Authentic Chinese Breakfast At Home

A lot of people, when they think of jianbing, they think, oh, it's like a crepe burrito kind of thing. This is about 5,000 times more than that. This isn't just some crepe. This isn't just some burrito. It is one of the greatest little eating experiences wrapped up in a handheld bite I can think of. There's so many different textures and flavors. It's something that anybody can make. But I'm not doing this alone. We're bringing Chef Jackie out from Portland. I was out there not too long ago doing street food in America. And he gave me a jianbing. It was so good. Not only did I have to shake his hand, I brought him out here to make it with us. Now, there are many ways to make jianbing. This is the loaded jianbing that I had at Bing Mi that was my favorite of all time that I've ever had. That's the one we're showing you how to make. My favorite thing about this is the varying textures. You bite into it. Not only is it soft, but there's massive crunch from the wonton inside. It's flavorful. There's Chinese sausage. It's salty. It's umami. It's sweet. It's so many different things in one. I would say it's at the top of the list for things that people should be making at home, and they just don't. Most people don't even have a place near them that makes it properly. And now, you can. So, let's make this, shall we? We're gonna start by making a simple crepe batter, then a signature sauce from our man, Jackie. Then, we'll prep our fillings, and finally, cook and assemble. It's easier than it looks. Okay, so we're starting with the crepe batter. Walk me through this. So, we're gonna do two cups of milk. We use the 2% milk, but at home, you can also use whole milk. And then, two cups of water. Beautiful. And then, we do one teaspoon of salt just to give the crepe a base flavor. Okay, let me know if I f*** this up. So, we've got four cups of all-purpose flour, which I'm gonna slowly integrate. Try not to go all at once and ruin this. Exactly. I don't wanna overmix this, so tell me how I'm looking here. Yeah, looks good. Small chunks, yeah? If you see the texture of your batter slightly look too thin, you can always add a tiny bit more flour. You're just looking for a slightly thicker consistency, so when later you make the crepe, it's smooth instead of a little bit wrinkly. And I'm just gonna add a tiny bit more. It is very close to what we want. It's sticking to the whisk just a little bit, but it's still a smooth consistency. So, it's a little looser than pancake batter almost. Yeah. Very nice, okay. So, this is a two-step blending process. First, we're gonna blend just the base batter, no eggs, to get all the chunks out. Then, we add the eggs. I would recommend just keep it under two minutes if possible, because too much blending also changes the consistency of the batter. Just making sure it's smooth, but not overmixing it once it gets to that point. Okay, so now we're gonna add five large eggs. Finally, I really wanted to add these eggs. I've been waiting to add these. Crack them all in. Very nice. And then, now we're going to degrade the eggs. Wow, it got a lot more loose from that now. So, now it's actually quite watery. It's almost like the consistency of heavy cream. You know, it's not so thick that it looks like a pancake batter. It's thinner and more of almost like a half-and-half sort of heavy cream texture. So, that's done. Final step. Cover it and into the fridge. The one thing that really makes a distinct, solid jianbing is the sauce. A lot of places don't do it right, and the ones that have really blown me away have had incredible sauces. You have the best sauce, in my opinion. Jianbing sauce, we strive for like a savory, sweet, with a little bit spicy kind of flavor. That's why, like, we add the bean paste. It gives it more of a savory flavor versus just more, like, sweet. What kind of bean paste is this? Doubanjiang. Okay. Douban is kind of like the soybean pieces, like salty, umami kind of flavor. Got it, okay. Yeah, so we add the bean paste first. Quarter cup. Same amount of hoisin. So another quarter cup hoisin sauce. One tablespoon or 15 mils of toasted sesame oil. One tablespoon or 15 mils of water. So at this point, the sauce is just the base with no spice at all, but usually we do recommend to add a tablespoon chili crisp in it. Adjust the amount that you want by your taste. The chili crisp that we use is the laoganma. It has a lot of, like, Chinese spices in it already, which adds more flavor to it, besides just adding a little bit of spice to it. Oh, it already looks so good. The second that chili crisp went in, it immediately just was like, pshh, like the flavor, you can smell it. Yeah, it smells so good. We are adding a little bit of our Chinese-inspired spice mix here. Secret ingredient, okay? We can't give that one away. I should add that you can make this sauce without his secret spice blend, and it's still gonna be delicious because you already have the base sauce. So should you wanna add Chinese-inspired spices, you could do that. He has his own blend, which smells incredible, but we won't be giving that away because you gotta go there to get it, pal. Yeah, you can come to Bing Me in Portland. Dude, Portland trip, let's go. Okay, the sauce is ready. It's actually quite thicker than I thought it would be. I was expecting it to be a little bit more loose, but we're gonna brush this on, essentially. Yeah. I'm gonna try a little bit. Oh, God, it's so ******* good, holy ----. Okay, keep that away from me. On to the next step. We have a beautiful cucumber, cilantro, pickled vegetables, green onions. Put me to work, how should I cut this? We cut the cucumbers on a bias, about like a quarter-inch thick, and then we cut it one more time into fries. Yeah, just about that, perfect. You cut them julienne, like sort of like- Yes, yes, great. And this is an English cucumber, right? So we're doing- Yeah, English cucumber. You always do English. Yes. Cilantro, we just give it a coarse chop. It looks nice, it looks elegant. All right, and then green onion. How do you like these cut? In between, like paper-thin and a little coarse, so it has a little bit more of a bite to it, but still pretty small. I always feel like I need to go super fine on everything, but whenever I do go a little coarser, a little thicker, it always reminds me that sometimes fine is not always better. So the last ingredient, which you actually don't chop, is, it says preserved vegetable, but I'm not sure. I'm assuming pickled mustard green? Yeah, pickled mustard root. This one, the Chinese name is jia cai, translates into preserved vegetable or pickled vegetable. There's MSG in this. There's a little bit. Oh my God, it's so good. Yeah, and it's crunchy. It's so good. So you get that crunchy texture, and also the umami flavor, the little bit of pickle flavor. Guys, do not ******* skip this. Holy ----, that is so good. Pickled mustard root does not sound appealing, I feel like, to the average, like, Westerner. Like, they're gonna hear that and go like, eh, I don't know about that. Dude, banger. It's really good. So, just in vegetables alone, you have the onion fragrance, you have a beautiful, fresh fragrance, and then you have a crunchy freshness, and then you have a crunchy sort of umami, almost salty, pickley, funky flavor, which I love. All just in vegetables alone, but this is a, I don't wanna say secret ingredient, but there is a power move here, and that is the Chinese sausage. This, I love Chinese sausage. It's one of my favorite things of all time. How should we cut these? I'd love for you to show me. We do two lengths, and then we also cut the Chinese sausage on a bias, and then saute it in a pan. So this Chinese sausage is a Cantonese style, so in Cantonese, it's pronounced lap cheong. In the U.S., I see it go in, like, fried rice a lot, sometimes, like, stir-fried noodles, and then we add it to jianbing, because it's more of a, like, a sweet, savory flavor. It goes really well with the jianbing sauce. God, the fat content is crazy in this. It's unreal. Look at this. There's more fat in this than salami, which is crazy, because salami already is a very high-fat sausage. This is even higher fat, so not only is it sweet, but it's gonna be, like, ultra rich. It's gonna add fat to this in a pretty significant way. The one thing that I think shocks people with jianbing, first time that they have it, is that crunch. You're, like, almost not even expecting it. It doesn't look like it's crunchy, and then you bite into it, it's like. So now we make the crunch, the crispy wonton. So the crunch is actually very simple. Just wonton wrappers split in half perfectly. He has a nice technique where you take the top first layer, fold it in half perfectly, fold it back over, you see the seam, and you cut those beauties in half. So now you have beautiful, even rectangles to then be fried. We have a deep fryer. This is around a seven-quart pot, three quarts of oil, 350 Fahrenheit. It does really matter, the wontons that you get, because you'll see in a second, when you fry this, right, it's gonna bubble up. You don't want it to be completely flat, but you also don't want the bubbles too big. Sometimes these guys are inconsistent, so it may take you a couple times. Do better, okay? Whoever's making these, manufacturers, you got the money. Do better for this man. Two at a time, to be safe. I'm gonna drop this in, and I'm scared now that you're watching me. It's gonna float. You see the bubbles already? I'm just gonna do one more. So the goal here is to keep them flat, essentially. You don't want them to fold over. You wanna try to keep one nice, flat layer. Yeah, like about 20, 30 seconds in, you can flip it. Just looking for a little bit golden kind of color. When I take those out, I just leave it vertical. I'm gonna drain some oil over here first, and then move it to the wire rack. Now do a second round. It looks almost like pigskin. Right? It does. Those bubbles are perfect. There's a faster technique. You can also overlap the wontons just a little bit, like half, or even two-thirds point. That way you can fit more crackers in each round of frying. I would be too scared to try that. My first fear would be they're gonna stick together, but they're already separated. Yeah, they're already separated. And the oil's frying in between the layers. So how do you flip this, then? Just grab the whole thing, flip. Bang, dude, what? See, look at this side. It's a really good color. This is already insane. You've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight in there. You're going eight at a time. It's not bad. Once you're done frying your wontons, let them cool in a wire rack while we move on to our sausage. Now, for your Chinese sausage, you don't wanna put this in just straight up sliced and cold. You'll wanna heat that up in a pan over medium heat, tossing occasionally for about two to three minutes, or until it starts to crisp a little bit and it's rendered much of its fat. Should look something like this. Once it's done, drain it of its fat through a fine mesh sieve or over paper towels if you don't wanna save the oil, and your sausage is ready to be used. So cooking a crepe, if you've ever done this before, it's very simple, you need a pan. We have this 15-inch massive pan. I know a lot of people don't have this. Don't worry, you can absolutely use a 12-inch skillet, nonstick, et cetera. Just know that you want people to fit as much in there, right? The bigger the skillet, the bigger the crepe. The bigger the crepe, the more proper the jianbing. At the restaurant, we use a 16-inch crepe grill. This is very close to the size. So if you really wanna go all out, you'll need a 15, 16-inch pan of some sort. You could use a kamal, you could use a griddle, you could use anything as long as it is 15 to 16 inches if you want the proper size, otherwise use a 12-inch skillet. So at home, we can just use some paper towel and then dip it in a little bit oil. Vegetable oil is fine, so it has a higher smoking point. And then just use the paper towel on the pan to grease the pan lightly. Be very careful about your finger, this part. I don't know what's worse. It's like using a cheese grater and then your knuckles hit the cheese grater or slipping off the paper towel and then going, eee, across a hot pan. Hurts a lot more on the pan. Yeah, yeah, that's true. For a 12-inch pan, you can just use four ounce of the batter. This is like a crepe wand, and it's specifically for making crepe and helps make it like this shape and get it pretty thin. It's kinda necessary to have it to make a thin crepe. At home, kinda like if you do the wiggle, the pan style is just gonna be a little too thick. Now you're gonna let that cook just until the edges look dry, start to curl a little bit, and the full crepe is cooked. This can happen as early as 45 seconds and up to a minute 30, depending on the heat. Then using a thin spatula, gently lift the edge, carefully flip, cooking the other side for another 25 to 30 seconds. Then proceed to assemble your Xiangbing. Okay, so Jackie's gonna show us how to do a nice, quality crepe. We use six ounce of batter for this size pan. Now you can see he's carefully using a wide, circular motion to spiral outward towards the edges of the pan until the batter is spread into a perfect circle and the thickness is even throughout. This may take a couple tries. It's okay if you don't get it perfect the first time. The more you do it, the better they'll get. Now we put the egg on it. Two eggs in this one, and then we are tapping the egg yolk to break it. And then try to spread the egg on the crepe, like very evenly. You can almost treat the egg like the crepe batter right now. Just kind of spin, get close to the edge, but it doesn't have to be like exactly to the very edge of it. So the egg is scrambled on top of the crepe as a very thin layer. Sometimes we would have customers come back and ask, where's the scrambled egg in my crepe? We would have to explain because it's like combined together as the crepe, as part of the crepe already. Are they like mad? They're like, where's my egg? Sometimes they would think we missed the scrambled egg for their order, yeah. At this point, the egg seems to be pretty solid. It's not all the way cooked yet. I'm gonna give it a flip to make sure the egg is like fully cooked. And then this is the perfect color. I would recommend maybe using a spatula because you don't got hands like we got them, all right? That's hands. But yeah, give it a few seconds and then flip it back. So now the egg is all the way fully cooked. With the crepe done, we're ready to assemble. First, we're adding two thirds to one spoonful, depending on how saucy you like your jianbing. The sauce is the flavor for the whole crepe basically. All the like savory comes from the sauce and the sweetness and then the chili, like the little bit spicy flavor. I love how tailored to the individual it is. You can kind of do it however you want in a way. And then we put the green onion on it, cilantro, pickled vegetable, like five or six bigger pieces on each side should be okay. And then we put a little bit cucumber because we are making a Chinese sausage loaded jianbing. So you're lining this up, but you're kind of leaving a gap in the middle. Is that intentional? Yes, so the reason is when we are putting the wontons on, we're trying to cut right in between. So anything that's heavy like this would be like falling out if we cut on it. If we cut on the cucumber, if we cut on the sausage, when you cut it, try to stack it, it's gonna make a mess. Okay, so you're sort of lining this like a burrito, but leave a gap in the middle. Yeah, a little bit. And then Chinese sausage, usually like one link per jianbing and the key is the crackers. So we're doing the double cracker for the loaded one. Just kind of wrap this around. Cut in the middle and then stack those two halves. It'll look like this. Wow, we've done it. We've made our jianbing. Cheers, thank you. Oh yeah, I wanna be clear. This has been sitting for like 20 minutes and still, you hear that? Still really crunchy. I was gonna say. Double cracker is the way to go. Oh yeah, see, even he agrees. The perfect example of an amazing jianbing at home. So soft and luscious on the outside. The crepe even has a bit of like stretchiness to it in a nice way. It gives it that elastic chew. The inside is super crispy, but also very, very, very flavorful. From the jianbing sauce, that texture of the egg just kind of enrobes the whole thing. And of course the Chinese sausage is like, I think you have to do Chinese sausage. Yeah, it goes really well with the jianbing sauce. If you're vegan or vegetarian, maybe just skip that for a day and make it this way, yeah? Incredible. The thing I love about jianbing is I think it's something that feels very fancy and very almost difficult because people don't know how to make it. But now that I've seen the whole process from beginning to end, I really think this is something that anybody can make at home. Truly, I really do. It doesn't require a ton, a ton, a ton of practice to have something delicious. It may not be perfect like our man Jackie's, but it will still be absolutely delicious. Beautiful work, Jackie. Thank you so much. Thank you. Absolutely incredible. If you haven't been to Bing Me in Portland, please go support our man. Absolutely the best jianbing I've ever had, period. And now you know how to make it. But also, you should go see him. Anyway, love you so much. Subscribe. Thank you.