Recipe: Braised Shiitake Mushrooms with Baby Bok Choy

When my grandmother cooked our family’s annual Chinese New Year dinner, there was always a dish of braised shiitake mushrooms, dried oysters, and fat choy (a type of black moss) over a bed of baby bok choy. The kids would always giggle because the black moss looked like hair, which symbolizes prosperity for the coming year. I always looked forward to the tender mushrooms, which soaked up the sweet, savory braising liquid and helped balance out the other richer dishes on the table, but had never attempted to make it on my own.

Turns out it’s not a difficult dish at all! Here’s the version my mom recently passed down to me, simplified but still tasty enough to pull off for your own Lunar New Year or weeknight dinner.

The core ingredients of this dish are the mushrooms and bok choy. While the dried oysters and dried moss are traditional additions, they can be hard to track down outside of Chinatowns or Asian grocery stores, so we’ve omitted them here.

When selecting dried shiitake mushrooms, look for large, whole caps. My mother also insists that price is a sign of quality and that the more expensive mushrooms cook more quickly and have more flavor, so get the nicest mushrooms you can afford. You can certainly use fresh shiitake mushrooms here too, but they will cook much faster, so check on them every ten minutes or so.

While regular white-stemmed bok choy can certainly be used here, baby bok choy, sometimes labeled Shanghai bok choy, is preferred for its lime-green stems and sweet flavor. Blanching them and then putting them in an ice bath before serving helps to preserve their vibrant color and keeps them from getting too soggy once the mushrooms and sauce are ladled over. While this dish is a Lunar New Year dinner staple, it can be part of a weeknight dinner and is perfect with a big bowl of steamed rice.