The skinny on Peking duck

If you order your Peking duck to go, you may be committing one of the worst crimes in eating. Peking duck is meant to be eaten as soon as it gets to your table — not reheated at home or bagged for the office. You eat it when the skin is still crispy, still glistening from the roasting fire, and the server has carved the skin into little square portions and put them on a serving plate along with sliced scallions. You wrap it in a crepe or a thin pancake, slather hoisin sauce on it, and then enjoy it.

This is not the time to think about the cholesterol. Or put it this way: If you allow yourself only so much cholesterol in a day or a week, let it be from a Peking duck at Peking Garden restaurant. The duck is prepared between 12 and 16 hours, and roasted only when the order comes in, and so the hour or two you spend for lunch or dinner there is well worth.

In fact, restaurant manager Archie Au almost takes it as a personal affront should you let your duck go cold. You hurt his feelings when the roasted bird is, well, not consumed immediately because then the experience is diminished. You have to enjoy the duck the way the emperors in Beijing did centuries ago and the way the Chinese do today, from the elite to the newly rich to the ordinary citizens. It’s a dish that doesn’t need an occasion because it is in itself a celebration of northern China’s cuisine.

Archie explains that the ducks are only about 45 days old when they are slaughtered. And like the famous cattle from Kobe, their days are spent being fed, sleeping, and confined to a small space. “The meat, compared with local ones, is more tender because they are put in a cage and do not have exercise, making the skin develop a lot of fat.”

That’s another secret to a good Peking duck — even when the duck skin itself is fatty, expert cooking can reduce this so that it becomes very thin and crispy. Peking Garden in the Philippines, an affiliate of the Hong Kong restaurant, is so famous for its duck that Archie says what they serve in Manila may be better than the Hong Kong version. On weekends, the TriNoma restaurant dishes out between 60 and 70 Peking ducks and, in classic Beijing style, the almost entire bird is used — the skin and meat are served with the crepes or thin pancakes, and other parts are stir-fried and served with sauce.

By the way, Peking duck is different from roast duck. While they’re the same bird, they’re totally different dishes — roast duck is simply roasted, no hours of air drying or glazing or elaborate preparations to make the bird more flavorful. “Peking duck is a specialty of northern China. You cannot find it in Cantonese restaurants, whose specialty is roast duck.”

Archie has been with the local Peking Garden for 11 years (by way of the original Hong Kong restaurant) and says the taste of its menu has been adjusted to the local palate. “In Beijing, the sauce is a little bit saltier; in Hong Kong it’s sweeter, which is how they like it in Manila.” (A word about the sauce: we call it “hoisin,” which Archie says means “seafood” in Mandarin, but there is absolutely no seafood in the sauce. “We just call it duck sauce, made from soya beans and sugar.”)

Peking Garden doesn’t serve half of a Peking duck because, again, you ruin it for the other half if it gets cold. If the whole bird is beyond your budget (P1,900), you can opt for the other bird — chicken. Its Beggar’s Chicken (P1,000) has to be ordered in advance or go for the Steamed Chicken Wrapped in Lotus Leaves (P780).

The beggar’s chicken has an interesting origin. Legend has it that during the Ching Dynasty in the 1700s, an old beggar stole a chicken from a farm and not having cooking utensils to cook it with, he wrapped it in lotus leaves and then used mud as a second wrapping. Then he baked it in an open fire.

These days, you won’t find your beggar’s chicken muddy. But you will find it stuffed with pickled Chinese cabbage, mushrooms, onions, and other herbs.

The menu of Peking Garden is straightforward, which makes choosing from its wide variety of dishes easy. It is categorized into appetizers, shark’s fin, bird’s nest, soup, abalone and sea cucumber, rice, seafood, poultry, pork, beef and lamb, beancurd, vegetable, noodle and dimsum. Most dishes come in small, medium or large size, which is convenient for a meal for two or 20.

Another signature dish is steamed xiaolongbao or soup dumpling. Archie describes it as somewhere between a dumpling and a balut, because you pierce the dumpling with your chopstick or bite into it to make a small hole and then suck out the soup (if you’re a woman), or you put the whole thing in your mouth (if you’re a man) and enjoy its flavors as the soup is mixed with the meat.

The most surprising thing for me about the soup dumpling is how delicately it tastes. We’re so used to the strong taste of dumplings (or maybe we just put on too much sauce on) that this one is almost lady-like. Archie says it’s probably the chicken broth I’m tasting instead of the ground pork that’s inside as well.

How do they put the soup inside the dumping without it dripping all over when steamed? The traditional way is that the soup broth is gelatinized and put inside the raw dumpling, and when it is steamed the gelatin turns into soup.

Peking Garden has many other choices for meat lovers, as well as seafood and noodle lovers, and vegetarians. Northern China being the coldest region of the country, it is not suitable to growing rice, hence its cuisine’s most distinctive feature is the fan: wheat and millet. At Peking Garden, they make the noodles by hand and are practically cooked in all manner and with all kinds of meats or vegetables. There are fried hand-made noodles with shredded pork, or with shredded beef and green pepper, with shrimps, with vegetables, or with soup.

The temperature in the north has also limited its ingredients so the cooking is simpler but no less flavorful than the south. “Southern China has a lot of sea and seafood, and the weather is warmer. Peking or Beijing in the north is colder, people are used to more oily and heavier food. But for Peking Garden here, seafood is easy to get, so the cooking is a mix of the north and south.”

Another dish we enjoyed was the crispy vegetable conpoy with bamboo shoots and honey walnuts. We’ve never had sweet walnuts with dried scallops before — and I love scallops, however you cook them, and I love walnuts, too, so this dish for me is a double winner.

Just as the Peking duck is served with thin pancakes, a lamb dish (or was it beef?) is served with a sesame puff — a turnover-like dough that’s covered with sesame seeds. If the Americans have hamburger, northern China has this Mongolian style bread dish. Archie explains that the bread was added probably because people long ago needed as much energy as they could to work on their farms and eating meat alone was not sufficient. It tastes incredible — the meat and bread so balanced that you will almost forget about the duck (and that’s saying a lot).

Then there’s the very curious dish that is made of scrambled egg whites. I don’t know what else is in it, but when vinegar is added at your table, it’s supposed to taste like crabmeat. It does look like crabmeat, but to me it still tasted like egg white. Then again, maybe it hadn’t been steeped in vinegar long enough when I tried it. Be that as it may, it’s a must-try if only to see how it plays in your mouth.

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Peking Garden at TriNoma Mall can seat 200 and has three function rooms for big parties. For inquiries, call 901-0502,901-0507 or 901-0531..