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 Egg generation had begun to grow up, started to hit the bars on the weekend. It's around this time in Chengdu, a nightlife district began to form aroun...

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 pretty much it. It’s seasoned to be on the salty side, with leaning on a mix of soy sauce, salt, and MSG. And, of course, the dish is designed to be do...

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 buffet of dishes all laid out, you select your smorgasbord, you devour over rice. And so, over the years we’ve tried our best to bring this fare to you ...

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 whole lot that's different, or that's missing. In our veneration of tradition, sometimes we forget just how dynamic Chinese cuisine is.

And so in th...

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 been perfect for us. We were sharing on the Discord and someone else gave it a try - and similarly loved it. So before we shoot off for a week and a half...

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 expensive) dog meat in Cantonese cooking, and apply it to the (less expensive) goose meat instead.

It's a tasty dish, albeit almost extinct in Guangd...

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, you’ll find scores of posts of dudes surprising their girlfriends with gifts of bouquets, jewelry, or even the deed to a house.

It is, in sho...

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 maximally delicious pizza dough, you probably would want to find an experienced Italian chef. But they never would have been able to even begin to conceptuali...

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 fantastic snack to have alongside a cold beer, and — I have to say — particularly excellent next to a bowl of good Cantonese conge...

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 city’s charming narrow streets (and certainly the gauche casinos), I find the Cantonese fare to be incredibly underrated as well — the sheer densit...

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 something that’s often grabbed on the go – whether it’s Guangdong’s Cheongfun rice noodle rolls, Sticky rice Fantuan in Shanghai, or v...

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 in heavily spiced, seasoned liquid’ is one of those good ideas that no Chinese cuisine seems to have a monopoly on.

Lushui — Chinese...

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 they do — pre-prepared, batch-prepped ingredients can obviously be useful. If you’re making Thai food on the regular, having an excellent homemad...

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 the thing shines, and Cantonese Stewed Beef Brisket isn’t much different.

You can see the stuff as a topping for noodles, rice noodles, soup noo...

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 Bijie, a town about a two hour drive west into the hills from the provin...

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 infamously treacherous and barely navigable chain that historically divided the province into distinct trading networks. So in addition to being a mix of...

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 to the pros and cons of rice cookers, when it feels like other pieces of equipment don't seem to invite... the same level of scrutiny? Instapots and Ai...

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 "make real content, albeit slightly sillier than usual", we decided to cook up said recipe. In the accompanying video, we'll give you our unvarnished op...

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 oyster sauce – this is how to make oyster sauce… sauce.

Because if you go to a Cantonese restaurant, it’s quite common to find dishes on...

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 - depending on the strictness of the definition of ‘egg salad’ and ‘sandwich’. It’s a dish that’s designed to be downed with steamed mantou 2025-03-14 03:54:12 +0000 UTC View Post