ChineseCookingDemystified

Early Look: Chengdu Tomato & Egg Noodles

Sometimes a dish is just in the right time and the right place, and this was definitely the case with Chengdu tomato and egg noodle soup. The dish isn't rocket science: it's more or less just fried eggs and cooked noodles, all smothered smothered in a rich tomato broth.

The genesis traces to the early 00s. China's post-reform Tomato and E...

Early Look: Ghost Fire Green (鬼火绿)

Beans and rice. Pickles and rice. Hot dogs and baked beans.

Everywhere’s got something. And in Yunnan, that tasty, humble light-on-the-wallet dish is guihuolu –literally, “Ghost Fire Green”.

It’s a pretty simple concept at its core: the dish is mix of fresh chili peppers, herbs (and herb roots), and… that’s pre...

Early Look: Three Cantonese Dishes to Smother Over Rice

I love big bowls of rice smothered with various dishes. Maybe it’s in my blood as an American – I mean, we are the proud originators of innovative food concepts such as the ‘garbage plate’ and the ‘slop bowl’.

This is why I adore Chinese ‘fast food’ counters and Thai ‘curry’ counters: there’s a veritable buff...

Early Look: 'Cheese Potstickers', a rare recipe

So... we have an increasingly problematic collection of old Chinese cookbooks.

The vast majority of them are from 70s, 80s, and 90s. And flipping through them, it really impresses on you just how different Chinese food was back then. While there's certainly a hunk of the classic dishes that we know and love... there's also a whol...

Early look: the best way to store homemade stock

I've always understood the instinct to store homemade stock in an ice cube tray, but... it always would (1) take a lot of freezer space for a single batch of stock and (2) risk a bit of grease spilling in the freezer (a risk I'm somewhat paranoid about).

In the last year or so we've started using these 'ice bags' which've just bee...

Early Look: Cantonese Doggy Pot [anything]

This has been a video that's been in the works for a while.

This dish is a very a traditional Cantonese dish, reportedly popular in the 19th century, called gouzaie (狗仔鹅): literally translated, "doggy goose pot". What it did was use the flavor profile that would have traditionally been applied to (more expen...

What is 'Chinese Valentine's Day' Food, Traditionally?

On the 7th day of the 7th lunar month – coming up this August 29th – throngs of couples will celebrate Qixi, commonly translated as “Chinese Valentine’s Day”. For a flower shop, it’s one of the busiest days of the year. Ditto for a western restaurant, or any similarly photogenic ‘romantic’ restaurant. Across Chinese social media,...

Early Look: "Stir Fry Sauce" and the Western Weeknight Stir Fry

I’ve always loved the dishes that sit awkwardly in between cultures: the well-done Cantonese steaks, the Canadian Hawaiian Pizzas, the Japanese boxed curries.

They give a rare honest prism into how the world views actually eachother’s food… but above all, they’re fun. They break the mould. After all, if you want a maximall...

Early Look: The Best Fried Wontons (in my opinion)

I have probably overly developed opinions on the topic of deep fried wontons.

Everybody loves a deep-fried wonton, of course, but they’re among my favorite dishes to order at a Cantonese restaurant. Given that they’re a perennial foreigner favorite, I’m probably living up to somebody's stereotype somewhere… but they’re just a fan...

Early Look: Macau's (Puzzling) Tamarind Pork

Porco Balichão Tamarindo is a Macanese dish, and it’s not just a tasty stew — it’s a dish that really changed the way I looked at food, and how food spreads.

The city of Macau, of course, wears its cross cultural influences on its sleeves. While you can find Portuguese-inspired restaurants meandering the c...

Early Look: Breakfast Potato Pancake Rolls (土豆丝卷饼)

If there’s one thing that I – and most foreigners in China, it seems – love, it’s some kind of bing in the morning.

There’s a lot of great breakfasts that can be had in China, of course. Doesn’t matter the city, you’re usually not overly far away from some sort of breakfast snack stall. In urban China, breakfast is s...

Early Look: Guizhou Master Stock Noodle Soup (卤粉)

Lushui — Chinese master stock — is something you can find all across the country. It might be a bit more concentrated in the south (Cantonese and Teochew-style master stocks are quite famous)… but there’s equally Sichuan-style master stock, Yunnan-style master stock, Henan-style master stock. ‘Stewing meat and tofu for hours i...

Sichuan Chili Oil: The Complete Guide

As a home cook, I’ve always hated what I call ‘nested’ recipes.

You know the sort —open up some cookbooks, and it’s like a damn matryoshka doll: recipes needing a spice blend given at page 6, a prepped sauce from page 35, which in turn uses a stock from page 12.

Of course, there’s a reason these cookbooks are doing what...

Early Look: Cantonese Brisket Pot (牛腩煲)

What Chili is to America, Stewed Beef Brisket is to the Cantonese world.

It’s a dish, yes. A tasty and much beloved one, for sure. But Chili would not have the cultural cachet it does today without chili fries, chili mac, chili dogs, and (everybody’s favorite) chili-over-spaghetti. It’s as a sauce that the versatility of th...

Early Look: Crispy Pork Noodles (脆哨面)

These are crispy pork noodles, from the Guizhou province. At some level, I probably don’t need to elaborate any more here: if you like spicy noodles, and if you like crispy pork, jump straight into the recipe above. It’s not difficult, and can be whipped up pretty quick.

The dish originally hails from the city of&nbs...

Early Look: Egg Battered Fries with Spicy Lemon Dip (元江蛋酥洋芋)

In a province of great food, the town of Yuanjiang has stood out to us so far as one of our favorite places to visit.

Administratively, it sits underneath our current home of Yuxi, and rather close to much of Han Yunnan as the bird flies. But this place exists smack dab inside of a canyon formed by the Hengduan range, an inf...

Early look: Should we use rice cookers?

Should we even bother to use rice cookers?

In the above video, I make the case why anyone seriously interested in Chinese cuisines (or East Asian, generally) probably should. I'm probably guilty of making this a bit of a borderline rant, mostly because I feel in - at least the online spaces I frequent - so much oxygen is devoted t...

Early Look: Henry Kissinger's Moo Goo Gai Pan

In 1996, in the Frank Sinatra Celebrity cookbook, Henry Kissinger shared his recipe for Moo Goo Gai Pan (discovered by the internet in this Reddit post, AFAIK).

Continuing our annual 4/1 tradition of "m...

Early Look: The Cantonese Oyster Sauce Flavor Profile (蚝汁)

So... we've covered how to make from-scratch oyster sauce before. It's a fun project, an educational endeavor for a Chinese cooking nerd to try their hand at sometime, but... this video I think, will be a lot more practical.

This is not how to make oys...

Early Look: Three (Traditional) Chinese Egg Salads

Pictured is a humble Chinese dish called jidansuan (“Garlic Eggs”) from the North of the country, from around Henan, Shandong, and Northern Jiangsu.

Let’s call a spade a spade: it really looks like an egg salad sandwich. And that’s because, in some ways, it is an egg salad sandwich - depend...

Early Look: Yi People's Pounded Chicken (舂鸡)

Okay, we're back! We'll be back to our previous schedule of three videos a month - apologies for the hiatus.

We're starting this year with Eshan style chongji, pounded chicken. It's a chicken dish from the Yi people, from a small town outside of Yuxi, Yunnan. It's a pretty unique dish, and relatively unknown even to most Yunnanese...

Early Look: the Complete History of Mapo Tofu

So historical Mapo Tofu used to be... different.

If you're familiar with the canonical Sichuan variety of the dish, you know the usual suspects: minced beef, Sichuan chili bean paste, a thick sauce courtesy of a starch slurry, and that numbing-spicy sensation courtesy of a heavy dose of Sichuan pepper.

But the very first ve...

Early Look: Yunnan Peanut Milk Vegetable Soup (花生汤)

After the monster of the video last week, we needed a simpler dish before we hop over to China for a few weeks to sort some things for the upcoming move. This was a suggestion in the comments of that video, and we thought it might be a nice one to cover.

It's a classic dish throughout south Yunnan, that - in addition to being tasty and abs...

Early Look: The Complete Guide to 63 Chinese Cuisines

Okay, so this video has been... a long time in the works. It was supposed to be a quick one while Steph was away in Yunnan and, uh, I might be guilty of a little bit of feature creep.

People say that there's eight Chinese cuisines - something that's always sort of bothered me, because like, quite obviously there's way more than that. The s...

Early Look: Big Plate Chicken Noodles, Shanxi style

The other day, we were watching this video from the esteemed travel vlogger A Xing (whose totally has English subtitles these days, huge recommendation). As we often do when we watch A Xing, we learned about an interesting dish from an interesting ...

Early Look: Celebrating 7 Years of Using MSG

A little over seven years ago, we called for MSG for the very first time in a recipe – Yunnan Dai flavor cucumber.

At that time, there was already starting to be a chorus of people pushing back on the idea that MSG is bad. I remember Fuschia Dunlop had blurbs in her books saying that there was nothing wrong with the stuff, and David Chan...

Early Look: "Velveting" 101 (and why I don't love the word)

With this video, we wanted to talk velveting – what it is, how to do it, and why I’m… actually not crazy about the terminology.

Which can actually present a bit of a problem, because there's no word in Chinese that neatly corresponds to the English term “velveting”. Like, go to the 2024-09-23 07:26:54 +0000 UTC View Post

Early Look: 3 ways to get into Zhacai

Go to practically any Chinese supermarket anywhere in the world, and it’s practically a guarantee that you’ll be able to find Zha Cai – Chinese Pickled Mustard Stems. Even poorly stocked grocers will tend to have a few bags; in China, you can even grab them at convenience stores.

And yet, in the English language world of Chinese cook...

Early Look: Fixing the Spaghetti Soup Noodle Problem, with Traditional Technique

I think there’s always a temptation for recipe writers to try to squeeze Spaghetti into Asian noodle dishes. You want to try to make things accessible for people, and perhaps there’s no noodle that’s more accessible than Spaghetti. You can find Brian Lagerstom reaching for it in his weeknighting series, you see Gritzner (cleverly) trying t...

Early Look: Are "Thai Salads" (Hakka) Chinese?

There’s no dish that tickles my brain as ‘Thai’ quite more than a Yam salad.

It’s not just their sheer ubiquity in Bangkok, though to be honest honest that’s probably part of it too. If you were to draw one of those little “15 minute city” maps for any given Bangkok neighborhood, I’d bet solid m...