ChineseCookingDemystified

Early Look: Cantonese Scrambled Eggs (黄埔炒蛋)

Hey guys, just finished editing this one up. Hope you give it a try :)

Early Look: Spicy 'Freestyle' Fried Rice from Guizhou (怪噜炒饭)

feat. colander!

Hope you guys like this one. Awesome sort of fried rice, hopefully we were able to give some general fried rice tips too in the process :)

[BOOK] Flavor Profile #1: Minsi Paste

Minsi Paste (面豉酱)

Introduction

Picture yourself a hundred years or so back, in the twilight of the Qing dynasty. You’ve just gone through the painstaking traditional process of making soy sauce: you’ve steamed the soybeans, you’ve mixed the koji, you’ve let it ferment. You tap it, and that very first spoonful’s called ‘touchou’ –i.e...

Early Look: Guizhou Fermented Chili Paste (糟辣椒)

Just finished editing this one up :) This's another Steph VO'd one - originally we were planning on tossing out two videos this week (this plus Guizhou 'freestyle' fried rice), but things got a bit hectic with setting up the Kenji interview and all. So next week we'll be coming in with the me-VO'd fried rice recipe.

We're a lot happier with the flow of this one than the Laozao vid. Steph's happier with her performance (tossing some headphones on made a world of difference), I'm...

Early look: Suzhou Big Meat Noodles (苏州大肉面)

So... this one is undeniably an intense one. Hope that one of you guys can actually make it sometime lol. We'll try to type something up akin to a baker's schedule to help with logistics - it's not a hard dish per se, but it is an intense one.

Calling all questions for Kenji...

So we've been hashing out doing a collaboration of sorts with Kenji - we ended up settling on doing a conversation for now. So uh... because I'm certainly no professional interviewer, I figured I'd open things up here to elicit some potential questions. 

Anything you'd be interested to hear from him?

(and just in case - even though I know the venn diagram of our two audiences are practically a perfect circle haha - 2020-08-27 03:34:34 +0000 UTC View Post

[Book] Introduction: Thinking in Flavor Profiles

Feedback welcome :)

Take a look at the menu of your local Chinese restaurant. Doesn’t matter if it’s a Cha Chaan Teng in Hong Kong, or a takeout joint in the United States: more likely than not, you’ll be greeted with a menu with dozens upon dozens of different dishes. For the purpose of illustration, let’s take a look at the menu of the following takeout joint in the United States:

2020-08-26 06:19:10 +0000 UTC View Post

So... a book.

We’re writing a book. Or at least, we’re going to try. 

We explored the possibility of going the normal publishing route with book proposals and so forth, and while we did make some progress, ultimately we felt that going that route would end up either (A) hurting the quality of the content that we put up on YouTube or (B) leaving us with a book that we wouldn’t be proud of.

So continuing on the ongoing trend of ‘Chris and Steph are apparently bad at making money', we...

Early Look: Laozao, Fermented Rice (醪糟)

Hey guys, sorry for the delay here, found out that my laptop wasn't fit to cut this sort of video... the hard way. Had to wait til we got home from traveling to cut this one on my box.

This one was a bit experimental.  Instead of me (Chris) doing the narration, we played around doing that sort of Alex/Andong/Ragusea style of video -  Steph talking to the camera, with the cooking clips interspersed. This style won't be a replacement for what we usually do, but it is so...

Early Look: Horse Station Pot, Lost Cantonese Street Food (大马站煲)

Hey guys, just finished editing this one up. 

Another Dawei video, which's always awesome to film. This time, we decided to sort of split the difference between the Chris-VO style we did in the past (e.g. stir fried sticky rice, Bak Chit Gai) and the stand-and-stir we did with the previous one, Gai Yong Yu Tou (which we really liked but was so much work to cut).

Not 100% satisfied with how it came out re the switch between me and Dawei talking, but definitely...

An actual proper early look: Stir Fried Milk (大良炒鲜奶)

Just finished editing this one up. Pretty excited for this one - it's a dish that's local to exactly where we're living - Daliang subdistrict in Shunde. I can see Jinbang from my balcony :)

We'll be tossing this one out of Saturday, then the following video'll be Dawei cooking. So we've got a couple more Cantonese dishes coming of for you guys...

Early Look: Bingfen, Ice Jelly (冰粉)

Hey guys, just finished editing this one up :) Hope you like it! It's one of Steph's all time favorite things... and just something awesome to eat in the summer.

Update regarding sales tax in the US, Australia, Quebec, and a couple other locations

Hey guys,

If you support anyone else on Patreon you've probably seen this going around. People that've been Europe based have already been paying VAT on their pledges, but starting July 1st the US (and a few other locations) will start having sales tax applied. 

There's a whole 'sample post' that Patreon gave us on the topic. I'm like allergic to boilerplate copy/paste writing lol, so I'll quote it in a second... but first I wanted to give what I thought to be the mo...

Patron Exclusive Recipe # 23 Pan Fried Bun Roll (Shengjian Style Huajuan Bun Roll) 生煎花卷

(Served with some tom kha gai, makes a great meal)

Hey guys, how's it going?
This week, I wanna share another variation on the mantou dough - "Shengjian" style bun rolls -  I promise this is the last one of this mantou series.
So these bun rolls use the same dough as mantou, with an easier rolling method than the previous huajuan bun rolls, and is pan-fried instead of steami...

Patron Exclusive Recipe #22 Steamed ”Huajuan/Flower Roll" Buns with Five Spices and Scallion (葱香花卷)

Hey guys, how's it going? So right, we put out the Mantou steamed buns recipe last week. And that can conveniently be used to make "huajuan" flower roll steamed buns. In this week's recipe, I want to show you how to use the same mantou dough and turn it into a nice looking and tasty little bun with a sweet-savory taste using scallion+five spices as main flavors.
I shared another corn flavor 2020-02-18 08:27:00 +0000 UTC View Post

Patron Exclusive Recipe #21 Coconut Chicken Hotpot (椰子鸡火锅)

Hey guys, how's it going? It's been a very weird and kinda crazy time in the past two weeks, it's literally a staycation that I never left the building... We've been whipping stuff up using food stock and limited supplies forced us to be creative. I've been posting pictures on Instagram regarding the stuff we cooked, you can go check it out if you're curious: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/co...

Patron Exclusive Recipe #20 Savory Sticky Rice Ball Soup with Chicken and Shiitake Mushroom (咸汤圆/咸丸)

Hey, guys. Happy Lunar New Year. It turns out to be a highly unusual new year holiday with the current event... But life goes on and luckily we're well stocked up at home with cooking ingredients. (Btw, I'm trying to record everything we made during this period and see what we end up whipping up, I think it'd be a fun project given that there's not much else to do in this situation. I'll post to Disc...

Patron Exclusive Recipe #19 Cantonese New Year Sweet Rice Cake (广东年糕)

Hey, happy weekend, guys. Chinese Lunar New Year is coming up next week. Let's make some festive food to celebrate (if you're celebrating~). 

So "rice cake/年糕" is such a ubiquitous item in southern China. Some regions would have it all year round - e.g. in Zhejiang, or all kinds of "baba/粑粑" in Guizhou, Sichuan, Yunnan and such. While her...

Patron Exclusive Recipe #18 Shanghainese Peanut Mochi (擂沙汤圆/糖不甩)

Hey, guys. Happy weekend!

As Chinese Lunar New Year is approaching, I figured it'll be fun to do some CNY related stuff. So this week, let's do a Shanghaiese Peanut Mochi that's round, cute, and golden color (symbolizes gold, lol). Although it's a dessert originated from Shanghai, this little sweet treat is ubiquitous in Cantonese dessert shops and I thought it's a Cantonese thing al...

Patron Exclusive Recipe #17 Rice Cake Soup with Tofu, Pickles, and Mixed Veg (嵊州豆腐年糕)

Happy New Year, guys!!! Wish you a happy, prosperous, and healthy year of 2020!

A quick update on my side, I (Steph) officially quit my job as the Simplified Chinese Language Consultant at Marriott Group, and now I'm full-time on the channel! 

I won't be able to do this without all the great support from you guys along the way. So again, please accept our most sincere appreciation. You're the best!

I want to do a rice cake dish for this year's first Patron recipe. Becau...

A (poorly edited) video of us meandering a Guiyang market

Are you a Chris and Steph completionist? Are you super bored and want to kill 21 minutes of your life? Do you like shaky iphone footage? Are you interested in listening to my (Chris's) crappy Mandarin, and interspersed with me say 'owh..' and 'right' on repeat? Does listening to me and Steph ask annoying questions to market vendors - and forgetting to switch back to/summarize in English - sound fascinating? And most importantly, again, are you super super bored? Well then, this is the vid...