usual amount of water with respect to the amount of bone.  This batch of pork should bones are very fresh and has a lot of meat.

here is a small bowl as a snack - served in a japanese "lacquered" bowl traditionally use for miso