Chinese Cooking Demystified

24

Chinese Cooking Demystified 's Posts

Zaolu Pickle Sauce! This is an awesome ingredient from Zhejiang that I haven’t seen much about in English language sources – and when I have seen it mentioned, about half the time I’ve seen it lumped into ‘zui’ or ‘drunken’ dishes. I hope we’re not somehow aggravating the confusion by… Continue Reading How to Make and Use Zaolu Pickle Sauce (自制糟卤)

This dish uses purely meat! Just fair warning to the vegetarians out there 🙂 Sichuan Chicken Tofu’s a nice dish that, I think, stands a lot of assumptions many Westerners have about tofu on their head. This dish uses chicken breast to mimic the texture of tofu by combining it… Continue Reading Using Chicken to Make 'Tofu' – Sichuan Jidouhua (鸡豆花)

MSG noodles – yep, you read that right (a direct translation of the Chinese – 味精素面). They’re a classic dish from Leshan, a great food city a couple hours south of Chengdu. They’re a pretty easy dish all things considered – basically just a mix of MSG, chili oil, and… Continue Reading Sichuan MSG Noodles (味精素面)

Chili oil chuanchuan xiang! There’s a few different variants, but we went with the variety that soaks the skewers for hours in a spicy broth – classic street food fare in Sichuan. The skewers are totally up to you. At its core, this is a mix of six parts stock… Continue Reading Chuanchuan Xiang – How to Make Sichuan Street Food Chili Oil Skewers (红油串串香)

A video that should’ve been put out a long time ago 🙂 Stocks are a building block in cooking, and Chinese cuisine’s no different. We wanted to teach you three different stocks that could perhaps be thought of as differing ‘grades’: a basic home-style stock using scraps (Maotang), a fancier… Continue Reading Three Chinese Stocks – Simple Home-style, Cantonese Superior, and Shandong Consommé

Hengyang Yufen! An absolute classic from Hunan, this rice noodle is a deceptively easy thing to whip up – basically just rice noodles in with a mildly spicy, milky fish soup that is *way* more than the sum of its parts. 0:00 – Hengyang’s Famed Rice Noodles 0:34 – Why… Continue Reading Hunan Fried Fish Noodle Soup (鱼粉)

Zha Jiang Mian are a classic Beijing noodle dish that features a sticky, chunky bean sauce. We wanted to show you how to make the sauce, but because this dish is often served with hand rolled noodles, we figured it’d be important to show you how to make that, too.… Continue Reading Zha Jiang Noodles, Old Beijing-style (老北京炸酱面)

Stir-fried clams can be found throughout China, and we’ve done a Cantonese variety with garlic and douchi (fermented black soybeans). Now we also wanted to show you guys a different sort of variety, so as I was saying in the video, check out sarcasmo57’s spicy Hubei version here: Detailed, written… Continue Reading Stir Fried Clams – Cantonese-style with Garlic and Fermented Black Soybeans (豉汁炒花蛤)

The ever popular Sichuan Mapo Tofu! If you’re a bit on the fence about tofu, this is definitely one of the best ‘gateway tofu’ dishes. This dish is the “Mala” flavor profile, meaning that it’s going to feature a combination of heat and that characteristic numbing flavor of the Sichuan… Continue Reading How to Make Authentic Chinese Mapo Tofu (麻婆豆腐)

“Liaojiu, a.k.a. Shaoxing wine.” I know I say that quite a bit in these recipes, so here, I wanted to explain myself a bit. We’ll go over the varieties of Shaoxing wine (plus, the Shaoxing wine-like objects labeled such in English), a bit about the historical background, and why/how it’s… Continue Reading What is Shaoxing Wine, and why's it in almost every Chinese recipe?