MeXO Sauce - XO Sauce with Chipotle, Ancho and Guajillo Chillies

  

One of my earliest posts on the Jarhead blog was about XO sauce, the decadent condiment from Hong Kong, which can give a regular stir fry a really good hit of umami.  I made some really tasty dishes from my first batch of XO – chicken and okra stir fry with XO sauce, pippies with XO sauce, and fried eggs with XO sauce on rice.  All really simple, but supremely delicious. 

Last time I used a recipe from chef Danny Bowien, but this time I decided to make a few changes and put my own spin on it.  I still had a lot of Mexican dried chillies lying around. I originally used them for my Chipotle Ketchup recipe, but I figured that the complex flavours of the ancho chilli, the spicy kick of the guajillo chilli, and the smokiness of the chipotle chilli, would all enhance an XO sauce. The dried chillies really added a layer of complexity to the flavour, but next time I would add in some extra chillies (fresh or dried) for stronger chilli hit. 

Dried scallops and shrimp form the basis of XO sauce.  Previously, I bought them from a Chinese supermarket in Haymarket.  But since my first batch of XO, I had walked past some stores in Sydney Chinatown that sold dried seafood, mostly dried abalone that tourists buy to bring home with them from Sydney.  I went to one of these stores on Sussex Street and found three different varieties of dried scallop and two types of dried shrimp.  The store was full of so many random types of dried seafood, but somehow I resisted buying any of the delectable-looking dried sea cucumbers.

One item that I omitted from my new recipe was a type of cured pork I found at a Chinese butcher shop.  I thought that it tasted pretty similar to the Chinese sausage and overwhelmed the flavour of the seafood.  A lot of the XO sauce recipes on the internet include Jinhua ham, which is a type of cured ham from the Chinese city of Jinhua.  Apparently prosciutto is a good substitute, so I sourced some good quality prosciutto from Harris Farm butcher at Potts Point to add to my sauce. 

Soaking the scallops and shrimp overnight to rehydrate them yields some flavourful cooking water.  Some recipes online call for the cooking water to be included, so I figured I’d take their advice and add some in when cooking the aromatics – I'm sure it enhanced the taste of the sauce.

Overall, I think the MeXO sauce tastes fantastic – actually a bit subtler than my first batch and more balanced.  My girlfriend preferred the first batch because it was spicier and had a stronger flavour – but perhaps I just need to spoon more of my new MeXO sauce into my next stir fry!

MeXO Sauce Recipe

What you need:

• 4 Guajillo chillies
• 6 small chipotle chillies
• 3 ancho chillies
• 150g of dried shrimp
• 150g of dried scallops
• 4 fresh long red chillies, roughly chopped
• 4 shallots, peeled
• 1 bulb of garlic, broken into cloves and peeled
• ¼ cup of sliced ginger
• 2 small chinese sausages sliced (approx ¼ of a cup)
• 5 slices of prosciutto, sliced
• 2 cups of canola oil
• 3 tablespoons of shaoxing rice wine
• 2 tablespoons of dark soy
• 3 tablespoons of fish sauce
• 2 teaspoons of sugar
• 1 teaspoon of sea salt
• ½ stick of cinnamon
• 2 star anise
• 1 teaspoon and a half of chilli flakes

Making the MeXO sauce:

1. Soak dried shrimp in a bowl with enough water to submerge. Similarly, soak the dried scallops in a separate bowl.  Leave both overnight to soften and rehydrate. 
2. The next morning, drain the shrimp and scallops, reserving  about a quarter of a cup of the soaking water from each (1/4 cup of scallop soaking water, ¼ cup of prawn soaking water).
3. Now prepare your dried chillies.  Cut the chillies open and scrape out the seeds and any pith (this is important, it will be horribly bitter if you leave them in).  Wipe off any dust on the surface of the chillies.
4. Heat a small pan, and toast the chillies on a low heat until they become fragrant and start to release their essential oils.  You don’t want to colour or burn them, just heat them up for a couple of minutes.
5. Place these toasted chillies into a bowl and cover with boiling water for about 30 minutes, until they have softened.  Drain and discard the water (again, important, bitterness awaits if you don't discard). 
6. Add your ginger, garlic, shallots and fresh chillies into a food processor and blitz until very finely chopped. 
7. In a large pot, heat about a third of the canola oil and slowly fry the processed aromatics. 
8. While these aromatics are frying, blitz your soaked shrimp and scallops in the food processor until they are very finely chopped.  Set aside.
9. When the aromatics have start to soften, add in the rice wine and cook off the alcohol for a couple of minutes. 
10. Now add in your reserved prawn and scallop water, and simmer on a high heat for about 5 minutes to reduce the mixture.  Pour the aromatics into a bowl and set aside.
11. Add the rest of the canola oil into the now empty pot, and then add in your finely chopped shrimp and scallops.  Fry this on a low heat until the shrimp and scallops look golden. 
12. In the meantime, add your soaked dried chillies from earlier, and the sliced Chinese sausage and prosciutto into the food processor and blitz. It should form a brown paste. 
13. Add this paste into the pot with the shrimp and scallops, and fry for another 5 minutes. 
14. Return the aromatic mixture you set aside earlier into the pot and stir to combine.  Drop in the cinnamon stick and star anise.
15. Add in the soy sauce, fish sauce and salt and simmer for 45 minutes on a low heat, stirring regularly to ensure none of the ingredients are sticking to the bottom of the pot or burning.
16. Remove whole spices.
17. Pour into sterilised jars.  

XO Sauce: The stuff dreams/nightmares are made of

I recently watched this video from the VICE Magazine series, Munchies, featuring Danny Bowien, the chef at Mission Chinese Food.


Watching this clip made me (a) want to move to San Francisco and (b) eat some Chinese food.  After reading more about Bowien on various websites and blogs, I came across his recipe for XO sauce, that he cooked on Martha Stewart's TV show.  XO sauce is something that I'd seen on Chinese menus a lot but didn't realise what was in it or that I could make it myself.  It's a very luxurious sauce but is also versatile - it's the hollandaise of Asian cooking.  It contains various forms of dried seafood, along with spices often used in Chinese cooking.

I read a few more blogs and recipes about XO, and started to get an idea of the key ingredients.  Finding some of the ingredients was a challenge but I tracked them down in the end.

Dried Scallops and Dried Shrimp:  The dried shrimp were easier to find than the dried scallops.  I found them both in the Asian supermarket on Thomas Street in Chinatown.  When I started looking around the shop, I came across an entire wall of dried seafood.  I spotted the dried shrimp easily, but I couldn't see the scallops.  They seemed to have every other kind of seafood, and I had almost resigned myself to using dried mussels instead, but I decided to ask one of the people at the checkout and (of course) they found it easily.  Dried scallops are meant to be pretty expensive but this was in quite a small quantity so it wasn't too bad.

Chinese sausage and bacon:  I've used Chinese sausage in recipes previously, so I knew it wouldn't be hard to get hold of some.  But on the Chinese bacon front, I just had no idea what it looked/tasted like or where to find it.  I'd asked the people at the same supermarket where I found the dried seafood, but they didn't know what I was talking about.  I then went to the Emperor's Garden Meat Market, which is my favourite Chinese butcher in Haymarket.  Their prices are extremely cheap - almost worryingly so.  You've got to wonder where the meat comes from when its being sold this cheap! I bought some Chinese sausage there, and noticed a vacuum packed strip of pork belly hanging in the window.  It was dark brown and looked to be cured or smoked so I figured I could use it as Chinese bacon.  After some further research I noticed that Kylie Kwong actually uses Italian pancetta instead in her recipe, and that Chinese bacon is very similar.  I think the product I bought was pretty much chinese bacon and in the end it was delicious.

The other ingredients in Danny Bowien's XO sauce recipe are easy to find, but they all combine to make an absolutely delicious sauce or marinade.  It just lifts a stir fry and adds a great umami taste.

The only downside:  You get really, really freaking crazy dreams.  I cooked this great stir fry for dinner the night after I made the sauce, I couldn't have been more pleased with the result.  But when I went to sleep my dreams were really vivid and bizarre.  It seems that XO sauce is pretty potent stuff... The recipe is below:

CRAZY DREAM CHICKEN STIR-FRY WITH OKRA

Ingredients

• A jar of XO sauce, recipe above.
• 500 grams of boneless chicken thigh, sliced into bite-sized pieces.
• 200 grams of okra, chopped into bite-sized pieces.
• A bunch of bok choy/chinese broccoli. 
• Peanut oil.
• A brown onion, sliced thinly.

Method

1. Marinate the chicken thigh pieces in two heaped tablespoons of XO sauce.  Make sure you coat each piece in the sauce.  Leave for at least 2 hours, or overnight in the fridge.
2. In a wok, add a tablespoon of peanut oil.  Stir-fry the sliced onion with a tablespoon of XO sauce.  When the onions are translucent add the bok choy/broccoli and stir-fry.  Put aside in a bowl.
3. Then add another tablespoon of peanut oil and when the wok is smoking, cook the chicken in batches until brown on the outside and cooked through.  Add to the bowl with the vegetables.
4. Finally, stir fry the okra with a tablespoon of XO sauce. Add three tablespoons of water and then put a lid or a bowl over the wok to steam the okra.
5. Add the okra in with the rest of the ingredients and then combine.  
6. Serve with white rice.