Perfect for Chinese New Year! Cabbage Rolls w/ Braised Mushrooms | CNY Reunion Dinner Recipe

Hi and welcome to Spice and Pans. Today we'll be cooking Chinese cabbage rolls with braised mushrooms. So let's start cooking! We are proud to announce our collaboration with Pots and Pans Culinary Studio. Our local Chinese Delight course features 10 of our dearest recipes for you to learn hands-on at Pots and Pans Culinary Studio. The experienced trainers here at Pots and Pans are prepped and ready to share with you the offline experience of our dishes. Join us in our exclusive local Chinese Delight culinary course. Sign up to the link below or scan our QR code. See you there! Now we are going to dry fry our mini shrimp or dried mini shrimp. In Chinese, we call this CRP. In Hokkien, we call this biohei. These are very small. You can replace this with sakura shrimp or even dried shrimp standard. Normal dried shrimp can't do smaller pieces. You can do so also. This is just 3 grams of it. I've actually just do a quick rinse and dry this up. So hot pan at medium low heat. Put everything in. Remember no oil. Move them around. We'll fry them until they are dry and light. This will release a lot of flavor into our sauce. Always use medium low heat or low heat. Move them around. We don't want to burn them. We just want to dry them. Dry frying this will give your sauce a lot of flavor. So I suggest you do it. But if you want to cut this step off, you can also. When we don't hear any more sizzling, that means we know that it's dry enough. It should be light and very easily move around like this. We'll just remove this and set this aside. I'll show you the next step after this. Using the same wok or pan, just give it a light rinse. We are now going to braise our mushroom. Add in a little bit of oil. Add in 3 cloves of chopped garlic. Move them around a little bit. We don't have to wait for it to brown. Once you can start to smell the beautiful fragrance from the garlic, we'll add in our rehydrated mushrooms. Chop pieces of rehydrated mushrooms like this. If you're using bigger ones, you can cut down the amount. It's really up to you. Add them all in. Add in half a teaspoon of sugar, one quarter of a teaspoon of salt. These are Chinese dried shiitake mushroom. We just fry them around until we can smell the beautiful fragrance. Just move them around. This will take a short while. We just need them to mix around with the salt as well as the sugar and to also be coated with the beautiful garlic oil. Once it's shining like this, we'll add in our water. Add in 350 milliliters of water, one tablespoon of oyster sauce, one third of a teaspoon of chicken stock powder and the CRP or the mini shrimp that we fried just now. Add everything in. Give it a stir. Spread out the mushrooms. Don't stack them. Open them up like this. Put the lid on. Turn the heat down to low and we'll simmer this for 20 minutes. In the meanwhile, we will go and prepare our Chinese cabbage. Now we are going to boil our Chinese cabbage, otherwise known as Nepal cabbage or even Wongbok. Have a wok full of boiling water. Make sure it's boiling. Add in a little bit of salt and a little bit of oil. This will help the vegetables retain its color. I have with me over here eight leaves because I'm making eight portions. This is how each of the leaves look like. Cut off the lower part otherwise it's very difficult for you to roll. Use one piece as a gauge and cut them to almost identical size. Place the leaf in one by one like this. We just need to soften them. This will take less than maybe 15 seconds or so. Try not to break the leaves. If need to, press it down a little bit so they will have contact with the water or with the boiling water. This will take about a minute or so. Once it's soft like this and can bend easily, remove them from the heat. Now don't throw the water away. We'll use the same water later to steam our cabbage roll. Once you're done with this, just remove them and drain them while we prepare the fillings for the cabbage rolls. Now we'll mince our prawns. I have with me over here with shell on approximately 275 grams, shell off approximately 153 grams. I've also deveined the prawns. Total quantity is about 12 pieces of medium size prawns. To mince the prawns up is very simple. Just place it on your chopping board like this. Using a cleaver, just smack it down and then we just push this aside and continue with the rest. Finish this up and I'll show you the next step in a while. Once you smash up all the prawns, we'll just chop it like this. Mince the prawns as finely as possible because we want them to be able to bind with our minced meat. Now don't cut it too big a piece otherwise the cabbage leaves will be broken easily. Something like this will be good and we will now add this to our minced meat. This is our minced meat, 200 grams. Add in your prawn paste. Add in half a teaspoon of sugar, half a teaspoon of salt, one teaspoon of ginger juice derived from grated ginger and squeeze them out, one teaspoon of hua tiao jiu or Chinese cooking wine, a tablespoon of oyster sauce, a few dashes of white pepper, as well as half a tablespoon of cornflour. So now all we have to do is just mix them up, slam them a little bit to have a better texture. For our Muslim friends, you can replace the pork with chicken, with minced chicken and of course omit the Chinese cooking wine. Stir them in one direction, make sure that they are fully mixed up together. It'll be sticky to touch like this. Now we'll slam them. Slamming them will get the air out as well as break up the fiber and this will be really really good. We need to slam them until they are really sticky, maybe 20-30 times depending on how hard you actually slam them down. I'll show you how they look like in a while. I've slammed this for about 20 times and it should look sticky like this and shouldn't drop out of the bowl. Okay now we divide this into eight portions. I'm dividing into eight portions because I'm serving for eight. Of course if you have 10, 12, 4, please just plus minus a little bit on the ingredients. Now we'll start to wrap and I'll show you how. But first this is how I hang my cabbage after boiling them. Okay just to get rid of the excess water. Take one piece down, okay the rough side facing down. Spread out the leaves gently like this. Take one of the fillings, place it two fingers up from the bottom of the leaf and from the sides of the leaf. Place it in, pat it down a little bit. Make sure that it's firm like this. Very simple to roll. First we roll this up. The side, roll it in like this. Follow all the way through. Same for this side. Same thing too. Follow all the way through and then just roll and roll and we are done. Continue to finish the rest and I'll show you the next step after this. Now let's steam our cabbage rolls. Make sure that your water is boiling. Put the cabbage roll in, put it back on. I'm using medium heat right now. We will need to steam this for 12 minutes. I'll see you back in a while. It's been 12 minutes already. Let's have a look. Wow it's done. Look at how beautiful this is. Now you remove this from a steamer. Don't throw away the liquid. We're going to add this liquid to our mushrooms. I've been cooking the mushroom for 20 minutes and now I'll show you how to finish this up. Add back the liquid from steaming the cabbage rolls. Mix it up a little bit. I suggest you give this a taste. Beautiful sauce. Now all we have to do is just thicken this up with cornstarch solution. Slowly drip it in. Thicken it to the consistency that you like. Look at how beautiful this is. The mushrooms are ready and as a garnish I've soaked some goji berries that I'm going to place on top of the cabbage rolls. Turn the heat off and we'll serve them to our family now. Now the dish is done. Let's have a taste. Smells absolutely delicious. Let's try the mushroom. I love how the small shrimp or the siap is helping to build the umami of this dish. Very very nice. Try the cabbage roll. Dip a little bit of the sauce. Super juicy. When I bite into it, the juice actually just spills out into my mouth. This is really really good. So ladies and gentlemen, I hope you like our video. Do click like on our video and do subscribe to our channel. Now it's time to cook. See you. Bye bye.