ChineseCookingDemystified

What is 'Chinese Valentine's Day' Food, Traditionally?

On the 7th day of the 7th lunar month – coming up this August 29th – throngs of couples will celebrate Qixi, commonly translated as “Chinese Valentine’s Day”. For a flower shop, it’s one of the busiest days of the year. Ditto for a western restaurant, or any similarly photogenic ‘ro...

Early Look: "Stir Fry Sauce" and the Western Weeknight Stir Fry

I’ve always loved the dishes that sit awkwardly in between cultures: the well-done Cantonese steaks, the Canadian Hawaiian Pizzas, the Japanese boxed curries.

They give a rare honest prism into how the world views actually eachother’s food… but above all, they’re fun. They ...

Early Look: The Best Fried Wontons (in my opinion)

I have probably overly developed opinions on the topic of deep fried wontons.

Everybody loves a deep-fried wonton, of course, but they’re among my favorite dishes to order at a Cantonese restaurant. Given that they’re a perennial foreigner favorite, I’m probably living up to somebody'...

Early Look: Macau's (Puzzling) Tamarind Pork

Porco Balichão Tamarindo is a Macanese dish, and it’s not just a tasty stew — it’s a dish that really changed the way I looked at food, and how food spreads.

The city of Macau, of course, wears its cross cultural influences on its sleeves. While you can fin...

Early Look: Breakfast Potato Pancake Rolls (土豆丝卷饼)

If there’s one thing that I – and most foreigners in China, it seems – love, it’s some kind of bing in the morning.

There’s a lot of great breakfasts that can be had in China, of course. Doesn’t matter the city, you’re usually not overly far away from some sort of bre...

Early Look: Guizhou Master Stock Noodle Soup (卤粉)

Lushui — Chinese master stock — is something you can find all across the country. It might be a bit more concentrated in the south (Cantonese and Teochew-style master stocks are quite famous)… but there’s equally Sichuan-style master stock, Yunnan-style master stock, Henan-style ...

Sichuan Chili Oil: The Complete Guide

As a home cook, I’ve always hated what I call ‘nested’ recipes.

You know the sort —open up some cookbooks, and it’s like a damn matryoshka doll: recipes needing a spice blend given at page 6, a prepped sauce from page 35, which in turn uses a stock from page 12.

Of course,...

Early Look: Cantonese Brisket Pot (牛腩煲)

What Chili is to America, Stewed Beef Brisket is to the Cantonese world.

It’s a dish, yes. A tasty and much beloved one, for sure. But Chili would not have the cultural cachet it does today without chili fries, chili mac, chili dogs, and (everybody’s favorite) chili-over-spaghetti. It�...

Early Look: Crispy Pork Noodles (脆哨面)

These are crispy pork noodles, from the Guizhou province. At some level, I probably don’t need to elaborate any more here: if you like spicy noodles, and if you like crispy pork, jump straight into the recipe above. It’s not difficult, and can be whipped up pretty quick. 2025-05-02 03:02:38 +0000 UTC View Post

Early Look: Egg Battered Fries with Spicy Lemon Dip (元江蛋酥洋芋)

In a province of great food, the town of Yuanjiang has stood out to us so far as one of our favorite places to visit.

Administratively, it sits underneath our current home of Yuxi, and rather close to much of Han Yunnan as the bird flies. But this place exists smack dab inside of a ca...

Early look: Should we use rice cookers?

Should we even bother to use rice cookers?

In the above video, I make the case why anyone seriously interested in Chinese cuisines (or East Asian, generally) probably should. I'm probably guilty of making this a bit of a borderline rant, mostly because I feel in - at least the onli...

Early Look: Henry Kissinger's Moo Goo Gai Pan

In 1996, in the Frank Sinatra Celebrity cookbook, Henry Kissinger shared his recipe for Moo Goo Gai Pan (discovered by the internet in this Reddit post, AFAIK) 2025-03-31 05:35:47 +0000 UTC View Post

Early Look: The Cantonese Oyster Sauce Flavor Profile (蚝汁)

So... we've covered how to make from-scratch oyster sauce before. It's a fun project, an educational endeavor for a Chinese cooking nerd to try their hand at sometime, but... this video I think, will be a lot...

Early Look: Three (Traditional) Chinese Egg Salads

Pictured is a humble Chinese dish called jidansuan (“Garlic Eggs”) from the North of the country, from around Henan, Shandong, and Northern Jiangsu.

Let’s call a spade a spade: it really looks like an egg salad sandwich. And that’s because, in some ways, ...

Early Look: Yi People's Pounded Chicken (舂鸡)

Okay, we're back! We'll be back to our previous schedule of three videos a month - apologies for the hiatus.

We're starting this year with Eshan style chongji, pounded chicken. It's a chicken dish from the Yi people, from a small town outside of Yuxi, Yunnan. It's a pretty unique d...

Early Look: the Complete History of Mapo Tofu

So historical Mapo Tofu used to be... different.

If you're familiar with the canonical Sichuan variety of the dish, you know the usual suspects: minced beef, Sichuan chili bean paste, a thick sauce courtesy of a starch slurry, and that numbing-spicy sensation courtesy of a heavy d...

Early Look: Yunnan Peanut Milk Vegetable Soup (花生汤)

After the monster of the video last week, we needed a simpler dish before we hop over to China for a few weeks to sort some things for the upcoming move. This was a suggestion in the comments of that video, and we thought it might be a nice one to cover.

It's a classic dish throughout south...

Early Look: The Complete Guide to 63 Chinese Cuisines

Okay, so this video has been... a long time in the works. It was supposed to be a quick one while Steph was away in Yunnan and, uh, I might be guilty of a little bit of feature creep.

People say that there's eight Chinese cuisines - something that's always sort of bothered me, because like,...

Early Look: Big Plate Chicken Noodles, Shanxi style

The other day, we were watching this video from the esteemed travel vlogger A Xing (whose totally has English subtitles these days, huge recommendation). As we often do when we watch A Xing, we lear...

Early Look: Celebrating 7 Years of Using MSG

A little over seven years ago, we called for MSG for the very first time in a recipe – Yunnan Dai flavor cucumber.

At that time, there was already starting to be a chorus of people pushing back on the idea that MSG is bad. I remember Fuschia Dunlop had blurbs in her books saying that ther...

Early Look: "Velveting" 101 (and why I don't love the word)

With this video, we wanted to talk velveting – what it is, how to do it, and why I’m… actually not crazy about the terminology.

Which can actually present a bit of a problem, because there's no word in Chinese that neatly corresponds to the English term “velvet...

Early Look: 3 ways to get into Zhacai

Go to practically any Chinese supermarket anywhere in the world, and it’s practically a guarantee that you’ll be able to find Zha Cai – Chinese Pickled Mustard Stems. Even poorly stocked grocers will tend to have a few bags; in China, you can even grab them at convenience stores.

And ...

Early Look: Fixing the Spaghetti Soup Noodle Problem, with Traditional Technique

I think there’s always a temptation for recipe writers to try to squeeze Spaghetti into Asian noodle dishes. You want to try to make things accessible for people, and perhaps there’s no noodle that’s more accessible than Spaghetti. You can find Brian Lagerstom reaching for it in his weeknig...

Early Look: Are "Thai Salads" (Hakka) Chinese?

There’s no dish that tickles my brain as ‘Thai’ quite more than a Yam salad.

It’s not just their sheer ubiquity in Bangkok, though to be honest honest that’s probably part of it too. If you were to draw one of those little “15 minute city” maps for...