DISH NAME : CRACKLING SPINACH

Preparation Time : 10 minutes + drying time

Cooking Time : 10 minutes

Description

Crackling spinach, also known as crispy sea weed , is a popular dish in Chinese restaurants. Although known as crispy seaweed, it has nothing to do with seaweed. It is called crackling spinach as fried spinach crackles in your mouth.
Spinach is a green coloured leafy vegetable. There are 3 main types of spinach, savoy, smooth leaf and baby spinach.
Savoy has crisp,wrinkled,curly leaves. Smooth-leaf has flat, unwrinkled, spade-shaped leaves.Baby spinach is great for use in salads as it has a sweeter taste.
Spinach was popularised by Popeye, the famous cartoon character. There is a story behind the love for spinach by Popeye. It seems that in 1870 German chemist Erich von Wolf ascertained the amount of iron in spinach as 3.5 milligrams. But while scribbling it in his notes, he accidentally left out the decimal point and wrote that spinach had 35 milligrams of iron per 100-gram serving. This fact wasn't corrected until almost seventy years later. This claim of iron content in Spinach was noticed by the studio that created the cartoon character Popeye. So they brought out the theory that Popeye got his strength from eating iron rich Spinach.

Note

1) To get crisp spinach, dry the spinach leaves individually and then shred them finely using a very sharp knife. The shreds may be kept long & thin. If spinach has water, it will become soggy.
2) Do not heat the oil too much as the shredded spinach tends to burn quickly.
3) Some recipes substitute Spinach with cabbage, but I made it with Spinach.
4) Frying spinach in a metal strainer, eases the gathering of the fried spinach from oil.
5) Some people dust cornflour on spinach before frying. But it did not make much difference when i tried it.

Method

1) Heat oil.
2) Place the shredded spinach in a metal strainer (like a tea strainer) and dip it in hot oil till it is crisp.
3) Drain the fried spinach on absorbent paper to soak all the excess oil.
4) Heat 1 tsp of oil in a pan from the fried oil. 5) Add sesame seeds and allow it to crackle. 6) Add the fried spinach, sugar and salt to this and mix very lightly. Serve immediately.

Serving Suggestions

Serve hot as an accompaniment to soups or as a starter.