At this point, you’d probably already know that we’re strong advocates for the awesome cuisines from Guizhou. We’ve done multiple dishes from there, be it street food egg-wrapped mash potato, or the incredibly flaky and fluffy baozi, or jiggly spicy rice tofu.

But there’s another factor that we haven’t talked about: how “xiafan”, which is “good with rice”, Guizhou cuisine is. It’s often bold, spicy, with very interesting ways to put humble ingredients together into one delicious bite to go over your rice. It’s our house staple when we’re cooking at home, so this time, we want to show you three dishes from Guizhou, introducing you to the immense xiafanability stemming from the tasty food from that province.

So below we’ll cover a spicy pork sliver that’s fried up with Guizhou’s fermented chili “zao la jiao”, a crispy pork belly that’s fry up with lightly fermented soy beans, and finally a spicy corn with tomato and chili.

Spicy “Zaola” Pork Slivers

Finely mince:

• ~2 tbsp of Guizhou Pickled Chili (糟辣椒) -or- Hunan Chopped Chili (剁椒), ideally grabbing more of the paste and less of the liquid.

• Ginger, ½ inch

• Garlic, 2 cloves

and set aside.

Cut

• 2 spicy dried chilis

into ~1 inch sections. Set aside.

Separate the whites and the greens from

• 2 stalks of green garlic (or scallions)

Cut the green part into one inch sections. Gently smash the white part, keeping with the dried chilis.

Cut

• 200g lean pork

into slivers. Then marinate with

• ¼ tsp salt

• ½ tsp sugar

• ½ tsp cornstarch

• 1 tsp Shaoxing wine

• ¼ tsp dark soy sauce

• ½ tbsp of oil

and set aside.

To stir fry, swirl

¼ cup oil

in a hot wok. Flame on maximum, add in the pork. Break up the slivers and stir fry for about one minute, or until the pork changes color. Remove the pork.

Remove all but about two tablespoons of oil from the wok.

Over a low flame, add the minced Guizhou pickled chilis and slowly fry for one to two minutes, until the oil is stained. Then add the minced ginger and garlic and fry until fragrant, about 30 seconds.

Turn the heat to high and add the white part of the green garlic and two dried chilis. Briefly fry, then swirl in

• 1 tbsp Baijiu liquor -or- Shaoxing wine

around the sides of the wok. Add back in the pork and mix. Swirl in

• ½ tbsp soy sauce

in the same manner.

Mix, then season with

• ¼ tsp MSG

• ¼ tsp dark Chinese vinegar

• A good sprinkle of white pepper

Add the green part of the green garlic (or scallions), give it a quick 15-second mix, and serve.

Crispy Pork Belly & Fermented Soybean

Slice

• 2 cloves garlic

into sheets.

Cut

• 4 spicy dried chilis

into ~1 inch sections.

Separate the whites and the greens from

• 1 stalk of green garlic (or scallions)

Cut the green part into one inch sections. Gently smash the white part.

Slice

• 400g of pork belly

into 3mm thick pieces. Mix with

• ¼ tsp salt

We will next cook the pork belly until crispy. To a hot wok or pan, swirl

• 1 tbsp oil

and add in the pork. Cook over a medium flame, patiently rendering out the oil. When the pork is golden brown and crispy, push the meat to the side of the wok, let the oil drain.

Remove the pork and set it aside. Scoop out most of the lard, leaving about two tablespoons inside.

Next, stir fry. With the heat on medium, add it

• 80g natto -or- Chinese shuidouchi (水豆豉)

Keep frying for about 3 minutes until the sticky strands form a gloop; remove and discard the gloop (you will have more ‘gloop’ with natto than Chinese shuidouchi). Continue frying the natto until it’s crispy and the grains can easily fall off.

Turn the heat to medium-high and add in the aromatics: the smashed green garlic whites, sliced garlic, and dried chilis. Fry the aromatics until fragrant, then mix with the natto. Swirl in

• 1 tsp of Shaoxing wine

and give it a quick mix. Add in the crispy pork belly, give it a mix, and swirl in

• 1 tsp light soy sauce

Give it another quick mix, then season with

• ⅛ tsp salt

• ⅛ tsp MSG

• ¼ tsp sugar

Give it a mix, then toss in the green part of the green garlic or scallion. Mix, turn off the heat, and serve.

Corn with Tomato & Chili

Cut the kernels off

• one ear of sweet corn

Rinse, strain, and set aside.

Roast or grill

• one tomato

• three green chilis (e.g. serrano, jalapeño) over a medium flame.

Once the tomato’s skin is blistered and shrunk, set it aside to cool. Peel, core, remove the seeds, and cut it into roughly corn kernel-sized pieces.

Peel off any loose skin from the roasted chilis, then remove the stem and seeds. Dice them into the same size.

Separate the whites and the greens from

• two scallions

and mince the white part. Cut the green bit into slices.

Mince

• two cloves of garlic

Cut

• 2 spicy dried chilis

into ~1 inch sections.

To stir fry, to a hot wok swirl in

• 1 tbsp oil

and fry the minced garlic, scallion whites, and dried chilis over a medium flame until fragrant. Add in the tomato and fry for about a minute. Swirl in

• 1 tsp of Shaoxing wine

and give it a quick mix. Add in the corn and mix them together. Add

• ¾ cup of water (or enough to be at the same level as the corn)

• ¼ tsp salt

and bring to a boil. Cover with a loose fitting or breathable lid (or crack the lid ajar), turn the flame down to low, and simmer for eight minutes.

Add in

• 1 tsp soy sauce

• ⅛ tsp MSG

Toss in the green chili, give it a quick mix, and finally add the green part of one scallion. Mix and serve.

Today, I wanted to show you how to make a classic Sichuan dish – Guaiweiji, or “strange flavor chicken”.

I’ve seen this dish tossed around in compilations of Chinglish menus or what not, but rest assured – the name feels just as odd in Chinese as it does in English. Guaiwei – literally, ‘strange flavor’ (honestly, that’s the truest translation I feel) forms one of the 24 core flavor profiles in Sichuanese cooking, can be used to make a multitude of dishes and is actually… not that strange at all.

At first glance, it features a lot of the usual suspects. Chili oil. Sichuan peppercorn. Sesame. You know, the same stuff that’d go in everything from Dan Dan noodles to Koushuiji Mouth watering chicken. So why is this called ‘strange’? Because it basically takes every single component and dials up the knob on it until this thing could basically be thought of as “every single flavor all at once”:

• Spiciness: Uses a non-insignificant amount of chili oil and chili flakes

• Numbingness: Uses a toasted and ground up Sichuan peppercorn powder

• Saltiness: Adds enough soy sauce and salt where it’s just starting to feel like it’s starting to become a touch on the salty side...

• Umami: Adds a rather generous portion of MSG. For this size dish we’d often add in a ‘sprinkle’ of MSG or maybe an 1/8 tsp. This uses six times that, and we weren’t even the most MSG-heavy recipe we’ve seen.

• Sourness: A non-insignificant amount of vinegar. You see a dash of vinegar in a lot of Sichuan recipes, but this a ratio of half of the quantity of chili oil. It’s… not not sour.

• Sweet: Ratio 2:1 vinegar to sugar… it’s not as sweet as a sweet and sour sauce, but we’re starting to flirt with that territory.

• Nuttiness: Toasted sesame oil isn’t a weak ingredient, and this uses a whole bunch of it… together with sesame paste. Of course.

And that’s all mixed together with aromatics – minced ginger, minced garlic, sliced scallions – none of which are cooked (so you get that raw garlic/ginger bite).

So yeah. That’s why it’s called ‘strange’. It uses strong flavors at ratios that feel like they don’t make sense. But somehow, it all does. To borrow a phrase from the game design world, “if every player is overpowered, then no player is overpowered”. And so it is with the Strange Flavor flavor profile – it all sort of comes together and forms a nice, strangely balanced sauce.

Ingredients:

Ok, so quick word here. Most traditionally this dish would use whole poached chicken, cleaved across the bone. But that’s not what we’ll do here, mostly because… we’ve done a few of those sorts of dishes before. From mouth-watering chicken to Cantonese Bak Chit Gai, the techniques can differ slightly from recipe to recipe but are… largely the quite similar. So we’ll change things up and show you how to serve this as boneless shredded chicken.

I’m not starting to make inauthentic sacrifices, I swear. You do see this served shredded too - I’d guess the breakdown’s roughly 90% bone in, 10% shredded? But if you want to do the whole cleaved chicken type – please, I’m into it. I’m a bone-in evangelist. Drop a line and I’ll send over some of the other whole poached chicken recipes, so that you can use that and just serve it with the sauce here.

1. Chicken thighs (鸡腿肉), 500g. Or you could alternatively use a whole chicken if you like, either way. The smaller Asiatic varieties feel like they’re easier to poach though (maybe a game hen or something?)

2. For the poaching liquid: ~2 inches of ginger (姜), ~8 sprigs of scallion (葱) whites, a good glug ~2 tbsp of liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍兴酒). Smash the ginger first. Use only the white part of the scallion – we’ll be using the green part in the sauce.

3. Bean sprouts (绿豆芽), 100g. We’ll serve this on a bed of poached bean sprouts – mung bean sprouts specifically (pretty sure those are the default ‘bean sprout’ in the West?).

4. For garnish: 2 scallion (葱) whites, julienned. To sum up, ten sprigs in all. The green part’s gunna go in the sauce below. Eight of the white parts go into the poaching liquid. Two are julienned for garnish.

Now, I usually lump all the stuff like ‘ingredients for the sauce’ into one category, but there’s a lot here to get through so I’ll list it out:

1. Hongyou, Sichuan Red Chili oil (红油), 4 tbsp. So unless you live in Sichuan or are absurdly spoiled like us and live right next to a restaurant wholesale market in China, you unfortunately (fortunately?) gotta make your own red chili oil. Note that this is red chili oil – i.e. not the same stuff as you’d get in your dumpling dipping sauce or whatever (that stuff’s called ‘youlazi’, confused yet?). If you’ve never made any before, you can check out our recipe here. But because this dish is so damn… easy besides this one component… also check out the note below where we give our best idea for how to sub this with the ever popular Laoganma chili crisps in oil.

2. Chili flakes (辣椒粉), 1 tbsp. The spiciest sort you can feasibly source in the C. Annum or C. Frutescens cultivars.

3. Sichuan peppercorns (花椒), ½ tbsp. Or a little more is fine. Whole peppercorns, we’ll toast and grind these to really get out the numbingness.

4. Salt, 1/2 tsp.

5. Sugar, 1 tbsp.

6. MSG (味精), ¾ tsp. Often this’s optional in these recipe, but please don’t skip it here. If you think you’re sensitive or whatever first check with a proper doctor to make sure it’s not in your head, because you’d be really missing out on a very useful ingredient. If you’re one of those people that pretentiously think ‘I don’t want to add MSG because I want natural food’, I hope you also refuse to use baking powder as well – that’s got a lot of scary science-y names in it if you look on the back of a package too.

7. Light soy sauce (生抽), 1 tbsp. I.e. regular soy sauce.

8. Dark Chinese vinegar (陈醋/香醋), 2 tbsp. So there’s actually two types of ‘dark Chinese vinegar’ – (1)chencu or ‘Shanxi Mature Vinegar’ and (2) xiangcu or ‘Chinkiang Vinegar’. This recipes uses the mature vinegar but honestly either one would work just fine. If for whatever reason this’s the sole missing ingredient in this recipe for you, sub the vinegar with one part balsamic to one part cider to one part water.

9. Toasted sesame oil (麻油), 2 tbsp.

10. Sesame paste (芝麻将), 1 tbsp. Cue the argument over whether tahini is the same thing. IIRC last time this came up I said it was, but then I ended up being proved wrong? Regardless, it’d be a close enough sub. If you want, you could also use peanut butter… so long as you use a natural one, I promise not to tell anyone.

11. Scallions greens (葱), 10 sprigs. Sliced.

12. Garlic, 3 cloves. Finely minced.

13. Ginger, ~1 inch. Finely minced.

Process:

1. Add the scallion whites, the ginger, the wine, and the chicken thighs to cool water. Bring up to a boil. This starts from a cold water poach, which helps it cook slower/more evenly.

2. Boil for fifteen minutes. Yeah, boil. Not simmer. One day I’ll figure out the boiling/simmering disconnect in Chinese vs Western cooking, but today is not that day.

3. Shut off the heat. Let it all naturally come down to room temperature, at least 2-3 hours or up to eight. I know 2-3 hours is kind of an annoying time to call for something to sit. Feel free to do this in the morning and come back to it for dinner. This soak helps make for juicy chicken, but also helps allow the flavor to actually absorb into the meat.

4. Optional: Pick the ends off the bean sprouts. If you snap off the two ends of the sprouts, they’ll have a more even snappy texture after blanching. For a good chunk of my life, I though I didn’t like bean sprouts – really, I’m just not too crazy about the stringy bit on the end. This’s a really a [nice] restaurant thing, so no need if you don’t feel like it.

5. Blanch the bean sprouts for ~20 seconds in pot of boiling water. Move over to the sink and run under cool water to stop the cooking process. Sprouts blanch quite fast – 20 seconds is enough, no more than 30.

6. Mince the garlic and the ginger. Slice the scallions greens.

7. Toast the Sichuan peppercorns over medium-low heat for ~2-3 minutes until oil splotches start to form in your pan. Then grind in a mortar or coffee-grinder. Get it into fine powder. Toasted and ground peppercorn have vastly more flavor/numbingness than the bagged stuff at the supermarket.

8. Once the chicken and pot is cool to the touch, remove the chicken and let it dry, at least ~15 minutes. You don’t need to go super crazy waiting for your chicken… if it’s around 40C, it’s still fine to shred.

9. Shred the chicken. The smaller and stringier the better here, so feel free to use the Western fork shredding method if you prefer. Just don’t go too crazy with it because Chinese shredded chicken dishes are usually done by hand.

10. Make the sauce. Basically just adding stuff together. Mix the salt, sugar, and MSG in with the soy sauce and vinegar until it dissolves. Then in a separate bowl, add the sesame paste… drizzling in the salt/sugar/MSG/soy sauce/vinegar mixture and combining. Then add the chili flakes, the Sichuan peppercorn powder, and the aromatics. Mix well, then toss in the sesame and chili oils. Super brief mix… don’t overmix at this step because you don’t want the oils to emulsify.

11. Spoon the sauce all over everything, garnish with scallion whites. And devour.

Note on subbing in Laoganma:

Now, first know that Laoganma’s ‘chili crisps in oil’ is a Youlazi (油辣子) chili oil at its core. It’s basically just the chili-flake heavy sort that they traditionally use in the Guizhou province with some extras added and then packed to the fucking brim with MSG. So If you ever see a recipe calling for that sort of chili oil… know that you don’t have to make it yourself if you got some Laoganma handy. If you’re making a Sichuan dish, just know that you’ll want to scoop out more oil than flakes.

But then… is there a way to mimic the proper Sichuan red chili oil using Laoganma? After trying a couple things out, not really but… I think it could work in the context of this dish.

Take two tablespoons of peanut oil – or rapeseed oil, preferably – and heat it up til almost smoking (~210), then shut off the heat. Wait a touch until it gets down to ~150C and spoon in 2 tbsp of Laoganma, trying to get mostly crisps. Give it a mix, then drizzle in one tablespoon of the oil in Laoganma into the mixture.

Is it the same as hongyou? No way. It’s most obviously missing some heat and a bit of color. You could potentially add in a touch of the spiciest chili flakes you could find to compensate for the former (or maybe use chili seeds?); you could potentially add in a touch of Korean chili powder to make up for the latter. But at that point? You might as well just make a batch of chili oil.

Note on Bang Bang:

So there seems to be a touch of confusion here. If you happen to look this exact dish – Strange Flavor shredded chicken – up on the English internet, you’ll see that many sources claim that it’s the same thing as Bang Bang chicken.

It’s… not the same thing. Different flavor profile – this one is strange flavor and that one is in the Hongyou chili oil flavor profile (think, mouth watering chicken). Not to mention, Bang bang chicken definitely is served cleaved across the bone – it’s basically in the name.

See, the whole thing about Bang Bang is that it uses big stick – a ‘Bang’ in Mandarin (that’s the term for a big stick – like, a baseball bat’s referred to as the same thing) to cleave a chicken into pieces. One person holds a cleaver, the other person hits it with a stick. It’s an… interesting dish, one that we’ll definitely need to tackle one of these days.

I have zero clue how strange flavor shredded chicken and Bang Bang chicken got mixed up. But then, of course, there’s “Bang Bang Shrimp” which… has nothing to do with anything

Second, I should state that our process for this one was ‘go to a Dai restaurant in Kunming, ask the owner how to make it, endeavor to recreate it’. A more culturally correct version of the salad is over here in our “Celebrating seven years of MSG” post. That said, some people love this one, and it is indeed a delicious recipe nevertheless.

So the other week we were traveling Yunnan, and we really loved the food there – the food of the Dai minority especially. This cucumber salad is a Dai dish, and has quickly become my favorite version of smashed cucumber salad.

So the Dai people in China are loosely related to the Thai people in Thailand (some Dai people we met talked about how they’d watch Thai television, and understand ~50% if it). As such, Dai food and Thai food share striking similarities — sauces are usually pounded, sour and fermented ingredients feature prominently, and produce is quite similar to that of Northern Thailand. And yet, there’s some quite obvious Chinese influences as well — most people’ll use chopsticks, and there’s quite a few dishes that borrow heavily from Southwest Chinese food.

This dish is pretty illustrative of those influences. It’s a Chinese smashed cucumber salad, but features some really obvious Thai flavors. The nice thing about this dish is that unlike a lot of Dai food which relies on pretty specific Yunnan produce, this dish is super-replicable and… dare I say… easy?

We got this recipe from a Dai woman that runs an awesome hole-in-the-wall Dai restaurant in Kunming, so a big thanks to her. [update: the restaurant was a COVID-casualty, unfortunately)

Basic Ingredients:

1. Two East Asian –or– English Cucumbers. (黄瓜) If you’re based in Asia, this is just the standard cucumber you’d find at any market. Outside of Asia, what you’re looking for is some sort of ‘burpless’ cucumber – something long with thin skin and not a crazy amount of seeds. The most common burpless cucumber in the West is the “English Cucumber” IIRC.

2. One tomato (番茄). We’re gunna roast and dice this.

3. Cilantro (香菜), ~one bunch (thanks /u/]slawkenbergius!) Apologies, we really should’ve weighed this… but take a look at in the video for a visual. You’re gunna want enough Cilantro to get about half a cup of stems and a cup of leaves. It’s best if you can find some Cilantro that still has some of the root attached, as the root’s got a ton of flavor in it.

4. Garlic, ~2 cloves. Minced.

5. Ginger, ~1 inch. Minced.

6. One lime (青柠). Lime features prominently in Dai cuisine.

7. Sriracha Chili Sauce (是拉差辣椒酱/泰国辣椒酱), 2 tbsp. That’s right, that Sriracha… I was surprised too. This was sorta that Dai cook’s secret ingredient – i.e. “that chili sauce from Thailand”. We took a gander at her kitchen and, sure enough, it was Thai Sriracha. Now, note that Thai Sriracha is a little different than the Sriracha that people get in the West. The western Sriracha has a gummier, almost ketchup-like consistency (won’t present a problem here), and also’s a bit spicier.

8. Salt, 1 ½ tsp. One teaspoon for purging the cucumber, and a half teaspoon for seasoning.

9. Sugar, 1 tsp. For seasoning.

10. MSG (味精), ¼ tsp. Optional, for seasoning. We like a little MSG in this dish, but if you hate MSG it’s not a critical ingredient or anything.

11. Fresh Bird’s Eye Chili -or- Heaven-Facing Pepper (朝天椒), 1-2*. Optional. We included one, and so did the restaurant in Kunming… but if you’re using the spicier Western Sriracha sauce you might want to opt out of the chili. Or not, if you like heat – up to you.

12. Sawtooth Coriander (老缅芫荽), a.k.a. Culantro, 8-10 sprigs. Optional. This is a pretty common ingredient in Dai Yunnan food, but is sorta tough for us to source here in Guangdong. We added it in for the video, but we had to use it frozen. When we were testing the recipe, we didn’t usually add this in and the dish was just fine. It’s a nice addition, so add it in if it’s convenient… but don’t beat yourself up over it if you can’t find this.

… and that’s it. Basically all stuff that could be picked up at any sort of bog-standard Western supermarket. Feels a bit ironic that it’s the dish from Dai Yunnan that’d be the easiest for people abroad to source stuff for.

Process:

1. ‘Grill’ the tomato over the stove. Rip off the stem and cut an ‘X’ into the bottom of the tomato. We’re gunna peel this, but instead of a quick blanch like the Italians do we’re gunna grill the thing over the stove (you could alternatively use charcoal for super-authentic bonus points). Hold the tomato over a medium-high stove until the skin begins to blister and peel a little. Set that guy aside.

2. Cut the Cilantro bottoms (the stems/roots) from the tops (the leaves), and mince the Cilantro stems/roots, the garlic, and the ginger. The bottom of the cilantro – the stems and roots – have a ton of flavor, so they’re gunna go into our sauce. The leafy tops are gunna go into the salad, so set those leaves aside. Mince those stems/roots, the garlic and ginger, and toss in a large mortar or a deep bowl.

3. Season, then pound. First, season the minced ginger/garlic/cilantro stems mix with the salt (1/2 tsp), the sugar (1 tsp), and the MSG (1/4 tsp). What we’re doing is following standard Southeast Asian pounding protocol of first pounding our dry ingredients, then adding and pounding the wet. Ideally, you’d have a proper mortar and pestle here, but we only own one of those tiny ones meant for grinding spices. If you’re like us, feel free to toss it in a bowl and pound with whatever pestle-like object you got laying around (we used a pastry rolling pin). Pound that for about three minutes.

4. Peel and mince the tomato, then add the minced tomato and Sriracha Chili Sauce to the bowl and pound. The tomato should be cool now, so peel that and then mince it. We’re keeping the tomato juice/gel here, as it’s gunna be the base of the sauce. Toss the tomato (with as much juice as you can muster) into the bowl together with the chili sauce. Pound that for two minutes until you get a rather smooth looking sauce. Toss that in the coldest part of your fridge.

5. Peel the cucumbers, and cut in half. First thing’s first, make sure your cucumber is really cold. If you’re abroad, that shouldn’t present much of a problem… but for us we’ll usually pick up vegetables from the market in the morning (obviously not refrigerated). This has gotta be in the coldest part of your fridge for at least five hours – I absolutely despise lukewarm cucumber salad, and so should you. Roughly peel the cold cucumbers and cut in halves.

6. ’Smash’ the cucumbers, then cut into 1-2 inch strips. To smash, wrap the cucumber half in plastic wrap – this’ll ensure cucumber ain’t flying around your kitchen. Give it about twelve good whacks with the flat side of a cleaver (or some similarly blunt object), then cut the cucumber in nice 1-2 inch strips (you can also cut the strips once lengthwise if you like). The ‘smashing’ of the cucumber is key to any cold cucumber dish you wanna make – it’ll help the flavor ‘enter’ the cucumber better.

7. Purge the cucumbers for 15 minutes. This is a step that’s neglected by a lot of smashed cucumber recipes I’ve seen. Add one tsp of salt into a bowl with the cucumbers and coat it thoroughly, then toss it in the fridge for fifteen minutes. This’ll draw out excess water from the cucumbers, and also allow the flavor to ‘enter’ the cucumber more.

8. Drain the excess liquid from the cucumber, and chop up the cilantro, sawtooth coriander, and chilis. Drain the liquid that’s been drawn out from the cucumber. Roughly chop up the leafy cilantro tops and the sawtooth coriander (if using). Slice up your chili (if using) and lightly crush each slice with a knife.

9. Assemble the salad, squeeze the lime juice over it, mix thoroughly and serve on a chilled plate. So now take the cilantro, sawtooth coriander, chilis, and that tomato-herb-chili sauce that we finished in step 4 and toss it in with the cucumbers. Squeeze the juice of one lime all over the mixture - we like squeezing ~5/6 of the lime over it using a press, then lightly squeezing the remaining ~1/6 by hand and nestling it in the salad for garnish. Mix that all together super thoroughly, and serve on a chilled plate (i.e. one that’s been sitting in the freezer for about 30 minutes). Eat immediately.

Note on holding the dish:

You might want to make this in advance and eat/serve it later… but if you just tossed the finished product in the fridge, after 30-60 minutes the cucumber’s gunna start to get a bit mushy (from both the salt and the acid). Not a good look.

What you can do in advance: (1) making the sauce, (2) smashing/cutting the cucumber, and (3) slicing up the cilantro/sawtooth coriander/chilis. Once you’re about ready to eat, purge the cucumber and assemble according to step nine.

So I wanted to teach you guys how to make my all time favorite tofu dish, Hakka stuffed tofu. Stuffed tofu is like the gateway tofu — it’s one of those dishes that’s like impossible not to like.

Now, the Hakkas are one of the world’s great diaporas — historically, these were people from North China that fled south during the collapse of the Northern Song dynasty. The story goes that as northerners, they really wanted to eat dumplings but couldn’t find any wheat flour down south… so they took tofu and started stuffing it with dumpling filling.

These stories are almost never historically accurate, but I do think it sorta captures the essence of the dish… as this is a dish with a huge amount of regional variation. What we’re making is the ‘Dongjiang style’ Hakka stuffed tofu, originating from the Hakka communities in Huizhou, which are rectangle-shaped and pan-fried. There’s also the super old school Meizhou variety, which is cut into triangles and steamed… and you might be familiar with the Singaporean/Malaysian style which are triangular, stuffed with fish, and deep-fried.

Basic Ingredients:

1. Two blocks Medium-Firm Tofu (客家盐水豆腐). What we’re using in the video is a Hakka variety of tofu called ‘yanshui’ tofu, which medium-firm and seems to work really well for this dish. Word of warning - it might be almost impossible to find this exact tofu outside of China. That said, I’ve cooked this in the USA before and found that opting for firm tofu – while slightly different – totally does the job. The Hakka Yanshui tofu is a touch softer than firm tofu though, so if you can find something ‘medium firm’, go with that.

Ingredients for the Pork Filling:

1. Pork Leg, 30% fat/70% lean, (后腿) 350g. A.k.a. the ‘ham’ cut of the pig. So, we’re gunna mince this pork up ourselves by hand... but why not just buy pre-ground pork from the supermarket? Three reasons: (1) we need to separate the fat from the lean, as we’re gunna be treating them differently (2) you’d need to continue to hand-mince supermarket ground pork anyhow, as we need a ‘pastier’ texture for our lean and (3) supermarket ground pork just always seems to come out consistently dry for me. Feel free to use similar cuts at a similar fat/lean ratio – and if you absolutely must use supermarket ground pork, see the ‘notes on pork’ below.

2. Dried Shittake Mushrooms (冬菇), Reconstituted and Diced, 50g. Wash these real good and reconstitute them by adding some hot boiled water to the mushrooms in a small bowl and soak for 60-120 minutes. Before dicing, remember to cut off the stems of the mushrooms. And as always, reserve that soaking water!

3. Dried Shrimp (虾米), Reconstituted and Diced, 25g. Reconstitute these guys in the same manner as the mushrooms, give it a dice, and remember to also reserve the soaking water!

4. Ginger (姜), ~1 inch. Diced.

5. White-part-of-the-green-onion (葱白), ~8-10. Diced. Hereafter referred to as ‘green onion whites’.

6. Water chestnut (马蹄), 4. This is for some crunch – we also really like bamboo shoots here, but they’re unfortunately out of season where we live. Give it a dice - an easy way to dice these guys is just to pound them with the flat part of a cleaver. If you’re abroad I’ve found water chestnuts can sorta be tough to source – Jicama’s a fine sub.

7. Light soy sauce (生抽), ½ tbsp. These next few ingredients are the seasonings for the filling.

8. Salt, ½ tbsp.

9. Sugar, 1 tsp.

10. Liaojiu (料酒), 1 tsp. A.k.a. Shaoxing wine, Huangjiu, Chinese rice cooking wine. Feel free to be liberal with your potential subs here.

11. Sesame Oil (麻油), 1 tsp. Always the standard toasted Chinese sesame oil.

12. Slurry of ½ tbsp cornstarch (生粉) mixed well with 1 tbsp of the reserved mushroom/shrimp soaking liquid. This is gunna as some springy-ness to the filling. We’re mixing it with the soaking liquid instead of water because, well, why not?

13. Reserved Mushroom/Shrimp soaking Liquid, 6 tbsp. I know this is like the third time I’ve gone off about this stuff, but it really is incredibly awesome… it’s packed with umami and just tastes incredible. We’re basically using it like we’d use stock – but unlike stock, all it takes to produce is a quick pour of hot water and an hour or so of waiting. It’s brilliant, and can be applied to western cooking too (you know what I use when I whip up risotto? This stuff).

Ingredients for the Sauce

1. Reserved Mushroom/Shrimp soaking liquid, 3 tbsp. Yeah, I know, we’re using this for everything. When you’re pouring water into reconstitute try to err on the side of a ‘little too much’ water. I think I used a total of like a cup in this recipe.

2. Oyster Sauce (耗油), 1 tbsp.

3. Sugar, 1 tsp.

4. Sesame Oil (麻油), 1 tsp.

5. Stock Concentrate (鸡汁), 1 tsp. Sorta optional here, I tossed it in. Feel free to sub a ½ tsp bouillon powder or MSG.

6. Cornstarch (生粉), 1 tsp.

Process to make the pork filling:

I’m separating this out because usually we wouldn’t make this whole recipe in one go. It’s a touch involved to make the filling… so usually we just make a big batch of it, freeze it, and thaw a bit whenever we want to use it. This filling here is basically the same as what’d go in wontons, Cantonese meat-pancake, meatballs, pearl meatballs, stuffed peppers… you get the drift. I really want you to try using this filling as a jumping point to explore different Chinese dishes, so this recipe is actually calling for three times what you’ll actually need for the tofu. For ideas on how to use it up, check out the note below on ‘how to use up the meat filling’.

1. Separate the lean from the fat, and dice the fat. The fat doesn’t get minced – keeping it as a dice’ll end up improving the final texture of the dish. Why? Couldn’t tell ya 100% (maybe /u/J_Kenji_Lopez-Alt could tell me if I’m off-base?), but from my lard making experiences, my theory is that finely minced pork fat’ll end up rendering out into oil much easier during cooking… leaving a dryer, less tasty filling.

2. Mince the lean. You don’t need a cleaver here, but you’ll probably at least want a Chinese cooks knife. Roughly dice the lean to help you get started, and then just start chopping it. Take a look at 1:23 in the video for a visual. Periodically fold the edges of the pork over into the center to ensure even mincing. We’re taking this way past a super-market mince to get something almost resembling a paste – this took me about five minutes. The pasty consistency will make the filling more of like a solid, singular thing – you don’t want you filling to be ‘random strings of pork’, you want it to be well mixed with all the other ingredients.

3. Dice the Shittake Mushrooms, Dried Shrimp, Ginger, Green Onion Whites, and Water Chestnut. Last reminder to save the soaking liquid of the dried shrimp and mushrooms! Also remember to cut out the stems of the mushrooms.

4. Toss the minced lean, the diced fat, and the diced ginger in a big bowl and season. This seasoning is mix is from the ‘ingredients for the pork filling’ list up top. That’s salt, soy sauce, sugar, liaojiu (a.k.a. Shaoxing), and sesame oil.

5. Put in the slurry of cornstarch/soaking liquid, and give it a good mix with chopsticks in one direction. Ok, so we’re gunna do quite a bit of mixing here. Mix well so that the mixture comes together and begins to get a bit ‘sticky’. The traditional way is just to mix with chopsticks, but you could also use a stand mixer with the hook attachment. We’ve only gotten a stand mixer in the past year though, so I’m sorta used to making this with chopsticks by this point… I think it’s easy enough. Chopsticks are like the perfect mixing utensil.

6. Add in a tablespoon at a time of the soaking liquid, incorporating it well each time before adding the next. This is gunna happen six times total… just be sure that the liquid’s well incorporated and the mixtures a bit smooth each time. Once that’s done, your mix should be starting to vaguely resemble a dumpling filling, check out 3:36 in the video for a visual.

7. ’Dat’ the mixture three or four times. This is one of my favorite techniques in all of Chinese cooking, haha. What’s ‘dat’ mean? Well, you just take the entirety of the mix, lift it up with your hands, and slam it against the bowl. I have no clue why, but this improve the ‘springyness’ of the mixture.

8. Add in all the other diced ingredients, give it a real nice mix, then toss in the fridge. Be sure to really incorporate all those other diced ingredients (water chestnut, green onion whites, mushrooms, shrimp). Toss it in the fridge to let those flavors mingle.

Process for Making the Stuffed Tofu:

1. Cut the tofu blocks into rectangles. We’re gunna make 12 rectangles – do so by making three vertical cuts followed by one cut in the other direction. I also like to trim out some ‘excess’ tofu from my rectangles in order to get nice, even rectangular pieces for cooking, as some pieces might’ve come out as ‘squarish’ during cutting.

2. Blanch and soak the tofu in salt water. I’ve read a number of tofu recipes in English that skip this step, which sorta dumbfounds me – for us, unless we’re being supremely lazy, this is always standard operating procedure. Blanch the tofu in lightly simmering salt water (for reference, I used about a tablespoon of salt for a couple pints of water) for about two minutes. Then, shut off the heat, and let that tofu soak for twenty minutes or so. This’ll do three things: (1) it’ll get rid of that grassy taste of the tofu (2) it’ll season the tofu and (3) it’ll slightly firm up the tofu and make it easier to work with.

3. Cut a rectangle out of the tofu and stuff it with the pork mixture. So this is a little difficult to describe, so check out 4:52 in the video for a visual. Once the tofu’s gotten up to room temperature (sprinkling a little cool water on it’ll help with that process), gently cut out a rectangle in the tofu and scoop some tofu out to form a pocket. I use a butterknife for this process, but if you were an old Hakka grandmother you’d use chopsticks. Once you make a pocket, stuff it with your pork mixture – don’t be cheap, you want it stuffed almost to the point of over stuffing. Press the sides a bit to get the tofu back to a ‘rectangle shape’ – it’s totally cool if the stuffing protrudes out a bit out the top. Now, you’ll have some leftover tofu scraps here – some people’ll toss it back into the meat mixture, but we think it sorta throws off the balance of the filling. I’d just toss those scraps or throw it in a smoothie or something.

4. Mix your sauce and reserve. We’re basically ready to cook, but we like mixing together our sauce first. Mix the mushroom/shrimp soaking liquid, the soy sauce, the oyster sauce, the sugar, the sesame oil, the stock concentrate (or bouillon or MSG), and the cornstarch in a small bowl and set aside.

5. Pan-fry the stuffed tofu pieces. Add enough oil to a flat-bottomed wok or pan (we used a round bottom wok in the video, which can still work) to get to about 1/3 of the way up the tofu, ~1cm deep. Add your tofu filling side down, and cook for two and a half minutes, on medium heat until slightly golden brown. Flipping the tofu is sorta a skill, because you don’t want the tofu to break – I like using a spatula and use chopsticks to gently flip the tofu over the spatula. Cook the tofu on the other side for about 45 seconds, then shut off the heat.

6. Drain the oil, add water, season with some soy sauce, and simmer the tofu. Some people’ll swap cooking vessels here, but we like to just drain out the oil. Add whatever mushroom/shrimp soaking liquid you got left and enough water to get up about 2/3 of the way up the tofu. Add a touch of soy sauce on top of each piece of tofu, roughly ½ tbsp in all. Get the liquid to a gentle simmer under low heat, cover, and cook for three minutes.

7. Plate the tofu, cook the sauce, garnish. Take out the tofu, and in a hot, clean pan toss the sauce we mixed in earlier. Let that sauce cook on medium until it’s thickened and has a little sheen, about 1-2 minutes. Pour the sauce over the tofu, garnish with some green onion, and serve!

Note on using Pre-Ground Pork:

Ok, I know not everyone’s weird like us… we might be totally cool with hand mincing the pork, but some people might be intimidated by the process. If you’re using supermarket pre-ground pork, try to get some super lean (like, 95%) mince together with some pork fat. Chop the lean mince akin to how we did to get that pasty consistency we’re looking for, and dice the fat.

Note on using up your pork filling:

Ok, so there’s tons of options here. First thing’s first, split your meat filling up into little baggies when you freeze them – about 3-4 of them.

You could make:

• Roubing, i.e. meat pancake. Take the filling and flatten it out into a thin patty (roughly the thickness of a smashed burger, ~1cm). Toss a couple ginger slices and sprinkle some soy sauce on it and steam. You could also toss it on some claypot rice or even in some rice-cooker-made-rice (once the rice starts bubbling).

• Meatballs. Roll them up into little balls and toss into soups, hotpots, or even instant noodles.

• Stuffed Pepper/Gourd/Deep-fried Tofu/Pumpkin Flower. These are some traditional Hakka ‘stuffed’ dishes outside of tofu. Just stuff em and steam em. For Hakka food, almost everything is stuffable – feel free to get creative.

• Wontons. The traditional filling for wontons is slightly different than this, but this stuff totally works. Wrap up some wontons and either deep-fry them or toss them in soup.

This time we wanted to show you what’s less of a ‘recipe’ and more of a ‘flavor profile’: the Sichuan ‘Fish-Fragrant’ Yuxiang flavor. To illustrate how to do this, we’ve actually got two recipes – one for Yuxiang Pork Slivers, and another for Yuxiang Eggplant.

No matter what cuisine you’re cooking, generally it’s preferable to begin to move past thinking in terms of recipes and start thinking in terms of technique and flavor profile. So while we got two different main ingredients for two different dishes, both the technique (stir-frying) and the flavor profile (Yuxiang) are mirror images of eachother.

Ingredients used for any Yuxiang Dish:

1. Pickled Chili Sauce (泡椒酱), 2 ½ tbsp -or- Sichuan Doubanjiang (郫县豆瓣酱), 1 ½ tbsp. Pickled chili sauce is the building block of the Yuxiang flavor profile. Now unless you happen to live in Sichuan, you probably can’t just pick up a jar of Pickled Chili Sauce (even our market in Shenzhen only sells those massive pots meant for restaurants), so we’ve also included how you’d make the pickled chili sauce from scratch. Some restaurants in China will also opt for Doubanjiang – chili bean paste – in the place of pickled chili sauce, so we also decided to test that method. We feel that using Doubanjiang is decidedly less tasty than the traditional Pickled Chili Sauce, but if you’re having trouble with sourcing appropriate pickled chilis it totally still works.

2. Garlic, 5 cloves. You can either mince or crush these. I personally like them crushed, because they’ll get soft after stir-frying and I enjoy munching on them. Most restaurants would mince them.

3. White-part-of-the-green-onion (葱白), ~6 small sections. Same thing, you could mince these or just leave them cut as sections. When I cook for myself, I like leaving them as sections for the same reason as the garlic.

4. Ginger (姜), 1 inch minced. Ginger and garlic are the critical aromatics in this dish, some people will leave out the green onion whites.

5. Sugar, 2 tbsp. For the Yuxiang Sauce. That’s not a typo, this sauce uses a hefty amount sugar.

6. Light Soy Sauce (生抽), 1 ½ tbsp. For the Yuxiang Sauce. If you’re abroad, note than Chinese light soy sauce and Japanese light soy sauce are decidedly different. For all these recipes, for the best results try to get a Chinese Soy Sauce. Kikkoman can work in a pinch, but that sort of Japanese dark soy sauce looks and tastes sort of ‘halfway’ between Chinese Light and Chinese Dark Soy Sauce.

7. Dark Chinese Vinegar (陈醋), 1 tbsp. For the Yuxiang Sauce. If you’re abroad and can’t find this, I’ve heard a decent sub is two parts balsamic vinegar, one part rice vinegar or white vinegar, and one part water with a touch of sugar dissolved into it. I haven’t tried that sub personally yet, so take that at face value.

8. Liaojiu (料酒), 1 tbsp. For the Yuxiang Sauce. A.k.a. Shaoxing Rice Wine, Chinese Rice Cooking Wine, Huangjiu.

9. Cornstarch (生粉), 1 tsp. For the Yuxiang Sauce.

Ingredients used for the Pickled Chili Sauce:

1. Sichuan Erjingtiao Pickled Chilis (泡二荆条), ~15. If you’re abroad you’ll probably not be able to find these, but any red pickled chili from a decently fiery cultivar should work fine. In the video I suggested pickled Serrano as a sub, which would work except for the fact that most canned versions are green (doh!). Worst comes to worst, you could obviously just make some pickled peppers yourself. If you’re playing around with substitutions, for reference those Erjingtiao are roughly 7 inches long and a little less than one inch wide.

2. Water, ¼ cup. We’re gunna be blending the pickled chilis, so to help it along we’ll need some liquid. Obviously, feel free to scale this and the other liquids up or down depending on the amount of chilis you got.

3. Baijiu (白酒), 2 tbsp. Or whatever liquor you got on hand. Vodka should also be fine.

4. Juice from the Jar of Pickled Chilis, 2 tbsp. If you’re abroad and using Western pickled peppers, make sure to taste the pickling liquid to make sure it’s not super-heavily seasoned. Hints of coriander or black pepper should be fine… but if you got strong dill or juniper flavors in there, swap this out for some vinegar.

5. Sugar, 1 tsp.

6. Salt, ½ tsp.

Basic Ingredients for Yuxiang Pork Slivers.

1. Pork Loin (瘦肉), 350g; Yielded 275g Slivers. Cut into slivers – note that depending on the cut you got, there’s probably gunna be a touch of wastage from the pork that you just plain can’t get into a proper sliver. You cut say ‘screw it’ and just toss those pieces in the dish anyhow, or you could give it a mince and toss it in some other dish that calls for a small amount of mince (e.g. Mapo Tofu). Also note that if you’re based in China, don’t get overly attached to the exact cut of ‘pork loin’… loin’s a bit easier to slice, but just go to the market and ask for ‘lean meat’ (shourou).

2. Liaojiu (料酒), 1 tbsp. For marinating the pork.

3. Light Soy Sauce (生抽), ½ tbsp. For marinating the pork.

4. Cornstarch (生粉), 1 tsp. For marinating the pork.

5. Salt, ¼ tsp. For marinating the pork.

6. Julienned Wosun (莴笋) -or- Bamboo Shoots (竹笋) -or- Carrot, 80g. Yuxiang Pork Slivers usually has some crunch to it, so we went for ‘Wosun’. Wosun is an awesome Chinese root vegetable that’s actually a kind of lettuce (translated name is ‘Celtuce’). This veg just seems to go perfect with the Yuxiang flavour profile – ditto with bamboo shoots. If you can’t source either one of those, lots of restaurants in China also use carrots. Note that 80g is about half a Wosun and about a quarter of a large carrot.

7. 1 Julienned ‘Honglajiao’ Chili (红辣椒), ~60g. This variety is actually the ‘paprika chili’. It’s not overly spicy, so anything on the lower end of the Scoville scale should work. We actually used a mix of green and red mild chilis in the video mostly to make things a little prettier.

8. Dried Mu’er ‘Wood Ear’ Fungus (木耳), small handful. Optional. We didn’t include this… basically because we’re lazy, it’s non-essential, and we sort of prefer Mu’er in cold dishes anyhow. I’d venture a slight majority of restaurants’ll include it though, so if you want it just (1) reconstitute them via soaking it ~30 minutes (2) chop into slivers and (3) toss them at the end of the stirfry where we put in the Wosun.

Basic Ingredients for Yuxiang Eggplant.

1. Eggplant (茄子), 500g. You’ve got a couple choices here. First decision: if you wanna get that pretty restaurant look, you can peel the eggplant. Most Chinese homecooks’ll leave it on though (Steph looked at me incredulously when I suggested perhaps peeling it), so that’s what we did in the video. Second decision: you could cut into chunks (~1 inch) or thick strips (roughly the size of a thick cut French fry). We slightly prefer chunks but strips are more visually appealing, so we went with the latter.

2. 1 Julienned ‘Honglajiao’ Chili (红辣椒), ~60g. Just as with the pork slivers above, we actually used a combination of red and green. One small difference with the way we cooked the Yuxiang pork is that Steph actually added half these chilis near the end of the stir-fry to give the dish a nice pop of color.

Process for Making Pickled Chili Sauce.

1. Give the pickled chilis a rough chop. You don’t need to get too fine here, as we’re gunna be using a blender.

2. Over a medium flame, mix the water, baijiu, pickled chili juice, salt and sugar together. The liquid is to help the chilis along in the blender. We’re heating this up for two reasons, (1) to take the bite out of the baijiu and (2) to help the salt and sugar dissolve. Once that simmers for a minute or two, let it cool for a sec and toss it into the blender with the chilis.

3. Blend for roughly a minute. Just give it a solid blitz to get something that basically resembles a sauce.

Process for Making Yuxiang Pork Slivers.

1. Cut your pork into slivers, then marinate. To cut pork into slivers, take a look at 1:42 in the video for a visual. What you’re gunna wanna do is first slice it into thin pieces, then into slivers. Word of warning – making proper pork slivers is sort of a pain. An experienced Chinese chef could make quick work of it, but for this amount of pork it took me 5-10 minutes… and if you’re just getting started with Chinese cooking it could perhaps take even longer. Then mix those slivers with our pork marinade (the soy sauce, the liaojiu cooking wine, the salt, and the cornstarch), and let than marinade as we’re prepping everything else.

2. Julienne a peeled Wosun (or carrot), the chili peppers, and the pre-soaked Mu’er (if using). If you’re using Wosun, be sure to do a bang up job peeling the thing – you want no visible white part remaining. Julienne the other ingredients.

3. Prep the aromatics and the sauce. Mince up the ginger, garlic, and white-part-of-the-green onion (or leave the garlic and green onion whites whole if you’re weird like me). Mix your sauce ingredients (the sugar, the cornstarch, the vinegar, the liaojiu cooking wine, and the soy sauce) together and set that aside.

4. Longyau, then Fry the Pork Slivers. As always, first you wanna longyau - that is, get a wok piping hot (it should be uncomfortable if you put your hand one inch over the bottom of the wok), turn off the heat, pour some oil in, and spread it around the wok to get a nice non-stick surface. Flip the heat to medium high (high on a Western range) and toss the pork in together with its marinade. Fry it until the pork looks ‘cooked’ – seeing how these are small slivers, the pork’ll be done basically when the pork looks done (about two minutes). Take the pork out and reserve.

5. Add some water to the wok, then blanch the Wosun/Bamboo Shoots/Carrot. Nice thing about doing the blanching right after the pork frying is that you save one wok rinsing! (I’m lazy lol) After taking out the pork, pour some water into the wok and get in up to a boil. Add in the julienned veg and blanch it for roughly 30 seconds (carrot’ll be slightly longer, roughly a minute). Be sure to taste the veg to make sure it’s basically the desired consistency, as it’s not really gunna cook much longer than this. Rinse the blanched vegetable under cold water or dunk into an ice water bath.

6. Stir fry. I’m gunna go through this step-by-step, but please note that the times I wrote here are only for reference. The last thing I’d want you to do is look at these steps verbatim while frying and think ‘here /u/mthmchris fried the ginger for 30 seconds so…’. A lot of this is slightly instinctual, but you’ll get your own pace down after stir-frying a couple times:

• Longyau. As before, get that wok piping hot, shut off the heat, swirl around some oil. Raise the heat back up to medium (medium high on a western range). In the video, I poured a little too much oil in with the longyau, which happens. Drain out any excess oil or toss a touch more in at this point if you need.

• Whole Garlic Cloves, in. Stir it around, fry for 30 seconds.

• Green Onion Whites, in. Stir it around, fry for 30 seconds.

• Minced Ginger, in. Stir it around, fry for 30 seconds. Note that if you were mincing all your aromatics, you’d put them all in at once and have a fry for roughly 30 seconds altogether.

• Pickled Chili Sauce, in. Stir it around, fry for one minute. That homemade chili sauce is gunna have some liquid in it, so be sure the water evaporates and the pickled chili sauce is incorporated into the oil.

• Chilis, in. Stir it around, fry for one minute.

• Pork slivers, in. Fry for 45 seconds. I personally like ‘tossing’ the wok here in place of stirring as I feel it better coats the ingredients.

• Stir your sauce well, then toss it in. Try to aim for pouring around the sides of the wok to aid in reduction. Stir it around and let that reduce for about 30 seconds. Especially with this step, don’t get overly attached to the timing, look instead at the consistency the sauce is in the video for your cue to move on to the next step. If you’re having issues with overly ‘soupy’ stir-fry, this is the step you gotta pay attention to – more on this in the notes below.

• Wosun/Bamboo Shoots/Carrot/Mu’er, in. Fry for 30 more seconds, tossing the wok if you can to get the sauce nice and even over the ingredients. Serve!

Process for Making Yuxiang Eggplant.

Besides prepping the eggplant, basically everything is the same as the pork slivers (except Yuxiang Eggplant usually won’t have a crunchy veg or mu’er). So you’ve already read through the pork slivers, after step four I’m gunna be repeating myself a bit here.

1. Cut your eggplant in your shape of choice, salt it with two teaspoons of salt, then let it ‘wilt’ for ~10-15 minutes.We’re gunna be deep-frying these eggplant pieces, and eggplant is a vegetable with a real high water content. So unless you enjoy starting raging grease fires in your spare time, we gotta get out the water out of the eggplant.

2. Squeeze out any remaining water from the eggplant pieces. Check out 5:18 in the video for a visual. We must’ve gotten more than a cup of water out of that eggplant.

3. Liuyou, a.k.a. ‘pass through oil’, the eggplant. This is a cooking method that’s used with a lot of ‘starchier’ vegetables like green beans, cauliflower, and eggplant. What you’re gunna do is deep-fry your vegetable in hot oil (~170 degrees Celsius) until it’s roughly 90% cooked. This should only take a couple minutes, but in the video Steph really wanted to save some oil, and opted for the ‘half-deep-fry-half-stir-fry’ method which works… but to achieve the same results as a deep-fry takes about twice as long, ~4 minutes. (pay no attention to my erroneous commentary that it was a ‘screw up’, talking to Steph again it was apparently totally intentional and I was out on a limb with my narration again)

4. Julienne the chilis, prep the aromatics, and prepare the sauce. Julienne those chilis, and mince up your aromatics. Prepare the sauce (the sugar, the cornstarch, the vinegar, the liaojiu, and the soy sauce) and reserve.

5. Stir-fry. As before, I’m gunna go through this step-by-step, noting the timing. Also, if you’re following along in the video, note that we decided to give doubanjiang a whirl here.

• Longyau. Get that wok piping hot, shut off the heat, swirl around some oil. Raise the heat back up to medium (medium high on a western range).

• Minced aromatics, in. Stir it around, fry for 30 seconds.

• Pickled chili pepper sauce, in. Stir it around, fry for a minute and make sure the water’s out of the sauce. If you’re using doubanjiang though, you don’t have to fry for quite as long (~30 seconds) as it’s a bit less ‘liquidy’ than the pickled chili pepper sauce.

• Chilis, in. Stir it around, frying for 30 seconds.

• Eggplant, in. Stir it around, frying for about 30 seconds.

• Sauce, in. Pour around the sides of the wok if you can to help aid in reduction. The sauce should be quickly reducing as you’re stirring, roughly a minute.

• Plate it up, and serve!

Note on how to avoid overly ‘soupy’ stir-fry.

Since we’ve starting doing these recipes, we’ve gotten a few people send us pictures of their results. Overall, we’re really happy with the way these dishes have been looking. The number one problem we’re seeing though is overly soupy stir-fried dishes.

We’re probably failing to communicate what’s one of the key stir-frying steps: the reduction of the sauce. You’re probably familiar with the four ways to thicken a sauce in Western cuisine: adding flour+oil (a ‘roux’, e.g. a gravy), whipping oil in (an ‘emulsion’, e.g. hollandaise), adding cornstarch+water (a ‘slurry’), and simply waiting for the sauce to bubble away (a ‘reduction’).

In Chinese food, the thickening method used is a combination of a ‘slurry’ and a ‘reduction’ - sort of akin to how you’d thicken a ‘pan sauce’ in Western cooking. Because our heat is quite high though, unlike reducing a pan sauce it won’t take long to get to like a 50% reduction (usually 30 seconds to a minute) – especially if you’re slowly pouring the sauce in around the sides of the hot wok.

If your sauce doesn’t seem to be thickening up nice enough, just up the heat and cook it down longer until it forms a nice sauce. In our very first Kung Pao video, I screwed up and didn’t have the wok quite hot enough when I added the sauce… so I ended up having to cook it down for about two minutes on high. Best practice? No. Did it really effect the final result in an overtly negative way? Nope. Just be a little careful with easy-to-overcook ingredients (like shrimp or beef) or delicate ingredients (like soft tofu).

A note on different types of Yuxiang Dishes.

So, we were a little torn before making this video. Yuxiang Eggplant was definitely the most frequently requested dish, but to be honest… neither of us are really crazy about eggplant served in this style.

What we prefer is deep-frying the eggplant with a coating of batter and making fritters – texture gets nice and crisp that way. That version’s around, but it’s usually not what people imagine when they think ‘Yuxiang Eggplant’.

If you wanna give it a go though - to make the fritters, use the following coating: 4 parts AP flour, 1 part cornstarch, a little salt, and enough water to turn it into what’s roughly a thick batter. Deep-fry the eggplant and then move on with the rest of the dish.

Because really, that’s the beauty of this flavor profile: it’s super-versatile. Another rather popular dish is Yuxiang Shrimp ‘Curls’ (Shrimp passed through oil to curl it up). We also had some leftover Wosun and made this dish again with that. So feel free to give whatever ingredients that’re good in your area a go. Get creative. I dunno, you got some awesome fresh crawfish or artichokes lying around? Seems like it might work, really most stuff works with this flavor profile.

Forty years back or so, this dish used to be a common street food through Hong Kong and Guangzhou. But it’s sort of an endangered species nowadays, as it’s too complex and variable for most restaurants to wanna cook. You can still find it at some nongzhuang sort of places in Shunde, a handful of higher end restaurants in Guangzhou, and of course in some older Cantonese home kitchens.

As a brief aside, if you’re watching the above video? It was ridiculously hot in Guangdong the day we were filming. And like many older Chinese people, Steph’s parents don’t like using air conditioning. So if you watch the video, uh… let’s just say that Dawei’s fashion choices were the rational ones there.

Basic Ingredients:

1. Sticky Rice (籼糯/江米), 300g. There’s three kinds of sticky rice – short grain Japonica (used in Japan, Korea, and in Coastal China), short grain Tropical Japonica (used in Indonesia), and long-grain Indica (used in Thailand, Laos, and Southern China). That long grain Indica is the least sticky out of the three, and that’s what we gotta use for the dish.

2. Jasmine Rice (丝苗米/泰国香米), 100g. We also use some normal rice too, so as to ensure that the stir-fried sticky rice doesn’t just clump together into a ball while frying. If you ever are having issues with your stir-fried sticky rice getting a little overly sticky, feel free to mess around with this ratio and add in more Jasmine rice.

3. Dried Mushrooms (冬菇), 30g. Ideally you’d want shitake mushrooms, stems discarded (note that 30g was the weight before we removed the stems). We’re gunna soak the dried mushrooms in hot, boiled water for 4-5 hours, then dice.

4. Dried Shrimp (虾米), 15g. Soak these guys in hot, boiled water for 4-5 hours, then dice. As an aside, this ingredient is underrated as hell in the west… it’s hyper rich in umami and a fun ingredient to get creative with.

5. Cantonese Lapcheong (腊肠), ~30g. Cantonese sausage, awesome ingredient. Diced.

6. Cantonese Lapyuk/Larou (腊肉), ~30g. Dawei didn’t end up adding this in the video, as their local market didn’t really have any good quality larou in. If you’re using it, dice it up. If not, feel free to do what we did and use one whole Cantonese Lapcheong (~45g) instead of going half/half.

7. Pork Loin (瘦肉), ~70g. Finely diced. A nice technique for getting a really fine dice is to first cut your pork into slices, then the slices into slivers, then the slivers into dice. Check out the video at 2:52 for a visual of how he does this.

8. Dongcai (冬菜/冲菜), 30g. Diced, being sure to only use the inner portion. This is to add some crunch and saltiness to the dish. Unfortunately if you find yourself outside of China, this might be a really difficult ingredient to source. Dongcai is cabbage that’s been fermented then dried, and I couldn’t really find anything close to it on Amazon. Those packages of ‘Tianjin preserved vegetable’ would be a good sub, but I couldn’t even find those online. Amazon seems to only have Sichuanese yacai, which you could try using in small amounts (yacai has a very distinctive taste though). Another idea I had is maybe you could take a little baek-kimchi or sauerkraut, toast it in a wok to get the liquid out and dice that up… but those might be a little overly sour, so just skip the Dongcai if in doubt.

9. Peanuts (花生), 50g. Toast these peanuts for 2-3 minutes in pan over the stovetop, then peel.

10. Green Onions (葱), ~1/2 cup. Cut into slices.

11. One egg. We’re going to fry this.

Dawei seasons this a few different times, so I’m going to break this up into sections. If you’re looking at this ingredient list as a shopping list or whathaveyou, don’t freak out over the long list (I’ll be repeating ingredients). Just know that you’ll need to have: some sort of liaojiu or rice wine, light soy sauce, cornstarch, sugar, and sesame oil.

Ingredients for the Pork Mince Marinade:

1. Peanut Oil, ½ tsp. Or any sort of neutral oil would do.

2. Light soy sauce (生抽), ¼ tsp.

3. Sugar, ¼ tsp.

4. Cornstarch (生粉), ½ tsp.

5. Liaojiu (料酒), ¼ tsp. A.k.a. Shaoxing Cooking Wine, Huangjiu, Chinese cooking wine. Dawei actually used mijiu - rice wine – in the video, so feel free to be liberal with your substitutions (i.e. even something like soju or sake would work).

Ingredients for seasoning the vegetable mixture:

1. Light Soy Sauce (生抽), ¼ tsp.

2. Sugar, 1 tsp.

3. Liaojiu (料酒), ½ tbsp.

Ingredients for seasoning the meat mixture:

1. Sugar, ½ tsp.

2. Liaojiu (料酒), ½ tbsp.

Ingredients for seasoning the rice:

1. Light Soy Sauce (生抽), 1 tbsp.

2. Toasted Sesame Oil (麻油), 1 tsp.

Ingredients for Cooking the Rice:

1. Reserved water from soaking the dried shrimp and mushrooms, ½ cup. After you’ve soaked your mushrooms and shrimp, you’re gunna have the leftover water from soaking them. That leftover water is absolutely incredible tasting – in an age where ‘umami bombs’ are all the rage and people are adding fish sauce to their damn chili, the world needs to know about this soaking liquid of dried mushrooms and dried shrimp.

2. Water, 1 ½ cups.

Process:

1. Soak your rinsed rice mixture and the dried ingredients. Whenever I talk about ‘soaking in hot, boiled water’, what we mean is to boil some water in something like a tea kettle and pour it into a bowl with whatever ingredient we want to soak (which is what we’re doing with the mushrooms and shrimp). But with the rice, there’s a bit of technique here – after you rinse some of the excess starch off the rice a couple times, you gotta slowly add water to the rice while stirring, until the water comes up about an inch over the rice. This dish is unique in that besides this, we’re not pre-cooking the rice at all before frying – that’s what makes this ‘shengchao’ or ‘raw-fried’. Leave the rice to soak for 3-4 hours, and the dried ingredients 4-5 hours.

2. A few hours later, prepare the ingredients. After the dried shrimp and mushrooms are done soaking, remember to take a half cup of the soaking liquid and reserve. Pour out the soaking water from the rice. Toast your peanuts and peel them. Dice up all the other ingredients, and start marinating your pork loin dice using the ‘pork mix marinade’ above.

3. Fry an egg and cut into pieces. This isn’t your standard fried egg – we want nice looking egg pieces, not a scramble. What you’re gunna do it whisk an egg real good, and then in a wok longyau (i.e. get the wok piping hot, turn the heat to low, toss in some oil and swirl it around to get a nice non-stick surface). When you put the whisked egg in the pot, swirl that around and try to get it as thin as possible. Cook for roughly 30 seconds, flip the egg, and cook 30 seconds on the other side. After you take out the egg… cut it into strips, then cut again a couple times in the opposite direction. Take a look at 3:34 in the video for a visual. Apologies in advance for the slight choppiness of this part of the video, it was so hot in that kitchen my phone camera was starting to crap out.

4. Fry the veg – i.e. the dongcai and the mushrooms. This is a Cantonese stir-fry, so we’re basically doing the ingredient-by-ingredient stirfry method here. Fry your dongcai and mushrooms on medium (medium-high on a western stove) and season with the ‘veg seasoning mixture’ above. Fry for a couple minutes, then take out the veg.

5. Fry the meat – i.e. the pork and the lapcheong/lapyuk. Same sized flame, small glug of oil, toss in the pork together with its marinade. Stir it around for about 30 seconds to make sure it’s not sticking too much to the wok (some stickage is normal), then in with the lapcheong and the ‘meat seasoning mixture’ above. Fry for about a minute longer, then take out the meat mixture.

6. Begin to fry the rice, adding the mushroom/shrimp liquid bit by bit. Ok, here’s the most critical part – and the easiest to muff up. If you already know how to make a risotto, you’ve got a little bit of a leg up as there’s some commonalities here. Frying over medium-low heat (medium on a Western range)… first thing you’re gunna use is that half cup of the reserved mushroom/shrimp water, adding roughly two tablespoons at a time around the sides of the wok. Once the water is evaporated/absorbed, hit it again with your liquid. Feels quite similar to a risotto at this stage, although we’re using a little less liquid each time (you don’t want the rice to be in any sort of ‘pool’ of liquid like you sometimes end up doing with a risotto).

7. Continue frying the rice, adding water bit by bit, periodically covering the rice. Once our mushroom/shrimp liquid is finished, we’re switching to water… and this is where the technique would radically diverge from a risotto. The basic idea is this: add in a sixth of a cup of water at a time around the sides of the wok, then cover and wait for ~30 seconds. Then uncover, fry for another 30 seconds, hit it with some more water, and cover again. You’re going to be doing this a total of eight times, and tasting your rice along the way. There’s some tricks to get the rice to just the right texture, which I’ll talk about in the notes below.

8. Add in your last bit of water uncovered, then all the ingredients, then season. Before the last addition, make sure your rice texture’s right… it should be a touch past al dente at this point. Then, do the whole ‘adding water’ process one last time but leave the rice uncovered and give it a good mix. Toss in your meat mixture, your veg mixture, the shrimp, the peanuts, and one tablespoon of soy sauce… giving it a super quick fry just to bring those flavors together. Turn off the heat, stir in some chopped green onions, and drizzle about a teaspoon of sesame oil on top. Mix it up, and you’re done.

Tips for ‘raw-frying’ the rice:

Ok, so distilling Dawei’s technique into a recipe wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. Most experienced homecooks here (and really, around the world) basically cook by instinct, and ‘raw-frying’ the rice was definitely an instinct-heavy step.

First off, if you’re feeling the rice is a little on the hard side, what you can do is skip the ‘stir-fry for 30 seconds’ step after uncovering. That is, uncover the rice, add in your slug of water around the sides of it, and immediately re-cover. For reference, Dawei did this twice out of the eight times he added the water in step 7.

Alternatively, if you feel it’s getting soft a little fast, just add the water and don’t cover. For reference, he did this once in step 7.

Also, you don’t want the rice to get like glued to the sides of the wok, as it’ll burn. A little bit of char is normal and desirable, but if things are getting a little too sticky just add a little oil. For reference, he did this once in step 6 and once in step 7.

Finally, don’t get too attached to the amounts of water or mushroom/shrimp liquid that you’re adding at once. In his head, he’s adding ‘a little’ - not like exactly a sixth of a cup or whatever. We got the measurements but taking the total quantity of liquid and dividing it by the number of times he added it in. Sometimes it was prolly a touch more, a touch less. It’s all good.

• Click to jump to recipe

Fried rice is one of those dishes that a lot of people seem to struggle with, so there’s no shortage of people online that bicker about this or that. Some people insist that you need to use day old rice and only day old rice, others insist think that fresh rice is completely ok. Some people will breathlessly tell you to heat a wok up to magma-esque temperatures, others are completely content in their non-stick. People argue about egg. About rice varietals. About liquid ratios. And so on, and so on.

For the novice cook, I’m sure it could all seem a bit dizzying. The internet’ll probably continue debating this all up until that final day when a nuclear winter takes out Alphabet’s very last server… so it’d be the height of foolishness for me to try to proclaim The One And Only True Way to fry up something as universal as rice. But what I hope I can do here is, at the very least, teach you one straightforward, reasonably easy approach — an approach that can yield you some restaurant-quality Chinese fried rice in a fraction of the time of many other recipes.

Because what I’m about to say may contradict a bit of internet fried rice dogma, I should lay some cards on the table. This is final result of this method — observe the clean, separate grains of rice. Pixel peep if you must.

I swear I’m not trying to be obnoxious on purpose. It’s just… over the years I’ve grown increasingly weary of arguing about fried rice online, with much of the dogma seemingly completely divorced from any kind of tangible end result.

The problem of fried rice

Take some rice. Rinse it (of course), then put it in your trusty rice cooker along with the requisite amount of water. Cook your rice like you’d always cook your rice… then take it out and try to fry the stuff directly.

You’ll be greeted with a… clumpy mess. Rice that’s straight out of the rice cooker is far to sticky to actually fry — generally speaking, with fresh rice the best you can hope to do is “mix”.

Now, don’t get me wrong: just mixing stuff together? Also completely valid, and can make an incredibly tasty end result in and of itself. Basically, what you’d do is whip up a stir fry — generally speaking, something on the saucier side — and just mix your cooked rice together with your stir fry. In China, you can see the mixing approach in dishes like fantastically delicious Toishanese Youfan, and (to the best of my understanding) a very similar method is employed in Korean Kimchi Fried Rice. And for the curious, we also have a video on mixed rice if you like.

But Korean nomenclature aside, sometimes you want a fried rice though, yeah? You know, something like you’d get at a Chinese restaurant — dry, loose, fluffy individual grains. And if that’s the end result that you’re pining for, the mixing method just won’t get you there — you have to actually fry the stuff.

So then enter: yesterday’s rice. Compared to today’s rice, that rice that you whipped up yesterday? Much dryer, especially (and importantly!) on the surface. There’s still some clumping, but you can break that up in the wok. And it works.

Why people use day old rice

Generally speaking (emphasis on the general), southern Chinese meals are centered around a pot of rice. You load up the rice cooker, set it and forget it, and use that as the staple starch of the meal. Quite often, a Chinese family will use their rice cooker every day — and quite often, things end up running at a slight surplus… with leftover rice cooker rice a common sight when you open up the refrigerator.

The next day, you could just sprinkle a bit of water on the rice and nuke it, of course, but as I said before… that dry day old rice can make for a very solid fried rice. So in many Chinese home kitchens, you see fried rice as a ‘next day dish’ for lunch or dinner that can absorb up those leftovers.

But now I want you to think about your personal cooking situation. Do you make rice in your rice cooker every day, or at least a couple times a week? If yes, the day-old-rice method is a go-to for Chinese home kitchens for good reason! It can be a touch finicky at times, but it’s a fantastic way to use up that leftover white rice.

Do you break out your rice cooker less than once a week, or [gasp!] not even own one? Can you barely remember the last time you’ve had leftover white rice sitting there in your fridge? If yes, forget about the day-old-rice method. You don’t need to dutifully plan your fried rice days in advance, because… using day-old-rice isn’t even the best method for fried rice.

What is, then, you ask?

The Steamed Rice Method

There’s a few ways that rice was traditionally prepared in China, before the advent of the rice cooker.

Probably the most common method you’re already well aware of. Rinse some rice, toss it in a pot together with enough water to come up to your knuckle. Toss on a lid, cook til it’s done.

Works perfectly well, but there is a slight hitch. If you’re cooking a lot of rice — like, festival time for a big family portion — often times the final rice texture isn’t phenomenal. So instead, you can use another rice preparation method: the steaming method.

The way you’d do it is this: first, you par-boil your (rinsed, of course) rice. Couple minutes at a rolling boil, kind of like how you’d cook pasta. You don’t want the rice to be completely cooked at this stage, however – just cooked enough for the rice to have lost a bit of its transparency. You then load up that rice into a big, wet cloth, and toss it all in one of these big buckets (called 甑子):

Then you grab that big bucket, place it over a large wok of bubbling water, and let it steam.

You can still see restaurants that follow this steaming method for their white rice. Putz into a restaurant in Sichuan, often you can just scoop some yourself, at your leisure. And it’s a pretty cool method — I personally quite enjoy the looser, less sticky texture of par-boiled-then-steamed rice. Not going to replace my rice cooker anytime soon for convenience-related-reasons, but it’s a nice rice.

But where steamed rice particularly shines is fried rice. That steamed rice is awesome for fried rice is something that — back in the day at least — was practically common knowledge, stretching from the North to the Southwest.

In Li Chunfang and Fan Guozhong’s “闾巷话蔬食”, retrospective of village life outside of Beijing in the 1930s, they write:

现在多用焖饭，其实真正的炒饭还是用捞饭来炒好

Nowadays, people use boiled rice [i.e. normal rice], but for the most authentic fried rice it’s better to used par-boiled and steamed rice. [pg 5]

Similarly, in Huang Xiaoji’s “一个村庄的食单”, a discussion of food in a Hunan village in the 1950s, he states:

剩饭也不甚好炒，炒时满锅黏附…

这饭炒食也好，依然粒粒可数

Leftover (boiled) rice is not good to fry, it will stick everywhere in the wok.

This (steamed) rice is good to fry, the grains will remain separate. [pg 4, 8]

It’s not an uncommon approach for professional kitchens these days, either: after all, the logistics of steaming some rice for a restaurant can sometimes be a bit easier than leaving out XYZ pounds of leftover rice from service the night before.

And, it’s a method that I — being an avid rice cooker using-homecook mostly based in urban south China — came painfully late to. As I said before, even day-old-rice fried rice can get a little finicky! You need to break up all the clumps, scrape to avoid stickage, and fry for a non-insignificant period of time to get to that loose, fluffy stage.

Using steamed rice? As the above authors imply, frying rice becomes a painfully simply process — you almost don’t need to do anything.

The logistical problem of steamed rice in a western kitchen

So, you’re convinced: steamed rice is best for fried rice.

But I can already hear a few of you groaning that this is already too much work. First boil, then toss into some sort of wet cloth, then break out the bamboo steamer, then fry the rice, then wash the damn sticky/starchy cloth?

To be completely frank, that whole process was a little annoying for me even — mostly because washing that rice cloth? Sucks royally (though Steph says I’m being lazy and overdramatic). But over the years, I streamlined that process for my own kitchen, and it’s something that I think can travel pretty well into the standard not-build-for-Chinese-food kitchen as well.

All you need is a fine mesh sieve, and a suitably sized pot that the fine mesh sieve can sit in, like so:

An overview of our “Strainer method”

This is still a slight multi-step process I know, but I promise that you can sort it all within like a half hour, give or take.

1. Rinse your rice, of course

2. Dump the rice in a pot of boiling water. Cook it ala pasta, 3 minutes

3. Strain the rice, keep it in the strainer.

4. Quickly rinse your cooking pot, and add in a touch more water (~2 inches worth). Bring to a boil.

5. Lay your rice filled strainer onto the pot and cover. Wrap a damp towel around the lid to ‘seal’ things closed (or wrap the strainer with foil, both are ok). Steam for 15 minutes.

6. While everything is steaming, this is the time that you can prepare all the add-ins to your fried rice, measure your seasoning, etc.

7. Once the rice is done steaming, transfer it to a plate.

8. Fry your rice

Recipe, Scallion Fried Rice with Egg

Ok, so let’s put this all together.

This method will work with any Chinese (or Thai) style fried rice you want to do, but let’s just sort a super simple, bog-standard Scallion Fried Rice with Egg:

Ingredients:

• Jasmine rice (粘米/泰国香米), 230g. Calrose is also fine.

• Eggs, two medium

• Seasoning for the egg: salt, ⅛ tsp; sugar, ⅛ tsp

• Scallion, ~2 stalks, ~40g

• Lard (猪油), for frying, ~2.5 tbsp. Using lard for frying rice is particularly delicious, but you can use any oil you like. Peanut, corn, soybean, whatever. In some Japanese fried rices they use butter as a base, also tasty.

• Soy sauce (生抽), optional, ~2 tsp. If you pushed me, I think I prefer fried rice sans soy sauce, but I know a lot of people enjoy the addition. If you don’t use soy sauce, up the salt quantity in the seasoning by a quarter teaspoon.

• Seasoning for the rice: salt, 1/2 tsp; sugar, 1 tsp; MSG (味精), ¼ tsp; white pepper powder (白胡椒粉), ¼ tsp. MSG is western supermarket available under the brand name ‘Accent’. If you dislike white pepper powder or don’t have it on hand, you can swap for black pepper, but cut the quantity to 1/8 tsp.

Process:

Rinse your rice 2-3 times. You don’t need to be paranoid here (especially because we’ll be par-boiling things), just a quick rinse to get off a touch of the surface starch.

Boil your rice for 3 minutes. It should look like this at this stage.

Dump into your strainer, set aside. Give the pot a super brief rinse to get off a bit of the starch, then add in ~3 inches of water. Bring to a boil.

Poke a couple holes in the rice to allow for more even heating. Nestle the steamer in, and cover with a lid. Wrap a damp cloth around the opening of the pot so that not too much steam escapes (a little bit is ok). You can alternatively wrap the top of the strainer with aluminum foil — whatever’s easiest in your kitchen:

Steam for 15 minutes.

As that’s steaming, prepare everything else. Toss that bit of salt to the egg and beat it thoroughly. Slice up your scallion. Toss all your seasoning in a little bowl and mix them together.

Once the times up, taste your rice. It should be completely cooked through at this stage. If you find it a touch undercooked, don’t panic, just toss it all back in for another 10 minutes (it’s pretty difficult to over-steam rice). Once cooked through, lay it on a plate.

To fry, we’ll just use a non-stick skillet. You can obviously also use a carbon steel wok too if your prefer (a wok will give you a little more room to work with, but either is will work great). Add in one tablespoon of your lard and let it melt over a medium low flame. Once it’s hot enough where little bubbles can form around a pair of chopsticks, pour the egg in a thin stream while stirring vigorously.

Now, what we like for our egg here is little bits of grain sized egg evenly incorporated within our fried rice, so to get there we’ll drizzle the egg in while stirring, then continuously kind of ‘smush’ it to break it up. This motion so that the egg can shred into little pieces and incorporate well with our final rice. After about three to four minutes of that motion, you should be looking at something a bit like this, which’s called guihuadan or osmanthus egg in Chinese:

But if you don’t care, that’s also fine, just scramble however you feel like it. Then just scooch that all to the side, and up your heat to medium.

Once the egg is cooked, scooch it to the side of the skillet and add in another tablespoon of lard. Once melted, add in your steamed rice. Quickly fry the rice for a bit in the lard, then combine them together. The reason we add the lard in stages is because egg has a tendency to really absorb oil — if you don’t care, that’s also fine, it’ll also totally work if you added all the oil at once in the beginning.

Continue to fry for once minute, then sprinkle in the soy sauce. Stir to combine the soy sauce into the rice, one more minute. Sprinkle in your seasoning, mix well to combine. Add in the scallion, shut off the heat. Mix well, fin.

Today I wanted to teach you how to prepare and cook tofu in the Chinese style. That’s… an impossibly vast space to cover, so to make it all actually possible to tackle, let’s focus on (1) the most common tofu varieties and (2) predominantly oil based cooking methods.

The techniques we’ll go over are:

1. Pan-fry/stir-fry. Probably the most commonly seen oil-based tofu fry technique. The tofu is pan-fried until crisp and then tossed with sauce and aromatics. To illustrate this, we’ll use a basic soy sauce fried tofu.

2. Pan-fry/simmer. Another oft-used approach. We’ll be showing this technique using an old-school shrimp and tofu dish that we adapted from an old Qing dynasty cookbook.

3. Strictly pan-fry. This is a less commonly seen approach that I’m hesitant to list out as its own ‘category’, as it’s predominantly only seen with one classic Chinese street food dish, Tieban Tofu. That said, of all these techniques it’s the one that’d be most applicable to Western cooking, so I think it’s nice one to cover.

4. Strictly Deep-fry. There’s a crazy number of deep-fried tofu dishes in China, but to illustrate we’ll go over my personal favorite deep fried tofu dish, the Teochew dish “Puning Tofu”.

5. Deep-fry/Stir-fry/Simmer. Show with Sichuanese Jiachang “Homestyle” tofu. Note that often pan-frying and deep-frying can be interchangeably used with this method, especially at home.

The above video corresponds to the last three techniques, which you can see in action. For the first two techniques, I’ll be referring to an older video we made – Fried tofu, two ways.

Tofu varieties:

So where in god’s name to even begin here? There’s so many damn tofu products, ranging from deep-fried tofu puffs to smoked tofu to pudding-like Douhua. So let’s zero in on the stuff that would be commonly referred to as just “Tofu”.

In the West, if you go to a supermarket that sells tofu, you’ll probably run into two types of tofu: regular and silken. The regular tofu then ranges in firmness from Soft to Extra-Firm, while the Silken tofu’ll come in three sorts: Soft, Firm, and Extra-Firm.

Regular tofu is made using Nigari (Magnesium chloride) as the coagulant. If you’re curious the general approach of how to make it, I talked about it a bit in the homemade Sichuanese Douhua post. Basically, to make tofu you follow the general process outlined there, then toss the coagulated soymilk in a specific tofu press in place of using the wooden basket. To get the varying degrees of firmness, the tofu is pressed for a longer or shorter time.

Silken tofu is made using Gypsum (Calcium Sulfate) as the coagulant. Silken tofu usually isn’t pressed in the same way, but varying firmness is achieved by controlling the ratio of soybean to water in the mix.

So right. Here’s the thing that was a bit of a mindfuck for me when I first came to China – there’s not really the same soft/medium/firm categorization that exists in the West. I mean, there is, soft of… allow me to explain.

First off, the names and dominant styles of tofu are extremely regional in China. I’m going to explain the ‘common tofu types’ but know that these are (1) the workhorse tofus in the city I live, Shenzhen and (2) how they’re referred to at my local market. I can’t guarantee it’d be the same if you went to a market in, say, Shanghai. That said? Shenzhen’s a migrant city with folks all around the country, so I think it’s still pretty indicative of the country at large.

1. Shigao Tofu (石膏豆腐). Shigao Tofu is made using gypsum as the coagulant – the Western counterpart would be ‘firm silken tofu’. It’s pretty delicate – usually used in soups or stews. The dominant tofu in Cantonese cuisine.

2. Yanshui Tofu (盐水豆腐). Yansui tofu is made using nigari as the coagulant. It usually ends up a bit firmer than the Shigao tofu – it’s the sort that’s in your Mapo Tofu. Depending on where you are in China, it can also be referred to as Lushui tofu or Hakka tofu (I’m sure there’s way more names). In the West, this would correspond with soft tofu, though in recipes that use it you could also use medium tofu.

3. Lao Tofu (老豆腐). Lao Tofu starts out at Yanshui tofu (i.e. a nigari tofu) but’s then pressed for longer. It’s the dominant tofu style in the North of China.

Generally speaking, we like to use Shigao tofu (i.e. firm silken) with water-based cooking methods, Yanshui tofu (i.e. soft) deep-frying, and Lao Tofu (i.e. firm) pan-frying. Lots of exceptions there but that’s usually our approach.

How to cut tofu:

Tofu’s pretty simple to cut. A few of the most common cuts:

1. Sheets. Slice the tofu in half lengthwise, and then cut in into 1 cm pieces working perpendicular from that cut.

2. Cubes. Slice your tofu in half lengthwise. Then, slice down to get one inch strips, and finally cut in the other direction to get one inch cubes.

3. Triangles. Slice your tofu in half crosswise. Cut each crosswise piece in half at a 45 degree bias. Flip each piece up, and cut each into ~3 pieces, about 1cm each.

How to Prep Tofu for frying:

Don’t.

That’s a bit of a strong statement, but… I’ve just gotta get something off my chest real quick. I see a lot of sources online – sources I love, places like Serious Eats and BA… recommend you buy firm tofu, and then press it further before you cook it. I see this advice everywhere from AskCulinary to Buzzfeed Tasty videos – it’s feels like it’s starting to become gospel.

I’ve also never seen anyone in China press their tofu at home. Ever. That’s the fucking point of firm tofu – it’s pressed.

I’ve gotten into arguments on this very topic, and the common response is that “well, in the West, we just like it firmer and meatier”. And I mean, if you just like it firmer than firm… I’m certainly not going to stop you. We’ve all got preferences. I like overcooked root vegetables, my parents like their steaks well done. But what I’d argue against is the ‘meatier’ claim.

When we cook meat we go to great pains to make it as ‘juicy’ as possible – brine, marinade, deep fry, pass through oil, whatever. So why when people in the West cook tofu do they go to such lengths to remove almost every bit of moisture they possibly can? You wouldn’t be mimicking meat… you’d be at best mimicking overcooked meat. And I mean really, tofu’s not the best mock meat anyhow – that crown likely belongs to Seitan (i.e. wheat gluten).

I can think of one and only one situation where it’d make sense to press tofu at home – I know in some supermarkets in the states a nondescript box of “Medium” tofu’s all you can find. If you have medium tofu and you want to morph it into firm tofu… totally. Press it yourself, good idea. Otherwise? I dunno. Feels superfluous at best.

Further, many people advocate coating tofu in cornstarch before frying it. While it wouldn’t really hurt too much (and I’m sure there’s some coated tofu dishes out there that I’m not thinking of)… tofu generally doesn’t need cornstarch, tofu needs patience. It’s one of the cool things about frying tofu – the outside tends to get nice and crisp.

A note on poaching tofu cubes in warm salt water:

Ok, so I said ‘don’t prep tofu’. There is one thing you can do if you feel so lead. If you’re using soft Yanshui tofu in something saucy, you can poach the tofu in hot, salty water for ~3 minutes… then leave it in there until it’s ready to use. Yanshui tofu can sort of have a slight ‘grassy’ undertone that you might not want to flavor your sauce with. The poach will help dampen that taste, as well as help form the tofu pieces... the latter sometimes helping if frying Shigao tofu as well.

Method #1: Pan-fry then Stir-fry.

High level overview here:

Cut firm tofu into 1 cm pieces or triangles --> Pan-fry on medium heat for 5-8 minutes until the bottom is evenly golden brown --> Flip, fry for ~5 minutes --> Remove the tofu --> Fry aromatics --> Add back the tofu --> Add seasoning (e.g. wine, soy sauce, salt, sugar, MSG, etc)

Ingredients, Soy Sauce Fried Tofu:

1. Firm Tofu (老豆腐) One block, 400g. Cut in half and then into one cm pieces.

2. Green onion (葱), about three sprigs, separated into the white part (to use as an aromatic) and the green part (to finish the dish). Cut these into about two inch sections.

3. Shallot (干葱), 1. Sliced. If you’re somewhere where you can only get those tiny little shallots, use 2-3.

4. Liaojiu (料酒), 1 tbsp. A.k.a. Shaoxing wine, Huangjiu, Chinese cooking wine.

5. Light Soy Sauce (生抽), 1.5 tbsp.

6. Sugar, 1 tsp.

7. Oil, 3-4 tbsp. For frying. Quick note that this amount – 3-4 tbsp – is if you’re using a round bottomed wok. If using a flat bottomed wok (or some other piece of kitchen cookware), add enough oil to get about 1-2 cm up from the bottom of the wok.

Process, Soy Sauce fried tofu:

1. Cut the tofu and aromatics, and thoroughly dry the tofu. When working with firm tofu, there’s a small tough bit on the very top and bottom of the tofu. This is totally optional, but we slice that off in order to get a more even texture from the tofu. Slice the tofu in half lengthwise, and then cut in into 1 cm pieces working from the other direction. Thoroughly pat the tofu dry with some paper towels – we don’t want the tofu to be popping like crazy when we add it to the oil to fry. Chop up the aromatics – slicing the green onion into two inch pieces and separating the white part from the green part. Thinly slice up the shallot and toss it together with the white part of the green onion.

2. Longyau, then with the heat on medium carefully add the tofu into the wok. As always, first longyau – get that wok piping hot, shut off the heat, add in the oil, and give it a swirl to get a nice non-stick surface. With the heat on medium, add in the tofu pieces. If you’re a pro you can carefully slide them all in at once, but to make sure that the tofu doesn’t pile and break (worst case scenario when making this dish), we recommend adding the pieces one by one.

3. Let the tofu panfry for five to eight minutes until the bottom is nice and golden brown. Same deal as whenever you’re panfrying anything from any cuisine ever – don’t touch the tofu. Let the tofu develop a crust and get nice and golden brown. If you got a round bottom wok like us though, you’re gunna want to tilt the wok to each side to move the oil and ensure the tofu cooks evenly.

4. Flip the tofu and cook on the other side for five minutes. Take out the tofu once each side is crispy and golden brown. Find a tiny plate or something to put your tofu on… this’ll be out for like three minutes tops.

5. In the same oil, same medium heat… fry the white part of the green onion and the shallot for 1-2 minutes, then add back the tofu. Just fry until they start to smell real nice, then add back the tofu. Give it a quick mix together (~15 seconds).

6. Up the heat to high, then add the liaojiu over the spatula and around the sides of the wok and give it a quick mix. Then do the same thing with the soy sauce. Adding these liquids on the spatula and over the sides of the wok’ll help ensure that they sizzle and quickly reduce instead of collect at the bottom and start simmering. After each addition of liquid, give it about a ~15 second mix. Make sure there’s no visible liaojiu in the wok before you add in the soy sauce.

7. Add the sugar, fry together until the sugar dissolves (~30 seconds). Add the green part of the green onion, shut off the heat, give it a quick mix, and out.

Method #2: Pan-fry then Simmer:

High level overview here:

Cut firm tofu into 1 cm pieces or triangles --> Fry on medium heat for 5-8 minutes until bottom is evenly golden brown --> Flip, fry for five minutes more --> Add liquid --> Cover, simmer for 20 minutes --> Season --> Simmer, allowing liquid to ~90% absorb into the tofu, ~20 minutes.

Ingredients, Fried Tofu ‘braised’ with Shrimp (蒋侍郎豆腐):

1. Firm Tofu (老豆腐/板豆腐), one block, 400g. Same deal. Cut in half then into one cm pieces.

2. Dried shrimp (虾米), 15g to be simmered in two cups water. Nature’s MSG.

3. Oil -or- Lard (猪油), 3-4 tbsp. For frying. Lard is a great frying oil for tofu.

4. Rice wine (米酒), ~¼ cup. So classically, this specific dish would be simmered in a specific sweet kind of Shaoxing wine. But here’s the thing – in the West the vast majority of stuff that’s labelled ‘Shaoxing’ is… salted. Alcohols laws are fun. So just grab a nicer sort of rice wine – something like a Japanese sake would work great (don’t waste an expensive one though).

5. Light soy sauce (生抽), 2 tbsp. To be added near the end of cooking.

6. Sugar, 1 tsp. Added together with the soy sauce.

7. Green onion (葱), green part only, ~3 sprigs. Cut into two inch sections.

Process, Fried tofu ‘braised’ with shrimp

So I’m putting ‘braised’ in quotes because using the English terminology ‘braise’ doesn’t really make a hell of a lot of sense with tofu. It’s just sorta the go-to translation for the Chinese word ‘men’ (simmering in sauce) and there’s enough similarities that you could kinda think of it in that way.

1. Rinse the dried shrimp to get the dust off, then simmer in two cups water – covered – for one hour. This is the first time I’ve personally seen this method, and holy hell… I was just blown away by the end result. Those Qing dynasty cooks knew their shit. The end result of this stuff after an hour long simmer is basically just concentrated umami juice. The first time I tasted this dish I just couldn’t believe that there was no MSG added in here… it’s that rich in glutamate.

2. Cut and fry the tofu in accordance to steps #1-4 above. With the obvious exception of cutting up the white-part-of-the-green-onion and slicing the shallots. This dish’ll only have some green onion sections that we toss in near the end.

3. Once the tofu is nice and golden brown on both sides, add in the shrimp, the shrimp liquid, and the rice wine. Cover and ‘braise’ for 20 minutes on medium low. This’s gunna (1) let the raw alcohol bite of the rice wine cook out (2) infuse the tofu with that delicious shrimp umami liquid. Random note that glutamic acid is water and not alcohol soluble – the rice wine is more for taste and to help bring out the other flavonoids in the dish.

4. After 20 minutes, add in the soy sauce and sugar. Let that continue to cook down on medium-low for a 2-3 minutes, flipping the tofu to make sure both sides absorb the sauce. So what you’re looking for is the liquid to be about 90% reduced/absorbed into the tofu. This should take 15-25 minutes. Add in the soy sauce and sugar, making sure the sugar dissolves into the liquid. Let that reduce and absorb into the tofu, flipping to make sure both sides get that delicious liquid.

5. Once the sauce is completely absorbed, shut off the heat and mix in the green onion. The green onion here is mostly for fragrance and color.

Method #3: Strictly Pan-frying

Cut firm tofu into large 2cm blocks --> Lightly oil a large skillet --> Add tofu, turn heat to medium --> Brush a touch of oil on top side --> Smother with way too much spice mix --> Fry for 5 minutes --> Rearrange if needed, fry for 5 minutes more --> Optionally chop into cubes

Ingredients, Street food style Tieban Tofu:

This dish’s a classic a nightmarkets in China – you’ll usually see the tofu slowly frying on a flat top, smothered in a type of Chinese BBQ spice mix, and then chopped into bite sized pieces to serve.

1. Firm tofu (老豆腐), 2 blocks, ~800g. Cut into larger ~2 cm pieces – four slices per block. This needs to be thicker because we can’t have bubbling oil muffing up and making our spice mix clump.

2. Oil. For brushing. Peanut oil or sunflower oil are nice.

3. Scallions. Sliced, for garnish.

4. Spice mix: 1 star anise (八角), ½ tsp whole Sichuan peppercorns (花椒), ½ tsp cumin seeds (孜然), ½ tbsp Perilla seeds (苏子) -or- up the cumin seed by 1 tsp, ¼ tsp white pepper powder (白胡椒粉), ¼ tsp ginger powder (姜粉), ¼ tsp garlic powder (大蒜粉), 2 tbsp chili powder (辣椒面), 1 tbsp salt, ½ tbsp MSG (味精), 1 tsp sugar. These’ll all get ground together. Perilla seeds are also used in Korean cuisine so you might be able to try your luck there. For the chili powder, you’ll want one that’s not overly fiery, so the bog standard cayenne pepper from the bottle should work great.

That spice mix above’s one of the classic spice mixes used in Chinese BBQ. Just add in a bit of anti-caking agents and you’ve basically got what the street vendors use.

Process: Street food style Tieban Tofu:

1. Grind together the spice powder. First grind together the star anise, Sichuan peppercorns, and cumin seeds. Then add everything except the salt/sugar/MSG and grind again. Finally, add the salt/sugar/MSG and give it a final grind. The reason the salt/sugar/MSG is added at the end is so that it doesn’t cake.

2. Brush the widest skillet you have with a thin layer of oil. Less oil for this one because any oil bubbling over the top’ll muff up the layer of spice – this’s kinda mimicking Chinese BBQ dishes here.

3. Add the tofu to the pan, brush on a top layer of oil, and smother with the spice mix. I know ‘smother’ isn’t really a proper amount but… just use your own judgement. Take a look at a picture of how much we added if you need.

4. Fry the tofu for 5 minutes, then rearrange if needed. The street food vendors use a flat top so they can cook these nice and even. For us on a stove, rearranging halfway through’s a nice idea.

5. Fry for 5 minutes more, and with a minute to go top with sliced scallions.

6. Optionally chop into 2 cm cubes. This’s the way they’ll often do it on the street, then toss it in a bit of a plastic cup, then eat with disposable chopsticks.

Method #4: Strictly Deep-Frying

With deep-frying, it can often be nice to use a softer tofu. The outside of the tofu’ll form a nice crust, while the moisture on the inside will evaporate and cause the tofu to puff up.

Note that this is not how they make tofu puffs – tofu puffs are made using a very firm mix of 1:4 beans to water, but then including agents like ammonium carbonate, borax, and baking soda in the soy milk blend. However, if you search online in Chinese for DIY tofu puffs, they’ll often (erroneously, IMHO) use deep fried soft tofu as a base.

High level overview:

Cut tofu into 1 cm triangles --> Add to oil at 180C over max flame --> Temp should lower to 150-160C --> Allow tofu to form and float --> Break apart any stuck pieces --> Lower flame to medium-low, fry at 140C for eight minutes

Ingredients, Puning Tofu:

Ok, so… this specific dish Puning tofu traditionally uses its own special tofu product here (also called ‘Puning tofu’). What Puning tofu is is a soft nigari tofu where the soy milk has some sweet potato starch mixed in… then the tofu pieces are individually pressed (and cut in half before frying).

You know how I just said that soft tofu puffs up really nice when deep-frying? Yeah… it also loves to collapse after. In an average batch of deep-fried tofu you’ll likely have ~½ collapse on you… it’s fine, still tasty, but way less easy on the eyes. The starch in Puning tofu, meanwhile, allows it to maintain that ‘puffy’ appearance.

Where I live in Shenzhen sometimes we see restaurants make this exact sub – soft tofu for Puning tofu – if they have sourcing problems with the latter (as a city with a bunch of Teochew migrants, the Puning tofu usually runs out at our local market by ~9am). Still works. So if you happen to find Puning tofu use that otherwise don’t hesitate to reach for soft.

1. Puning tofu -or- soft tofu, ~400g.

2. Oil: 2 cups. For frying. Peanut’s nice. Two cups is if you use a round bottomed wok for deep frying. Heavily recommended, you’ll need way less oil in a wok. If using a Dutch oven use like the 50 gallons of oil or whatever you need to actually fill that up proper [/s, if it needed to be said].

3. For the sauce: 25g Chinese chives (韭菜), ½ tsp salt, optional 1 tsp fish sauce (鱼露), ½ cup water. Fish sauce is a thing in Teochew dipping sauces, I swear.

Process, Puning Tofu:

1. Cut the tofu into triangles. If actually using Puning tofu, just cut those little blocks in half.

2. In a wok, heat the oil up until 180C, then drop in the tofu slices. For best results I’d suggest no more than ten slices at a time, else you could start to flirt with crowding.

3. Continue over max flame, until the tofu slices begin to float, ~3 minutes. Once you drop the tofu slices in, it’ll likely lower the temperature to 150-160C. That’s fine. The tofu’ll also start to stick slightly, also totally normal… just let it form and gently break them apart with chopsticks.

4. Lower the flame to medium-low, fry for 8 minutes at 140C. Or until puffy, golden brown, and the exterior begins to slightly break down. Flip periodically.

5. Remove the tofu pieces, lay on a paper-towel lined plate.

6. To make the sauce: mince the jiucai, toss in a bowl. Add the salt and mix it into the Jiucai. Then add the fish sauce and do the same. Then add the water.

Method #5: Deep Fry, then Stir Fry, then Simmer

Note again that you can either deep fry or pan fry your tofu here. If pan-frying, choose firm tofu. If deep-frying, choose soft tofu.

Basic high level overview:

Panfry according to method #2 -or- deep-fry according to method #4 (though after they begin floating, they only need ~1 minute) --> Stir-fry aromatics --> Add back tofu --> Add sauce --> Let sauce reduce by ~1/4 --> Add vegetables, let cook for ~30 seconds --> Thicken with slurry

Ingredients, Sichuan Jiachang Tofu:

1. One block tofu – soft or firm – ~400g. Cut into 1 cm pieces. Soft for deep frying, firm if pan-frying.

2. Sichuan Chili Bean Paste (郫县豆瓣酱), 1 tbsp. I.e. Pixian douban.

3. Aromatics: 2 cloves garlic, ~1 inch ginger. Both thinly sliced.

4. Sauce: 1 cup water or simple homestyle stock (毛汤), ¼ tsp stock concentrate (鸡汁/瑶柱汁) if using water, 1 tbsp light soy sauce (生抽), ¼ tsp salt, ½ tsp sugar, 1/8 tsp white pepper powder (白胡椒粉). For the stock concentrate, we often use the scallop or abalone sauce varieties simply because they taste good.

5. Green garlic (蒜苗), 2 springs. Cut into two inch sections. Green garlic’s classic with this flavor but ~3 scallions would also be perfectly fine.

6. 1 mild green chili (请教). Cut into diamonds. Something like an Anaheim would work great.

7. Dried Mu’er Wood Ear Mushroom, 5g. Reconstituted in cool water for ~30 minutes. Skip if you can’t find these.

8. Optional: pork belly (五花肉), 30g. Sliced into ~3mm pieces. To be rendered out and form the base of the stir-fry.

9. Liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍兴酒), 1 tbsp. For use while stir-frying.

10. Slurry of 1 tbsp cornstarch (生粉) mixed with 3 tbsp water. For use while stir-frying.

11. Sprinkle of MSG (味精). Optional.

12. Toasted sesame oil (麻油), ½ tsp. For finishing the sitr-fry.

Process: Sichuan Jiachang Tofu:

1. Slice the chilis, the green garlic, and the tofu. Reconstitute the wood ear mushrooms in cool water. Prepare the sauce. Optionally mince the chili bean paste. You can mince chili bean paste so that you don’t have… broad beans… floating around. We opted not to do that in the video, instead breaking them apart with a spatula when stir-frying. Either way.

2. Pan-fry or deep fry the tofu. If pan-frying, refer to methods #1 and #2. If deep-frying, follow method #4 above, but once the tofu is floating, you only need to give it 30-60 more seconds. We don’t really need the tofu to puff up here, we just want it to form together so it doesn’t break while stir-frying and simmering.

3. Stir-fry, then simmer. As always, first longyau: get your wok piping hot, add in the oil – here, about ½ tbsp (or ~2 tbsp if skipping the pork), and give it a swirl to get a nice non-stick surface. Heat on medium now:

• Pork belly, in. Fry for ~3 minutes until much of the oil’s rendered out… about ~2-3 tbsp in all.

• Shut off the heat, add in the chili bean paste. Make sure the paste isn’t burning, then swap the flame to medium-low.

• Fry the chili bean paste for ~2-3 minutes until it combines with the oil, and then re-separates (kind of akin to some curries). This process is called ‘zuochu hongyou’ (frying out the red oil), and is very important in Sichuan chili oil based dishes.

• Aromatics, in. Swap flame to medium high. ~30 second stir-fry.

• Swirl in the ~1 tbsp liaojiu wine around the sides of the wok. Super brief mix.

• Tofu, in. Super brief mix.

• Mu’er wood ear mushrooms, in. Super brief mix.

• Sauce, in. Up the flame to high to bring to a boil.

• Let boil for ~5 minutes uncovered, or until reduced by ~1/4.

• Add chili and green garlic. Mix and continue to cook for ~30 seconds. If using scallion, only cook for ~5-10 seconds.

• Sprinkle of MSG, in. Quick mix. Heat off.

• Toasted sesame oil, in. Quick mix. Fin.

So the timing for this was like perfect this week… yesterday /u/Theoderic77 was asking for some fresh fish recipes, and last weekend we just so happened to film what we feel to be one of the best ways to eat a super-fresh fish – Cantonese whole steamed fish.

So right off the bat, I’ll admit that we’re insanely spoiled living over here in China. If you’re unaware, usually the fishmongers here keep their fish alive in tanks, then take it out and kill it right when you buy it. The fish’s just so much fresher than those fillets I’d buy back in the States, it can’t help but make me wonder why as consumers we don’t demand that sort of approach from our seafood supply chain.

And then because the fish are kept alive in tanks, a relatively common practice among the older generations in China is to simply buy the fish… alive. Often the best fish are available early in the morning and sell out by mid-day, so if you’re eating fish for dinner you’d hardly wanna keep a dead fish in the fridge for eight hours, as it’ll lose some freshness during the day. Keep the fish in your sink, kill it before dinner. Logical, yeah?

So for this video we wanted to show you guys not only how to steam the fish, but also how to kill and prep it. I figured that usually a normal person’s best source for fresh fish outside of Asia is probably your own fishing pole, so maybe this would be a good two-for. Or maybe not. If you don’t care about learning how to kill and prep the fish, just join in at 1:51 in the video and the second part of the process below.

Basic Ingredients

1. One flaky white fish (preferably an ocean or estuary fish), Seabass (海鲈) is perfect. You can use any sort of fish you like, but generally I prefer ocean or estuary fish. These fish are generally much, much less boney than river or lake fish - if you’re like me, it’s easy enough to eat around large spine and rib bones… but there’s nothing pleasurable about taking a big bite of fish and having it filled with pin bones. My go-to fish is here is Seabass (海鲈), because (1) it’s not really boney at all (2) it’s pretty big, the taste is good, and it has a nice quantity of meat and (3) the price is reasonable for me, usually about 元25-30 (~$4) from my local market. I know you can usually get this sort of fresh fish in Chinatowns around the Northeast of the USA at least, but you might need to pay a pretty penny ($15-20 IIRC) for it.

2. Ginger (姜), about an inch. Julienne this ginger, preferably a bit finer than I did in the video. We’re going to be steaming the fish with the ginger, and that’s gunna basically be it for our seasoning.

3. Green onions (葱), roughly 5-6. These green onions are going to be used for two purposes: first, a couple will be placed under the first to help aid in air circulation while steaming. Second, we’ll make some green onion curls with the remainder for garnish. The garnish’ll look a bit prettier is you only use the white part of the green onion, like we did in the video.

Ingredients for the Sauce:

1. Boiling water, 5 Tbsp. Similar to what we did for Mapo Tofu, the boiling water will help the sugar and stock concentrate dissolve.

2. Stock Concentrate (鸡汁), 1 tsp. What we mean by concentrate is the bottled stuff. A plain western-style ‘broth concentrate’ like Savory Choice is a totally fine sub. You could alternatively use chicken stock in the place of water/concentrate, but unlike Western cooking a good stock’s generally not overly critical to the overall flavor of the dish (unless you’re making a soup, of course).

3. Light Soy Sauce (生抽), 3 Tbsp. The biggest mistake that I see when people make this sauce is using far too much soy sauce. The basic ratio here is five parts stock, three parts soy sauce, and one half part sugar. That’ll get you to the taste that the restaurants have.

4. Sugar, ½ Tbsp.

5. Liaojiu, ½ Tsp a.k.a. Huangjiu, Shaoxing Wine, Chinese Rice Cooking Wine.

6. Sesame Oil, 1 Tsp. When I’m making this for myself I’ll often double the sesame oil, just because I fucking love sesame oil.

Process for Storing, Killing, and Cleaning the Fish:

1. Put the fish in your sink or a really large basin. An actual fish tank is perfect if you’re looking to store the fish for a bit, but a sink’s great if you’re a normal person and don’t happen to have an extra fish tank laying around. Every hour or so drain some water from the sink and refill it to make sure the fish has enough oxygen.

2. Kill the fish with a heavy cleaver, or some sort of other heavy object. Unless you’re some sort of super-experienced, badass old Chinese fishmonger… you’re gunna want a pair of rubber fish gloves. Fish can get quite slippery, so the last thing you wanna to is lose grip on the fish and turn your kitchen into something out of a Tarantino movie. Firmly grab the fish and give it a strong smack it on the side of the head with the heavy part of the side of the cleaver. This knocks the fish unconscious but it isn’t dead yet. Flip it 90 degrees and give it another strong smack on the head right above the eyes – that breaks the skull, and that’ll do the trick.

3. Cut along the belly, get the guts out, then cut out the gills. You don’t want to cut too deep, as you don’t want to end up puncturing any organs (which would make it bitter). This’ll basically form a bit of a ‘pocket’ from your cut to the spine, which is where all the organs are. Reach in there, get your hands dirty, and pull out all the crap that’s inside. Once you’re sure that you got all the guts out, right next to the fish’s cheek there’s the gills – cut those out with a knife.

4. Scale the fish. You can use the back of a knife, but vastly easier is using a fish scaler. Scrub the fish with the fish scaler, and be sure you do a good job getting all the sides of the fish. Sometimes I’ve seen people forget the head or behind the fins.

Process for Steaming the Fish:

1. Lay the fish on a large plate on top of two thick sprigs of green onion, then spread the julienned ginger on top of the fish. It’s a little hard to describe the exact location of the green onion – take a look at 2:12 in the video for a visual. The reason for the green onion is because fish is too big for a steamer, so we’re going to be using the plate method to steam. The green onion elevates the center of the fish to ensure the bottom of the fish cooks through as well.

2. Start boiling some water in your steamer, then combine the ingredients for your sauce. Take five tablespoons of water from the steamer and combine with the soy sauce, the sugar, the liaojiu, and the sesame oil.

3. Julienne the remainder of the spring onions, then put them in a glass of ice water. To make your green onion curls for garnishing later on, one trick is to take the finely julienned green onion and put them in a glass of water. The green onions’ll basically curl up immediately.

4. Steam the fish, four and a half minutes per pound of fish. Make sure the water’s boiling rapidly, then set your plate on a steaming rack in a big wok. For us, our fish took five minutes.

5. Remove the fish, then drain out any liquid on the plate. You’ll know the fish is done once the eye has popped out. If you wanna be extra sure (e.g. if you’re feeding other people), poke a chopstick through the thickest part of the fish – if it goes through without resistance, it’s done. Then, drain out any liquid that the fish has released during steaming. I’ve seen some English language recipes that claim that this is the base for the sauce, which is absolutely bonkers – that liquid is about as bitter as bile.

6. Lay the green onion curls over the fish, then pour some piping hot oil over the fish and the green onions. Drain out the oil. Make sure your oil’s really hot here – the hot oil’s gunna soften up the green onions and give us a nice sheen on the fish. I like to use peanut oil here because if there’s any vestiges of oil in the fish after draining, it’ll sort of combine with the flavour of the sesame oil in the sauce.

7. Pour the sauce around the fish on the plate. Don’t pour the sauce over the fish – that wouldn’t really do much flavour-wise and would just kind of make the thing uglier. The sauce will be for (1) dipping the fish pieces in and (2) soaking the bottom side of the fish.

A note on equipment:

To steam this, we placed a steaming rack in a wok and then put the put plate on top. If you don’t have one (you should buy one, it’s like the easiest way to steam stuff), you can Macgyver one pretty easily by crossing a few chopsticks in a round-bottomed wok.

Your lid should fit snugly on your wok, so be sure that your fish and/or your steaming plate isn’t bigger than your wok. If you fish is slightly bigger than you wok, it’s not the end of the world – cut off as much of the tail as is needed with kitchen scissors. It won’t look as pretty, but you’ll survive.

A note on how to eat whole steamed fish:

A lot of people I think are interested in eating whole steamed fish, but some people don’t really know how to attack it.

First off, if you’ve steamed something like Sea Bass and are eating it with chopsticks, you don’t have to worry about bones. For the most part, just go at it and pick pieces off with your chopsticks – let’s just say that ripping the fish’s large vertebral bones from the spine would take some effort, and you aren’t going to be doing that by accident.

That said, take a look at this picture. I categorized three ‘eating areas’ of the fish.

The primary part you’re going to be eating is the fillet, which is section ‘1’ of the fish. When you’re eating a fish in the West, this is basically what you’re eating. A cool thing about a whole fish though is that you can keep on munching to the tail, which basically has the same texture.

The best part of the fish is the cheek, section ‘2’. This meat is super tender… it’s like the filet mignon of fish. Obviously, if you were trying to get at that with a fork it’d be a bit of a pain, but it’s super easy to pick out with some chopsticks.

In my personal opinion, the ‘meh’ part of the fish is the belly, section ‘3’. Now you can absolutely eat this – the fattier meat is prized by some Chinese people - but the texture’s a little slimy and you’ll need to pick around a couple bones. I’ll usually just eat a couple of the bigger chunks of meat here.

So… should you eat the skin? Eh… if you feel like it. If I accidentally grab some skin along with a nice chunk of fish meat, I’m not going to go out of my way to not eat it. There’s some really nice crispy fish skin dishes that they make in Guangdong, but the skin of a steamed fish isn’t really anything to get too excited about.

Once you’re done one side, flip it over. “Oh no mthmchris! Someone told me Chinese people think it’s bad luck to flip a fish!” I’ve lived here for nine years, and haven't once encountered someone that actually believes that. Maybe it’s a super location-specific sort of thing, I dunno. But regardless... flip the fish and eat the other side of it.

So we wanted to show you how to make the authentic version of Cantonese lettuce wraps, San Choy Bau.

Now, there’s a lot of recipes being thrown around the internet for ‘San Choy Bau’, and a lot of them feature ground beef/pork/chicken. If you like that style that’s cool, but what you’d really be looking for ain’t Cantonese – it’d be Thai/Laotian laab, which has its own intensely complex process (if you just stir-fry ground meat directly it has the tendency get quite dry).

There’s a few varieties of San Choy Bau in Guangdong, but we wanted to show you guys how to make a Shunde seafood style, which is pretty easy and a common weeknight meal for us.

Ingredients

1. Deshelled Asian Golden Clams (黄沙蚬) or Cockles, ¾ pound. The Asian Golden Clam is usually what’s used here, but I doubt y’all have them at your local supermarket (there’s a discussion on the Asian Golden Clam in the note at the end). The key though is to use the smallest clam that you can find… so we also tested this recipe using cockles. And you know what? Even though it’s not traditional, we thought cockles were really, really good here too. So feel free to play around with whatever miniscule-bivalve-mollusk is cheapest in your neck of the woods (littleneck clams could also be a possibility). A quick note – for cockles we yielded ¾ pound deshelled cockles from around 7 pounds shelled cockles.

2. Lap Cheong Sausage, 150g (腊肠). The Lap Cheong is a real integral part of this dish. For the unaware, Cantonese lap cheong is a dried, hard sausage that sort of has the texture of pepperoni. The closest western equivalent might be a nice salami, but the soy sauce and the sugar in Lap Cheong give it a real distinctive taste.

3. Two Full ’Paprika Chili’ Peppers (红辣椒), 120g. I’ve finally been able to zero in on what this chili is called in English – paprika sweet chili pepper! This chili’s not very spicy, so any red chili that’s low on the Scoville scale (e.g. Anaheims) should work great too.

4. Chinese Celery (芹菜), 120g. Chinese celery is a common aromatic in Chinese cooking – the taste is extremely similar to Western celery, but a bit more assertive. You can use Western celery in a pinch, but because Western celery has a bit more water content you’ll need to sweat them before stir-frying, which we’ll talk about in the process.

5. White section of the green onion, 50g (葱白). As always, this is used as an aromatic. I’m getting a bit tired of writing out ‘white-part-of-the-green-onion’, you think we could all just agree to start calling them ‘green onion whites’?

6. Liaojiu, a.k.a. Shaoxing Rice Wine (料酒), 1 tablespoon.

7. Light Soy Sauce (生抽), 2 Tablespoons.

8. White Sugar, ½ Tablespoon.

9. Romaine Lettuce (生菜), 2 Heads. If you’re abroad, your romaine lettuce is gunna be much bigger than our heads, so just use your common sense regarding amount here.

10. Hoisin Sauce (海鲜酱). A sauce for smearing on the lettuce wraps.

11. White Rice. Optional, the wraps can also be stuffed with rice together with the filling.

Process

1. Prep your clams or cockles. Like all shellfish, these guys are a bit of a pain to prep. If you’re prepping clams, refer to the note on clam preparation below. For cockles, what you’ll want to do is rinse them, and put them in a big basin (or maybe two) with a quarter cup of salt and a quarter cup of cornstarch. Massage them a bit to get some of the mud off. Let that sit for about a half hour – the cornstarch will help get the mud off and the salt will make the cockles ‘vomit up’ any impurities. After that, rinse them again until the water comes clean… then boil in your biggest stockpot until the cockles open, 3-4 minutes (you don’t want to crowd them, this might take two batches). From there, there’s two techniques then to remove the shell – you can do it by hand, or you can give a vigorous stir at the later stages of boiling which will cause the cockle to separate from the shell and rise to the top. Personally, with cockles I haven’t had a lot of luck with the latter method, so I’ll just go through the slog of deshelling them by hand.

2. Remove the lettuce pieces from the head, wash and dry thoroughly, the toss in the refrigerator. After washing your lettuce, a good idea is putting it in a salad spinner to get it nice and dry (as an aside, holy crap I finally bought a salad spinner and now I have no idea how I lived my life before). Toss in the refrigerator to make sure it doesn’t wilt or anything.

3. Dice the Remaining Ingredients. Dice up your Lap Cheong (we want a nice and small dice here, check the video for a visual), the chili, the celery, and the white-part-of-the-green-onion.

4. Sweat the Seafood. Over a dry wok on medium heat, toast the clams/cockles to dry them out a bit and remove any excess water content. The reason we’re doing this is because any ingredient that can let out some liquid in a stir-fry has the potential to muff up the stir-fry, transforming a ‘fry’ into a ‘simmer in a little bit of oily water’. Let this toast for about three minutes – and don’t panic if some bits of clams or cockles stick to the bottom of the wok, that’s normal.

5. If using Western celery, sweat the celery. Western celery has a bit higher water content than Chinese celery, so we’ll need to do the same toasting process. Toast the diced celery in the wok over medium heat for about two minutes.

6. Pre-heat your wok, then longyau. Get your wok piping hot, then pour some oil in. Swirl it around to coat the wok with oil and get a nice non-stick surface, then drain any excess oil (for this dish, we’ll just need the coating). This technique is called ‘longyau’, and is step one of most stir-frying.

7. Stir-fry the rest of the ingredients via ‘xiaochao’ Ok, so what we’re doing here is building our stir-fry by adding our ingredients one-by-one. Different ingredients have different cooking times – so longer to cook ingredients get tossed in first, and shorter to cook ingredients get tossed in later. A lot of this is done by instinct - so please don’t attempt to follow these times religiously - but I went through the video and grabbed the cooking times for each ingredient for your guys’ reference (in retrospect, I’m amazed at how similar all of the stirring times were). Over high heat (medium-high on a Chinese stove):

• Green onions, in. Stir for 15 seconds.

• Red diced chili pepper, in. Stir for 15 seconds.

• Lap Cheong sausage, in. Stir for 45 seconds.

• Liaojiu, in. Check out the video at 4:28 in the video to see how she does this – she’s adding some to a spatula and pouring it first on the sides of the wok. Because it’ll sizzle and evaporate as soon as it hit the wok, this is gunna help get some more flavor out of the liaojiu and also make sure we’re not adding too much liquid in, which would just screw up the frying. Stir for 45 seconds.

• Celery, in. Stir for 45 seconds.

• Clams/cockles, in. Stir for 15 seconds.

• Soy Sauce, in. Use the same method as you poured in the liaojiu. Because it’s two tablespoons, you’ll likely need to do this a couple times, giving a quick stir in between. Stir an additional 15 seconds.

• Sugar, in. Stir for one final minute, and the filling is done!

When eating these, smear some hoisin sauce on the lettuce first, then a bit of rice (if using), then one or two spoonfuls of the filling. This is an awesome dish to go alongside a bigger meal, or as a quick weeknight meal so long as your seafood’s pre-prepped.

Note about the Asian Golden Clam:

I asked /r/cooking a couple weeks ago if y’all could source these, and the answer was a uniform ‘no’. And yet, if you look at a map of where these guys live, the United States and Europe are absolutely crawling with them. We just don’t eat them.

Which is a shame, because they’re (1) an invasive species and (2) pretty tasty. I can’t claim to be the most ecologically sensitive guy, but it kind of feels like common sense to eat the crap out of something we got too much of, yeah?

Now, I wouldn’t bash my head against the wall trying to source these though. The reason they’re used for this dish in Guangdong is that (1) they’re really tiny, perfect for a lettuce wrap and (2) they’re basically the cheapest shellfish you can buy. Suppose you’re living in a place where crawfish are real cheap… go ahead and play around with crawfish and see how that works! It’d stay true-ish to the flavor profile of the original recipe but use local ingredients - that’s how actually inspired fusion is created IMO… not from a CIA graduate backpacking Southeast Asia for a couple months.

Note about Asian Golden Clam Preparation:

Ok, so if you look at 1:57 in the video, this is what the clams we’re working with here in Guangdong look like. I want to be clear here because I dunno if I was in the video – we buy the clams prepped like that straight from the market.

If you’re grabbing these from a lake or a bait shop though, I’d imagine you’d get the whole clams themselves sort of like this in the video. We really wanted to figure out the traditional method to turn the latter into the former, so that you guys outside of China could recreate this exactly. From our research, we’ve found that what people seem to do is: boil them, de-shell, salt them, and sun-dry them for a day.

After trying this a few times, our results were less than ideal. One time they came out alright, another time it had a crazy strong fermented smell, and in another attempt they ended up with bugs crawling all over them. If anyone has any tips we’re all ears. We’re going to keep on trying – we’re thinking about making a Chinese cooking ‘techniques’ playlist with shorter length videos, and if we figure it out we’ll toss it up there.

If you’re like me though and really down with the idea of consuming invasive species, feel free to prep the clams in the same way that you’d do the cockles – wash, boil, deshell, and use them straight. It’s not quite the same as the dried variety but still nice.

A note on ingredients:

So there's one pretty traditional ingredient that we didn't include here that maybe we should've. /u/Flying-Camel rightly points out that the vast majority of restaurants will add dried turnip (萝卜干) - we usually don't include this when cooking for ourselves (we feel it adds a bit too much of a textural contrast), but when testing this recipe we sort of felt compelled to add it in (as it's traditional). If you look real closely in the video at 4:50, there's totally a bit of dried turnip in there... but then when we ate it we both felt we liked it a bit better the way we usually cook it, without. Given that it might not be the easiest ingredient to source outside of China, we kinda felt 'screw it, let's just cut it out'.

But we want to stray as far away from 'adapted recipes' or 'our twist' as possible, and just communicate the real deal recipes for the food you'd get over here. So add in 70g of dried turnip to the ingredient list, and get that into a fine mince. When you're doing the stir-frying, add in the minced dried turnip after the liaojiu and before the celery.

So we wanted to show you one of our favorite Teochew (a.k.a. ‘Chaozhou’ in Mandarin, ‘Chiuchow’ in Cantonese) dishes, oyster omelette. There’s a ton of different varieties of this Oyster Omelette besides this version – most notably the Taiwan street food style, which I’ll talk about in the notes below.

Teochew are sort of a global diaspora of Chinese people originally hailing from from the Chaozhou/Shantou region in eastern Guangdong. Many of the varieties of Oyster omelette – the Taiwan street food style, the Singapore hawker stand style – are also Teochew creations, so the reason we called this recipe the ‘Teochew original version’ is because this is the style that you’d get in Chaozhou and from many Teochew families.

Ingredients

1. Oysters, 300g (去壳生蚝). You’re going to want to get pre-shucked and jarred oysters (if you’re outside China), or those big bags of pre-shucked oysters (if you’re in China). If you’re in either China or opting for fresh oysters, you’re gunna need to wash these real good… which we’ll go into in step one of the process. If you’re abroad, you probably don’t need to be so overly paranoid about washing those jarred oysters – just give them a good rinse and pick up with step three of the process.

2. Sweet Potato Starch”, ½ cup (地瓜粉). This is a real critical ingredient, as the sweet potato starch is going to give this dish its characteristic chewiness. If you’re abroad, because sweet potato starch is gluten-free, you can find it in some specialty stores and it’s available online (in the video description there’s a link to the starch on Amazon). Note that sweet potato starch isn’t sweet potato flour – the starch is further processed and purified.

3. Water, 6 Tablespoons. The ratio of the batter is four parts sweet potato flour and three parts water.

4. Large Egg, 1.

5. Green section of the green onion, ~1/2 cups (葱). Slice this up. We use the white part of the green onion as an aromatic so much, this dish is a good way to use up some of those green parts.

6. Liaojiu, a.k.a. Shaoxing Rice Wine (料酒), 1 tablespoon. This is just to help get out the ‘fishyness’ when blanching the oysters, so feel free to be liberal with your substitutions here – white wine would also be totally fine, you could even use baijiu in a pinch.

7. White Pepper Powder (白胡椒粉), 1 tsp. Used as a final seasoning, white pepper vastly preferable.

8. Cilantro (香菜). However much you like, for garnish.

9. Fish sauce (鱼露). For dipping. Again, fish sauce isn’t used a lot in Chinese cooking, but it’s used here and there in Chaozhou cuisine. This is one dish where fish sauce is pretty critical –we’re not salting this, all of the salinity is going to come from the oysters and the fish sauce when dipping.

Process

1. Wash your oysters. Put your oysters in a bowl with water and a few teaspoons of salt and cornstarch. Massage them real good (don’t have too heavy of a hand, oysters can break), pick out any remaining shells, and set it aside for a few minutes. The cornstarch is going to latch onto any remaining mud or sediment on the oyster, and bring it down to the bottom of bowl as the cornstarch and the water separate. Remove the oysters, give em a good rinse, and put them in a bowl with new water. Make sure the water is more or less clear at this stage – if it’s not (let’s say) 95% clear, just keep washing and draining the water until it is.

2. Transfer the oysters from the water to a strainer. There’s actually a technique to this. You want to sort of let the oysters ‘dangle’ a little bit from your fingers to make sure you’re not getting any remaining impurities. It’s a little difficult to describe, so take a look at 1:15 in the video for a visual of what’s going on.

3. Blanch the oysters. Get a pot of water up to a boil and add in a splash of liaojiu wine – we used roughly a tablespoon. Add in your oysters and give them a quick stir. We don’t want to overcook the oysters (nobody like a rubbery oyster), so as soon as that pot gets back up to a simmer – about 1 minute – take them out and strain them.

4. Make your batter. The amount of oysters and batter that we’re using here is for an 8 inch skillet. If you’re using a different size pan than that, check out the note on equipment below. Mix your sweet potato starch and water and give it a real good whisk, incorporating it as much as humanly possible. Then add in your green onions and oyster, giving that a nice mix (but being careful not to break the oysters).

5. Pre-heat your pan, give the batter one final mix, and pour it in. We’re using ‘hot pot, hot oil’ method here, so make sure that pan’s piping hot… basically hot enough that you could sear a steak. Add in a bit of oil, I’d say roughly ½ cm deep – we’re not shallow frying or anything but you’ll want more than a coating. Give that batter one final mix right before you pour it in – sweet potato starch has an annoying tendency to separate and sink, so make sure you don’t forget to do this.

6. Cook on high for about a minute, evening out the batter and oysters in the pan, then lower the heat. First thing’s first, arrange your oysters to make sure that the oysters are evenly spread around the pan (you don’t want some bites being pure oyster and some being none). Then, tilt the pan to make sure the batter’s even – you can tell a place needs batter if there’s a visible bubbling of oil, like at 4:25 in the video. Turn your heat to medium low.

7. Pour a whisked egg over the pancake, then cut into quarters. Crack an egg and give it a good whisk. Pour the egg over the pancake, trying to get it as even as possible. Tilt the pan to spread the egg to any areas you didn’t quite get. Then, cut the omelette into quarters with your spatula, which will help it cook evenly and make it easier to flip.

8. Cook for about one more minute, then flip. You’ll know you’re ready to flip once the batter is a bit translucent and the egg is no longer overly runny. You’re gunna flip each quarter, but this ain’t like a Western omelette where if you screw up the flip everything’s ruined. This is going to be eaten with chopsticks anyhow, so a messed up piece isn’t the end of the world. At 5:13 in the video we actually muffed up one of the pieces a little bit, and it obviously didn’t make a noticeable difference to the end product.

9. Drizzle some more oil in the cracks of the flipped omelette, then up the heat to medium high and cook for two minutes. Adding some more oil between the cracks is going to help achieve a nice golden brown color. Let it cook for a couple minutes on this side – this is gunna be our ‘show’ side.

10. Flip it back over, turn off the heat, and season. Flip the omelette back over to get that nice golden show side and turn off the heat. Sprinkle some white pepper pretty liberally over the omelette – I’d estimate we used about a teaspoon as you want to make sure every bite has a nice seasoning.

11. Garnish with cilantro and serve with fish sauce. Again, notice that we didn’t add salt here – you’re really gunna want that fish sauce for dipping. Fish sauce and this omelette go absolutely perfect together too.

Note about Oyster Omelette Styles:

Some of you might be more familiar with the Taiwan street food style variety. The difference between that and this is that they’ll usually: (1) have a thinner batter (often a mix of sweet potato starch and cassava flour) (2) have a greater ratio of egg (3) flip the omelette over top some veg, like lettuce or bean sprouts and (4) smother it with a gravy. You’re left with a sloppy mess of deliciousness – it’s one of the world’s great drunk foods, to be sure.

Obviously, this Chaozhou style is quite different – almost to the point where I think we could safely call them different dishes. I personally prefer the Chaozhou style to the Taiwan street style, but in the end they’re both pretty awesome.

Note about equipment:

If you’re using a bigger pan than an 8 inch skillet, you’re gunna need to increase the quantity of batter (and thus everything). See, we want a nice, thick pancake - if you just used our exact recipe on a bigger pan, what’s going to happen is that you’re going to get a super thin pancake with the oysters sort of just laying on top. That’s not the result we’re looking for, which is a pancake with the oysters incorporated.

But how much to up your quantity of batter? Remember your middle school math – the ratio of area is going to increase by a factor of the square of the radius of the pan. I’m a math teacher by trade, so I guess I’ll be helpful and list out the ratios you’d need to up the recipe by:

9-inch pan: ~1.25 times everything

10-inch pan: ~1.5 times everything

12-inch pan: ~2.25 times everything

14-inch pan: ~3 times everything

16-inch pan: ~4 times everything

For anything bigger than a ten inch pan, we’d recommend cutting the omelette into eighths instead quarters.

In this post, we wanted to show you guys how to make a classic homestyle dish - hongshaorou or “Red Braised Pork Belly”. If you peaked in these threads before and were intimidated by some of the specialty ingredients, this might be an easier dish to replicate. There’s nothing in here that you couldn’t find at, say, a Wholefoods.

Now, homestyle hongshaorou is one of those dishes sort of like gumbo in that there’s a million different ways to make it. Every family’s got their own recipe – what spices are used, how the sugar’s used, how much soy sauce, what size the pork cuts are, etc. The basic commonalities for this dish are (1) use pork belly (2) braise in a sweet sauce for 60-90 minutes (3) flavor with ginger, cassia/cinnamon, and star anise. Everything else will change depending on the region and the cook.

For this dish we got a guest cook Rob (who uh... understandably wants to keep his reddit account anonymous), who recreated this awesome dish from his Hunan friend’s family recipe.

Ingredients

Basic Ingredients:

1. Pork Belly (五花肉), ~600g. In an ideal world, you’re going to find some pork belly with skin on. The best pieces for this dish are about half lean, half fat, and a sliver of skin. But because this isn’t an ideal world, don’t stress if you can’t find pork belly with the skin.

Ingredients for your Braising Liquid:

1. Crushed Rock Sugar (冰糖) or brown sugar, 80g. This is a key ingredient for the dish, and we decided to go for some authenticity bonus points and use rock sugar. If you can’t get rock sugar, brown sugar completely works here as well. The flavor is obviously slightly different, but it’s real tasty either way.

2. Liaojiu (料酒), 1 tablespoon. A.k.a rice cooking wine, huangjiu, or Shaoxing rice wine. Feel free to be liberal with your potential substitutions here.

3. Dark Soy Sauce (老抽), ¼ cup. This is going to form the base of our braising liquid. Now, there’s generally two schools of thought when it comes to this dish – do you want a deep, dark color like we have, or do you want to aim for that light brown almost ‘reddish’ color? We love the color and flavor of the former, so that’s what we’re opting for here. There’ll be a discussion on the differences between this style and ‘Mao-style’ hongshaorou in the notes below.

4. Light Soy Sauce (生抽), 2 Tablespoons. Light soy sauce has a sharper saltiness to it than dark soy sauce, so we’re adding this mostly for salinity.

5. Water. I should’ve measured this amount, but you’re looking for enough water to reach halfway up the uncut pork belly when boiling it in step #1.

6. Ginger (姜), ~25g. Peel and cut into slices.

7. Garlic, 2 gloves. Crushed.

8. Star anise (八角), 2.

9. Cinnamon or Cassia bark (桂皮), 1/2 stick. The reason these guys are basically interchangeable is what we get as ‘cinnamon sticks’ on the international market is actually cassia. The characteristic ‘curl’ of the stick that we get abroad vs the shreds of ‘bark’ that you’d find in China depends only on the method of harvesting. If you actually have true cinnamon I’m sure that’d be tasty too, just watch your balance and make sure it’s not dominating the dish.

10. Dried Sichuan Chilis (大红袍), 2. Cut in half and deseeded. You could sub dried Arbol if you're abroad and can’t find these. This is a Hunan variety of hongshaorouwhich is why the chilis are included, but note the dish isn’t spicy at all – the chilis are basically just for some subtle flavoring.

11. Sichuan Peppercorn (花椒), ~12. Similarly, we’re using Sichuan pepper, but this small amount ain’t gunna get you any sort of numbing sensation. Same deal, subtle flavoring. I hope you have some whole Sichuan peppercorn into your pantry… but for this dish you could skip it or toss in few whole black peppercorns if feel so inclined.

Process

1. Briefly boil the Pork Belly. Add enough water to a wok or pot to get halfway up the pork belly – this doesn’t have to be exact, but we’re going to be using this water later in our braise so try to aim for roughly that amount. Boil a minute or two on each side, until the outside changes color and firms up. The reason we’re doing this is to allow for easier cutting, as the structural integrity of your pork slices is critical to making a tasty hongshaorou (especially if your knife isn’t extremely sharp, sometimes the fat can separate from the lean while cutting). Reserve the hot water in a separate pot - preferably a claypot.

2. Cut your pork belly into chunks. The size of your chunks totally depends on your preferences – we like big thick cubes (about 2 inches each side), but some people prefer to cut each of those chunks into four smaller pieces. Regardless of what you’re aiming for, the important bit is the ‘height’ of your pork pieces - you can get a visual at 1:23 in the video. You want to have a nice cross-section roughly two inches high that has a solid mix of lean, fat, and a slice of skin. If you have some extra lean, cut that up into chunks too; if you have some extra fat, toss it or render out some lard to use as the base of the braise.

3. Fry the chilis and Sichuan peppercorns, then add these and the rest of your aromatics to your pot of water. So briefly fry the Dried Chilis and Sichuan peppercorns. After they’re nice and aromatic (about a minute or two later), toss it in to that reserved water along with the garlic, ginger, cinnamon/cassia, and star anise. Now, this is my buddy’s recipe, and I personally would’ve also fried the ginger and garlic along with the chilis and peppercorns. Obviously it didn’t make too much of a difference to the end result though, so it’s all good.

4. Make your ‘caramel’. This is a critical step. I wasn’t sure how to translate this, the method is called chaotanse in Chinese. To that oil, you’re going to add half (40g) of your crushed rock sugar (or brown sugar). Over low heat, melt your sugar into the oil until it’s melted into the oil and a nice dark brown color. This’ll take about five minutes, but don’t walk away – the sugar can burn real easy, going from zero to midnight in a blink.

5. Fry the pork in in the caramel. Add your pork chunks and get a nice coating for caramel on each side of the pork pieces. You gotta be real careful with the pork... don’t be overly aggressive, as you don’t want the pieces to come apart. In the video, we actually probably could’ve gotten a nicer coating of caramel, but we were a bit paranoid about the pork structure.

6. Turn off the heat, add in the liaojiu and the soy sauces, the transfer to the pot. The reason we used the previously boiled water from step #1 as the base of the braise is because at this stage, it’s critical that the water that is added to the pork is hot. Otherwise, the pork can tighten up and become tough. So instead of bringing hot water to the pork, we save some time and just bring the pork to the hot water.

7. Braise the pork, covered, for 90 minutes. Try not to peek too much here, just check on it every 30 minutes or so. Your pork will be done one a chopstick can pierce the entire piece of pork with very little resistance. Take a look at 5:11 in the video for a visual of what a done piece of pork looks like.

8. Add in sugar, and reduce uncovered 20 minutes (if not using a claypot). Add the second hit of your sugar (rock sugar or brown sugar) and let it dissolve into the sauce. Something that we found is that if you’re using a pot with a heavy lid (instead of a claypot which can breathe a bit), you might need to let the sauce reduce a bit so that it thickens up a touch. We’re not looking for a sauce that’s super thick or anything, but rather a thin sauce that has a bit of adhesiveness.

9. Remove pork, strain sauce into separate bowl. We’re not serving the sauce with the pork – this ain’t hongshao soup. Brush the pork with the sauce to get a nice sheen, and then drizzle a spoonful of the sauce over top. Obviously don’t waste the sauce though – we took some hard-boiled eggs and soaked them in it overnight for breakfast the next day.

10. Serve. Eat with rice, a fried veggie, and some cold beer.

A note about equipment:

The best way to cook this dish is in a claypot – the claypot still traps steam pretty nicely, but will still allow for some moderate reduction as it’s cooking. Unfortunately, our claypot recently broke, so we used a Western-style cast iron Dutch oven – the heavy lid was great for cooking the pork, but required us to reduce the sauce a bit more after we were done braising. Honestly, basically any vessel that has a lid is totally cool (many people just use a flat-bottomed wok), but each will have their own quirks so just use your common sense.

Also, some people like to help preserve the shape of the pork by wrapping it with twine. This is a great idea and probably something we should’ve done here, but… this is a homestyle dish and we were feeling lazy.

A note on different types of Hongshaorou

There’s a bit of regional variation here. Probably the most famous style of hongshaorou is ‘Mao-style’, which uses similar seasoning as ours but wouldn’t use any dark soy sauce (and add some salt and cut the light soy sauce in half). If you want that light ‘reddish’ color, go for that and keep everything else the same.

Also, depending where you are in China, some places wouldn’t use chilis or Sichuan peppercorns. Some places would add in green onion and vinegar. There are variations where people toss in water chestnuts or serve on pickled mustard greens. So once you get the basic recipe down, go nuts and make it your own.

So, this time I’m really excited to share the recipe of how to cook Cantonese Char Siu pork at home, from scratch.

We’re doing the rather labor intensive traditional from-scratch Char Siu sauce, together with a roasting technique using a Western-style charcoal grill to mimic the Chinese restaurant oven. But don’t be intimidated – you can also do this using bottled Char Siu sauce and an oven. We’ve combined these two recipes in the same reddit post/video, which I hope doesn’t get overly confusing.

Ingredients

Ingredients for your roast:

1. Fatty Boston Butt (梅肉) and/or Pork Belly (腩肉) and/or Pork Neck (猪颈肉), ~2.5 lbs. The amount of pork is totally up to you (the roasting is mostly done by ratio), as is the cut of pork. Meirou is one of the traditional cuts – it’s basically a Boston Butt with some fat still attached to it. Probably the best if you’re abroad is pork belly, which is generally a bit leaner outside of China and the easiest to get the texture right. Our personal favourite is pork neck, but as it’s slightly unconventional we did half meirou half pork neck in the video.

2. Char Siu sauce (叉烧酱) – bottled or homemade, 1 bottle. We really like our homemade Char Siu sauce, but you can use bottled in a pinch. Lee Kum Kee is the standard, and you can get it online real easily worldwide. If you’re outside of China and don’t live near a Chinatown, using bottled is probably the route you wanna take, unless you’re up for a (really tasty) challenge. We’re going to be using this for our marinade and for basting.

3. Light soy sauce (生抽), ~3 tablespoons. This is for our roasting marinade, which is done by ratio. Our marinade is 3 parts Char Siu sauce and 1 part light soy sauce.

4. Honey, (蜂蜜) ~3 tablespoons. This is for the basting sauce, which done by ratio. Our basting sauce is 1 part Char Siu sauce and 1 part honey. This is what gives this dish the name ‘honey Char Siu’ (蜜汁叉烧).

Ingredients for your homemade Char Siu Sauce, if using (I hope you do!):

1. Red Miso (面豉), 3 tablespoons. This is the key ingredient that makes Char Siu, char siu. There’s no sub for this, this is a critical ingredient. Making from-scratch Char Siu without red miso would be like making an American barbecue sauce without vinegar. Ideally, you want a nice quality one – we used some from a little workshop outside of Guangzhou that still makes it according to the old methods. If you’re in China, the brand fengxianhua (凤仙花) makes a real solid one. If you can’t find that or if you’re abroad, a Japanese red miso paste works real nice too (I prefer the good Chinese brands to standard Japanese red miso here, but Japanese red miso is safe in that it’s way better than some of the crappier Chinese brands).

2. Maltose (麦芽糖), 3 tablespoons. This is a sweetener that’s going to give the Char Siu sauce its characteristic sheen. It’s used in a lot of Chinese roast dishes – probably most famously Peking Duck. If you can’t find this, you can use honey here too (the super old, traditional recipe uses honey), but just be careful – Maltose is really not overly sweet, so make sure you’re using a natural honey.

3. The liquor from Red Fermented Tofu (南乳), 1 tablespoon. This is not only going to help us arrive at that characteristic Char Siu color, but it’ll also add a nice sour-fermented undertone to the sauce. We are only using the liquid from this, as the fermented tofu itself has a really strong taste. If you’re making a massive batch of this – say, quadrupling the recipe – you could add in half a piece if you really want.

4. Red Yeast Rice (红曲), ¼ tsp ground -or- Hungarian sweet paprika, 1.5 tsp. This is an optional ingredient, as it’s mostly for color. We used some red yeast rice that we ground up… but for all of you guys that are abroad, I always like to search on Amazon to see what ingredients are available for you. I couldn’t find this, so if do you want to help that color along, feel free to use some sweet Hungarian paprika. I tested this for one batch - it didn’t really affect the flavor at all, so go nuts.

5. Rock sugar (冰糖), 50g. Maltose isn’t really overly sweet, so this is going to help us arrive at that mellow sweetness that Charsiu has. You could carefully play around with white sugar if you don’t have this.

6. Water, 2.5 cups. This is going to be the base for our lushui (卤水) liquid, which I’ll go into when discussing the process.

7. Light Soy Sauce (生抽), 3 1/3 Tablespoons. Apologies for the weird amount. What we’re doing is using a ¼ cup soy sauce, 2 tsp of which is dark soy sauce.

8. Dark Soy Sauce (老抽), 2 tsp.

9. Liaojiu (料酒), a.k.a. Shaoxing Rice Wine, ¼ cup. I’ve seen some recipes that swear by using rose rice wine. I don’t think it really makes a difference, but that ain’t the trench I’m willing to die in – if you feel compelled, use Rose rice wine.

10. Green onion whites (葱白), ~1/2 cup minced. Make sure you’re only using the white part of the green onion, as we’re going to fry this. Apologies, I forgot to weigh my ginger and green onion for you guys here.

11. Ginger (姜), ~1/4 cup minced.

12. Star anise (八角), 8-10. Critical. (I’m going to list a bunch of spices here, which I’ve split up into ‘critical’ and ‘suggested’. There’s certain spices that this sauce absolutely needs, and some that’ll just make it better. In general, don’t be overly paranoid about balance with the spices, if you can find some of the ‘suggested’ spices but not others, just toss in what you can find)

13. Cinnamon or Cassia bark (桂皮), 2 sticks. Critical.

14. Shajiang powder (沙姜粉), a.k.a Sand Ginger, Kencur, Cutcherry powder, ½ tsp. Critical. This might be a tougher spice for you guys abroad to find. It’s one of the four plants that’s sometimes called ‘galangal’, and tastes sort of like a peppery ginger? It’s used a bit in Cantonese cooking, but also Malay and Indonesian. I looked on USA Amazon and found this under the name ‘cutcherry powder’. Great ingredient.

15. Whole Cloves (丁香), ~12. Suggested.

16. Black Cardamom (草果), 2 pods. Suggested. Pound em with a knife and make sure they’re slightly cracked.

17. Dried and Aged Tangerine Peel (陈皮), 1 peel. Suggested. Make sure you prep these by soaking them in water and scratching off its ‘pith’ (think of an orange – the pith is the bitter white stuff on the interior of the peel). Make sure you do a real bang-up job scratching off the pith – it can really infect the sauce with bitterness if you’re not careful.

18. Liquorice root (甘草), about 8 small slices. Suggested. This is another thing I should have likely weighed as slices aren’t standard. You can get a rough feeling for the quantity we used from watching the video.

19. Luohanguo (罗汉果), ½ dried fruit. Suggested. This is a dried fruit that has an interesting flavour and a mellow sweetness, and often used in herbal teas. I was actually surprised to see this available on Amazon under the name ‘Luo Han Guo’, thank god for the hippies and their love of herbal medicine I suppose haha.

Process

Process to Make Char Siu Sauce:

1. Fry the aromatics. Fry your minced white-part-of-green-onion and ginger is the smallest oil that you could muster, about 1 minute or so on medium heat.

2. Add in the liaojiu (rice wine), then the water and the two soy sauces, then the spices. My addition of the liaojiu (rice wine) first is probably just a deep seeded reflex from Western cooking’s technique of deglazing. So also add in your water, the soy sauces, and all of your dried spices except the shajiang (cutcherry powder) – that’s going in later.

3. Simmer on low for 30-90 minutes. What we’re doing here is basically making what’s called a lushui (卤水), which is a braising base of soy sauce and spices that is used in a ton of Chinese dishes. There’s a whole category of awesome Cantonese food that uses this base – which we’ll try to teach in a future video. Here I wasn’t overly paranoid about the lushui reducing, but we’ve got to use about a cup of this, so add a touch of water if it’s going a little too crazy.

4. Strain out the spices and aromatics. The reason we made this lushui first before adding the thicker ingredients is that if you just added in sugars and thicker sauces together with the spices, the sauce is gunna stick to your spices and your yield will much, much less.

5. Add in ¾ cup of the reserved lushui liquid, the red miso, the liquid of the red fermented tofu, the shajiang (cutcherry powder), the ground red yeast rice (or sweet paprika), and the chunk of rock sugar. Then simmer. We’re going to be simmering this on low until the rock sugar dissolves. We want to try to bring those flavors together and let it reduce a touch, and the time that it takes the rock sugar to dissolve is really about right. Spoon the sauce over the rock sugar to help it along, and add in a couple tablespoons of your reserved lushui liquid in case it’s reducing a little too much (for the batch that I did in the video, I had to do this once). Take a look at the video at 5:08 for a visual of how thick we’re aiming this to be.

6. Turn off the heat, add in the Maltose. Word of warning – if you’ve never worked with Maltose before, I swear to Jesus it might be the stickiest substance known to mankind. Stir that in, and incorporate into the Char Siu.

7. Jar it!

Procedure for Marinating:

1. Cut your pork into strips. No matter what roasting method you use, you’re gunna want to get the same sort of pork strips. You know those iconic strips of Char Siu that hang in Hong Kong Chacaanteng? That’s what you’re aiming for. Roughly 1 inch high and 2 inches wide – for the grilling method you’re not going to quite be able get the same length that the restaurants have, but it’ll be fine I promise. For pork belly, they’re conveniently in little strips for you.

2. Make your Marinade. The marinade will be three parts Charsiu sauce – either bottled or homemade – and one part soy sauce.

3. Poke holes in your Charsiu with a fork and toss it in a bag to marinate. Poking holes with your fork will theoretically help the marinade go into the pork (I know the issue of ‘poking holes’ is controversial, poke or don’t poke… ain’t none of my business). Then massage the meat and make sure the marinade is even.

4. Marinate, 4-48 hours. Char Siu strips are one of the ‘thickest’ things you could marinate in Chinese cooking, so the longer time is going to be pretty important. You could get away with an afternoon or overnight marinade for a softer meat like belly, but for the meirou/Boston Butt cut especially you’d really want to aim for around 48 hours.

Process for Charcoal Grill Roasting:

1. Gather your materials. We’re gunna need a Western-style charcoal grill here, a cast iron dutch oven (or other large pot) that’s deep enough to let strips of Char Siu hang, aluminium foil to cover the bottom of the pot, and some handle-less metal skewers (I just removed the handles from mine).

2. Set up a two zone charcoal fire, and nestle the Dutch oven into the cool side. If you want to soak some lychee or Applewood chips to get a touch of smoke, I think that’s a pretty cool idea I haven’t tried yet.

3. Skewer your Char Siu strips at the very top of the strip, and cover the top with a wet paper towel. The tops of the strips next to the skewer have a tendency to burn. The wet paper towel keeps the top cooler so that the strip cooks evenly. Aim for 3-5 strips of Char Siu hanging from each skewer.

4. Hang your Char Siu ‘skewer’ over the Dutch oven to let it cook, periodically moving and basting the Char Siu. For me, these cooked for about 90 minutes – your fire and my fire might be different though, so grab an instant read thermometer if you got one. You might also want to periodically rearrange your skewers as the ones closer to the charcoal will tend to cook a little faster. Three times during cooking, I took the Char Siu out and basted them with a brush. Again, the basting sauce is 1 part Char Siu, and 1 part honey.

5. Once finished, brush one more time with charsiu, once with oil, then let it rest. For these, if you got an instant read, what I like to do is take out the Dutch oven and pork skewers once they get to be around 67 degrees Celsius (150F). Once you brush them with the oil and Char Siu sauce one last time, hang them back in the Dutch oven to rest in a hanging position for about 30-45 minutes. The residual heat from the cast iron plus the natural cooking which resting will get them about perfect.

Process for oven roasting:

1. Pre-heat your oven to 275 degrees (130C) Fahrenheit, and put the Charsiu strips in a roasting tray. If you’re like us and don’t have a roasting tray, just get creative – the air should be able to circulate underneath the strips.

2. Roast your Charsiu in the oven for one hour, flipping them and basting them every 15 minutes. Your basting sauce will be one part honey and one part Char Siu sauce (either bottled or homemade).

3. Broil them for a two minutes each side under 425 degree Fahrenheit heat (220C), then let the Char Siu rest, preferably in a hanging position. I don’t really need to broil these in my opinion, but if you really want a light black char, go for it. Once they’re done, brush the Char Siu one last time with Char Siu sauce and oil, and let it rest for 30-45 minutes before chopping (preferably you’d find a way to hang these suckers).

A note about homemade vs. bottled Char Siu sauce:

The obvious question is – is the traditional, homemade Char Siu sauce worth it? My answer is an emphatic yes – the red miso gives it a much deeper umami taste, and the spice mixture gives it a much more complex flavour. Lee Kum Kee will also add in sugar, which isn’t as nice and mellow as the maltose/rock sugar combination.

But… I’d venture to say that they’re the same category of ‘thing’. This ain’t like the difference been homemade mayonnaise and store bought – a much better comparison would be the difference between a real good homemade American-style Barbecue sauce and, say, Sweet Baby Ray’s. And just like Sweet Baby Ray’s, Lee Kum Kee is one of the better brands for Char Siu sauce. If you don’t feel like sourcing all those ingredients, no one’s going to bat an eye if you use store-bought.

Note on using up the spices:

We wanted to give you guys a few ideas on ways you could use up some of these spices (barring cooking more variety of Chinese dishes, lol), just in case you end up buying them and they start to collect dust:

1. Grind some spices up and make your own five spice powder. ‘Five spice’ will generally have star anise, cloves, cinnamon/cassia, fennel, and Sichuan peppercorn. But five spice isn’t really one recipe – you can also add some tangerine peel, the liquorice root, and the shajiang.

2. Make nanru peanuts as a snack. Marinate some raw peanuts in that red-fermented tofu together with some water and sugar for about an hour. Drain your peanuts and toast some star anise and liquorice root. Splash a little baijiu or rice wine or your liquor of choice a few times until the peanuts are cooked.

3. Make a Maltose syrup. If you’re weird like me and actually prefer the consistency of Aunt Jemima “maple syrup” because you grew up on it, much tastier than those bottles is to make a maltose syrup. Take your maltose and heat it up, adding enough water to get to the proper consistency. Add a little bit of proper maple syrup for flavouring.

4. Make an herbal tea. Take your luohanguo (you could also add some liquorice root) and add it to boiling water, letting it steep for five minutes. Alternatively, you could use do the same with that tangerine peel, but also add some sugar. I’m not a big TCM sort of guy but they are nice if you have a sore throat, especially the luohanguo and liquorice root combination.

5. Chew on liquorice root. Some Italians use it as a mouth freshener. Who knew? I tried it, ain’t for me, but if you like it go nuts.

6. Make Akamiso Soup. Use your red miso to make Japanese Akamiso soup. I’m probably not the person to ask on Miso soup (some other commenters here would probably know better than me)… but IIRC the base is just a simple dashi and red miso.

7. Make miso butter. Make a compound butter with red miso. I know many people use a light miso for miso butter, but the saltiness of the red miso seems to work really well in a compound butter. Just google ‘miso butter’ for ideas – there’s a ton of different uses for it.

8. Grind up spices and use as a rub. The dish ‘orange chicken’ isn’t super well known these days in China, but is originally a sauceless sort of deep fried chicken (usually pork in China) that uses ground tangerine peel, salt, sugar, and cornstarch as a rub. It’s delicious. Also, for a lot of these spices, you can completely use them as part of a rub in American-style grilling. Star anise, cinnamon, and even clove can tossed in with some other spices for a rub for grilled or roast pork. Shajiang goes great with chicken.

So we wanted to show you guys how to cook a Cantonese fried noodle dish – Supreme Soy Sauce Fried Noodles - that I think you’ll quite like. Generally, people seem to have two major complaints with Chinese fried noodles – expats in China will sometimes find them quite oily (and we’ll talk a bit about why later), and people abroad often get an overcooked, gloopy chow mein. If you use these Cantonese techniques though, you’ll get a really tasty, perfectly cooked noodle with… very little oil.

Ingredients

1. Cantonese Egg Noodles, 100g (蛋面). Take a look at the consistency in the video. What we’re using are fresh ones (which are generally much easier to work with), but dried ones could also work in a pinch. We’ll discuss the differences in cooking times and such when we go over the process. If you’re abroad, I’ve sometimes seen these called ‘Hong Kong Chow Mein Noodles’.

2. Jiucai, “Chinese Chives”, 50g (韭菜). Cut these up into 2 inch long sections. There’s going to be a harder portion right by the root, just toss that.

3. Bean Sprouts, 70g (芽菜). Something we like to do to prep bean sprouts is to prepare them into ‘silver sprouts’. To do so, you’re going to take your bean spout, and pull off the little mungbean at the top and the small root at the bottom. This is a little bit of a pain if you got a huge batch, but really improves the texture of the beansprout – instead of having the little chewy bits at the end, you’ll get a nice evenly crunchy beansprout. You don’t have to do this of course… most of the time, you’ll only see this in China in higher end restaurants or old Cantonese eateries that keep on with the older traditions. This yielded about 40g of ‘silver sprouts’ for us.

4. Half of a Shallot (干葱). Dice this up. If you’re in China or elsewhere in Asia you might be only finding those small shallots on the string – if using those, use one whole one.

5. Quarter of a White Onion (洋葱). Sliced.

Ingredients for your Sauce:

1. Boiling Water, 5 TBSP. In the video, we just used the boiling water from the noodles.

2. Sugar, 1 TBSP. Take your sugar and dissolve it into the reserved hot boiling water, giving a healthy stir. We’re just using boiling water here to make the sugar dissolve easier.

3. Dark Soy Sauce, 1 TBSP (老抽). This is going to form the base of the sauce and the flavor of the dish.

4. Light Soy Sauce, 2 tsp (生抽). If you watch the video, no… your eyes aren’t deceiving you – we put a TBSP in originally. However, it was slightly on the salty side (I have a high tolerance for salinity so I personally was fine with it), so with a later run at it we reduced the light soy sauce a touch and it was perfect.

5. Sesame Oil, 1 tsp (香油). Toasted of course.

6. Thick Soy Sauce, ½ TBSP (酱油膏). This was one of two less conventional ingredients that Steph ended up using based off an interview that she read with a cook from one of our favorite restaurants in Hong Kong. It’s a thick, sweet, soy sauce that’s really popular in Taiwan, but you can find it in most large grocery stores in Mainland China. If you’re outside of China and can’t find this, the Indonesian Kecap Manis should also work great. And if all else fails, just sub in Oyster sauce.

7. Fish Sauce, ½ tsp (鱼露). Also a touch unconventional for this dish, but works really well. While you probably associate Fish Sauce with Southeast Asian food, it’s a rather common ingredient in Guangdong and is especially used quite a bit in Chaozhou cooking (also used in Shandong but called xiayou - 虾油). We used a Vietnamese fish sauce though, because Vietnamese fish sauce has a real deep umami flavour and is thus outrageously awesome. We didn’t test the Chinese or Thai varieties (which seem to have a sharper saltiness to them), so if that’s what you’re using knock it down to ¼ tsp at first to be safe.

Process

1. Prep your veggies. Cut the jiucai (“Chinese Chives”) into sections, dice your shallot, slice the onion, and (if doing so) prepare your silver sprouts.

2. Cook the noodles. Before you toss your noodles in, take 5 TBSP boiling water for the sauce in step #4. Now, for fresh noodles like the ones in the video, we’re cooking them for exactly one minute in boiling water – move them around with chopsticks or tongs to make sure they don’t clump together. If you’re using dried, cook them according to the package (different dried noodles may use different times) until al dente - likely ~30 seconds before ‘done’ on the package. Chinese cooks will usually know dried noodles are al dente once the noodles start to loosen up and become individual ‘noodles’ (you can get a visual at 2:50 in the video), but if you know your pasta you can use the western method to figure out doneness as well.

3. Rinse, drain, and cover your noodles. Once it’s finished, in a colander rinse your noodles thoroughly under cold running water to stop the cooking process. Then, try to drain as much water out as you can. There’s still going to be a tiny amount of residual heat/steam from the noodles, so one trick is to take a paper towel and cover the noodles with it to make a nice little ‘lid’ of sorts. You can get a visual at 3:20 in the video. This is going to help the noodles cook evenly, as the residual heat is going to continue to cook any slightly undercooked noodles.

4. Prepare your sauce. Whisk in the sugar into those 5 TBSP of boiling water that you reserved. Then add in the rest of the ingredients for the sauce and give it a mix.

5. Sweat the jiucai and the bean sprouts. What we’re doing is lightly ‘toasting’ these ingredients over medium heat with zero oil. This technique is called baiguo honggan, and the idea is the quite similar to sweating vegetables in Western cooking - we want to get out some water content from the vegetables. For the jiucai, sweat for about two minutes until slightly wilted, being sure to move them around with chopsticks or tongs so that the jiucai doesn’t wilt into a big pile. For the bean sprouts, sweat for one to two minutes, until the edges of the bean sprout turn slightly brownish.

6. Oil your wok using the longyau technique. I’m separating this into a separate step, but we’re going to be doing this three times over the next three steps. The longyau technique is this: get your wok nice and hot over a high flame, pour some oil and swirl it around to coat the wok and get a nice non-stick surface, and then pour out any excess oil. The amount of oil that we drain will be different for each ingredient. We’re not going to drain any oil before frying the shallots, drain basically all the oil except for that coating when we fry the onions, and drain most of the oil – keeping about ½ TBSP in the pot – when frying the noodles. The visual for this is at 6:20 in the video.

7. Fry your shallots. Oil the wok using the longyau technique without draining out any oil, then add in your shallots. Fry for a couple minutes over medium heat, and take them out once they’re nice and brown. Drain the oil into a bowl and reserve for step #9.

8. Fry your onions. Oil the wok using the longyau technique and drain out all the oil except what’s lining the pan. Fry for a couple minutes over medium heat, then take them out.

9. Fry your noodles. Oil the pan using the longyau technique and drain out most of the oil, but keeping about a ½ TBSP in. Use the drained shallot oil here as it’ll lend a real nice flavor. So, you have a choice here – if you’re afraid of the noodles sticking to the wok, you can always leave a little more oil in… but you’ll end up getting an oilier end result. Fry the noodles for about 30 seconds on medium or even medium low heat (if on a Chinese range), then add your onions back in. Give them quick stir together.

10. Add your sauce and reduce it in the noodles. Take a look at 9:21 in the video for a visual. Move your noodles around to absorb some of the sauce as it reduces. After a minute or so, add back in the remainder of the ingredients – the jiucai, the beansprouts, and the shallots. Stir these around for a few minutes as the sauce reduces. Once you have no real visible liquid pool remaining at the bottom of the pot, it’s done and ready to eat.

A note on technique:

Something that you’ll notice about Cantonese stir-fried dishes is that in general, they’ll tend to cook each ingredient separately to their desired doneness – then all added back together at the end. On the street and in many homes in China, you’ll see people just dump in all the ingredients at once and fry everything together. The latter style is called xiaochao (‘little stir fry’), and is really convenient once you nail it but… it can be real variable and your timing needs to be perfect. If you’re just getting started cooking with Chinese food, an ingredient-by-ingredient Cantonese stir-fry has a much smaller learning curve.

If you’ve never seen someone doing xiaochao, here’s a video of a dude on the street making some noodles. As you can see, it can look real impressive – especially if you’re doing it over a jet engine flame.

I love xiaochao like anyone, but for starchy things like fried rice and noodles… Cantonese technique is going to be really preferable I think. Here’s the thing - if you try doing xiaochao with a noodle dish, what’s gunna happen is your aromatics and veggies will suck up your oil, leaving a dry pot for the noodles to just get stuck on. To compensate, many cooks will just dump a mountain of oil into the pot which will prevent sticking but will make it super oily. I mean, just look at that Shanghai street food video – that guy uses like over ½ cup oil for one bowl of noodles, probably ten times or so the amount we use here.

Cantonese people will traditionally judge a place’s noodles by what the bowl looks like when you’re done eating. If there’s a bunch of sauce or a ton of oil at the bottom of your bowl, it ain’t a good fried noodle.

A note on ingredients:

This noodle dish is called ‘supreme soy sauce fried noodles’ and as such the flavour should be all about the soy sauce, and the dish should be all about… the noodles. This is my big gripe with a lot of American-Chinese food – they’ll take a fried noodle dish and add a bunch of bizarre ingredients to it (plus zucchini? No thank you!).

If you really want, you could take some julienned chicken, pork, beef, or char siu and add it in – but just remember, it should all be about the noodles. If you wanna eat more meat, make a meat dish to go along with it!

If you’re in the USA or somewhere and thinking to yourself ‘could I… just use spaghetti’? The answer from us is an emphatic… probably? Honestly, if you lived somewhere where you had access to (A) really awesome freshly made Western-style pasta or (B) sub-par dried egg noodles, I’d lean towards option A. Here’s the thing though, some of the process might be a touch different – we might be able to give a couple tips, but you’ll probably need to take that journey yourself.

Lastly, notice that we’re not putting any cornstarch in. Gloopy sauces have their time and place, but it ain’t here.

Hey, so /u/soupaboy and /u/VinDouxNaturel both requested our rendition of Mapo Tofu. Despite how beloved this dish is, there’s a lot of really marginal recipes for Mapo Tofu floating around the internet (in both English and Chinese), so we figured it'd be a nice dish to try to demystify.

Before we get started, a note about what we’re looking for in the end product. We want intact cubes of tofu suspended in a thin sauce with a sheen of red oil on the top. Something like this or this is what I want in a mapo tofu, and what you'll see in good restaurants in Sichuan. You’ll see some home cooks in China shoot out varieties like this or this, which I don’t think is quite right. If you’re really looking for the second variety, I’d be happy to recommend some videos for that.

As before, I made a video to go with this. I think the videos are improving! So feel free to have a watch, and if any of you are video aficionados I’d love some feedback.

Basic Ingredients:

1. Soft Tofu (嫩豆腐), 230g. Note the tofu type. The biggest mistake I see people do is use the wrong tofu – if you’re in China, make sure to get this nen doufu (嫩豆腐) and not neizhi doufu (内酯豆腐). The latter is silken tofu, breaks down real easy, and is usually used in desserts. Now if you’re outside China I’m pretty sure you can get something called ‘soft tofu’, but reviewing Kenji’s Serious Eats recipe it appears that this is sometimes called ‘extra firm silken tofu’ (confused yet?). If you’re in doubt, and frantically comparing tofus at the supermarket… aim for the proper 'soft tofu' but slightly too firm is better than slightly too soft.

2. Sichuan Peppercorns (花椒), ½ Tablespoon. We’re gunna toast these and grind them in the first step of the recipe. You could sub for powder I suppose.

3. Minced Pork, 35g. Yeah, that ain’t a typo. We’re using a really small amount of mince here – the meat is used to flavor the tofu, this isn’t a meat-and-tofu stirfry. Personally I prefer pork to beef, as beef has a tendency to suck up oil while pork will slightly render out more oil. If you’re using beef mince, just get the fattiest that you can and keep an eye on the oil level.

4. Garlic gloves, 2-3. Minced.

5. Sichuan Chili Bean Paste (川式豆瓣酱), 1.5 TBSP. Minced to break down any bean chunks. A super critical ingredient - this is going to form the base for our sauce.

6. Chili/cayenne pepper powder, 0.25TSP to 2 TSP. I’m giving a range here because everyone’s everyone’s heat tolerance is a little difference. The flavor profile here is mala - we want Mapo Tofu’s heat to be balanced with the flavor of the Sichuan peppercorn. It should be a bit spicy but our goal isn’t to turn your mouth into a fireplace. In the recipe, we use a ½ teaspoon of really firey stuff from the Guizhou province – usually standard for me would be a teaspoon of normal Chinese chili powder. If you've got a super high heat tolerance so just go up to 2tsp.

7. ”Stock”, ¾ cup. We’re using the standard stock-plus-concentrate mixture here, using 1 tsp of concentrate (if you’re China-based, that’s called 鸡汁). If you’re making your own Asian style chicken stock at home though… go nuts, use that.

8. Caiziyou (菜籽油). Caiziyou is a sort of crude rapeseed oil that’s used extensively in Sichuan cooking. It has a really distinctive taste and works really well with Sichuan flavours. I figure you’re not going to be able to get this outside of China (I did a cursory search on Amazon), so sub canola oil until the day I get rich and make my millions by exporting this stuff.

Other Ingredients:

1. Rice Wine (料酒), 1 tsp. In the West this is usually called Shaoxin Wine.

2. Light Soy Sauce (生抽), 1 tsp.

3. Sugar, 1 tsp.

4. Dark Chinese Vinegar (陈醋), ½ tsp. This is added near the end of cooking.

5. Cornstarch, 1 tsp. Slurry of 1 tsp cornstarch and a TBSP of water.

6. Sesame Oil, 1 tsp. Toasted of course, to finish it off.

Process:

1. Toast and grind your Sichuan peppercorns. This is going to be on medium-low heat for a couple minutes (dry pan, no oil of course). You’ll know it’s done once the Sichuan peppercorns are aromatic and leave little oil specks in the wok, as shown here in the video. This is gunna really heighten the flavor and numbingness of the peppercorns. Grind those up in a morter-and-pestle or a coffee grinder. If you have neither of those things you can also be a hobo, put them in a plastic bag, and pound em with a hammer (I spent an embarrassingly long quantity of my life doing that).

2. Cut and simmer your tofu. Cut your tofu into small cubes, about a half inch. Then toss your tofu cubes in a pot of salted water (we used 2 tsp of salt in that smaller pot) that’s barely simmering. This does three things: first, the salt water gets out some moisture from the tofu and firms it up. Second, it’ll get out the so-called ‘grassy’ taste from the tofu; and third, it’ll slightly season the tofu. Simmer that for 2-3 minutes, then take the pot off the heat but continue to soak the tofu til we’re ready to use it.

3. Fry your mince. This is going to be the reguoliangyou (hot pot, cool oil) method, which gives you the chance to break up the mince with your spatula. Fry for a couple minutes on medium high heat.

4. Fry your chili bean paste. Add your chili bean paste in with your mince, frying on medium heat. As this cooks, the chili bean paste is going to create the hongyou by infusing the oil - that characteristic red oil in Sichuan cooking. Note that unlike some other recipes, we’re not going to need to add any chili oil at the end – all of the red oil is going to be from the Chili bean paste. Move on to the next step once your oil looks something like this, which was about two to three minutes for us.

5. Fry your minced garlic and your chili powder. Add these ingredients and fry it for about a minute.

6. Add the stock, season, and start to simmer. Add in your stock (or “stock” in our case), the soy sauce, the Shaoxing cooking wine (料酒), and the sugar. Taste it – it should feel slightly undersalted at this juncture. Allow it to simmer for a couple minutes before we add in the tofu.

7. Drain your tofu, then add it to your pot. Make sure you’re not getting any extra water in there.

8. Let the tofu simmer in the liquid as it’s reducing. Bring the heat back up to medium-high to get a hefty simmer going on (basically a small boil). Stir the tofu by gently pushing it back and forth with your spatula. At about the 3 minute mark, the liquid should start to be boiling away rapidly and starting to resemble a thin sauce. For ours, we timed it to be 3 and a half minutes in this step.

9. Season the sauce, then thicken it up with your slurry. Remember our toasted-and-ground Sichuan peppercorns from earlier? This is where we’re gunna add them in. If you do it too early you’ll end up with this brackish-black colored sauce instead of the red-oil that we’re looking for. It’ll be plenty numbing I promise. Also add in that half teaspoon of dark vinegar, stir and cook for about 30 seconds. Hit it with your slurry (1tsp cornstarch mixed with 1 TBSP water) to thicken, and turn off the heat.

10. Stir in some sesame oil, then put in a plate and garnish. Make sure you get all that red-oil-deliciousness out from the bottom of the pan. Sprinkle some green onion slices (or cilantro) for maximum prettiness.

A note about where you can screw up: The biggest variable that I can only go so far control to control in the recipe is how thin/thick your sauce ends up. This is going to be simmering down and reducing away with the tofu cooking inside of it. And depending on your stove, your wok, your tofu… the end result after the four minutes of cooking might end up looking a touch too ‘soupy’.

First, remember that we want it to be a bit soupy, but don’t despair. Taste your tofu and your soup. Does it taste good? If so, just plate and take leave some of the extra sauce that you don’t want in a separate bowl.
Then, after a few minutes that red oil – the hongyou - is gunna rise to the top. Skim it off and drizzle it over the mapo tofu. Nobody will be the wiser. Just do me a favor and don’t continue cooking the tofu – it’d be at a real risk of breaking down into mush if you keep it on the heat too long.

Alternatively, maybe your sauce is looking way too thick. Turn the heat down to the lowest it could possibly go and add a tablespoon or two of water. Should thin it right out.

A note about meat: If you’re using beef mince instead of pork that’s perfectly fine, but make sure you’re getting the fattiest beef you can. Also, in this step at around 4:17 in the video, take a look at the oil quantity. Add some to your beef if there’s not quite enough.

Furthermore, don’t make the mistake of thinking “meat in a tofu dish, brilliant! I’m gunna quadruple the meat amount because I love meat!” I’ve been there, I thought that way for a bit too.

But it’s an inferior dish if it’s got a big pile of mince – I mean, who wants to eat ground meat in thick-soup-ish form anyway? I know it feels a little weird, but the meat is for flavoring. Think of it as like anchovies in a Caesar salad. You want some anchovies in a nice Caesar salad, and if you really like anchovies you can add some more. But if someone tossed you a plate of half-anchovies-half-lettuce, you wouldn’t really want that as a Caesar salad, no?

To that end, some recipes I see online have way too much meat – the proper ratio that Sichuan cooks use is 10:1 tofu to meat. But because I do like meat, the 7:1 ratio that we use here is also good.

A note about oil/mince: A couple people have tried to recreate this recipe and have reported issues with not being able to get the hongyou (the red oil). We believe that it is likely due to the pre-packaged mince that is available in the United States - it's quite dry, and a bit dissimilar to fresh mince. We have two idea on how to overcome this problem:

1. Steph's Idea: Steph likes to cook Southeast Asian food, and a YouTube channel that she likes to check out is "Hot Thai Kitchen" (nice channel by the way). The host of that channel cooks Thai food but is based in Canada IIRC, and she has a ton of tips on how to cook Asian food in the West. Apparently (though we can't find the video), a good way to overcome the dry-ness of packaged mince is to massage a bit of water (~1 TBSP here) into the mince before frying it and then drain the excess. This sort of makes sense to us as in Cantonese food uses the same trick to stir-fry beef, which is notoriously lean/dry in China.

2. Chris's Idea: I have never tried this 'massage water into mince' trick so I have a tough time wholeheartedly recommending it. First best solution, I feel, would be simply buying a cut of fatty pork and mincing it by hand - you should not get the dry-oil-sponge issue. Alternatively, if you can't or don't want to mince by hand, I would fry your mince first, then remove the mince - make sure you have ~3TBSP of oil in the pot after and continue to fry the doubanjiang. Add back your mince when you add the tofu.

If those ideas don't work for ya, just skip the damn mince. It's better with mince, but getting that red-oil is vastly more integral to the dish than the meat flavoring.

Hey, last week we did a dish that you guys were a bit more familiar with (Kung Pao Chicken, here) – so this time we wanted to do something awesome that maybe you’ve never heard of before: Pearl Meatballs (珍珠丸子).

This is a dish from the Hubei province. This is a super underrated cuisine in China – Wuhan is one of the best food cities in the country in my opinion. This particular dish forms one leg of the Mianyang Three Steamed Dishes, and has a Ginger/Green Onion flavor profile.

As before, we’ve got a video to go with this. And just like before, I’m not totally thrilled with the final result of the video, but it should still be a useful visual if you’re following along with the recipe.

Basic Ingredients:

1. Pork Leg, 70/30, 500g. We use pork leg (a.k.a. ‘ham’) because it’s got a good ratio of lean to fat. If I recall correctly, when I was living in the USA I don’t think pork leg is overly easily accessible. I think a mixture of Boston Butt and Pork Belly would probably sub fine. What we’re looking for is a ratio of 70% lean to 30% fat, which is the most important thing here. Just be careful with pre-ground pork mince (discussion on ground pork at the end).

2. Ginger, 50g. Roughly enough to get about 3 TBSP minced.

3. Lotus Root, 100g. Or use ~6 water chestnuts. Either are perfectly fine. We chose Lotus Root to give it a little more Hubei flair – lotus root is everywhere in Hubei.

4. Soaked Dried Shittake Mushrooms (冬菇), 4. Soak these in very warm water at least three hours beforehand. Make sure to save the water! The water that the dried mushrooms have been soaking in is awesome, and we’re gunna use this later in the recipe.

5. Green Onions, white part only. 8-10 sections. If you’re not familiar with working with green onion, a discussion on how use the ‘white part’ of green onion at about 4:20 in the video.

6. Soaked Sticky Rice (糯米), ~3/4 cup. Soak this in warm water at least 3 hours before using. There’s actually two types of sticky rice, short grain and long grain. For this recipe, some Hubei cooks will swear up and down that you have to use longer grain, but honestly I’ve used shorter grain and it comes out great too. If you’re in China, the shorter grain one will be the Jiangsu/Zhejiang style, and the longer grain will be Hubei/Sichuan style. In you’re abroad, the longer grain one is Thai/SE style, and the shorter grain one is Korean/Japanese style.

Ingredients for your Marinade:

1. Slurry of cornstarch, 2 tsp; mixed into reserved dried mushroom water, 2TBSP. The water that you soaked the dried mushrooms in should be a brownish color. Taste it, it’s awesome. That stuff’s like crack, use it in anything you can. ‘Umami-bombs’ are all the rage nowadays, yet somehow I’ve never seen this one… take 2TBSP of it and mix in 2 tsp of cornstarch.

2. Egg, 1. This isn’t overly common in Chinese minced meat dishes, but for a ball like this it helps add some structural integrity.

3. Rice Wine (料酒), 1 tsp. In the West this is usually called Shaoxin Wine.

4. Sesame Oil, 1 tsp. Toasted of course.

5. Sugar, 1 tsp.

6. White pepper, ¼ tsp. Black pepper could work in a pinch.

7. Chicken stock concentrate, 1 tsp (鸡汁). We use a really nice one that we buy from Guangzhou, but Knorr makes a Chinese-style one that works just fine. But feel free to use your favourite bullion or even MSG if you need.

8. Light Soy Sauce (生抽), 4 tsp. Got a comment in the Kung Pao recipe about the difference between light and dark soy sauce. Light soy sauce is the ‘standard’ soysauce.

Other Ingredients:

1. Salt, 2 ½ tsp. We’ll add this one after we marinade the meat.

2. Soaked reeds, plantain leaves, banana leaves, lotus leaves, or bamboo leaves. Soak for 3 hours in warm water. Reeds are traditional for this dish as that’s what they have it Hubei, but any of these work in a pinch as the effect on the final flavor is pretty subtle. These are only used if you’re using a bamboo steamer - if you’re steaming with a plate, you obviously don’t need these. Discussion on steaming methods at the end.

Process:

1. Soak your dried mushrooms, sticky rice, and reeds/leaves (if using) in very warm water. Remember to wash your sticky rice 2-3 times before soaking. And save that dried mushroom water!

2. Dice the pork fat, roughly chop the lean. The basic idea here is that we’re going to want to fincely mince our lean into something almost resembling a paste, while keeping the fat as a nice solid dice.

3. Peel and dice ginger, combine with the lean.

4. Mince your lean and ginger. Use a big knife and chop the pork into a mince. It’s a bit difficult to describe the technique – a demonstration is at 1:45 in the video. This takes a bit of effort, but you should be able to mince it all down in about ten minutes or so. You could use a food processor, but I feel like it also takes me 10 minutes just to wash the damn food processor. You can control the consistency a bit better doing it with a knife as well.

5. Prep your meat marinade. Re-combine the lean-mince with the fat cubes. Add in your mushroom water slurry, the rice cooking wine, the sugar, the soy sauce, the chicken stock concentrate, white pepper, and sesame oil. Crack and egg into it a mix it together.

6. Mix your meat. This is a critical step. I like to do this the traditional way with chopstocks. Again, this is a little difficult to describe, so here’s what the process looks like in the video. Mix it vigorously in one direction for a couple minutes, until it’s sticky and springy. I’ve also heard rumors that you can do this with a stand mixer with the hook attachment, so if you’re weak with chopsticks you can give that a try. I’d try setting ‘1’ for a few minutes, but keep an eye on it, as I’ve never done it before. Once you’re done, toss the meat mixture in the fridge to marinate for about 20 minutes or so.

7. Dice up your lotus root (or water chestnut), the whites of the green onions, and the dried shitake mushrooms. Remember to squeeze the mushrooms before dicing them because often they can have some water left inside.

8. If you’re using a bamboo steamer, cut your leaves and lay them down on the steamer to make a ‘floor’ for your meatballs to eventually go on.

9. Season and ‘dat’ (咑) your meat mixture. Take out the meat mixture and add the 2.5 tsp salt. Now, ‘dat’ it (I’m sure I’m butchering that word as it’s a Cantonese word). Try to grab almost all of the meat mixture with your hands and slam it down into the bowl. This will improve the ‘springy-ness’ of the meat and give it a more solid texture.

10. Roll your meatballs. Take a heaping tablespoon of the meat mixture (~1.5 TBSP) and shape it into a small ball. Lightly roll the meatball in your pre-soaked sticky rice (you should drain the rice before this if that wasn’t obvious). Remember that the rice is gunna expand - you do not want too much sticky rice on your ball, unless you want a meatball that’s 50% rice and underseasoned.

11. Steam. You’re putting your stove full blast when you steam. Steam this for 5-6 minutes if using a bamboo steamer set-up. If you’re using a plate there’s going to be much more variability in the timing depending on your plate and your stove. When I did this at my brother’s place in the US it ended up being about 9-10 minutes if I recall correctly. If you’re steaming using a plate and have an instant read thermometer, do me a favor and check the temperature at 7 minutes to see how much longer you need.

12. Garnish and serve with other steamed stuff. Traditionally in Hubei this meal is served alongside a steamed fish dish and a steamed veg dish.

Makes ~20 meatballs. If you're satisfied with the results, make a big batch of meat your second time. The meat mixture freezes real well.

A note about ingredients: Don’t use pre-ground pork. I just feel pre-ground stuff is never really… that good. If you feel like you have to use pre-ground pork, get a mixture that’s mostly lean – then buy some belly or pork fat or something and dice the fat from that using the method described.

A note about method: You can absolutely use a plate to steam. The reason bamboo steamers are generally superior is that they allow for better air circulation inside the steaming tray. In a bamboo steamer, the steam is coming up from under the food, while in a plate it’ll circulate above it. This makes steaming times in bamboo steamers quicker and more reliable.

If you have a bamboo steamer but can’t get reeds or leaves, can use cheesecloth in its place. It doesn’t look as impressive but absolutely does the job.

With a plate, some water will accumulate on the plate as its cooking. Just transfer the meatballs to a different plate and forget the water ever existed.

So don’t ‘trust’ anything that’s written below - this is copied straight here in all of its… dubiousity… because (1) this way you can get a full frontal of the Dunning-Kruger that started it all, and appreciate just how critical Steph is to everything we do on the channel and (2) some people do enjoy the recipe nonetheless - and in fairness to myself seven years ago, it’s not the worst Kung Pao recipe that ever graced the internet.

Hey, I've been living in China for about nine years and wanted to share some recipes for Chinese food. Figured I'd start with an old favorite - Kung Pao chicken.

I made a video to go with this, but I've uh... learned that making videos is a bit harder than it seems. So if you watch the video excuse my stuttering.

Basic Ingredients:

1. Chicken Thighs, 270g. Debone these and cut into cubes. You don't need to get them perfect. Many recipes use Chicken breast which you could also do, but I think it's much better to use thigh meat.

2. Dried Sichuan Chilis (大红袍), 8-10. Cut in half and deseed. If you can't get dried Sichuan chilis, dried Arbol or something similar should work.

3. Fresh Erjingtiao (二荆条), 1. Cut into ~2cm pieces. I figure erjingtiao chilis would be tough to get outside of China, so feel free to sub it with any sort of chili you can get locally. This chili is quite mild, so sub it with anything you can find that's lower on the Scoville scale. Something like Anaheims (or even Jalapeno in a pinch) would probably be ok. The Chili should not be too spicy if you took a bite from it straight.

4. Green Onions, white part only. 2-5 sections (depending on the size). Quarter these and chop into roughly the same length as your fresh chili.

5. Garlic gloves, 3-5. I like using whole crushed cloves because they're easier to stir fry and actually have a quite nice taste/texture to munch on at the end. You could obviously mince them if you like.

6. Peanuts, 1/2 cup. Get unroasted, unsalted peanuts. If you're feeling lazy you could get salted roasted peanuts I suppose, but the texture's not quite right and it would be easy for the dish to become overly salty.

7. Sichuan Chili Bean Paste (川式豆瓣酱), 1 TBSP. This is sort of a controversial ingredient for this dish, but after trying many methods I think it's a really important ingredient. Discussion on the Chili bean paste (doubanjiang) at the end.

Ingredients for your Marinade:

1. Egg White from 1 egg. This will form the base of the marinade.

2. Rice Wine (料酒), 1 tsp. In the West this is usually called Shaoxin Wine.

3. Sesame Oil, 1 tsp. Toasted of course.

4. Sugar, 1 tsp.

5. Cornstarch, 2 tsp.

Ingredients for your Sauce:

1. Water or Stock, 3 TBSP. I like using water and a touch (about 1/2 tsp) stock concentrate.

2. Dark Chinese Vinegar (陈醋), 2 tsp.

3. Sugar, 2.5 TBSP. That's not a typo. It uses quite a bit of sugar.

4. Rice Cooking Wine (料酒), 1 tsp

5. Light Soy Sauce, 1.5 tsp.

6. Dark Soy Sauce, 1/2 tsp.

Other Ingredients:

1. Slurry of 1 tsp cornstarch and a touch of water.

2. 1 tsp sesame oil and 1 tsp vinegar to finish the seasoning.

Process:

1. Pour hot water into your peanuts. This will make them easier to peel. Leave them for 10 minutes and prep some of the rest of your ingredients.

2. Marinate your chicken thigh cubes. Toss your marinade into with your chicken cubes, and massage the marinade in. The beautiful thing about Chinese cooking is that because these are small cubes, this sucker's gunna be finished marinading in like 30 minutes tops.

3. Peel peanuts. Two ways to peel - either pinch the end of the peanut as if it's a shrimp tail, or rub the peanut between your fingers. I prefer the second method because if you get on a roll you can peel a few at once.

4. Deep fry your peanuts. Or I guess 'shallow fry' might be a more accurate description. For this step, we're using the method of reguoliangyou (hot pot, cool oil) - that is, heat up the pan, then basically add in your oil and the ingredients at the same time. This helps prevent burning - if you're cooking Chinese food and you feel like some of your ingredients just seem to burn immediately, this is the technique you're missing. The peanuts should fry for about 5 minutes, med-high heat. Take out the peanuts for the next step. Strain your oil if you didn't do a good job peeling.

5. Stir fry the chicken. For this step we do reguoreyou (hot pot, hot oil) - basically, what we do in western cooking all the time. For this step especially, your pot should be screaming hot. If you have a Chinese style burner that's great BUT it's no excuse not to stir fry. I cook Chinese food in the US sometimes, no problem. If you can sear a steak you can do a stir fry. Stir fry until the chicken is cooked - for me this was about three minutes. Take out your chicken, wipe your pot.

6. Put a smaller amount of oil in (~1 TBSP) or so, and using the reguoliangyou (hot pot, cold oil) method stir fry your dried chilis on high. As soon as they start to turn color, take them out. For me this was like 30 seconds.

7. Put in your garlic, green onions, and fresh chili. Stir fry for a bit, then hit it with your chili bean paste (doubanjiang). Break up the paste a bit and stir fry, ~30 seconds. All of this is high heat remember.

8. Add your sauce. The pot is hot so it should reduce quite a bit almost immediately. See the thickness, and add enough of the slurry to ticken it to your liking. This is often eyeballed in Chinese cooking, but here I added 1 tsp of cornstarch with a touch of water.

9. Add back your chicken. Fry for another 30 seconds or so, then turn off your heat. Add back your dried chilis and peanuts. Stir vigorously.

10. Add your final seasoning, the 1 tsp of vinegar and 1 tsp of sesame oil. You can taste for salinity, but the chili bean paste has salt in it so we should be good on that front. Serve with rice.

A note about ingredients: Notice what's not in here: cucumber, carrots, lettuce, whatever. You can obviously do whatever you want, but honestly those ingredients kinda clash with the dish. Some restaurants will add these things, mostly because they skimp on meat.

Also notice that there's no Sichuan peppercorn in here. Some of the recipes I've read really overdo it with the Sichuan peppercorn (looking at you, Fuschia Dunlop...). Kung Pao chicken is part of the "lychee burnt pepper" flavor profile of Sichuan cuisine (荔枝煳辣) which means it is: (1) a little spicy (2) a little sweet and (3) a little sour. The numbing taste of Sichuan peppercorns ain't in the flavor profile.

Now, many Sichuan cooks will still use small, almost unnoticable quantities of Sichuan peppercorn in many dishes... sort of like how we use black pepper in Western cooking. For Kung Pao, many Sichuan chefs will add a tiny amount of Sichuan peppercorn. You can use it if you like, but no more than a couple. This isn't the mala flavor profile.

Now, finally - about chili bean paste, doubanjiang. Some Sichuan cooks will absolutely insist that it has no place in a Kung Pao chicken. I think this is bollucks - doubanjiang is used in many restaurant in China, and it gives it that wonderful, red Kung Pao color. Some people use red chili powder to color it but I think this adds way too much heat. You obviously shouldn't use too much doubanjiang - this is just a tablespoon. Too much and the Chili bean paste can dominate the dish.

If you want to do super, super traditional Kung Pao... like true to the original recipe 100 years ago, take out the chili bean paste and add a tsp or two of salt.

Walk around any city in China, you’re almost guaranteed to find three things: a Lanzhou pulled noodle chain called “Lanzhou Lamian”, a Fujian-style dumpling shop called “Shaxian Xiaochi”, and increasingly… braised chicken rice, led by a chain called “Yangmingyu”.

These types of chains are kind of an interesting modern Chinese phenomenon. They’re honestly like the least standardized franchises ever. They have the look and feel of a little family run place . Quality can vary widely, and sometimes even the menu can change. And while an MBA student might frown at that dynamic, it’s honestly what can make them worth going to. Because while sometimes you can get a mediocre meal there… you can also sometimes get a good meal. Which’s a hell of a lot more than you can say for, I dunno, Applebees.

So right. Yangmingyu. They’re everywhere, and’ve even expanded abroad under the name “Yang’s chicken rice”. They make a sort of braised chicken that’s native to the Shandong province called Huangmenji. It’s a bit different than the very most traditional versions of the dish – Yangmingyu uses leg (not whole chicken), included dried shiitake mushrooms in their braise, serves it in a still-scalding bubbling small claypot along with rice, and you have the choice of adding in a whole bunch of add-ins (e.g. Enoki, tofu puffs, etc.)

Their success also spawned a lot of copycats, because as you’ll see in a second… this version of Huangmenji’s pretty easy. And while even though we usually like to dig deeper and give the very most traditional version of certain dishes, we felt like it’d be most appropriate to teach you this ‘fast food’ style.

Ingredients

1. Chicken leg -or- whole -or- wings, ~500g. Ok, so here’s the thing. This is one of those Chinese poultry-on-the-bone dishes. I know that’s a non-starter for some folks – there’s a reason why otherwise completely authentic Chinese restaurants in the USA’ll still swap for boneless. But just try it – braised dishes like this one are a great introduction to on-the-bone dishes. If you’re still unconvinced, I’d suggest using wings: same essence, a little more annoying to eat with chopsticks, but you’ve got the advantage of knowing where the bones are. Lastly, know that the traditional Shandong version’s a whole chicken, so you could also just do that.

2. Marinade for the chicken: 1 tbsp each light soy sauce (生抽), liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒) cornstarch (生粉). Real simple marinade just to get some base flavor here.

3. Aromatics/spices: 1 inch ginger (姜), 5 inches escallion/welsh onion (大葱) -or- ~5 scallion whites, 2 star anise (八角). Ginger and escallion’s smashed. If you can’t find escallion, swap with five of the white portion of the scallion. If you have no idea what escallion/welsh onion is and don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, check out the note below. Escallion’s also known as Daepa or Chinese leek.

4. Tianmianjiang Sweet Bean Paste (甜面酱), two heaping tbsp Ah, sweet bean paste. The paste that’s neither sweet (it’s intensely savory) nor made from beans (it’s made from fermenting steamed buns IIRC). This stuff is great though, and form the base of this flavor profile (i.e. Jiangxiang, ‘fragrant sauce’). If you can’t find this, you might be able to get away with playing around with Hoisin, but it’s so fundamental to the dish that I’d really recommend seeking it out first. It’s used pretty extensively in Korean cooking too.

5. Light soy sauce (生抽), 2 tbsp.

6. Granulated sugar, 2 tbsp.

7. Dried shiitake mushrooms (冬菇）four, reconstituted in 500 mL of hot, boiled water. We’ll reconstitute this for ~1 hour in hot boiled water, though you could also do ~8 hours in cool water if that works out better for you (i.e., before work). Be sure to save your soaking liquid! The stuff tastes fantastic and’s going to be the base of our sauce.

8. Liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒), 1 tbsp. For use while stir-frying.

9. White pepper powder (白胡椒粉), ¼ tsp.

10. MSG (味精), ¼ tsp. Optional for this dish but recommended.

11. Slurry of 1 tsp cornstarch (生粉) and 1 tbsp water.

12. 1/2 green (青辣椒) and red mild chili (红辣椒). Mostly for a bit of color, and hey, who doesn’t like peppers. This variety of chili that’s used in China is actually the paprika chili, but you could swap the green for anaheims… or both with bell pepper. You could also just skip it if you’d rather.

13. Toasted sesame oil (麻油). For finishing.

14. White rice. To serve. If you don’t have a rice cooker, steaming’s probably the most fool-proof way to cook white rice. Quick ‘recipe’ for steamed rice in the notes below.

Also, quick note that in some versions of this dish nowadays, people’ll load it up with dried chilis and make it spicy. If you like that, totally – go for it. We just prefer this as a more isolated Jiangxiang flavor.

Process

Now note that for the final cooking, you’ve got a few options. You can:

(A) Do the whole thing in a wok.

(B) Do the whole thing in a large cast iron dutch oven.

(C) Start in a wok, move to a dutch oven.

(D) Start in a wok, move to a claypot.

(E) Do any of the above, then once it’s ready for the final reduction, swap to a individually portioned claypot <-- this is what the fast food joints do

We went with wok --> claypot --> individually portioned claypots for authenticity bonus points. But honestly any of the above would be fine. Just in case, for replication purposes… we mostly tested using (D), i.e. Wok --> claypot.

1. Soak the dried shiitake mushrooms. The one hour soaking time could even be cut down to ~30-45 minutes if you’re in a rush and you cover your bowl. For a cold water soak, ~4-5 hours is enough but I figure you could maybe soak some before work then come home to some prepped mushrooms for Huangmenji.

2. Cleave the chicken into ~1.5 inch wide pieces. Alright, if you watch the video, note that neither me now Steph are the best butchers in the world. Basically, for leg you cut out the extra bit of boneless meat on the thigh and chop that into a couple boneless pieces. Then go at it and cleave the chicken up, aiming the side of the cleaver that’s closest to you to the bone (we didn’t do a great job of that in the video, unfortunately. Win some and lose some somedays). If the knife ever gets stuck on the bone, don’t move it, and instead take the whole leg and smack it down against the board.

3. Marinate the chicken for ~30 minutes. Be sure to mix well.

4. Slice up the chilis, crush the escallion and the ginger, de-stem the mushrooms, tear the mushrooms into bite-sized pieces, strain the mushroom soaking liquid. The chili is ~1.5 inch sections like the chicken – you can cut into diamonds, or alternatively just do the Chinese rolling cut. The escallion you can do two ~2.5 inch sections, and slightly crush each.

5. Pass the marinated chicken pieces through oil, drop in at 200C, fry on high for ~3 minutes until dark golden brown. Ok, so you really don’t need that much oil to pass through – in the video, we only used two cups here. Get it up to a blistering 200C, drop in the chicken pieces, and fry until ‘reddish-brown’ – i.e. a dark golden brown. If you’d rather pre-stir fry your chicken instead of passing through oil… sure. Just make sure they look something like this by the end. Let the chicken sit on a strainer and the oil drain out.

6. Stir fry, then braise. As always, first longyau: that is, get you wok piping hot (about steak searing temperature), shut off the heat, add in your oil (here about two tablespoons), and give it a swirl to get a nice non-stick surface. Heat on medium now, immediately:

• Go in with the escallion/scallion whites, the ginger, and the star anise. Fry for ~45 seconds, or until it smells real nice. Scooch the aromatics up the side of the wok.

• Add in the Tianmianjiang sweet bean paste. Frying this paste give the base of the dish’s flavor. It has a tendency to stick. Once it’s just starting to stick to the wok…

• Pour the one tablespoon of liaojiu wine over your spatula and around the sides of the wok. Quick ~15 second mix together.

• Do the same thing with the two tablespoons of light soy sauce.

• Sugar, in. Combine/let it dissolve, about ~15 seconds.

• Mushroom soaking liquid, in. Up the heat to high. Wait ~1 minute until bubbling.

• Chicken, mushrooms, and white pepper in. Get up to a boil.

• Cover -or- swap to a claypot (and cover). If you’re using something cast iron/with a heavy lid, keep it ajar. Swap the flame to medium-low and keep at a heavy simmer for ~20 minutes.

• Uncover. The liquid should be reduced by ~1/4. Swap the flame to high and let it reduce until reduced by another quarter, or one half in all.

• Season with the MSG, add the slurry. Let it thicken ~20 seconds. It will not be too thick. This’s close to a stew consistency, not a sauce consistency (if that makes sense).

• Add in the chilis (if using a wok, cook the chilis for ~5 seconds). Sprinkle on the toasted sesame oil. If using claypot/cast iron… cover, then shut off the heat and serve in the claypot/cast iron. If using a wok, transfer to serving bowl.

Note on steaming rice:

We’re spoiled. We’ve got a Zojirushi, which we make extensive use of. I’ve used a rice cooker so much that I honestly kind of forget how to make rice on the stovetop. Honestly, I think there’d be at least a 35% chance I’d fuck it up.

I do know how to steam rise though.

Take your rice and thoroughly rinse it ~3 times until the water’s beginning to get clear. Try to use a wider bowl/container (not a deep one), and fill that up with water until ~1/2 inch above the rice and soak for 20 minutes. Then toss that whole thing in a steamer and steam for 20 minutes on high. Fin.

Note on Escallion:

So, I fucked up.

For the last 2+ years I’ve been translating a certain Chinese ingredient as “leek”. This thing, it’s called “Dacong” in Mandarin. Literally, ‘big scallion’ – it’s one of the go-to aromatics in North China.

And I know I’m not the first person to make this mistake. Dunlop’s referred to it as leek. Elaine from ChinaSichuanFood has too. And I mean, come on, leek IS a dead ringer for Dacong.

But… it’s not leek. Big thanks to /u/desmond2046 for bringing it up and teaching me that there’s difference. Dacong is Allium Fistolum – you might see it as Welsh onion, bunching onion, Japanese bunching onion, negi (Japan), escallion (Jamaica), or daepa (Korea). Leek, meanwhile is Allium ampeloprasum… and after looking it up a bit, it appears that Dacong is more closely related to scallion than leek.

So here’s the thing – speaking in broad generalities… Dacong is used as an aromatic in the north of China, while in the south of China people’ll cut off the white portion of the scallion and use that in much the same way. So really, don’t go crazy trying to source Dacong if it’s hard for you – just go with the southern Chinese style and use scallion.

(I’m also wondering what the best translation is by the way… I’ve heard that it’s most commonly available in Korean supermarkets abroad, should I just go with daepa from now on? I do sort of like the word ‘escallion’, and I feel like I’ve definitely seen that before)

Ok, so I’d like to talk about boney river fish.

It’s a pretty common situation for a visitor to China – maybe you’ve had some Shuizhu Fish at a Sichuan restaurant back in the West. Maybe you quite like it. You come to China and excitedly order the same dish, dig in, and… bones. Lots of little ones, tiny shards poking your gullet, and they seem… impossible to eat around. And while I’ll usually wax poetic about how I think more Americans should be comfortable eating around bones (e.g. Chinese poultry dishes), this one… I totally get.

Those little fish bones, literally translated, are referred to as “fish daggers” in Mandarin… and it can be a bit tough to work through. You have to eat at like a snails pace, patiently nibbling at the meat. Otherwise? It’s crazy easy to get them stuck in your throat, to which the cure is gargling vinegar. They’re often called “trash fish” in America. So then, you might ask, why even go though the trouble of eating those sorts of fish?

The answer’s pretty straightforward – they taste good. Like, the flesh itself. Certain breeds of river fish are often prized as very ‘umami’ fish, and are deemed worth the effort. Where those happen to fall on your personal taste <-> effort continuums is ultimately up to you.

Which brings me to lingyu – mud carp. Lingyu is a small, super boney river fish that’re found in the Pearl and Mekong rivers. They are an extreme case of the above dynamic – super tasty fish, super boney. In Vietnam they crack that nut by eating the fish only when they’re small (i.e. about fingerlings) so that they can be eaten whole. Smart, IIRC they make a hotpot with them. Cantonese cuisine, meanwhile… takes a different approach.

Adult Lingyu are used, but’re used in a whole host of different preparations – some of which feel like echo an almost deconstructionist view of cooking. The basic way to sort it’s to mince it up – bones and all – and pound it into a paste, stuffing it into everything from chilis (what we’ll show you today) to bitter gourd, to back into the skin the fish came in. Another awesome use of the paste is to make it a bit looser, mix it with egg white, and deep fry it – a preparation that’s so reminiscent of tofu that it’s literally called “fish tofu”. Or another way people sort it is to carefully get all of the flakes of meat off the little bones, and make it into a soup that’s a deadpan for the consistency of congee.

Now, I know you’re not going to be able to source mud carp… I mean, unless you happen to live along the Pearl or Mekong rivers. Don’t worry, I tested this with sea bass and tilapia too, it all works (with an adjustment or two).

So why am I telling you all this? Because I feel like it a speaks to a bit of the essence of Cantonese food. Ask ten Cantonese chefs what Cantonese food’s all about and at least nine will respond “preserving the original taste of the ingredient”. And I guess maybe compared to, say, Sichuan food? But how much of the original taste of pork do you get in braised pork with Chuhou paste? Or soy sauce chicken? Cantonese food, to me, is about transformation – taking ingredients that some people may discard and doing awesome things with them. And while that philosophy can certainly be found in many cuisines… it just feels especially pronounced here.

Anyway, enough rambling. Fish stuffed chilis. I’ll show you how to make it the original way using Lingyu (just in case you happen to live in China or want to get creative with your own local boney fish), and also show you how to sort it with something you could actually buy from the supermarket.

Ingredients

1. Flaky fish fillets, e.g. Tilapia (非洲鲫鱼) or Sea Bass (海鲈), obviously preferably Lingyu (鲮鱼) if remotely possible, 250g. Really any flaky fish should work, though I’ve only tested it with Sea Bass and Tilapia. Quick high level overview in case you’re a by-ratio sort of person like me: the paste is 10 parts fish, 2 parts water, 2 parts water chestnut, 1 part cornstarch, half part scallion.

2. Optional-ish: dried scallops (干贝) -or- dried shrimp (虾米), 5g reconstituted in 50mL of how, boiled water. Ok, so here’s the deal: Lingyu is this famously umami fish. Tilapia is this infamously not-that fish. How to close the gap? We found reconstituting dried scallop, including that into the mix, and then using the soaking liquid as the liquid for the paste helped enormously. If dried scallop’s not reasonable for you to source, use dried shrimp. If neither are, then I mean, whatever… charge ahead anyhow. Maybe add a sprinkle of MSG or a good fish sauce.

3. Salt, 1 tsp. Seasons, but also helps develop the myosin in the fish to make it sticky.

4. Cornstarch (生粉), 25g. To be mixed in with the soaking liquid (or just water if you’re not using the soaking liquid).

5. Seasoning for the paste: ½ tsp sugar, ¼ tsp white pepper powder (白胡椒粉).

6. Water chestnut (马蹄), 50g. Minced, for some crunch.

7. Scallion (葱), 15g. Thinly sliced. I like mine a bit more scallion heavy than some, 5-10g might be more authentic.

8. Chilis: Jalapenos, 6-8 -or- Jianjiao (尖椒), 4. Halved. So this dish uses Jianjiao, a mild sort of Chinese pepper. Not sure what I’d estimate the SVUs at, but it’s the sort of chili that’s really mild if you just eat the flesh, but then has a real obvious kick to it if you ate it with the ribs and seeds. To me, that’s feels like a lot like Jalapeno. There’s nothing all that special about that chili so feel free to be liberal with your subs – I’d probably reach for Jalapeno if I was in the States or whatever. Jalapeno has a slightly more distinctive taste but I don’t think it’d be bad (honestly, it might be even better). The issue is more size… it’s really annoying for me to get my hands on fresh Jalapenos here in Shenzhen so I haven’t tested it myself. I think that 6-8 chilis feels about right to me… but you might have excess fish paste (which you can always form into fish cakes and fry up, not a huge loss or anything).

9. Mijiu rice wine (米酒) -or- sake -or- water. To give the chilis a quick steam when frying. Mijiu seems to really work for this dish, so if you can’t find it I’d recommend sake (which’s a similar sort of rice wine as Mijiu). If neither are convenient, just use water.

10. Seasoned soy sauce to serve: 20mL hot boiled water, 1.5 tbsp light soy sauce (生抽), ½ tsp fish sauce (鱼露), ½ tsp sugar. There’s a million seasoned soy sauces in Cantonese cuisine, like almost every restaurant’ll have their own that they like. We like this one – 10 parts water, 10 parts soy sauce, 1 part fish sauce, 1 part sugar. Fish sauce isn’t really used much in Cantonese cuisine but it is around, and one usage for it is this sort of seasoning soy sauce.

Process

1. Reconstitute the dried scallops: 30 minute hot water soak, ~8 hour cold water soak. If a hot water soak’s a little annoying to do logistically, you could also swap for a cold water soak… do it before work or whatever.

2. Mince the scallop and the water chestnut, slice the scallion, mix the cornstarch in a bowl with the soaking water (if using). If you’re not using the soaking water, just use water for this slurry.

3. If using Lingyu: skin the fillet, slice across the fillets into thin ~1-2mm pieces to break up the bones. If you aren’t using Lingyu, skip to the next step. If you are, skin the fillets by slicing into the back of the fillet, press down with your knife, and rip the meat from the skin with your hands. Then, once you’ve got your fillets, finely slice them across the bone to break them up… you should be able to hear the bones breaking.

4. Quickly mince the fish, then chop/pound for 5-10 minutes until you get a good paste. Ok, so I think theoretically you should be able to do this in a food processor. Don’t own one though, so you’re on your own there. Grab a cleaver or two and just start going at it, periodically folding the meat over itself in order to get a nice mealy paste. If you’re more used to doing this with pork, note that it’ll be a bit more granular than pork… something like this is fine. For us, getting there took 5 minutes for Lingyu, 10 minutes for Sea Bass, and Tilapia was somewhere in between IIRC.

5. Toss in a bowl, add in the salt, stir for ~1 minute. Add in the cornstarch slurry bit by bit, stirring constantly, ~4 minutes. What you’re looking for is the fish begin to break down further into a sticky paste. This is the same idea as making an emulsified sausage like a mortadella – what you’re aiming to do is develop the myosin in the meat mixture. Lots of different things can affect myosin development – the freshness of your fish (the fresher the better), the coldness of your mixture (the colder the better, it’s a nice idea to keep you soaking liquid in the fridge until you use it), the fat content of your fish (the leaner the better), and of course the mixing time. For us, this took ~4 minutes, but depending on your situation it might take a bit more or a bit less. Look for something sort of like this in the end.

6. ’Dat’ the mixture: grab everything and slam the mix down against your bowl ~10 times. One of my favorite techniques in Chinese cooking. Helps develop springiness in the mix.

7. Mix in the sugar and the white pepper, then mix in the scallop, the scallion, and the water chestnut. Really go at it to mix them all evenly in, then toss in the fridge until you’re ready to stuff.

8. Slice the chilis in half lengthwise, de-seed. If you’re happening to use Chinese jianjiao, I like to chop off the very end as they seem to love to scorch. If you washed your chilis recently, make sure their dry for the next step.*

9. Coat the inside of the chili with cornstarch, and stuff with your fish mixture. The cornstarch coating’ll help the filling stick to the inside of the chili. We like to stuff the chili with chopsticks because we find we can get more in, but feel free to use a rubber spatula.

10. Make the seasoned soy sauce. Dissolve the sugar into the hot boiled water, then add the rest of the ingredients and set aside.

11. Pan-fry/steam the chilis. As always, first longyau: get your wok piping hot, shut off the heat, add in the oil – here about a half a cup, we are pan-frying after all – and give it a swirl to get a nice non-stick surface. Alternatively, if working with something flat-bottomed get the oil up ½ inch from the bottom of the pan. Heat the oil up (over whatever flame you want) until bubbles start to form around a pair of chopsticks, ~175 centigrade. Then, shut off the heat, and:

• Place the chilis filling side down into the wok and press it slightly as you do so. We like doing this step with the heat off as sometimes the first ones might end up overcooking.

• Swap the flame to medium-high. If working with a round-bottomed wok, start tilting the wok in each direction – to the left, to the right, away from you, towards you, center… the idea should be that at some times the chilis should be completely submerged in oil, sometimes just frying on a thin smear. Flat bottomed, just let em fry.

• After three minutes or so, the bottom should be golden brown. At that point, swirl in the wine (or water) and immediately cover. Steam for ~15 seconds.

• Uncover, flip the chilis with a spatula, stir things around for ~15 seconds. Out.

• Let any excess oil drain out, then plate. Pour the seasoned soy sauce all over everything.

If you have extra paste:

Don’t fret. Just grab ~2 tbsp of filling and shape it into a cake. Then pan-fry over medium heat for about ~ minutes each side, or until it’s golden brown. Dip in soy sauce.

Today I wanted to show you how to make a classic Baozi from Dim Sum, custard buns.

So there’s two related but distinct Baozi that’re often translated into English as ‘Custard Bun’: first, a classic Baozi filled with a Cantonese style custard called “Nai Huang Bao”; and second, a more modern sort that’s packed with a gooey filling that uses salted egg yolks as a base called “Liu Sha Bao”.

At times that second sort might be translated “Salted Egg Yolk Custard Bun”, but generally speaking Dim Sum restaurants’ll tend to carry one or the other. The former kind is more traditional, but the latter sort is becoming increasingly common in China nowadays. So I figured that it might be nice to teach you both types of filling: gooey and custardy. While I personally like mine custardy they’re both pretty great, so ultimately it’s up to you which direction you go. The gooey filling’ll be both easier and more visually impressive.

The way I’ll organize this is to first go over the custard-y filling, then the gooey filling, and finally how to make the Baozi wrappers/steam these.

Ingredients, Custard-y filling:

So what you’ll find with Cantonese custard is a lot of the same ideas as Western custard, but translated for use in Guangdong. Perhaps most obviously, the custard that you get here is going to be way thicker than what you might be used to – this’s going to end up almost a paste.

Some of the ingredients are different too – likely harkening back to a time when it was much tougher to source cream/milk in Guangdong than it is now. It makes use of condensed milk, butter, and instant custard… and in a very Cantonese way opts to steam the custard over low heat instead of simmering.

Makes filling for ~24 Baozi.

1. Eggs, 2; ~100g. That’s whole eggs, not just yolks. Another difference between this and Western custard.

2. Unsalted butter, 75g. Melted then returned to room temperature.

3. Condensed milk (炼奶), 120g. Some older recipes are based off of evaporated milk, but we liked the sort that use condensed milk. Sometimes you’ll see a bit of coconut milk in the mix too.

4. Instant custard (吉士粉), 1 tsp; -or- ½ tsp custard powder and ½ tsp milk powder. So AFAIK ‘custard powder in the West’s basically a mix of cornstarch and food coloring? What’s generally available here is actually ‘instant custard’. This’s a pretty unscientific substitution recommendation, but we want a bit of color from the custard powder, but also some of the milk powder it contains. So let’s go half/half of each?

5. Sugar, 1 tbsp.

6. Salt, ¼ tsp.

7. Cornstarch (生粉), 50g.

Process, Custardy Filling:

1. Thoroughly whisk the eggs. Really beat the snot out of them… keep going until you see no stray strands of egg white remaining.

2. Add the remaining ingredients one by one, whisking them together. Then strain into a bowl. Straining the mixture is to ensure that there aren’t any lumps.

3. Toss the bowl on a steamer and steam over medium high heat for five minutes. After five minutes, mix/stir the filling well, ~20 seconds. The initial medium high flame is to let the filling set.

4. Swap the flame to the lowest heat your stove’ll go, and steam for 55 more minutes, stirring in the same way every five minutes. In testing there we times we did it every ~10 minutes. We just found it to be a bit safer to opt for a shorter time, as while this’s more forgiving regarding small lumps than Western custard… you obviously still don’t want the thing to break on you.

5. Transfer to a container, let it come down to room temperature then toss in the fridge for at least ~3 hours or the freezer for ~1 hour. You final consistency should be gloopy/pasty – very different from a Western custard – something like this. You can also toss in the fridge overnight if that’s more convenient for you.

Ingredients, Gooey Filling:

So what makes this filling so impressively gooey? [Insert Drumroll Here] … gelatin. We’ll be adding a touch of cornstarch in there too, but way less than the previous version – gelatin’ll do the heavy lifting.

Makes enough filling for 24 Baozi.

1. Salted Egg Yolks (咸蛋黄), 4. For the unaware, salted egg yolks are pretty much what they say on the tin – the yolks from salt-cured eggs. Duck eggs usually, as the yolks are fattier. You should be able to get them at an Asian supermarket, but barring that you can also just make some yourself… all you need’s eggs, salt, and about a month. They’ve become real trendy to toss in desserts nowadays – perhaps a bit overly so (you know how food trends are) – but they’re super rich and go awesome with sweet stuff.

2. Cantonese Rose Wine (玫瑰露酒) -or- Mijiu Rice wine (米酒) -or- Sake, ~1/2 tbsp. To steam together with the salted eggs. Helps remove/balance the subtle ‘off’ taste from the curing process. Cantonese rose wine is preferred but don’t bother buying a bottle just for this… you can also use Mijiu (i.e. Chinese clear) rice wine or Japanese sake (which’s a lower ABV relative of Chinese Mijiu).

3. Water, 130g mixed with Gelatin, 5g.

4. Coconut milk (椰奶), 40g. Another cool addition to this variety of filling, though sometimes you’ll see this in the previous sort too.

5. Condensed milk (炼奶), 35g

6. Sugar, 40g.

7. Milk powder (奶粉), 10g.

8. Instant custard (吉士粉), 5g. Or in the same way, swap for half custard powder and half milk powder.

9. Cornstarch (生粉), 5g.

10. Unsalted butter, 40g. Not melted this time.

Process, Gooey Filling.

1. Mix the salted egg yolk with the wine, then in a bowl steam on high for ~10 minutes. The color of the salted egg yolk will obviously change.

2. With a bench scraper (or whatever), mash the steamed salted egg yolk into a paste. Really go at this, you might need to work on it for 3-5 minutes. There might be some small harder pieces that you can’t quite mash… just take those out and eat them (they’ll taste good, for sure).

3. Bloom the gelatin – i.e. mix in the gelatin with the water. Whisking these together in advance helps deter clumping.

4. Mix together the coconut milk, the condensed milk, the cornstarch, the sugar, the milk powder, and the custard powder. Mix this real well together. Basically everything except your water/gelatin mix, the salted egg yolk paste, and the butter.

5. Cook the filling. Over medium flame, add the gelatin/water mix to a saucepan. After ~1 minute when the gelatin’s dissolved, add the butter. Stir and let the butter melt into the liquid, ~1 minute. Slowly pour in the mixture from step #4, stirring constantly. Continue to stir for ~2-3 minutes, until thickened.

6. Take the filling off the flame, mix in the salted egg yolk paste. Let come down to room temp, then toss in the fridge for at least ~3 hours or ~1 hour in the freezer. Or toss in the fridge overnight if that’s more convenient.

Ingredients, Baozi Wrappers:

Ok, so the type of wrappers here belong to the category of Famian Baozi (发面包子), or Leavened Baozi. However, these are the kind of Baozi wrapper that’re used for sweet fillings in particular… the most obvious differences between these and your ‘bog standard savory Baozi’ is that (1) these ones have this smooth skin that’s kinda tough to achieve (annoying) but (2) are steamed pleat side down (people with fat clumsy fingers like me rejoice!).

Now there’s two kinds of sweet Baozi wrappers: those that use water as the base of the dough, and also enriched doughs. The former is more common for cost reasons, but after a good bit of testing… we had much better luck with the latter. So we’ll be using milk and also including lard in the mix, which I know is a slight deviation philosophically from the Cantonese custard… but really works well (and many of the very best Dim Sum places in Guangdong use enriched doughs here).

(If you’re curious, the other dough’s 55% hydration then by weight is 4-10% sugar, 2% baking powder, 1% yeast).

Makes wrappers for 12 Baozi.

1. AP Flour (中筋面粉), 220g. Our AP flour’s ~11% protein, just for reference.

2. Baking powder (泡打粉), 5g. The another difference between this and savory Baozi doughs, which generally just use yeast.

3. Yeast (酵母), 2g.

4. Sugar, 10g.

5. Milk (鲜奶), 140g.

6. Lard (猪油), 9g -or- vegetable shortening. I know that lard can be weirdly annoying to find in the West… we always make our own and have a big batch (always recommended) but feel free to use shortening if you need.

Process, Baozi Wrappers and Final Baozi:

So those smooth wrappers, the bit I said was kind of annoying to achieve? Those are accomplishment by repeatedly rolling the dough out thin to remove any air bubbles. With that kind of step, we like using a pasta maker. Is it traditional? Nope. Does it accomplish the same exact thing with way less effort? Totally.

So if you don’t have a pasta maker don’t fret, you can still use a rolling pin in step #4. Your life’ll just be a bit more difficult.

1. Sift together the flour, the baking powder, and the yeast into a mixing bowl. Sifting these helps remove clumps, but also mixes everything together.

2. Add the sugar to the milk, then slowly pour it into the dry ingredients, mixing constantly. You should be looking at a shaggy dough that’s about this consistency… with all the dry flour basically incorporated.

3. Knead for 6 minutes, add in the lard, then knead for another two. Or alternatively, the same amount of time in a stand mixer with the dough hook attachment on speed 1.

4. Pass the dough through a pasta maker on the widest setting, fold it like a letter, then pass it through again. Just your sheet in half, and with each half, continue to fold/send it through the pasta maker 5 times total. If doubling the wrapper quantity, cut the sheet into four pieces. You can also do this with a rolling pin – just fold, and roll each bit out as thin as you can.

5. Lay the sheet out, then from the back tightly roll up the sheet like a log. Push in the ends, roll it a touch so it’s even… then toss in a bowl. Let rest for 15 minutes. You should be looking at something that looks basically like this by the end.

6. Portion out the filling, toss in the freezer for ~10 minutes. Take out your filling and weight them out to be ~15g gram pieces. Roll them a touch into balls (note that the gooey filling won’t be overly ‘rollable’), and toss back to the freezer for them to firm up a touch.

7. Portion out the dough for the wrappers. Twelve buns, 30g each. Roll them into balls.

8. Make the Baozi wrapper. So this is a little tough to describe, but the way that you roll Baozi wrappers (and dumpling wrappers for that matter) is to first press down, then with the edge of the rolling pin to gently roll in, then roll back out with force. Twist slightly (~15 degrees) and repeat. This makes the center of the Baozi thicker than the edges… allowing it to better hold the filling, while also making it easier to pleat. If you’ve seen some amateur Baozi online whose pleating makes it look like they’ve got elephantiasis… this is the step that’s being done incorrectly.

9. Stuff and form the Baozi. Another thing that’s a little difficult to describe with the written word. Take your ball of filling, then gently press down into the center of the bun. Pinch one side of the Baozi, then pleat around while gently pressing the filling down inside. Once you get to the edge, close it up, twist the end back to the beginning/top of the bun… and pinch it closed (thoroughly). Then take the Baozi and pleat side down roll it a bit on your work surface to make the whole thing a bit more even.

10. Place the Baozi on ~1.5 inch squares of parchment paper, then toss on a steamer. Parchment paper’s so that it doesn’t get stuck.

11. Proof the Baozi over 28 centigrade water for 15 minutes. The 28C water is just for standardization purposes. You have a bit of flexibility.

12. Move the steamer over boiling water, and steam over a medium/medium high flame for 8 minutes. Then, shut off the heat and wait at least 3 minutes. Medium flame on a Chinese range/medium high on Western. Shutting off the heat and waiting is so that the temperature doesn’t change too drastically, and the bun can better keep its shape.

Note on Portions:

Yeah, this’s where the fact that we’re not professionals at this game sometimes gets obvious. Filling for 24 Baozi, wrappers for 12. Allow me to explain.

We probably should’ve just doubled the dough but we… didn’t want to eat that much in testing and there’s only so many custard buns we can give to our neighbors before it gets weird. I also didn’t want to double the amount in the narration for the accompanying video (while still having the visual of the dough we had for twelve), because I think it’s important for those things to match up.

So… either double the dough, or take the remaining half of your custard and freeze it. If you’re going with the gooey filling, you could halve it… but with the classic steamed custard scaling down might be a bit problematic (steamed stuff can sometimes cook a bit fast if you have a small amount)… so if you’re trying to scale down the custardy filling, we’d recommend a double boiler set-up.