ChineseCookingDemystified

Early Look: Gutter Oil, the Real (Not Clickbaity) Story

Okay, so apologies that this one is not a delicious recipe like we had planned - next video is a pretty cool Hakka dish with some Thai connections! - this was just something that we felt like we just... had to make.

A few days back, we bumped into a post over on Reddit that, I dunno, pissed us off to the point where we felt the need to clear the air a bit. English language content on the topic is a space that's rife with clickbait, tabloid journalism, and thinly veiled racism. There's j...

Early Look: Fujian Fried Rice (福建炒饭)

I’ve always had a real soft spot for Fujian fried rice.

For many years in Shenzhen I lived right across the street from a Hong Kong style Cha Chaan Teng called Sun Fat, and – like I think happens to us all when you live upstairs from a quality restaurant – Sun Fat delivery became practically a food group. But even amidst the Roast Meat Platters, the Deep Fried French Toast… there were two dishes that I’d get delivered again and again: Cheesy Seafood Rice, which I...

Early Look: How much is "One Inch of Ginger"?

Just a quick one before we head out for our next trip back to China. Hopefully it's not overly navel gazy - we often get questions about "inches of ginger", and wanted to use that as a platform to chat a bit about the 'theory' of writing recipes, if that makes any sense.

So... fair warning that this video is basically just me (Chris) chit chatting with the camera. No recipe or anything - and I'm not fantastic on camera - but hey. Hopefully it can still be useful to someone :)

Early Look: Crispy Mint Ribs (Traditional Yunnan Drinking Food)

For me, deep frying herbs is a technique that I associate quite a bit with Thai cooking.

Because... it’s a move that makes a lot of sense if you’re running at, shall we say, an ‘herb surplus’. Like, living in Bangkok, figuring out what in gods name to do with massive bundles of excess Makrut leaves is a… constant struggle for me. The smallest quantity I can pick up at the market is, like, twenty – a variable when most recipes call for two or three. Because whil...

Early Look: Cantonese Rice 'Plates' (碟头饭)

Ok, so... you know those cliché, food bloggery, white people “rice bowls”?

As people interested in the cultural dimension of food, there’s always something so incredibly odd scrolling through Instagram and seeing them pop up. They feel like... an anachronism for 2024. They’re always these haphazard mishmashes of relatively random ingredients from random pockets in Asia – Chinese style stir fried vegetable, Japanese style boiled eggs, Korean style canned tuna sal...

Early Look: Henan Basil Noodles (荆芥拌面)

This week, we wanted to share a summer classic from the Henan province - Basil noodles - Jingjie Banmian (荆芥拌面). It's a mixed noodle dish topped with (1) stewed tomato and egg (2) garlic water and (3) lemon basil, an herb quite local to Henan.

Now, I'm sure if I say the words "Basil, Tomato, Garlic, Noodles" in rapid succession, your mind might immediately jump to, uh, some other country that's not exactly China. But I think this dish is a really interesting case of how...

Early Look: 'Western' Food in Asia - Curry

Okay! Apologies for not uploading for a hot second there, this one's been a while in the works. Was definitely one of those research-heavy videos.

We had a lot of fun with our previous 'western food in Asia' video on Spaghetti, where we looked at spaghetti dishes from (1) Hong Kong Cha Chaan Teng (2) Japanese Yoshoku and (3) Bangkok, Thailand. This time, we wanted to cover another mainstay in the Cha Chaan Teng/Yoshoku world: Curry.

Curry's got a fascinating history in its own rig...

Early look: Chinese bagels (贝果)

Bit of a fun one this time. You see, one of the ‘trendiest’ baked goods in China these days is… the bagel. The popularity began ramping up during the COVID years, and as of late, they’ve firmly planted themselves in the Chinese bakery scene.

They’re stuffed. They’re technicolor. They’re… squishy.

In the past, among some expats circles in China, we’d dismissively refer to these as ‘Chagels’ (after all, if you’re from North America - and a little hom...

Early Look: A Cantonese Congee Formula (Shunde style)

A good while back, we went over one of the classic Chinese congees - Pork and Century Egg - in the Dim Sum style. With this one, we wanted to give a bit more of a 'general' congee overview: a formula of sorts so that you can whip up whatever sort of congee that you're feeling.

And luckily? One of the classic congees from our old home in Shunde - Shenggunzhou (生滚粥) - is a fantastic fit for the job, and the mise actually fits really well inside of a home kitchen. Using that...

Early Look: What (our) cooking videos don't show you

Hey, just finished editing this one up :)

I hope this one isn't overly navel-gazy. Sometimes, when we're chit chatting on the Discord, we find ourselves discussing certain cooking habits that - for one reason or another - we never actually show on camera.

I know that a lot of these habits'll be stuff that many of you are already intimately familiar with, so in the interest of potentially saving you some time... here's all eight (with timemarks so that you can jump around):

...

Early Look: Xingyi Beef Pot, a Unique Dry Pot/Hot Pot Combo

Hey, just finished editing this one up. Fantastic dish from the Guizhou province - specifically Xingyi, tucked in the Southwest corner near the border of Yunnan. 

Really fun video to make - was able to touch a bit on the Yunnanese Hui, a bit of a fascination of mine (hopefully the intro wasn't overly indulgent).

Early Look: Steph's Dad cooks Cantonese food using Thai ingredients

So... we've done this a couple times on the channel before, but I think this was the most fun instance.

You see, the two of us have this game that we like to play when we’re bored on the train or the bus or whathaveyou. Basically, one person chooses an ingredient from a certain cuisine, and asks the other person to brainstorm how a cook from an unrelated cuisine might use that ingredient if they bumped into it at the market. For example,

• What would a Sichuan grandmother do...
  2024-02-21 04:05:09 +0000 UTC View Post

Early Look: Chinese Cold Dishes 101

Happy Spring Festival everyone! Just finished editing this one up before we start doing some cooking with Steph's parents tomorrow, figured we might as well release it here at first.

Not Spring Festival themed or anything, so this'll be live a couple days after the holiday. Just a bit of no-fluff formulas for some Sichuan cold dishes :)

(apologies if you just received an email twice from us - the audio in the first video was a bit muffed up)

Early Look: Lao Gan Ma Fried Rice (老干妈炒饭)

Hey! So just a simple one as we were coming back from traveling around Yunnan and Guizhou.

See, one of the spots we were going around  Xingyi in Southwest Guizhou – a city not too far away from Lao Gan Ma’s birthplace in Huaxi. Nice, perhaps surprisingly walkable town settled amidst some pretty stunning karst formations. I was recovering from the flu, checked our list of saved restaurants to find something as close a walk to the hotel as possible, and settled on a rest...

Early Look: My Favorite Sichuan Hot Pot Recipe, from 1972

Hey, just finished editing this one up. This one way a fun one to do - really happy we were able to finally show a (slightly different) angle on Sichuan hotpot, as well as get a chance to show off the 28075 x 13889 historical map we have of Chongqing haha (will have a link to download it tomorrow).

Hope you enjoy it!

Early Look: Salty Cantonese Yuletide Rice Balls (i.e. savory Tangyuan)

Actually got something out festive this year, hope you enjoy it :) This is a classic Cantonese winter solstice dish, though you can definitely see it throughout wintertime. 

It's particularly popular in the Toishan region, and given the Toishanese influence on the Chinese diaspora, you can find some Toishanese recipes around. So instead, we wanted to show you the version made in Steph's grandmother's ancestral hometown, Dongguan.

Early Look: An update on our long term plans, plus a small rant

Hey, we just got back from our trip the other day- proper video recipes will be coming soon, promise (we've got three coming up that we're quite excited about).

With this one, we sort of wanted to share some longer term interests of ours food-wise, stuff that takes... a little explaining. Because last year there was a reason we chose Thailand specifically - there's a good bit of relevance to the Chinese cuisines we've been most fascinated about.

In any event, hope this one isn't o...

Early Look: What is... "Brown Sauce"?

This one is a bit of a different one - in it, we really wanted to zero in (1) what this thing is that people online seem to refer to as Chinese brown sauce and (2) the technique to make it. 

We illustrate both 'brown sauce' and 'white sauce' with two different dishes, but we only briefly touch on them in the video. I figured that it might be better to save my breath and go into detail on that front within the written recipe. 

Just like last week, that's going to...

[Book] Flavor Profile #12 Cantonese Plum Sauce

Cantonese Plum Sauce 酸梅酱, 梅子酱 or 苏梅酱

Introduction

Plum, is one of the oldest seasoning ingredients in Chinese cooking. It was (and still is) used as a source for natural sourness, with pits of plums found in vessel at the archeological site of Yinxu (Ruins of Yin, dating around 1350–1046 BCE).

Being such an old ingredient, plum o...

Early Look: Cantonese Fried Chicken Wings

Daipaidong-style fried chicken wings are quickly becoming a modern classic in Guangdong. As eating establishments that specialize is serving up, well, whatever food's tasty and comforting... over the last few decades fried chicken wings have quickly began to spread through Daipaidong menus.

As a newer sort of thing though, the chicken doesn't really have any clear 'standard' between restaurants. So for this video, we decided to go over two sorts of fried chicken - one mimicking a daipai...

Two styles of baked mochi cakes for Lunar New Year （粑粑糕）

In recent years there’re some Chinese style baked sticky rice cake shops sprouting around the country. These shops are usually called 粑粑坊 (baba workshop), in which “baba” means rice cake (粑粑糕 / baba gao).

These kinds of shops are quite popular and they only sell one kind of products – baked sticky rice sponge cake. Personally, I really love those little spongy yet chewy swee...

Spicy (Sichuan) vegetarian stock - From Old Cook Books

Among the old cook books we collected, there’s a book of mostly Sichuan vegetarian dishes from temples and day to day eating, within which, there’s a Sichuan style vegetarian stock recipe that I found interesting and may be helpful for vegetarians out there trying to make more Sichuan flavor.

As this is in our “Old books translation” project, below is the picture of the recipe itself so that any Chinese readers can have a look. This belongs to the tested category of recipes, the...

[Book] Flavor Profile #11 Two types of “Green Sichuan Peppercorn”

Green Sichuan Peppercorn and Rattan Sichuan Peppercorn 青花椒与藤椒

Introduction

So, green Sichuan peppercorn. You may start to see them appearing on shelves of Asian supermarkets and Chinese ingredient specialists like Mala Market and Weee.

It’s a relatively new phenomenon on dining tables outside of Sichuan. I remember start seeing it around 10 years ago at Sichuan style grilled fish restaurants as a special flavor. Over the years it’s g...

[Book] Flavor Profile # 10 + Old Recipes Translation

Two more shiitake recipes as previously promised. Also trying out a fun little project for Patreon.

So we loving collecting old and/or weird cookbooks, and we love reading them. They're very fun to explore as we can see many different old recipes, various ways of making certain ingredient that may be obsolete by now, or simply just a good read.

I often have the urge to share these little gems we discovered along the way of collecting more and more dusty old books. But just sending...

[Book] Flavor Profile # 10: Dried Shiitake Mushroom

Dried shiitake mushroom, a.k.a. fragrant mushroom as suggest by its Chinese name, for a reason (香菇)

Introduction

With our recent video on how to use dried shiitake mushroom, we want to cover a bit more on this awesome ingredient, which can also be thought of as a flavor profile with its unique and distinctly powerful umami taste, and always ended up being a highlighted flavor in the ...

[Book] Flavor Profile # 9: Ginger and scallion

Ginger and scallion, a classic combo from the Chinese cooking trinity (姜葱)

Introduction

Scallion, ginger, garlic are the trinity in Chinese cooking in general. Each of these aromatics have their own distinct feature and aroma, from which certain flavor profiles are born out of either using only one or a combination of these fragrant plants.

In Cantonese cooking, the combo of “ginger + scallion” is a classic and basic flavor profile that can ...

[BOOK] Flavor Profile #8: Huangjiang soy bean paste

Huangjiang soy bean paste, a classic fermented soy bean product from northern China (黄酱)

Introduction

In our last ingredient of the “fermented soy bean” chapter, we want to introduce one of the classic “yellow bean paste” from north China, Huangjiang (黄酱), literally meaning “yellow sauce”.

In the confusing wall of bean paste at Asian supermarkets, I’ve seen all sorts of “soy bean” products lumping together, be it Chinese, K...

Early Look: Cantonese Tong Sui, Sweet Soup

Just finished editing this one up. Enjoy :)

Early Look: Guizhou Egg Wrapped Potato

Another Guizhou street food classic :) With this one, we decided to also have a street food companion video, so you can also check out how our favorite vendor in Guiyang also whips it up - a card's in the video, but here's a link if you prefer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfLo0n3oah8

Really really fun dish. During testing we also messed around and tried getting creative with this (the 'pad thai' flav...

Beef Noodle Soup: from Sichuan, to Taiwan, and back

Hey guys, apologies for taking an extra week (and a day) with this one, it was... a monster of a video. Basically, we wanted to discuss red braised beef noodle soup, which you might know best according to the Taiwan version of the dish. So we wanted to tell the story of how (1) Sichuan red braised beef got to Taiwan and became this cultural icon there, followed by (2) how the Taiwan version of the dish came back to the mainland in the form of the most popular instant noodles ...