Great explanation of both the meat prep/fabrication and the nuances of how to use a wok for the right degree of char ... that is the sort of thing that well over 90% of all youtube recipes fail to cover, regardless of cuisine. Good job.
Hey guys, a few notes: 1. One thing that I'm a bit worried about was how we showed the heating of the hotplate kinda separate from the frying. Generally if I wasn't filming, I'd have those things going on concurrently. The onions got in right as the lamb goes in. 2. As we said in the video, the ginger-sichuan-peppercorn-water is to sorta balance out the 'shanwei' i.e. 'gaminess' of the lamb. There's three primary ingredients that do this: Sichuan peppercorn, Ginger, Liaojiu/Shaoxing Wine. There's lots of different approaches here. Some people marinate with wine and sliced ginger. Some people fry with ginger. Some people include Sichuan peppercorn in with their slice mix. Some people marinate with Sichuan peppercorn. Some people make Sichuan peppercorn water and soak like us. It's all ultimately up to you which approach you prefer. 3. In case you really don't wanna follow through into the reddit post, the Xinjiang style uses more thinly sliced meat (you can even use hotpot meat) coat it with a solid chunk of oil, and starts to fry it directly. It takes a bit of time as it starts to release moisture... then you gotta add the seasoning and move quickly. Takes a good bit of practice, super easy to have it still be a bit overly moist or a bit overcooked. 4. Some people marinate with onions, then pick out the onions... separating them right before you fry. I find that slightly irksome, lol. Feel free to do that if you like, I'd only bother if for whatever reason I was keeping the lamb in the fridge for a while before cooking. 5. The salad spinner is very much our own twist. You can squeeze this dry with a tofu/cheesecloth if you prefer. You wanna make sure the lamb's really relatively dry on the surface (you won't get it 100%), as you'll obviously be dipping this in 185C oil. 6. Many restaurants add a sprinkle of MSG to this dish, but I don't really like it with this flavor profile. Up to you. 7. So I dunno how easy it is to get super fatty lamb outside of China. Again, the fat % that we were working with wasn't really ideal... the very best pieces here are the ones with about half fat and half lean. If your lamb leg's looking a bit like ours, consider marinating with a bit of baking soda or papain to tenderize it a bit. This dish is an honorary member of our 'Western supermarket club'! ...so long as you skip the Sichuan peppercorns. I'm just gunna go ahead and add it to the playlist though ;)
Chinese Cooking Demystified To reply ... 1. PAN: Ive found that a hand made indian karai pan offers a decent compromise between the ergonomics and responsiveness of a southern style wok and the heat retention of a cast iron skillet. 2. SPICES: I didnt know sichuan pepper was water soluable ... I always thought it was oil soluable. I will definitely try a hot water infusion to test that. 7. FATTY LAMB: Yeah, i've yet to find anything but lean lamb in supermarkets here in the northeastern USA ... the only way to find anything close to well marbled lamb is to find a halal butcher early in the day, and hope to get lucky. BTW, one way to cut back on the gamey notes in leg of lamb is to always remove the waxy/fatty lymph glands from the inner side of the thigh, along with the fell (the outermost layer of fat, just below the skin). Question: does massaging the sliced meat help with tenderness in this dish the same way it does for sliced fatty beef in chili oil ?
Re Sichuan peppercorn, different flavinoids are water soluble and oil soluble. To generalize, that 'floral' quality of Sichuan peppercorn is water soluble, so if you want the flavor without the numbingness using peppercorn water is a nice route to take. As for the lamb... crap, that was my worry. They make the animals so damn lean in America. Try marinating with a touch of papain or baking soda, then washing it off. That'll make the lean a bit more tender. Lean still tastes fine using this method, but it's nowhere near as tasty as the fat! Re the massaging technique, I gotta admit that we're kinda blanking on you're talking about. You referring to slapping water into the beef? Feel free to shoot me a recipe that illustrates the technique :)
Chinese Cooking Demystified Re: Massaging Meat ... sorry for using the wrong term. I was thinking of whats referenced at the 1min 0sec mark of your vid fpr sichuan poached fatty beef. Link below. czcams.com/video/QU-IplVjFAk/video.html Not big on papin, as it seems to add a soapy texture, and velveting would make the meat slices too gloppy, which left only milk massaging the meat. As for fatty lamb again, yes it is a major longstanding pet peeve of many chefs, and myself as well, that animal fat has been unfairly villfied, to the point that all our pork and lamb (and sub USDA Prime beef) are unappetizingly lean. Change for the better is happening, albeit slowly, and so far only for pigs (in the form of heritage breeds like mangalista raised by specialty providers), not lamb, which in most parts of the country is in comparatively low demand. Compounding the problem is that most animals are fed bulk grain rather than natural forage, and flavor suffers there as well.
Ah got it. So the big thing about that is to slap in water into the beef to up its moisture content - you could do that with just plain tap water, although your riff using milk seems like a fun idea. For this dish, that's actually kind of the opposite of what we're looking to accomplish - we're trying to draw moisture out of the lamb in order to achieve that grilled meat sort of texture. Counter-intuitive, I know :) I understand what you're talking about re papain... that stuff's a bit *too* effective in my book. We're usually not too into it, but it's just such a classic with Shuizhu beef and I do like it there.
Chinese Cooking Demystified Btw, we crossed posts ... i updated and expanded my prior post. And yes i fully understood on drawing moisture out ... i just lumped massage (to soften muscle fibers) together with techniques like papin (which tenderize with enzymes) and velveting (a surface textural trick that mimics tenderness) because their goals are superficially related (tenderness), even though theyre all different.
OH MY GAWD! That looks absolutely scrummy! Just a great looking dish. You're not bad behind that wok Chris. The research, effort and time you put into every recipe/video is proof of your love for food and sharing. Just an awesome job~in every video. Thanks. Jenn 💖 in Canada 🍁
Chinese Cooking Demystified My hubby~and I am not kidding, didn't know how to boil water for almost the entirety of our living together. Really~he could not tell when it boiled. He can now boil water, boil eggs and make a salad. That's it. 😂 Good thing I love to cook! he wants to learn. But he just doesn't grasp it. We"re having fun with in this. Most of the time, 😂 Jenn 💖 in Canada 🍁
This is so exciting for me....there is one restaurant in my city that makes something exactly like this. It is absolutely my favorite thing and now a good recipe to make it at home.
Love this dish so much!!! it's one of my all time favorites! for my own personal taste its missing lamb marinade in dark soy sauce and a splash of soy sauce at the very end. I just love the richness it adds to the onions and the lamb (oh I add garlic to the onions part). But truly a spectacular dish... I hated lamb before I found this dish and since my first bite, it changed my life (literally).
I just want to say thank you. I bought a wok burner and a few woks about 6 years ago and even while learning to use them won a few cooking competitions. I’ve been absolutely enamored with Chinese cooking since I found a traditional Chinese cookbook from the 60’s in my mother’s cabinet. It’s a tough one as the translations aren’t great. Thanks for all you do. Much love from a hungry chef. :-)
Cheers! Jealous of your wok burner haha. We force ourselves to stick to that little 9K BTU guy for ease of home-kitchen replication. A buddy of mine up in Beijing had one of those 100K+ BTU guys, so much fun.
Yeah it was actually my first ever CZcams upload advertised around 100k btu if the regulator is cranked up. At half cocked it’s hot enough to glow a steel wok red. I love this thing best 100 bucks I ever spent. czcams.com/video/X28-ZWlwpos/video.html
I've been addicted to this dish ever since I first had it in a very good Chinese (mostly Sichuan) restaurant in my town in the US. I have tried to make it from western blog recipes and while it came out pretty good, it never captured the taste and texture quite like yours does. The half-ground cumin is very important. Cumin powder alone will make for a bad texture on the lamb, but whole seeds alone are also not good. So good callout there. Thanks to your videos I just pulled off 3 of my favorite dishes, Shandong Fengwei Eggplant, Dry Fried green beans, and this cumin lamb dish. Next I'm excited to try to make Laziji. So thank you!! I have one request for a recipe. In the restaurant I go to, they call it "Beef Brisket Szechuan Style Hot Pot". It has potatoes in it and a nice thin sauce. It also has pieces of something else that I can't identify, it seems like intestine, skin, or something like that. It's not an ingredient I would normally like but they cook it to absolutely perfect tenderness. Any tips what this dish is? Any chance you could take a stab at a recipe if so?
@@ChineseCookingDemystified hey, I visited Shanghai, Hangzhou, huangshu, taishan, yantai, and weihai. I think what I'm craving the most is the cold jelly bean curd noodles with veggies and sichuan oil 😍
I'm really enjoying your recipes and reference them a few times each week. With this lockdown I've gone from 8 trips a year to China to none for nearly year now. Can't wait to be able to get back there for the work and the food. In the meantime this is a life saver lol.
Tried this tonight. It was SO good!!! Discovered your channel only 1~2 months ago, and have tried multiple dishes. Very glad I found your channel! At first I was skeptical... "a white dude teaching me how to cook Chinese dishes?!?" But I very quickly realized how WRONG my init impression was! I'm from TW originally and am an engineer + home cook enthusiast. Your videos (& associated Reddit posts) hit all the right spots on: explanation of technical science behind things done, techniques/methods, conciseness, and potential substitutions/alterations. I particular like the bilingual use for ingredients and terminologies.... Allows me to be able to find stuff easier at my local 99Ranch market, and the Chinese terminologies imprint better in my memory. Oh, and the end credit music score is very catchy signature too! Now a request... more lamb recipes please! This seems to be the only lamb recipe in your channel... and I love lamb! :D
Haha I get that, honestly I'd be skeptical too. Pretty much the only other foreigners I trust as sources for Chinese food are Dunlop and Kenji. It bears emphasizing how much of this channel is Steph's brainchild too though - like, I have my own way of researching stuff... digging deep into Chinese sources online, talking to friends/people at the market, running stuff past my buddy Adam's chefs etc... but then Steph ended up one-upping me like crazy digging into decades old cookbooks, culinary school textbooks & culinary industry periodicals. Like, while I obviously know a good bit of the language, *that's* really the benefit of being a native speaker for these sorts of things, you know? That intuitive sense to be able to separate sense and nonsense when researching stuff. We'd love to do more lamb! I really wanna do the NW sort of roast 羊排... but tbh the big limiting factor's that (1) I (Chris) am going to do that dish (2) I always need to test things like 3-4 times more often than Steph and (3) we live in Guangdong, so that'll get *pricey*.
@@ChineseCookingDemystified Yeah, I think that's what makes your channel so good. Your complementary backgrounds make you two, Chris + Steph, such a great team on this! My Chinese skill is only at 6th grade level (that's when I emigrated, some 35+ yrs ago), thus English is much better for me on detailed info conveyance. But I still know enough Chinese to find their appearance useful. Thus for me, you hit the perfect harmonic ratio on this! Otherwise, I would end up spending too much time on my old Chinese Wei-Chuan cookbooks (味全食譜), cross-translating between their Chinese & English sections... just to be sure I didn't miss any nuances... than actually cooking and experimenting! :D But maybe I should do that more now also... Understood on your constraints for doing lamb. So far the other lamb recipe i've used is the 羊肉串 one from SeriousEats. I'm familiar with Kenji (I'm in SF Bay Area), but had to look up Dunlop. Will start researching into her more! thx
Cheers! Also look into "Phoenix Claws and Jade Trees" by Kian Liam Kho if you're looking into cookbooks. Singaporean Cantonese that immigrated to Boston IIRC, he's a proper chef and did a really nice book on techniques. Probably the only cookbook in English that I'll sometimes find myself flipping though - his discussion on the old-style Shanzha sweet & sour pork was the inspiration to do that video.
Strange coincidence....I was thinking of making this at the weekend, found several different recipes and thought about whether you would make this recipe one day!
Speaking about chinese bbq. How about making a video showing how to make that amazing muslim (?) bbq you can find in china. It's usually chicken wings or skewers with meat. A little bit spicy, and i guess there's a healthy dose cumin as well. Additionally i would like a video showing how to make the garlicy, vinegary cabbage stir fry that is usually found at the same places. I tried a lot of times, but just can't get it right. As always, amazing work making these videos!
Yeah, we really gotta do one. Big question for us though - should we test on a Chinese or Western grill? Food's *way* closer to the coals on a Chinese grill, but I think more people would be able to replicate on Western. Tough choice.
I think I had something like this at a restaurant inside a pan-asian supermarket last week, it was billed as "stir-fried beef with cumin" It was definitely beef, and the cumin was more of a powder, but everything else was on point with your recipe here. It was frickin' amazing.
Looks incredible. I can't wait to try this. I think I'll cook it outside so as to avoid smoking out my apartment, and also to make my neighbors super jealous.
@@user-ml8dl4rh1e Yes, It originated in Xinjiang, but it made its way to Hunan is quite popular there. They adopted it a bit, like marinating the beef in alcohol, which the Uyghur muslims would probably not do.
Yep, we've got a few more Dim Sum dishes to sort first though... notably Pineapple Buns and Har Gow. Our most recent vid that we just uploaded today's vegetarian if you wanna check it out... and our vid two weeks from now'll be Wuhan hot dry noodles, which would be vegetarian with a small tweak.
Chinese Cooking Demystified Well, livestocks that aren't pigs. Traditionally sheep, but nowadays it depends on countries. Here in SE Asia, mutton are pretty popular (goat relatively cheap compared to, say, cows).
I'm about to say this as well. I wonder if this channel post the recipe knowing that in a week muslims will celebrate eid- Al adha. Traditionally, in where I live, we eat alot of lamb on this day. This recipe is perfect, all the ingredients are also easy to find. Thanks!
Thanks for so many wonderful videos! After 7 years of living in China, thanks to your videos, I’m finally learning Chinese cooking. When my Chinese friends tried to teach me before, they would say things like, “add some of this” or “it’s a sense” of how much to add, but I don’t have any sense about it not having grown up with Chinese food! I love that your videos are authentic but also precise enough that it really does demystify the process for Westerners who are used to more exact measurements and explanations in recipes. One question I have about this video - what is the Hanzi for “30 to 40 percent fat” so that I can correctly ask for the lamb at a Chinese market?
Haha I totally feel that. "适量" was like the bane of my existence first learning Chinese food. In a sense, we really wanted to make these videos in a way that I myself (Chris) would've found them helpful if that makes any sense? So while we definitely try to hit a few different notes, I think these vids might be the *most* relevant to people like yourself, i.e. long term expats in China. Re 30-40% fat, that was kinda an estimate. When you're at the market, just ask for a bit fattier of a piece of lamb leg... i.e. "羊腿，肥一点", possibly also telling them what you're making (I've found that vendors can often be super helpful if you just tell them what you're trying to cook... sometimes even telling you a basic process of how they'd go about it).
omg i ate this ( i think) it was lamb and was spicy stir fry with some sauce. Could it be this. I literally went to your channel to see if you guys did this food
bro not everything lamb is Xinjiang related, this is popular in Sichuan and all across the country and made by every ethnic group. Lamb is enjoyed everywhere in colder climates in Chiina
Some people use cornstarch with this recipe, though most restaurants don't. Feel free to give a bit of a dusting w/ starch before frying if you'd like!
Hi there, can u make some video recipe for popular hing hwa/putian dish, or popular fujian dish? im really interested in your video espc when you make the charsiu using a "ancient" recipe, that is pretty authentic and distinguishable from other recipe.
You actually did the lamb recipe, YAY! Not a fan of cumin tho, still this looks great, will probably try it soon. Not related to the meat used in the video, but what do you do with the "prime" cuts of beef (rib-eye, new york, tenderloin and such) in China. It has recently caught my attention that most recipes call only for the "cheap" cuts, while the "expensive" ones are only sometimes called for in a few stirfrys.
Super generally speaking, stir fry or hot pot. It's worth noting however that even though we're super spoiled re other sorts of ingredients, beef quality in China is not as high as it is in the West. So using, say, sirloin to stir-fry isn't really any different than using pork loin conceptually. The cut that would be a NY strip is 45 RMB ($6.50) per 500g at my local Halal beef shop... chuck is 38 RMB ($5.50) for the same amount.
Thanks for the answer. That looks expensive, at least compared to where i live, NY here costs what would be equal to $10 dollars a kilo and it's even good quality stuff.
Up north it's cheaper. IIRC in Beijing at the beef/lamb markets it's about half the price of what we pay down here in Guangdong. Fish and seafood are super cheap though - like, in season we can get live, fresh shrimp for USD ~$3 a half kilo.
Would love to have cheap and decent fish and seafood here :(, can't have it all i guess. I may be nagging you with all my questions, but i love learning about China, you got a wonderful country! Anyway here it goes: is meat as rare in China as it is in Japan? Or does it depend from province to province? Also, if you're ever curious about mexican food, culture or want to learn a REAL recipe (most of what is in english is just tex-mex crap tbh), send me a message, that's the least i can do in appreciation for your channel since i ain't got money for shit.
Hmm... neither of us have been to Japan, so it's a bit tough to say. I would say that the diet is a bit less meat heavy than, say, it is in America. In the USA, a normal meal might be a big hunk of meat, with 'sides'. Here, a normal meal might be one meat dish, one veg dish, one tofu/fish dish, soup, white rice... all shared family-style. So a lower % of calories consumed if that makes any sense? Obviously, meat's more expensive so there was less of it when times weren't as good. And I do have a question about Mexican food! Just the other day when we were doing the Zongzi vid I had an 'aha' moment. We were chatting about how they deshelled the mungbeans - apparently by soaking in lye water - which immediately made me think about Nixtamalization. Poking around, apparently in the Guangxi province they 'deshell' corn in the same way. So I've got this sort of hominy-looking stuff (www.taobao.com/list/product-amp/%E8%84%B1%E5%A3%B3%E7%8E%89%E7%B1%B3%E7%B2%92.htm ) and wanna make tortillas. Any advice on how (1) to get that into masa? just grind it up? (2) any nice techniques to make a corn tortilla without a press?
@FrostedCreations don't be a twat, we all pronounce things differently depending on where we are from and as long as you know what he meant why mention it?
Hmm so this is a Northeastern dish, so really whatever NE-style food you're feeling. We've got a small Beijing/NE playlist here: czcams.com/play/PLrwj0yE_2deBNxFBgNUIzO5pCmKOLjRCG.html If I was cooking this for people... I'd probably whip up this, some dumplings, and a veg dish (maybe Disanxian?)
I have to say , followed this to the "T" exact and it came out rather flavorless and very underwhelming. Used exact ingredients, pre wash, etc etc. ....even grinded whole cumin to the instructions...I saw many other dishes like this use a chili oil or soy sauce ....without question it needed more salt after final cook in the skillet. Curious your thoughts @chinesecookingdemystified?
If it came out flavorless I would suggest that you either didn't use enough cumin/chili powder for your ratio of lamb, or perhaps your spices themselves were old/bad. This is a dish that is extremely bursting in flavor when done right.
East Turkistan (Xinjian) is not Chinese food, it is Uyghur food, and you are not just commiting genocide but also appropriating their food and culture.
thank you for your great recipe, i turned off the smoke alarm and my house was burnt to the ground. but i love that lamb tho, so it's worth it i guess
😂
Great explanation of both the meat prep/fabrication and the nuances of how to use a wok for the right degree of char ... that is the sort of thing that well over 90% of all youtube recipes fail to cover, regardless of cuisine.
Good job.
Spam duo reported
Hey guys, a few notes:
1. One thing that I'm a bit worried about was how we showed the heating of the hotplate kinda separate from the frying. Generally if I wasn't filming, I'd have those things going on concurrently. The onions got in right as the lamb goes in.
2. As we said in the video, the ginger-sichuan-peppercorn-water is to sorta balance out the 'shanwei' i.e. 'gaminess' of the lamb. There's three primary ingredients that do this: Sichuan peppercorn, Ginger, Liaojiu/Shaoxing Wine. There's lots of different approaches here. Some people marinate with wine and sliced ginger. Some people fry with ginger. Some people include Sichuan peppercorn in with their slice mix. Some people marinate with Sichuan peppercorn. Some people make Sichuan peppercorn water and soak like us. It's all ultimately up to you which approach you prefer.
3. In case you really don't wanna follow through into the reddit post, the Xinjiang style uses more thinly sliced meat (you can even use hotpot meat) coat it with a solid chunk of oil, and starts to fry it directly. It takes a bit of time as it starts to release moisture... then you gotta add the seasoning and move quickly. Takes a good bit of practice, super easy to have it still be a bit overly moist or a bit overcooked.
4. Some people marinate with onions, then pick out the onions... separating them right before you fry. I find that slightly irksome, lol. Feel free to do that if you like, I'd only bother if for whatever reason I was keeping the lamb in the fridge for a while before cooking.
5. The salad spinner is very much our own twist. You can squeeze this dry with a tofu/cheesecloth if you prefer. You wanna make sure the lamb's really relatively dry on the surface (you won't get it 100%), as you'll obviously be dipping this in 185C oil.
6. Many restaurants add a sprinkle of MSG to this dish, but I don't really like it with this flavor profile. Up to you.
7. So I dunno how easy it is to get super fatty lamb outside of China. Again, the fat % that we were working with wasn't really ideal... the very best pieces here are the ones with about half fat and half lean. If your lamb leg's looking a bit like ours, consider marinating with a bit of baking soda or papain to tenderize it a bit.
This dish is an honorary member of our 'Western supermarket club'! ...so long as you skip the Sichuan peppercorns. I'm just gunna go ahead and add it to the playlist though ;)
Chinese Cooking Demystified To reply ...
1. PAN: Ive found that a hand made indian karai pan offers a decent compromise between the ergonomics and responsiveness of a southern style wok and the heat retention of a cast iron skillet.
2. SPICES: I didnt know sichuan pepper was water soluable ... I always thought it was oil soluable. I will definitely try a hot water infusion to test that.
7. FATTY LAMB: Yeah, i've yet to find anything but lean lamb in supermarkets here in the northeastern USA ... the only way to find anything close to well marbled lamb is to find a halal butcher early in the day, and hope to get lucky.
BTW, one way to cut back on the gamey notes in leg of lamb is to always remove the waxy/fatty lymph glands from the inner side of the thigh, along with the fell (the outermost layer of fat, just below the skin).
Question: does massaging the sliced meat help with tenderness in this dish the same way it does for sliced fatty beef in chili oil ?
Re Sichuan peppercorn, different flavinoids are water soluble and oil soluble. To generalize, that 'floral' quality of Sichuan peppercorn is water soluble, so if you want the flavor without the numbingness using peppercorn water is a nice route to take.
As for the lamb... crap, that was my worry. They make the animals so damn lean in America. Try marinating with a touch of papain or baking soda, then washing it off. That'll make the lean a bit more tender. Lean still tastes fine using this method, but it's nowhere near as tasty as the fat!
Re the massaging technique, I gotta admit that we're kinda blanking on you're talking about. You referring to slapping water into the beef? Feel free to shoot me a recipe that illustrates the technique :)
Chinese Cooking Demystified Re: Massaging Meat ... sorry for using the wrong term. I was thinking of whats referenced at the 1min 0sec mark of your vid fpr sichuan poached fatty beef. Link below.
czcams.com/video/QU-IplVjFAk/video.html
Not big on papin, as it seems to add a soapy texture, and velveting would make the meat slices too gloppy, which left only milk massaging the meat.
As for fatty lamb again, yes it is a major longstanding pet peeve of many chefs, and myself as well, that animal fat has been unfairly villfied, to the point that all our pork and lamb (and sub USDA Prime beef) are unappetizingly lean. Change for the better is happening, albeit slowly, and so far only for pigs (in the form of heritage breeds like mangalista raised by specialty providers), not lamb, which in most parts of the country is in comparatively low demand.
Compounding the problem is that most animals are fed bulk grain rather than natural forage, and flavor suffers there as well.
Ah got it. So the big thing about that is to slap in water into the beef to up its moisture content - you could do that with just plain tap water, although your riff using milk seems like a fun idea.
For this dish, that's actually kind of the opposite of what we're looking to accomplish - we're trying to draw moisture out of the lamb in order to achieve that grilled meat sort of texture. Counter-intuitive, I know :)
I understand what you're talking about re papain... that stuff's a bit *too* effective in my book. We're usually not too into it, but it's just such a classic with Shuizhu beef and I do like it there.
Chinese Cooking Demystified Btw, we crossed posts ... i updated and expanded my prior post.
And yes i fully understood on drawing moisture out ... i just lumped massage (to soften muscle fibers) together with techniques like papin (which tenderize with enzymes) and velveting (a surface textural trick that mimics tenderness) because their goals are superficially related (tenderness), even though theyre all different.
Using terms like "myoglobin water" definitely proves that CZcams never dumbs down the content. 😀
OH MY GAWD!
That looks absolutely scrummy! Just a great looking dish. You're not bad behind that wok Chris.
The research, effort and time you put into every recipe/video is proof of your love for food and sharing.
Just an awesome job~in every video.
Thanks.
Jenn 💖 in Canada 🍁
Haha as the Char Siu Bao video proved... Steph's definitely lapped me, but I like to think I can still cook ;)
Chinese Cooking Demystified
My hubby~and I am not kidding, didn't know how to boil water for almost the entirety of our living together. Really~he could not tell when it boiled.
He can now boil water, boil eggs and make a salad. That's it. 😂 Good thing I love to cook! he wants to learn. But he just doesn't grasp it.
We"re having fun with in this. Most of the time, 😂
Jenn 💖 in Canada 🍁
This is so exciting for me....there is one restaurant in my city that makes something exactly like this. It is absolutely my favorite thing and now a good recipe to make it at home.
Love this dish so much!!! it's one of my all time favorites! for my own personal taste its missing lamb marinade in dark soy sauce and a splash of soy sauce at the very end. I just love the richness it adds to the onions and the lamb (oh I add garlic to the onions part). But truly a spectacular dish... I hated lamb before I found this dish and since my first bite, it changed my life (literally).
So, what you're trying to say is... where's the lamb sauce?
I just want to say thank you. I bought a wok burner and a few woks about 6 years ago and even while learning to use them won a few cooking competitions. I’ve been absolutely enamored with Chinese cooking since I found a traditional Chinese cookbook from the 60’s in my mother’s cabinet. It’s a tough one as the translations aren’t great. Thanks for all you do. Much love from a hungry chef. :-)
Cheers! Jealous of your wok burner haha. We force ourselves to stick to that little 9K BTU guy for ease of home-kitchen replication. A buddy of mine up in Beijing had one of those 100K+ BTU guys, so much fun.
Yeah it was actually my first ever CZcams upload advertised around 100k btu if the regulator is cranked up. At half cocked it’s hot enough to glow a steel wok red. I love this thing best 100 bucks I ever spent.
czcams.com/video/X28-ZWlwpos/video.html
I've been addicted to this dish ever since I first had it in a very good Chinese (mostly Sichuan) restaurant in my town in the US. I have tried to make it from western blog recipes and while it came out pretty good, it never captured the taste and texture quite like yours does.
The half-ground cumin is very important. Cumin powder alone will make for a bad texture on the lamb, but whole seeds alone are also not good. So good callout there.
Thanks to your videos I just pulled off 3 of my favorite dishes, Shandong Fengwei Eggplant, Dry Fried green beans, and this cumin lamb dish. Next I'm excited to try to make Laziji. So thank you!!
I have one request for a recipe. In the restaurant I go to, they call it "Beef Brisket Szechuan Style Hot Pot". It has potatoes in it and a nice thin sauce. It also has pieces of something else that I can't identify, it seems like intestine, skin, or something like that. It's not an ingredient I would normally like but they cook it to absolutely perfect tenderness.
Any tips what this dish is? Any chance you could take a stab at a recipe if so?
Thank you so much for your videos. I have just finished my first trip to China and will be referencing your recipes for the dishes I miss!
Ah nice, where'd you travel to? Any dishes you're craving in particular?
@@ChineseCookingDemystified hey, I visited Shanghai, Hangzhou, huangshu, taishan, yantai, and weihai. I think what I'm craving the most is the cold jelly bean curd noodles with veggies and sichuan oil 😍
I'm really enjoying your recipes and reference them a few times each week. With this lockdown I've gone from 8 trips a year to China to none for nearly year now. Can't wait to be able to get back there for the work and the food. In the meantime this is a life saver lol.
Tried this tonight. It was SO good!!!
Discovered your channel only 1~2 months ago, and have tried multiple dishes. Very glad I found your channel! At first I was skeptical... "a white dude teaching me how to cook Chinese dishes?!?" But I very quickly realized how WRONG my init impression was! I'm from TW originally and am an engineer + home cook enthusiast. Your videos (& associated Reddit posts) hit all the right spots on: explanation of technical science behind things done, techniques/methods, conciseness, and potential substitutions/alterations. I particular like the bilingual use for ingredients and terminologies.... Allows me to be able to find stuff easier at my local 99Ranch market, and the Chinese terminologies imprint better in my memory. Oh, and the end credit music score is very catchy signature too!
Now a request... more lamb recipes please! This seems to be the only lamb recipe in your channel... and I love lamb! :D
Haha I get that, honestly I'd be skeptical too. Pretty much the only other foreigners I trust as sources for Chinese food are Dunlop and Kenji.
It bears emphasizing how much of this channel is Steph's brainchild too though - like, I have my own way of researching stuff... digging deep into Chinese sources online, talking to friends/people at the market, running stuff past my buddy Adam's chefs etc... but then Steph ended up one-upping me like crazy digging into decades old cookbooks, culinary school textbooks & culinary industry periodicals. Like, while I obviously know a good bit of the language, *that's* really the benefit of being a native speaker for these sorts of things, you know? That intuitive sense to be able to separate sense and nonsense when researching stuff.
We'd love to do more lamb! I really wanna do the NW sort of roast 羊排... but tbh the big limiting factor's that (1) I (Chris) am going to do that dish (2) I always need to test things like 3-4 times more often than Steph and (3) we live in Guangdong, so that'll get *pricey*.
@@ChineseCookingDemystified Yeah, I think that's what makes your channel so good. Your complementary backgrounds make you two, Chris + Steph, such a great team on this!
My Chinese skill is only at 6th grade level (that's when I emigrated, some 35+ yrs ago), thus English is much better for me on detailed info conveyance. But I still know enough Chinese to find their appearance useful. Thus for me, you hit the perfect harmonic ratio on this!
Otherwise, I would end up spending too much time on my old Chinese Wei-Chuan cookbooks (味全食譜), cross-translating between their Chinese & English sections... just to be sure I didn't miss any nuances... than actually cooking and experimenting! :D But maybe I should do that more now also...
Understood on your constraints for doing lamb. So far the other lamb recipe i've used is the 羊肉串 one from SeriousEats.
I'm familiar with Kenji (I'm in SF Bay Area), but had to look up Dunlop. Will start researching into her more! thx
Cheers! Also look into "Phoenix Claws and Jade Trees" by Kian Liam Kho if you're looking into cookbooks. Singaporean Cantonese that immigrated to Boston IIRC, he's a proper chef and did a really nice book on techniques. Probably the only cookbook in English that I'll sometimes find myself flipping though - his discussion on the old-style Shanzha sweet & sour pork was the inspiration to do that video.
man this looks absolutely terrific
I envy your neighbours. The smells wafting from your balcony must be amazing.
Popping oil is inevitable, looks like I might need a riot sheild and a cooking mit to make this one
Jay Bee a lid will do the job
Strange coincidence....I was thinking of making this at the weekend, found several different recipes and thought about whether you would make this recipe one day!
Speaking about chinese bbq. How about making a video showing how to make that amazing muslim (?) bbq you can find in china. It's usually chicken wings or skewers with meat. A little bit spicy, and i guess there's a healthy dose cumin as well. Additionally i would like a video showing how to make the garlicy, vinegary cabbage stir fry that is usually found at the same places. I tried a lot of times, but just can't get it right. As always, amazing work making these videos!
Yeah, we really gotta do one. Big question for us though - should we test on a Chinese or Western grill? Food's *way* closer to the coals on a Chinese grill, but I think more people would be able to replicate on Western. Tough choice.
Actually this is what served at Xi'an Famous Foods as a topping for their Biang-Biang noodles.
thanks Chef 👨🍳Chris. Great meal. my kids are Cambodian and American blood. they love it. thanks 👩🍳 Chef. Steph taste tester 😁😋😇😎☝️❤️📹🌶🫑🍜🥡
I think I had something like this at a restaurant inside a pan-asian supermarket last week, it was billed as "stir-fried beef with cumin" It was definitely beef, and the cumin was more of a powder, but everything else was on point with your recipe here. It was frickin' amazing.
great episode with the dry fry!
Let's call this a 'true dry fry', unlike ganbian which I strongly believe should be translated 'fried-til-dry' :)
love this dish.. hard to come by
Looks incredible. I can't wait to try this. I think I'll cook it outside so as to avoid smoking out my apartment, and also to make my neighbors super jealous.
love your vids!
I'm guessing this is one of those dishes where if it doesn't irritate your throat and make you cough while cooking, you're not doing it properly 😅
Wow wonderful cooking I like Xinjiang food…
Thank you so much for doing this!!
Cheers, hopefully this wasn't too far off from the style that you were looking for!
Chinese Cooking Demystified yeah!! I may make yr handpulled noodles to go with this. Should be delicious
I see people from northwest eating this with Roujiamo~That would be fun.
Have you come across Zi Ran Niu Rou, a blazing hot cumin-beef dish from Hunan?
Lars Westerhausen OK that's cumin beef, it's not from Hunan, it's from northwestern China even though you probably ate it in Hunan
@@user-ml8dl4rh1e Yes, It originated in Xinjiang, but it made its way to Hunan is quite popular there. They adopted it a bit, like marinating the beef in alcohol, which the Uyghur muslims would probably not do.
Please can you do daikon radish cakes?
And maybe some more vegetarian recipes if possible? :) you guys are the best!
Yep, we've got a few more Dim Sum dishes to sort first though... notably Pineapple Buns and Har Gow. Our most recent vid that we just uploaded today's vegetarian if you wanna check it out... and our vid two weeks from now'll be Wuhan hot dry noodles, which would be vegetarian with a small tweak.
amazing! And yes I have Looking forward to it ^_^ will check out today's veg recipe now, exciting!
Trivia comment: One week for now will be Eid Al-Adha/ Eid Al-Haj. That means one week for learning to cook this. :D
Ah cool, what do you guys usually eat around that time?
Chinese Cooking Demystified Well, livestocks that aren't pigs. Traditionally sheep, but nowadays it depends on countries. Here in SE Asia, mutton are pretty popular (goat relatively cheap compared to, say, cows).
I'm about to say this as well. I wonder if this channel post the recipe knowing that in a week muslims will celebrate eid- Al adha. Traditionally, in where I live, we eat alot of lamb on this day. This recipe is perfect, all the ingredients are also easy to find.
Thanks!
Cheers guys, just a happy accident! Let us know how it turns out :)
Thanks for so many wonderful videos! After 7 years of living in China, thanks to your videos, I’m finally learning Chinese cooking. When my Chinese friends tried to teach me before, they would say things like, “add some of this” or “it’s a sense” of how much to add, but I don’t have any sense about it not having grown up with Chinese food! I love that your videos are authentic but also precise enough that it really does demystify the process for Westerners who are used to more exact measurements and explanations in recipes. One question I have about this video - what is the Hanzi for “30 to 40 percent fat” so that I can correctly ask for the lamb at a Chinese market?
Haha I totally feel that. "适量" was like the bane of my existence first learning Chinese food. In a sense, we really wanted to make these videos in a way that I myself (Chris) would've found them helpful if that makes any sense? So while we definitely try to hit a few different notes, I think these vids might be the *most* relevant to people like yourself, i.e. long term expats in China.
Re 30-40% fat, that was kinda an estimate. When you're at the market, just ask for a bit fattier of a piece of lamb leg... i.e. "羊腿，肥一点", possibly also telling them what you're making (I've found that vendors can often be super helpful if you just tell them what you're trying to cook... sometimes even telling you a basic process of how they'd go about it).
Chinese Cooking Demystified super helpful! Thank you!
ART
omg i ate this ( i think) it was lamb and was spicy stir fry with some sauce. Could it be this. I literally went to your channel to see if you guys did this food
PLEASE DO HOT AND SOUR SOUP....You are the Alton Brown of Authentic Chinese cooking.....Thank you...Hot and Sour Soup!
bro not everything lamb is Xinjiang related, this is popular in Sichuan and all across the country and made by every ethnic group. Lamb is enjoyed everywhere in colder climates in Chiina
Do you have to use lamb leg or is there anoher good lamb part? My grocery store doesnt have lamb leg unfortunately.
Anything with a good bit of fat'll do ok :)
I can smell it through the screen.
Pour this over biang biang noodles! Supposedly it's not just in the west that does that but Xi'an as well.
I don’t see salt in the ingredient. I never cooked without salt. Don’t know how it’s going to taste.
say coomin one more time dude
There is also another one I like stirred fried lambs that covered with flour I don't know the name
Some people use cornstarch with this recipe, though most restaurants don't. Feel free to give a bit of a dusting w/ starch before frying if you'd like!
K-yu-min, Ky-oo-min
Hi there, can u make some video recipe for popular hing hwa/putian dish, or popular fujian dish? im really interested in your video espc when you make the charsiu using a "ancient" recipe, that is pretty authentic and distinguishable from other recipe.
We just traveled to Fujian, there's a few dishes we're looking to try to do from there :)
Chinese Cooking Demystified great i cant wait for your new authentic recipe video for the region :)
I want to see the it who is cooking.. love ❤️ his voice
Any thoughts on how to not set off every smoke alarm I have?
You actually did the lamb recipe, YAY! Not a fan of cumin tho, still this looks great, will probably try it soon.
Not related to the meat used in the video, but what do you do with the "prime" cuts of beef (rib-eye, new york, tenderloin and such) in China. It has recently caught my attention that most recipes call only for the "cheap" cuts, while the "expensive" ones are only sometimes called for in a few stirfrys.
Super generally speaking, stir fry or hot pot.
It's worth noting however that even though we're super spoiled re other sorts of ingredients, beef quality in China is not as high as it is in the West. So using, say, sirloin to stir-fry isn't really any different than using pork loin conceptually. The cut that would be a NY strip is 45 RMB ($6.50) per 500g at my local Halal beef shop... chuck is 38 RMB ($5.50) for the same amount.
Thanks for the answer. That looks expensive, at least compared to where i live, NY here costs what would be equal to $10 dollars a kilo and it's even good quality stuff.
Up north it's cheaper. IIRC in Beijing at the beef/lamb markets it's about half the price of what we pay down here in Guangdong. Fish and seafood are super cheap though - like, in season we can get live, fresh shrimp for USD ~$3 a half kilo.
Would love to have cheap and decent fish and seafood here :(, can't have it all i guess.
I may be nagging you with all my questions, but i love learning about China, you got a wonderful country! Anyway here it goes: is meat as rare in China as it is in Japan? Or does it depend from province to province?
Also, if you're ever curious about mexican food, culture or want to learn a REAL recipe (most of what is in english is just tex-mex crap tbh), send me a message, that's the least i can do in appreciation for your channel since i ain't got money for shit.
Hmm... neither of us have been to Japan, so it's a bit tough to say. I would say that the diet is a bit less meat heavy than, say, it is in America. In the USA, a normal meal might be a big hunk of meat, with 'sides'. Here, a normal meal might be one meat dish, one veg dish, one tofu/fish dish, soup, white rice... all shared family-style. So a lower % of calories consumed if that makes any sense?
Obviously, meat's more expensive so there was less of it when times weren't as good.
And I do have a question about Mexican food! Just the other day when we were doing the Zongzi vid I had an 'aha' moment. We were chatting about how they deshelled the mungbeans - apparently by soaking in lye water - which immediately made me think about Nixtamalization. Poking around, apparently in the Guangxi province they 'deshell' corn in the same way. So I've got this sort of hominy-looking stuff (www.taobao.com/list/product-amp/%E8%84%B1%E5%A3%B3%E7%8E%89%E7%B1%B3%E7%B2%92.htm ) and wanna make tortillas. Any advice on how (1) to get that into masa? just grind it up? (2) any nice techniques to make a corn tortilla without a press?
Is it COO-MIN or CUE-MIN ?
Can't make this in my apartment kitchen with it's inadequate range fan :(
if i dont have szechuan pepper what can i substitute with?
Just skip it.
I've never bothered washing lamb, but it might be good if they sold you skinny pink mutton as lamb lol
Suddenly after the sizzle his voice changed to a chinese woman talking
What’s this trend of using black fonts on a white background as profile pictures of Chinese-themed channels?
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_calligraphy
I think it refers to this typical chinese tradition
What other veggies can I add to the stirfry? Green bell peppers maybe?
Can i request for Bak Kwa (pork jerky)
It's a tough one to get right, we've had some failures before. We'll toss one out as soon as we figure it out :)
Cooomin? It's cumin. But looks good.
Haha it's apparently an American English vs British English thing. "Q-min" just feels so unnatural to me.
@Chinese Cooking Demystified - We pronounce it the same way you do, in Chicago. I've never heard anybody say "Q-min"
Might be a midwest thing? I'm from Pittsburgh originally, which's kinda part of that linguistic sphere.
@FrostedCreations don't be a twat, we all pronounce things differently depending on where we are from and as long as you know what he meant why mention it?
@@ChineseCookingDemystified yep Aussies and poms say cue-min, accents huh, we pronounce the H in herb too lol
Silly to wash after you sliced the meat, washing away the lamb taste and nutrients.
What do you generally serve this with?
Hmm so this is a Northeastern dish, so really whatever NE-style food you're feeling. We've got a small Beijing/NE playlist here: czcams.com/play/PLrwj0yE_2deBNxFBgNUIzO5pCmKOLjRCG.html
If I was cooking this for people... I'd probably whip up this, some dumplings, and a veg dish (maybe Disanxian?)
I have to say , followed this to the "T" exact and it came out rather flavorless and very underwhelming. Used exact ingredients, pre wash, etc etc. ....even grinded whole cumin to the instructions...I saw many other dishes like this use a chili oil or soy sauce ....without question it needed more salt after final cook in the skillet. Curious your thoughts @chinesecookingdemystified?
If it came out flavorless I would suggest that you either didn't use enough cumin/chili powder for your ratio of lamb, or perhaps your spices themselves were old/bad. This is a dish that is extremely bursting in flavor when done right.
It’s uyghur not Xinjiang people.
T
The pronunciation of “coooomen” makes it almost unwatchable.
It’s just not this complicated really lol 🙄
Coms on you should not be added those Coriander it will dominate the mutton and besides it's sucks 😕
Someone didn't watch the entire video
*Sees onions*
wtf
Immediately attention grabbed
East Turkistan (Xinjian) is not Chinese food, it is Uyghur food, and you are not just commiting genocide but also appropriating their food and culture.
please do not use "xin jiang" to describe chinese-occupied east turkestan
Coomin