Patron Exclusive Recipe #15 Steamed Napa Cabbage with Garlic Sauce

Sup guys, I hope you had a wonderful week.   

This week, I wanna show you how to make a dish with the garlic sauce from the post last week. This is almost like a formula, besides napa cabbage, you can steam eggplant, scallop, or just tofu. So play with it and have fun!

Let's get started.  

**Ingredients**  

1. Napa cabbage, 1 head. 

2. Garlic sauce, 3-4 tbsp.  (I did 5 in the recipe, but Chris thinks that it can be 3 as it's quite oily at the end. At the end of the post, there's a note on how to steam it without the garlic sauce) 

3. Fresh garlic, finely minced, 2-3 cloves.  (If you're doing 3 tbsp, you can top it with an extra 2-3 cloves of finely minced garlic to enhance the flavor.) 

4. Soy sauce, 1 tsp. 

5. Sugar, 1/2 tsp. 

6. Glass noodles, about 40g.  Reconstituted for 20 minutes, give it some rough cut so that it's easier to eat. (Glass noodle is the classic in this flavor combo, but I used tofu, smashed it and put it on the plate instead of the glass noodles since I was testing this week's smothered tofu anyway.) 

7. Jinhua Ham, finely diced (optional), 5g.   

 **Process**  

1. Take a napa cabbage, quarter it, then cut each piece in half, and you have 8 sections. When washing, gently soak it in water for a few minutes and repeat 2-3 times. Try your best to keep the leaves on each section. Like this:          

2. On a plate, put your reconstituted and cut glass noodles on, or put mash tofu on:    

3. On top of the glass noodles/tofu, lay the fell out small leaves on it first:    

4. Then neatly lay the 8 sections of the cabbage on, press it down gently if necessary:   

5. Now, we put sauce on it, try to get evenly put them on each section. If you're using 3 tbsp, you can top it with an additional 2-3 cloves of finely minced fresh garlic:       

6. Now, I used some finely diced Jinhua ham on top of it for extra flavor, you can totally skip it, or do it with some lean ham, or Cantonese lap cheong sausage.    

7. Now we can steam. To a pot/wok of boiling water, put a steaming rack in, then put the plate of cabbage in.      

8. Cover and steam on high for 8 minutes if you want it to be on the crunchier side, or 12 minutes if you want it to be on the sweet and soft side. I did 12 minutes.    

9. Now carefully take the very hot plate, and pour out the liquid that's collected in the plate into a bowl:  

10. Add in 1 tsp of soy sauce and 1/2 tsp of sugar in, taste and see if it's seasoned to your liking. You may want to adjust the salt or sugar level a little bit base on how much garlic sauce you used or how sweet your cabbage is.    

11. Now pour the sauce back on the cabbage and the dish is done.
Note on serving: if you want it to be pretty, DON'T pour the sauce directly on top of the cabbage, pour it carefully along the sides of the plate instead.
This way the cabbage will keep its color and shape better. When eating, just dip the cabbage in the sauce.  
I pour it directly over the leaves because we're not serving it to other people and this way it absorbs the sauce better.       

(See how the leaves softened after I pour the sauce on?)

Note on how to make it without the garlic sauce: 

If you don't have the garlic sauce, you can still do it. 

1. Follow steps 1-4. Get 8 cloves of garlic finely minced, put 2/3 on the cabbage, then steam it for the same amount of time. 

2. Take it out, pour out the sauce, add in 2 tsp of soy sauce and the same amount of sugar, and then salt to taste. Pour it back into the plate. 

3. Now take the remaining 1/3 of the finely minced garlic, sprinkle it on top of the cabbage. Get 2-3 tablespoons of oil up to about 200 degrees, when smoke's starting to appear. Then pour the oil over the fresh garlic.  

And then, steamed napa cabbage with garlic is done. 

This is a real really yet good looking and tasty weeknight dish, hope you like it~ 

See you next week.