Cantonese to please

The meticulous preparation of every top-notch ingredient is the reason cited for awarding one Michelin star to chef Li Qiang's Cai Yi Xuan restaurant at the inaugural Michelin Guide Beijing. Li's is one of five Cantonese eateries among Beijing's 23 Michelin-starred restaurants.

The 46-year-old Tianjin native studied transportation at a technical secondary school. The factory in which he worked closed when he was 20 years old. So, he applied to become a cook at a Cantonese restaurant. He learned from a Hong Kong chef for over a decade before becoming a chef at Cai Yi Xuan when it opened in 2012.

Li has over 20 years of experience in the various cooking styles found all over China, including Cantonese, Beijing, Tianjin and Chaoshan cuisines.

Seafood is one of his specialties, and especially abalone. He has mastered braised whole South African abalone, double-boiled fresh abalone-chicken soup in coconut, poached abalone in rice soup with minced pickled Chinese cabbage and oven-baked whole abalone puffs with diced chicken.

The abalone for the puff is stewed for three hours before it's added to the diced chicken. The puff is then baked until it's crisp and topped with a spoonful of abalone sauce.

His signature dish is stewed pork belly with abalone and truffle. Pork belly is prepared differently throughout China. For instance, it's spicy in Hunan province and sweet in Shanghai.

Li believes the key is to select the right slices with three layers of fat and two layers of lean meat. It's fatty but not greasy when cooked.

Li uses a spray gun to remove the villi and then blanches the cuts to make the meat more compact and tastier. The pork is steamed for half an hour.

The live abalone from Dalian are cleaned and boiled in warm water for two minutes. Li then makes an abalone sauce, which is the key to his signature dish.

The pork belly is cut into 50-gram cubes and deep-fried before it's boiled again with yellow liquor, soy sauce and rock sugar for an hour.

Finally, abalone sauce and abalone are added to the pork belly. It's soft and sweet with a strong truffle flavor.

"Abalone is seafood, and truffles are fungus. And both match well with pork belly," Li says.

Spotted grouper is prepared in various ways. Li steams it whole, deep-fries the bones and wok-fries the fillets.

Li's signature spotted grouper dish is a seafood soup ideal for winter.

The chef also experiments with ingredient combinations to give traditional pairings a new twist－for instance, foie gras with Chinese chives and wok-fried prawns with fermented black garlic.

He doesn't waste anything. Ginger, for instance, is served in slices or strips, or is minced into different dishes. So, Li asks his team to slice the ginger first and then cut it further if needed.

"Cantonese cuisine values the freshness of its ingredients, and the flavors change a little according to the season. Summer dishes are lighter, while winter dishes are heavier," he explains.

When Li returns to Tianjin on weekends, he gets up early and cycles to a local market to learn about seasonal ingredients and buy what he needs to prepare a large meal for his family.

"You can learn about the times to harvest and enjoy the ingredients because farmers understand this better than chefs," he says.

Li is continually developing seasonal menus.

He creates Cantonese dishes using hairy crab in winter. He serves them steamed in his crabmeat balls and in bald-butter soup rice dishes.

His grapefruit, sea urchin and crabmeat jelly with sturgeon caviar and his deep-fried crabmeat, roe and shrimp meatballs coated with almond slices feature the flavor of umami.

Li's innovative approach to the classic drunken hairy crab dish swaps the traditional Shaoxing yellow liquor for a plum spirit to make it sweeter and fruitier.

Li is preparing a festive menu for the Spring Festival family-reunion period.

"For Spring Festival dinner, we must have Cantonese dishes as well as dumplings, which is a must for northern culture," he says.

Li heads up two different teams preparing northern and Cantonese food, respectively.

"Each cuisine has its own specialty. Even the pots and scoops they use to fry the dishes are different," he explains.

"We offer high-end Cantonese cuisine. But since our customers come from all over the world, I want them to get a taste of Beijing during their visit. So, I added some northern-style dishes."