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From cooking approaches to the size, design and origins of abalone, there are numerous intricacies associated with examining the world's most in-demand shellfish. Before you next face a complete page of premium abalone meals in a restaurant, we break down the subject for you with the assistance of professional chefs from MICHELIN Plate restaurants Yan Ting and Cherry Garden.
And then there's the usual flummox: do abalones actually have several "heads" and is less heads constantly much better than more? We ask Chef de Cuisine So Kam Lok of MICHELIN Plate restaurant Yan Ting of The St. Regis Singapore and Executive Chef Eric Tan of Mandarin Asian, Singapore who oversees MICHELIN Plate dining establishment Cherry Garden, for more insights into the delicacy.
For instance, "2 heads in 1 catty" (600g) relates to two pieces of 300g abalone while 4-head in 1 catty (600g) describes four pieces of 150g abalone. For this reason, the bigger the number, the smaller sized the abalone. While this generally refers to the abalones that have actually been dried, it is likewise utilized to explain canned abalone.
A giveaway is when the "heavier" one is described in the menu as tang bao, or soup abalone, and the "lighter" one as tang xin gan bao, or sugar heart dried abalone, which are canned and dried abalones respectively. Xian bao describes fresh abalones that could either be live or frozen.