MY TOP 5 Classic Chinese Recipes | Marion's Kitchen

Here on my channel I love to delve into the classics, the flavors and the techniques that make Asian food really special. Oh yeah it's hot. Now I wanted to deep dive into Chinese classics in particular in this collection so I have five of my ultimate favorites. Cantonese rice noodles with egg gravy, Szechuan Chongqing noodle soup. Now you've got to love spicy food for that one. Chinese barbecue pork steamed buns doesn't get any more classic than that. Hot and numbing Szechuan eggplant and finally my very famous, well you guys love it anyway, 10-minute hot and sour soup. Okay so this is the kind of Chinese restaurant classic that I think everyone should be able to master at home. It's very easy but there's a couple of little tricks to the noodles and the sauce that we're going to go through. First of all let's have a look at our rice noodles. These are fried rice noodles, typically that's what they're called or they're just called you know sort of fresh rice noodles. Now what happens is when they come in a big block like this, they kind of need a little bit of work here. So just pull them out and at this point they've come out of the fridge they're really stiff. Now if you try and break them up and slice them things will just break and you will just get a big mess. So don't do that. My tip here is to pop the whole lot into the microwave about a minute and then we'll come back and you'll see the difference. Okay so now we've got kind of like a much more pliable sort of base to work from. So I'm going to open these up and it's a bit of a section in here so I'll grab that out first and I want quite a wide noodle here about sort of like two centimeters or so and now they'll peel away so much easier. There we go, perfect. So you'll usually find these kinds of noodles in your Asian grocery store, in the fridge section but if you can't get a hold of them what you can do is use like a dried pappardelle noodle, cook those noodles and stir fry them in the sauce or you could use fresh pasta as well. So don't miss out just because you can't get a hold of these noodles because this really is a delicious dish. So I've got my bunch of noodles here now what I want to do is just prep up a few other things before we get into the wok. So what I want here is some Chinese green vegetable. I mean typically I would use choy sum but I couldn't find any at my local market today so this is a bok choy that I'm using and I'm just going to slice the end off and it typically really needs some like washing in between these leaves so you definitely want to do that. All right so just some nice sort of chunky pieces of my bok choy and then for proteins here I'm going to go in with a double whammy because I mean for me like a lot of Asian noodles like this often have a meat protein and a seafood one so we're going to go with pork and prawn for this one. I've got a pork fillet here and the secret here is to slice very thin slices. I kind of want that pork to be so thin that when you bite into it it almost disintegrates in that velvety sauce at the end. So a few more things here I just want an egg and some corn flour. So this corn flour mixture is what's going to create that kind of shiny thick glossy gravy situation at the end. So just a little bit of water there give that a mix. Okay so we're pretty much set up here what we're going to do now is do our wok fried noodles first. This is the really key part of this dish is getting the noodles perfect and then the gravy kind of goes on top after. Now the first thing is to get your wok or your frying pan super hot. Now add in just a little bit of oil here and in with those noodles. A little dash of regular soy sauce and then just a little even smaller dash of some dark soy sauce. What we're looking for here is for those noodles to soften up and we want them to get nice and dark and kind of charred at the edges. Alright these are looking good so just pop those out onto a plate. Those noodles already look so appetizing to me I love that kind of charry rice noodle kind of business. Okay so let's do our gravy sauce now. I want that wok coming back up to a really high heat then I'm going to add in a little bit more oil. Add in your pork and the prawns and I like to get these proteins in first so that I can give them a really nice kind of hard sear without worrying about burning garlic or ginger and that kind of thing. So I do that first and then now that I've got some color now I'm going to go in with the garlic and the ginger. That is already such a beautiful smell I love that. Ginger and garlic in a wok nothing better. So at this point I just want a little drizzle of Chinese cooking wine just to give it some extra oomph. Now it's gravy time so I want some chicken stock and then I'm going to season with some oyster sauce, some sesame oil and a little pinch here of white pepper and a fairly decent pinch of sugar as well. So the flavors we're going for here are nice and subtle I don't want this to be too salty so I'm not going to add any soy sauce in here because of course we've got our noodles with the soy sauce already so just a nice light comforting kind of gravy. Now I'm going to go in with my bok choy and now here's where the magic happens so in with our corn flour mixture and things should get fairly velvety and gravy like almost instantly. Amazing and now finally our egg. So just drizzle that around in there. I mean it's not exactly like you know uber instagram worthy but wow I mean to me that looks amazingly delicious I'm very excited. It's like your favorite Chinese restaurant dish at home. All right so I am just gonna now pour slash sort of spoon out this thick lovely gravy all over my noodles here and that my friends is one beautiful steamy, smells delicious plate of noodles there. I'm so excited about getting in here. I mean this is the kind of like Chinese restaurant dish that you know you just kind of dream of. It's beautifully velvety and those wok tossed kind of smoky noodles are so good and the crunchy vegetable yum. But what's next? Let me introduce you to xiaomian noodles. This is a style of noodle from the Chongqing province in China. It is spicy, it is fragrant, it is so ridiculously amazing. Let's do it. So the deal with these noodles is that classically it's all about the chewy wheat noodle being seasoned with a whole bunch of aromatics and like chili oil and then obviously a little soupy business going on. But I'm also going to add some stewed beef. I'm going to start off with some chuck steak here and you want to use chuck because you kind of get this lovely fat marbling a little bit of connective tissue and doesn't everyone love connective tissue? So I'm going to get some salt here and start off I want some oil and we want to hear some sizzling here. What we're doing here is actually trying to brown the beef so that we get some flavor. So it's all about that Maillard reaction, the browning, the caramelization and that is going to be the flavor base for our stew. I now want to deglaze the pan with some Chinese Shaoxing wine and then we've got all that aromatics. So I've got some spring onion, ginger, star anise, Chinese five-spice and this guy here is doubanjiang. This is a fermented chili and bean paste from Sichuan in China and it is like salty and spicy and packed with umami and like all good things. Soy sauce and a little dash of sugar. Mix all of that through and this is already smelling so good. I'm going to add a little bit of water here, cover that up, turn the heat down low and then let that simmer for about 90 minutes or until the beef is really soft and tender. So here we have a big reveal. So if we just get our forks in here and just pull that apart. To make the chili oil you want to start off with some small Chinese dried red chilies. Now the trick to using these chilies for a chili oil is that you need to take out as many of the seeds as possible. So you get it out on your board and then just start like chopping through those chilies and once I get to this point I'll pick up my chunks of dried chili, give them a bit of a shake and take out all those seeds that we can now get rid of. The first part of preparing the chilies involves toasting them in a dry wok or a pan. This part gets a little nasty. It's in like deep chili breathing. Who's gonna cough first Dax? You or me? Oh it's me! So when you get to this point, okay so when you get to this point, oh no! So when you get to this point where you can't breathe, you want to add in a little bit of oil and now give them another few minutes to get nice and toasty. Now you can add in the Sichuan peppercorns and just toss those around for another like 20 seconds or so. Transfer the chilies and peppercorns into a spice grinder or a little blender like this one and just blend until you've got a very coarse kind of powder, not too fine. I still want to see some little chunks of chili in there. Scoon your chilies and peppercorns into a heatproof jar. Heat up some vegetable oil until it just starts to sizzle when you put a wooden spoon in it. That's how you know it's kind of hot enough. Now pour the oil over the chilies. Perfect! The real key to this dish traditionally is actually all the seasonings and the aromatics that happen in the noodle bowl. So let's get some of those things done. I'm going to start off with my peanuts and I just want to dry roast these until they've got a really lovely deep caramel colour. Now just pound and grind those peanuts fairly coarsely, not too fine. Now let's talk about pickled mustard greens. Traditionally you would use a Sichuan preserved vegetable. I couldn't find that in my area so this is a Thai pickled mustard green which will give you the same kind of tangy pickled tart flavour. Just want to finely chop it and set that aside for later. Now we can build the bowl. We want some garlic, ginger, spring onion. Add in a little bit of Chinese black vinegar, a drizzle of sesame oil and as much of that chili oil as you think you can handle. Be careful it's hot. And then some hot chicken stock. So this bowl is now ready for the noodles and I'm using some thin wheat noodles here. So when the noodles are cooked you can just pop them straight into your bowl. That already looks so good. Let's add the stewed beef, pickled mustard greens, peanuts and coriander. I love coriander. The devil's herb. So here it is. I mean is that not a thing of beauty? You've got that beautiful chili oil, all those aromatics in there, the beef, the noodles. Oh so excited. Okay so you mix it all up. Oh my goodness that just looks so good. Here we go. Oh yeah it's hot. It's hot but it's so delicious. Do you know what's so great? It's literally like a million explosions of flavour in there. You've got garlic and the ginger. Ah that beef is so soft and tender. Amazing. I swear to god you have not tasted the spicy noodle soup until you have tasted this one. Some people take great joy in making bread dough at home or pizza dough. For me this steamed bun dough is one of those truly joyous things to make at home. Really good and easy. So we're going to start off with some flour. I am using what's called cake flour. It's not as bleached white as your what we would call like Hong Kong flour or bao flour. You can find that in an Asian grocery store and feel free to use that one if you if you want to but cake flour is very easy to find in a mainstream supermarket. So I've got that one. It means though that your buns might not be as bright white as a restaurant style one but they'll have a bit more flavour. Some sugar, some baking powder and some instant yeast. So just be careful when you're buying yeast that you're buying the instant version. This version doesn't need to be bloomed in hot water. It can be thrown straight into the mix here. It's also called fast action yeast as well. So that's the one you're looking for. Just give this a mix and make a well in the centre. Now pour in some water, some vegetable oil. Start mixing that from the centre, slowly working in that flour and then once your dough doesn't seem to be heating your wooden spoon anymore, get in there with your hands. Now I want to take this and put it onto my workbench. A little bit of flour on here to stop sticking and then here's where you want to just relax into this kneading process. You want to give this a good 10 minutes so that the dough becomes really beautifully smooth. Okay so that dough has come together beautifully and that's what I love about this dough. It has a really lovely soft pliable texture which makes it a real joy to work with. So I'm going to put that into a bowl. Now just cover that with a lid and let it rest for 20 minutes. So in the meantime, let's do our filling. I just need a little bit of oil in my pan here and some garlic and some onion. To help those onions break down and become nice and sweet, I'm going to add a little bit of salt. That'll help to draw out some of the moisture. Those onions got a couple of minutes, they're beautifully soft. Now I'm going to add in some Chinese barbecue pork. You can buy this from a Chinese restaurant, Chinese barbecue restaurant. I actually am using my homemade version and there's a video on how to make this on my website if you would like to give it a try. Now add that in and some char siu sauce. Char siu sauce is Chinese barbecue sauce. You can buy it in the Asian aisle of most supermarkets. Now some seasonings, some soy sauce and some sugar. Now I'm going to add some water. I want to let this pork simmer in that beautiful sweet sauce for about three or four minutes just to let those flavours intensify. This pork is smelling so amazing. I'm always so tempted to start digging in right now before I make the buns. But I will refrain from doing that and add in a pork jelly that will sit inside of our buns. Now you can see just how thick that's become almost instantly. Now I have to get this out to cool before I make my buns. Just add onto a tray. Then I'm going to pop this in the freezer and by the time my dough is ready to roll out, this should be nice and cool. Time to have a look at our dough. I want to get a little bit of flour out onto my surface here. Just take my dough and then roll it out. We're going to do a couple of rolls and folds here. Fold that dough over and roll again. Fold it over. One more roll out here. Now roll that dough up to form a cylinder. I want to cut this into 16 even pieces. Just place those pieces out. You can see we've got a lovely spiral shape there with our dough. That's going to give us a little bit more air and some fluff. I'm going to cover these up while I roll them out so they don't dry out. Take one of your dough pieces, sprinkle with a little bit of flour. In the first instance, roll out into a circle. Then just like you would with a dumpling wrapper, I want you to take your rolling pin and just thin out the edges of that circle, leaving the centre with a little bit more mass than the outside. This way, we're going to get a more even spread of our dough around that filling. My pork is nice and cool now. Now here comes the fun part, folding and wrapping our little buns. Follow my lead. Take a piece of your wrapper. Put a generous helping of pork in the middle there. I don't like to be too stingy with my sticky pork. This goes sort of like a soup dumpling fold, but it's a lot bigger so it's easier. Take your right hand and use your left index finger to push a little pleat into your right hand. Then push again into your right hand. You're basically using both hands to wrap and pleat around the top of the filling. Then you'll get to the point where everything wants to close up. Your thumb should still be in the middle there. Start twisting and then squeeze. There you go. Beautiful little steamed bun shape. Now just tuck in those beautiful little buns with slightly damp tea towels to keep the air out. Then let these guys rest for half an hour. Now we are ready to steam our little guys. Let's get them out into a bamboo steamer, just with some baking paper on the bottom so we don't get any sticking to the bottom. I've got some boiling water here. These just need about 12 minutes until they're beautifully fluffy. Let's have a look at our buns. So good. There you go. Moment of truth though is opening these guys up and having a look. Wow, look at how light and fluffy that bun is. Just the way it should be. I just can't wait. That combination of that super fluffy bun and then that really savoury sweet salty pork, one of life's true pleasures. This is the famous eggplant you find in really good Szechuan restaurants, but this is my at-home version of how to make hot and numbing eggplant. So you guys know this is going to be a dish that I love, right? Spicy Szechuan peppercorns, that hot and numbing situation going on. So good. Now I always used to love to order this dish when I was out at like a really good Szechuan restaurant, but I thought that it might be a little difficult to make at home. But I figured out it's not if you have a little bit of technique going for cooking the eggplant, which we'll get to in a bit. No, actually we'll get to it now. We'll start with the eggplant. You were waiting for the eggplant, weren't you, Dax? I was. You were, you were. Okay, I know. So I have these long eggplants now and they're often called Japanese eggplants or Lebanese eggplants. You can use the larger ones as well, but the main point is the preparation of them. So I like to take some of the skin off. I don't want to take all of it off because leaving some helps to keep the tender eggplant together a little bit when it's really soft. So just a bit of the eggplant skin off and then take the end off. I like to make sure that these slices are fairly thin, like nice little elegant slices of eggplant, if you like. That means they're going to cook quite quickly when we steam them a little bit later on. And I think that gives you the right surface area of eggplant to be soaking up all the yum, spicy stuff that's going to happen later on. So the process for the eggplant is that you want to steam the eggplant. That's actually the best way to cook it, so that you're kind of breaking it down and making it soft and tender, but you're not searing it or you're not boiling it. I think boiling the eggplant would be weird. It would get kind of weird and slimy. So steaming is the way to go. So open up your steamer and then grab your pieces of eggplant and just pile them in. And no, you don't have to salt eggplant these days because basically that bitterness that you used to get with eggplant has kind of been bred out of the eggplant. So now you don't need to do that salting step. Can if you like, but you don't have to. Now, 25 minutes. I'm going to let that steam away. In the meantime, let's make our spicy sauce because this stuff is really good. I'm going to start off with my Sichuan peppercorns. I'm using green ones because green ones, there's green and red, right? But the green ones seem to have a much heftier kind of numbing and citrusy flavor than the red ones. So if you can get a hold of these green ones, that would be really great. I just crush those. Now I also need some ginger and some garlic. So now we're going to get into the wok and I need a little bit of regular oil here first. And then we're going to go in with some chili oil. So this is my homemade chili oil. You can watch the video on how to make it, but you can use store-bought as well. The reason I like the homemade version is you get all these lovely spices in here. Cardamom pods, star anise, there are extra Sichuan peppercorns in here as well. It is good stuff. That in there, put in that garlic and ginger. That is such a good smell. Slightly clears you out. Now I'm going to go in with doubanjiang. Doubanjiang is an ingredient you would have seen me cook with on my channel a fair bit, particularly if you're doing Sichuan style dishes, you might see it as well. It's basically like a fermented chili and broad bean paste and it kind of gives you a kick of umami and saltiness as well as the spicy. You can search it out online. It's widely available to order online. So just see if you can find it or check your local Chinese grocer. To that, I'm going to add some soy sauce, some rice wine vinegar, and some sugar. Now lastly, we go in with our peppercorns. Our sauce is pretty much done. That sugar is dissolved. Everything is really lovely and spicy and garlicky in there, which is really what I wanted. That extra hit of the peppercorns at the end is really punchy. It's good. Just wait and see until the end. I'm going to have a look at my eggplant now. At this point, my eggplant should be really lovely and soft. Let's take a look. Very nice. They're not quite dressed for the party yet. It's not the most Instagram-worthy stage of the recipe. You want to carefully just transfer them into a bowl. Carefully, because they are really soft now. I don't want to break them up too much. Then you just want to spoon that spicy stuff all over the top. Then almost as if you're tossing this like a salad, I just want you to just really gently encourage that eggplant and the sauce to make friends in there. Then you can scoop that out onto a plate. Make sure you catch all of that yummy sauce and pour that over the top. A little sprinkling of spring onion here. There you go. A really beautiful restaurant classic that I've only just started making at home. I think it's really delightful. I'm not even in there yet, I think it's delightful. I love that red oil. That red sauce in there just looks amazing. The eggplant should be really nice and soft. It's almost like it just melts away in your mouth. You're left with all those yummy spices. So perfect. It's almost like the eggplant, because you've steamed it, it's like it's gone all creamy. Then you've got big hits of spice and Sichuan peppercorn. Then that numbing, tingling sensation you get at the end. So good. Serve this with steamed rice, some other Chinese dishes if you like. But even just rice and this eggplant would be a perfect dinner for me. Yum. Believe it guys, we are going to make restaurant-style Chinese hot and sour soup in 10 minutes flat. First thing we need to do is get our vegetables prepped. I'm just going to go straight in with my carrot here. If you've got one of these julienne vegetable peelers, they're so great because you can just strip away the little fine shards of the carrot. If you don't have one of these, don't worry. Just buy shredded carrot already pre-done from your supermarket. It's pretty easy to find those these days. To that, we want to add a mixture of mushrooms. I've got some enoki mushrooms here, which I love for this soup because they turn into nice little silky tendrils all the way through our beautiful soup. Then just take your shiitake mushroom. The stem itself is a little bit tough, so just slice through that mushroom and then remove the stem. Then just keep on slicing. They go into our pot as well. I've got some firm tofu here. I'm just going to slice that through the middle. I want some fine slices of that. We want some bamboo shoots and some cooked chicken. I'm just using some rotisserie chicken that I've shredded up, but leftover roast chicken would be good as well. Or you could keep this meat-free and leave the chicken out. Now for our chicken stock. You know what? I'm just using a store-bought stock today because it's the middle of the week and I'm in a bit of a hurry. If you've got homemade stock, of course go ahead and use that. Then we want to get this mixture gently bubbling away on our stovetop. I love this soup. Most kids when they're at a Chinese restaurant are ordering the chicken and sweet corn soup. I was always the hot and sour kid ordering the hot and sour soup. It was my favourite. Now time to add the seasonings. I've got some light soy sauce here, which is just a regular Chinese soy sauce. Then I've got some dark soy sauce here for some colour. Some white vinegar. If you've got some Chinese black vinegar at home, go ahead and use that. That would be the traditional vinegar to use here. But white vinegar is much easier to find, so you can use that one. Some pepper. The main flavours in the soup are sour, salty and then a really good hit of pepper. I'm going to put quite a bit of pepper in there. That is the hard part done, folks. We are just now waiting for this to bubble away, all those flavours to infuse and become nice and tasty. I just love the colour of this soup. It's like autumn leaves. Just lovely. Those mushrooms have softened now. It's only been a couple of minutes. I'm going to add in some cornflour mixed with a little bit of water because, of course, this style of soup is quite thick. I'm going to add this in. Just like that, our soup is turning beautifully thick and glossy. I just want to let that bubble away a few more minutes to thicken up a little bit. Now let's try this out and see. That's good. I'm loving those really nice sour flavours. But you know what? I think I'm going to add a little bit more vinegar. This is where your own personal taste will come into it. Add in some more vinegar, a little bit of salt if you think it needs it because that, of course, depends on your chicken stock, how salty that was to start with. Because I like things spicy, I'm going to add in a little bit more black pepper. Such a simple soup but so ultra comforting. All that's left now is to serve up and just sprinkle with a little bit of spring onion.