Pak Choi

Smashed, into hot oil, thirty seconds before the greens. Any longer and it is bitter.

Sweet-savoury glaze clinging to a vegetable with no fat to hold it otherwise.

Off the heat, at the end. Cooking it kills the only reason it is there.

Warm pungency against mustard-family bitterness. Neither backs down.

Guanylate from the mushroom, water from the stalk. The stalk becomes the sauce.

Salt drives out the water so the leaf wilts instead of stewing.

The hollow stalk holds oil the way a spoon does.

A green bitter enough to reset the palate between mouthfuls of fat.

Italian treatment on a Chinese brassica. Salt-fish does what oyster sauce does, louder.

Nutty milk solids against sulfur. Nobody does it; it works.

Brassica sulfur and mould sulfur are closer relatives than anyone admits.

Both bitter, both roasted if you char the stalk. A tasting-menu move, not a Tuesday one.