What (our) Cooking Videos Don't Show You
A look at eight cooking habits that - for one reason or another - we practically never show on camera.
Recipes are, at their core, simplification - you have to make myriad of little decisions on what you want to keep in, what you want to leave out.
And yet, I think in a lot of people’s heads there’s this overarching view of recipes as a kind of ‘technical documentation’ of sorts, something to follow as if it was an ISO standard. But this, I think, is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a recipe is. An actual specification that truly tried to control every single variable would quickly begin to resemble the US Army’s 26 page brownie recipe. Instead, a recipe is a lot closer to something like a classroom handout – something that’s there to facilitate instruction, and can be safety discarded once you internalized the process.
And because we all internalize things quite differently, there’s a predictable diversity in recipe writing styles online. Stella Parks specifies everything from the brand of flour to the exact kneading motion you need to employ. Internet Shaquille is incredibly concise and leaves it to the viewer to fill in the blanks. Neither style is intrinsically ‘better’ than the other.
So where do we fall on the whole ‘Parks-NetShaq’ spectrum of recipe writing?
If you’ve followed us at all, I think it’s pretty obvious we lean heavily towards the former. Our assumption is that you, the viewer, are an intermediate cook that is new to Chinese cooking. For this kind of person, there’s a real risk that if we leave too many blanks, they’ll end up getting filled with the habits, techniques, and philosophies of Western cooking. After all, only look so far as the Culinary Institute of America’s old Mapo tofu recipe that we lampooned for the two year anniversary of the channel.
And while I do think our approach can be successful for some – many, even – it also leads us ingredient lists that have been labeled ‘imposing’, and can give off a general vibe that we’re ‘nitpicky’ or even ‘gatekeeping’.
For example, sometimes we get a bit of flak for explicitly telling people to do a sort of pseudo-restaurant longyau routine in practically every video (“get the wok piping hot, shut off the heat, add in the oil, give it a swirl to get a nice non-stick surface. Flame swapped to low now…”). But we do this because I still see people on Reddit doing crazy things like pre-heating a wok on high for fifteen minutes – and then wondering why their minced garlic is burning.
But once you’ve watched and internalized the move one time, there’s not really all that much value to my repeating the thing every single video, right? Further, often that level of granularity can potentially get a bit confusing to people new to the sport – here there’s this routine that’s got this whole Cantonese name to it, it’s got four discrete steps to it and all… why can’t I just add oil like I’m used to again?
Because I mean… someone can certainly add oil like they’re used to! But we also need to keep in mind that dude that’s out there with their homemade flamethrower trying to push their stir-frying oil past its combustion point. When you’re teaching a dish, you need to keep a… variety of learners in mind – including those at the back of the class, or those that’ve missed a semester.
So we err on the side of inclusion. But even with this penchant, there’s still a ton of stuff we leave out. And so, in the spirit of communicating even the nitty gritty… we took a look at the totality of our cooking footage, and tried to group together some of our most common cooking habits that don’t make the final cut.
In no particular order…
Washing the Wok
What we do:
Within any given meal, there’s often a number of discrete steps done solely inside of your wok - whether it’s prep before the final stir-fry, or between multiple dishes. This contrasts a touch, I think, with western cooking, which tends to make use of multiple pots and pans between each step (in some ways, most of Chinese cooking consists of ‘one pot/wok dishes’).
Once you’re finished with a pot or pan, you wash it. But what about the wok? What if you’re going to continue using the wok in later steps in the cooking process?
We conceptualize wok washing as three ‘levels:
No need to wash. If you’re doing something simple like blanching vegetables or toasting some spices, screw it. No need to wash the thing. Further, if you’re doing something that’s mostly ‘clean’ outside of the oil used (e.g. passing some meat through oil), you don’t really have to wash it either - after all, after dipping out the bulk of the oil, any leftover residue can simply become ‘seasoning’, or base oil for the next step. If there’s a touch of schmutz, you can wipe it off with a paper towel.
A quick rinse, plus a scrape with the wok chuan. But, suppose you’re doing something a bit on the saucy side - maybe you’re making one stir-fry, with another stir-fry immediately following right after. You’ll want to give the thing a quick rinse and scrape. This is where a Wok Chuan can be enormously helpful: the design allows you to smoothly scrape any residual sauce off your wok, especially with a bit of running water. There’ll likely be a touch of oil remaining, and that’s ok.
A full wash. At the end of cooking, you should wash your wok - with detergent, like you would any other cooking vessel. After washing, make sure that the wok is completely dry to avoid rusting - a nice move it to heat the thing dry over the stove.
Why we don’t show it:
We get this question of ‘when to wash the wok?’ quite a bit, so maybe we should show it a bit more. The issue is that these wok-washing-logistics are most relevant to multi-dish meals, and most of our videos are instructions on how to make a singular dish.
Throwing a random wok-washing step in between, say, making lazy tofu together with its chili oil topping could (1) potentially give people the impression that the specific way that we wok-wash is integral to the recipe and (2) potentially make people think that they must use a wok (when for practically any recipe the wok is preferred but far from mandatory).
Washing Dishes as we go
What we do:
In the accompanying video, Steph goes into a bit of painstaking detail on how we wash dishes (it’s a topic she’s quite passionate about). I think that most of you guys reading this likely have your own system, so I don’t think we really need to dwell.
Why we don’t show it:
This is a habit that I conceptualize as important for beginners to learn. Because we assume that y’all are intermediate cooks, I don’t think continuously communicating our dish washing system would add very much value.
Vegetable Washing
What we do:
Before cooking, step one is almost always to thoroughly wash herbs and vegetables (or, sometimes I’ll do this in the morning right after when I bring stuff home from the market, but only if it’s used within the day - pre-washed vegetables don’t tend to keep as long in the fridge). This is important not only to rinse off any schmutz, but also to wash off pesticides.
The process is generally as follows:
If the herb/vegetable joins at the root (e.g. cilantro, bok choy), cut it above the root to get it to individual ‘stems’. Dirt loves to hide in those crevasses.
Add to a basin. Rinse the vegetable under running water as the basin fills up. Once full, vigorously jiggle the vegetables in the water to wash. Pour out the water.
Fill the basin up again. Let the vegetables sit in the water for at least five minutes, up to thirty. You can let them sit there as you do other parts of your prep.
Pour out the water. Refill the basin, rising the vegetables under running water as you fill it back up. Vigorously jiggle the vegetables again to wash them.
If your vegetables are very dirty, or if they’re something like Ong Choy (which loves to hide dirt), repeat the soaking process again. Otherwise, pour out the water and transfer the vegetable to a strainer.
Why we don’t show it:
The world is divided into those that thoroughly wash their vegetables, and those that think that they don’t need to thoroughly wash their vegetables. The former already knows what to do, and we’re not going to change the latter’s mind.
Hand washing
What we do:
Like you, we, uh, wash our hands when they’re dirty - especially when handling meat.
But we did want to touch on those ‘meat hands’. Often, when we’re cutting pork or marinating meat or whathaveyou, certain people in the comments’ll be grossed out when they see us doing so with our bare hands. …where are our kitchen gloves?
Firstly, you’re handling meat, not polonium. It’s not like Trichinella’s going to absorb through your pores - you simply do not need to be that cautious. In the west, you do see glove usage in a restaurants, but (1) this is an overabundance of caution (as these restaurants also need to serve the elderly and immunocompromised) and (2) these gloves are disposable. If you aren’t disposing of the gloves after each usage, there’s simply not any material benefit over simply washing your hands.
But yes, do, uh, wash your hands.
Why we don’t show it:
Maangchi famously shows washing her hands between each step, a practice much extolled on Reddit.
I think this is a nice touch in a stand-and-stir like she does. But for the hands-only style that we do, I feel it’d be a drag on the pacing of the video. Plus, our VOs are usually organized conceptually (and not chronologically), and… I think an intermediate cook should probably know how to wash their hands.
Aromatics Prep
What we do:
Garlic-mincing-avoidance seems to be a common cooking trope in the west - so much so that it led to the ‘thingness’ of jarred minced garlic.
If you like your jarred minced garlic, do what makes sense for you. This is not one of those “how dare you reach for the Polaner” diatribes. All I would like to do is present a different (and in my mind superior) brand of ‘lazy’ - especially as it relates to Chinese cooking:
If lazy, smash.
Cut off the root. Smash, with force, down on the garlic. Remove the peel.
Done in 15 seconds.
Because the fundamental idea of a stir fry is that you’re flavoring the oil with the aromatics, you practically never need to mince the thing. You’ll get more flavor per square inch about of a mince, but sometimes you can’t be bothered - and that’s ok. If a recipe calls for three cloves of minced garlic, maybe just smash 4-5. Same idea with ginger - if you don’t want to mince, just smash the stuff.
And while we’re on the subject of ginger, I see a lot of people online trying to peel their ginger with a spoon, which looks painful as all hell. In Guangdong, the ‘culturally correct’ way to peel ginger is scraping with the caidao with a slight rotational motion… but if you’re feeling lazy, just slice the peel off. Done in a couple seconds.
Why we don’t show it:
In our early videos, we used to show a lot more garlic mincing, ginger mincing, etc etc. These days, we allocate much of that time instead to (1) cultural bits and (2) sourcing considerations.
Because after all, if you want to learn knife skills, you should learn from professional chefs. Wang Gang’s got a whole knife skills series. Our core competency is research and translation, so we try to focus more on that – the stuff (I think) that we do uniquely well.
Popping Meat in the Freezer to make it easier to slice
What we do:
For many stir-fries, slicing your meat quite thinly – 2-3mm – is an absolute critical initial step. If you’re somewhat clumsy with a knife, achieving this thinness can sometimes present a certain degree of difficulty.
I think many of you might know this already… but if you pop your meat in the freezer for a touch, it can be much easier to slice. For our freezer, for the hunks of pork we usually get, I find the sweet spot to be between 30-75 minutes. After thirty minutes the pork’ll just be beginning to get firm; after 75, it begins to freeze.
Steph doesn’t usually do this move, it’s just not part of her mise. For myself, I’ll probably do it about… 50% of the time? It can be particularly helpful when filming, to make the slicing shots a bit smoother.
Why we don’t show it:
It’s not very commonly seen in China, and is more of a crutch if you’re a touch clumsy with your knife skills.
How we Handle Deep Frying Oil
Why we don’t show it: Like a lot of this stuff, there’s more than one way to crack the oil-handling nut, and we don’t want to drag the video continuously communicating our particular approach.
Plus, frying oil handling is one of the things that can really get the whole ServSafe-or-Bust crowd’s blood moving. There’s people that insist on keeping their oil in the fridge, those that insist on clarifying it… and we just can’t be bothered.
Turning the flame to low - or off - when stir-frying (especially when seasoning)
What we do:
There’s this conception out there that stir frying needs to be done at maximum flame, full blast, all the time. Stir-fries need to be pumped out at lightning speed at restaurants, of course, but the same time pressures simply do not apply to home cooking.
As you might notice from our recipes, we prefer to stir fry aromatics over a low flame, especially when minced. It takes longer (30-45 seconds in place of 10-15 seconds), but introduces less room for error. After that, we’ll up the flame to high.
Further, something that we’ve never shown in a video is that near the end of cooking, we’ll be seasoning with the flame low, or even off.
After all, when you’re cooking, unless it’s a dish you’ve made a million times… you practically never season perfectly on the first go. So you’ll taste it, think if it needs more salt, sugar, MSG, etc etc. You simply cannot do this step while things are frying on a high flame.
So relax. Many stir-fries do quite like high heat, but trust your senses and trust your judgement. Burnt food is not ‘wok hei’, no matter what the internet might tell you.
Why we don’t show it:
…so as not to enrage the cult-of-wok-hei?
Just kidding (for the most part). Perhaps we should include something to the tune of “and in the seasoning, up here on the top of the screen, swapping your flame off if you need to season to taste”? Thoughts welcome.
How we Ventilate
What we do:
We use a gas stove, but I’m not going to touch on that can of worms (other than saying that an ideal kitchen has both gas and induction at their disposal). But whether you’re on a gas or an electric, if you actually care about indoor air pollutants… you should ventilate.
[Rant]
I did this little experiment back in China that perhaps one day I’ll recreate in a video. Like many people in China, in our apartment we had an air purifier that had a little PM 2.5 detector on it. If I forgot to turn on the vent - a bad habit of mine that I’ll blame on growing up in the States - especially if I was deep frying, it’d easily cause the AQI to spike up over 120 (and elicit jet engine noises from the purifier as it worked overdrive in the other room).
So, with the ventilation off, I tried (1) boiling water over our gas stove and (2) deep frying over our induction hotplate. The latter predictable caused the indoor AQI to pump up above 120, the former, nary a blip. And of course, if I remember to turn on the vent like usual… neither activity really made much of a difference.
Because in China? People take kitchen ventilation seriously. These are not little dinky vents that barely filter the air while pumping it into the hallway. These are the sort of vents that you might see in commercial kitchens in America - they work well, and discharge the pollutants outside the house.
And like, I get it, natural gas also produces NO2, which won’t show up on the PM 2.5 meter. I also get that there’s a climate element as well. It’s just… if some of these anti-gas activists truly cared about people’s health, you’d also care about standardizing proper ventilation, right? Because there’s way more indoor pollutants than just NO2.
[/rant]
I don’t mean to get up on too much of a soapbox. I’m sure most of y’all would love a proper vent, but either your landlord or your previous home owner just didn’t care (which is why the issue needs to be solved collectively on the societal level).
At a practical level, while here in Thailand our vent is better than when I had when I was living in America, it’s old and still not quite up to our standards. So there’s an old fashioned way to handle the problem as well: open a window. Turn on a fan. When we’re stir-frying, we do all three.
Why we don’t show it:
Everyone’s kitchen set-up is… different. When we were in China, I felt like it’d be borderline gatekeepy to include a line like “okay now, as always, first turn on your powerful, commercial-grade hood, just like all civilized kitchens should come equipped with” in a VO.
While we obviously have strong opinions on the topic, it feels like those opinions would be better directed towards activism than they would be articulated in a recipe video.