Let's Wrap This Up


It is our final FFT action project! That also means Summer Break is coming up too. Let us finish what we all started, the school year. Lettuce Wraps served at the P.F. Chang’s restaurant in Northbrook. What this action project is all about is testing the comparisons between a homemade dish and a restaurant dish. For this project, I chose to prepare homemade Chinese Chicken Lettuce Wraps and compare them to the Chinese Chicken Lettuce Wraps served at P.F. Chang's restaurant in Northbrook. To describe our dishes, we had to use relevant adjectives and ayurvedic tastes to describe them. We also needed to relate our experience to Michael Pollan’s Five forward than all the others. This AP was more straight Quite sophisticated I must say, right? That is not all, remember Micheal Pollan?

Food Transformations we used to compare our dishes to. Feel free to try this project out for yourself. I hope you enjoy my final action project!

For this meal review, I ate Chinese Chicken Lettuce Wraps at the P.F. Chang’s restaurant in Northbrook. P.F. Chang's is a restaurant that specializes in Asian-inspired cuisine with a 'Farm-to-Wok' food philosophy. The menu claims the dishes are made from scratch every day with clean ingredients. The lettuce wraps I ordered had a light brown color, and looked fresh and balanced. The dish smelled smoky and pungent. As I was eating the wrap, the texture of the lettuce was crunchy, and the ground chicken was chunky, chewy, and juicy. The puffed bean sprouts were crispy and added an element of fun to the dish. The dish tasted sweet, salty (fire and water), and pungent (fire and air). The chicken lettuce wraps appeared fresh due to the brightness of the lettuce and green onion. Also, the water chestnuts had a nice snap when I bit down on them.

Illustrated by "SN"

I chose to recreate these Chinese Chicken Lettuce Wraps by Rachel Castro on Allrecipes.com. The website claims that over 4,000 people have made the recipe and has a 4.5 star rating. Once the dish was completed, it looked bright and appetizing to the eye. The color was a deeper, more appetizing brown. The smell of ginger flooded the air, in the best possible way. The texture of the dish was a perfect balance between soft, firm, and crunchy. From pan to plate, the dish sizzled. The meat tasted both sweet and savory, while the vegetables tasted pungent (fire and air) and astringent (air and earth). The dish was prepared with organic ground chicken, green onion, and lettuce. 

Illustrated by "SN"

For this recipe, I chose to use Organic Korean BBQ Sauce in place of Hoisin sauce. The ingredients of this sauce includes organic tamari sauce, water, organic cane sugar, organic rice vinegar, organic molasses, organic tapioca starch, organic jalapeno puree, organic ginger puree, organic garlic powder, organic diced garlic, organic sesame oil, organic cayenne pepper, and organic garlic granules. Aside from the tamari sauce and jalapeno puree, all of the ingredients are whole and healthy.

Both dishes were quite similar, however, I preferred my homemade dish to the restaurant version. This is mostly because, from start to finish, I knew what was going into my dish. Between the two recipes, the difference was the Korean BBQ sauce I substituted for the Hoisin sauce. The addition of the Korean BBQ sauce added a little more spice and depth to the dish.

If I were to recommend one dish over the other, I would recommend the homemade recipe. The textures in my recipe were much more balanced between soft, firm, and crunchy. Is it the tastes and textures that make a dish appealing? Or is it the sounds and smells? Sounds and smells come before taste - they are the senses that send signals to you and make the dish desirable. How a dish looks is important to the appeal - when you see the food, you might say, "I want that." 

Of Michael Pollan's Five Food Transformations, this experience related to Quality vs Quantity. Most low to mid-range restaurants are more focused on quantity than quality. Even though P.F. Chang's has a 'Farm-to-Wok' philosophy, they are still making food for hundreds of people each day. Some of the quality gets lost during the professional cooking process. They need to feed people in a certain amount of time, so they can have them eat, pay, and leave so the next table can continue the cycle. Restaurants sometimes sacrifice quality for quantity. If it isn't going to taste amazing, then they might as well give you a lot of it! This makes you feel like you are getting a good deal. If you make a dish from scratch, at home, you are able to choose your ingredients and take your time in the cooking process. You are the one in charge of everything, from start to finish - quantity AND quality. Even though this isn't a STEAM action project, I must say that I got some significant results in this experiment!

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