I spotted these terrific looking little baby bok choy (pechay)greens at the FreshField stall at Market!Market! yesterday and quickly snapped up two bags at PHP50 a piece. Edwin, 
one of the owners of Fresh Field ALWAYS seems to try and bring new products to market and I always find his romaine and other lettuces to be top notch quality and highly consistent. He also carries microgreens which I have used in pizzas with terrific success. Because he makes such an effort, I usually try and frequently feature his products. Baby bok choy seems like it would be such an obvious green to raise but you don’t see it that often locally. I think the first few batches Edwin harvested, he let them grow too much and they were kind of like adolescent bok choy by then…
But this batch of greens was perfect, small enough to qualify as “babies” and rather sweet and tender. I just washed them well, stuck them in a spinner to dry and 
chilled them for an hour or two to make sure they had regained as much moisture and vibrancy as possible. Then, minutes before sitting down to the dinner table to eat, I heated up a large stainless steel pan, added some vegetable oil, 6 peeled cloves of garlic until golden brown, then threw in all of the baby bok choy and tossed vigorously for about 30 seconds. I added a little bit of soy sauce and oyster sauce and a few tablespoons of chicken borth and tossed for another 1-2 minutes until completely wilted but still a fresh green (not an overcooked olive green). Serve immediately. Two bags serves 4 modestly, add more greens if you like lots of veggies. Delicious and incredibly simple to make.
11 Responses
I love this dish MM =) I make it often. The only difference is I put a bit of sugar in it to balance the saltiness from the soy sauce and the oyster sauce =) Absolutely delish!
MM sorry for the somewhat ignorant/stupid question of mine(in my opinion heehee) but I sometimes see leaves labelled as ‘chinese pechay’. They are definitely smaller in size than the usual native pechay, so can you consider them as bok choy already or not? How do you tell the difference if these is such?
Thanks in advance, I’ll try my best to go to Market!Marktet! to avail of those as I really liked them the first time I tried them in Singapore.
Bok choy in cantonese is pak choy or close to pe-chay, I am guessing… Lei, I am not really sure what the difference is…but these ones above look like just small baby pechay as I traditionally know it in the local wet markets and that I used to grow in gradeschool…
Lei, I think the Chinese pechay has wider stalks and is less leafy than bokchoy so whe you look ay them Chinese pechay is bottom heavy while bok choy is top heavy
bok choy, pechay or pak choy … they are all the same. in chinese, they all spell the same … 白èœ
in hongkong, they call the green color pechay as Shanghai Green Green, but locally we call it taiwan bokchoy or sometimes zhingkang.
what MM featured in this article is what we call DWARF CANTON BOKCHOY. Its totally different from the local pechay.
The green gems look very inviting, begging to be picked up and tasty. I can eat the whole plate without the guilt of getting it into my hips and thighs! Simply delicious and not greasy.
Hey thanks MM and everybody for the info. Really appreciate it. =)
‘adolescent bok choy’ ;-) mwahaha! i love that phrase.
This looks easy enough to follow! I don’t think I’ve seen baby bok choy. Aha! Time to make a trip to Market! Market!
Looks like those are a month-old pechay tagalog MM. If I am not mistaken, ang fully matured niyan ay 45 days.
Dito sa NZ ang tinatawag nating pechay baguio sa atin, ay tinatawag din nilang bok choy at kung minsan, Chinese cabbage. Pati iyong mestisong mustasa at pechay tagalog minsan ay may label na bok choy din sa mga supermarket. Pero sa akin, pareho lang ang tawag ko…petsay!
i love bokchoy over a hot little bowl of fragrant jasmine rice! whip out the chopstix and stuff your face!:)