How To Braise Meat | Chinese Double Cooking Lesson 4

Double cooking, triple cooking, quadruple cooking, pentuple. Pentuple cooking, we're pentuple cooking. Welcome back to the channel. This one is the final lesson in double cooking and it's all about the pre-blanch, poaching, plus deep fry and then braise. And then if you want to go all the way, adding a steaming process and seeing what difference that makes to the texture of these chicken wings. So we've had our blanched chicken wings, poaching, your deep fry, your roasting, all these core techniques of Chinese cooking that we're kind of piecing together through these double cooking processes. Braising your poached chicken is also a thing or poached meat, any poached meat. And the initial sort of blanch, as I say, is tighten up the skin. It's done. We've learned that already. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to marinate the rest of these chicken wings with a sauce that's very similar to what you would get from the steamed or finished in steam chicken's feet in the dim sum restaurants that I'm talking about. And first thing I've got here is these fermented black beans. So these are salted, dried, preserved black soya beans. And they've got very deep and salty preserved flavor to them. So they've just been soaking in cold water for five, ten minutes. That's all really. That soaking brings out some of the excess salt. I'm going to mix it together with some chopped up garlic and ginger. And I'll give that a really sort of gentle push through with the bottom of my spoon. And that is just to make a rough, very coarse black bean paste. Really what braising is, you need to fry your ingredients first in your pan. And then even with sauce, it needs time to almost fry this sauce and caramelize around what you're cooking before you then add any liquid. You can put all the flavor into your meat and just marinate it because it will get that fry, that initial caramelization around the meat if you're to do it all in one go. But most importantly, it's almost as if braising itself is a double cooking method in one pan. So I'll take half of this black bean paste mix for the marinade. And then we'll start to build up a sauce that we're going to fry. This stuff here is the doubanjiang, the chili bean paste. So a couple of teaspoons, they're very heaped teaspoons of that will go in there. Some oyster sauce for savory, so I don't want it to be too sharp. I want the braising liquid to be very, very deep and savory in flavor. To follow that, but a bit more saltiness and light soy sauce. Dark soy sauce to deepen the color of this braise. Not too much, one to two teaspoons is plenty. Shaoxing rice wine, two to three tablespoons is good because I want it to have enough sort of time to caramelize around the chicken and some sesame oil to go with that. Sugar, anything sweet. So a tablespoon, that's probably about one and a half tablespoons of sugar. I feel like I need a little bit more to caramelize, so I'm going to use some of this maple syrup. Similar amount, one and a half tablespoons of maple syrup. So that's three tablespoons of sweet stuff all together. And that sugar, along with the thickness of the oyster sauce, will allow this mix to really caramelize very quickly. I've got some of this pickling liquid as well from the pickled chicken wings. Three or four spoons of that to balance out the flavor. You get this sweet, sour, spicy, salty, savory. Let's have a little taste. Yeah, that tastes great. And then with the rest of the wings, because there's so much flavor in that sauce, which is going to kind of caramelize around the wings, I'm just going to pour the rest of the Shaoxing rice wine into those wings. Give those a good massage through. But what you need is a little bit of oil, because even though there's oil in the chicken and there's fat in the chicken and there's oil in this sauce, the key is to make sure that the sauce hits your thick base pan with that little bit of extra fat and gets that instant bubble, that sizzling. Because that will change the nature of that sauce very quickly and it will start to caramelize a lot. And now I'm showing you the traditional method of these dim sum style chicken's feet, but using wings as my ingredient of choice today for this lesson. It's had its blanch or its poach, then it gets a dry and then a deep fry. I'll do half of them like that and then half that just goes straight into the sauce. And you will see an ever so slight difference between the half that go into the deep fry and the half that are just going to go into this caramelizing sauce. And I want to show this so you kind of get the real detail of where or how far we can really push this quintuple cooking process or double what we in general call double cooking processes in Chinese cuisine. That's sealing the meat in the oil before it then goes into the braising liquid. Whereas with these ones, they're just going to go straight into the braising liquids, right? There's no reason why you can't just braise your wings, especially your chicken like I'm doing here. But if you want to get that sort of perfect finish, then the seal of the meat before it goes into the braising liquid will give you that more restaurant style finish. Now I'm going to try my best to keep the non-fried chicken pieces on one side and then braise the deep fried ones on the other. What deep frying that deep frying process does is that, of course, it's crisping up the chicken, but we're not creating a crispy chicken dish here. We're cooking a braised chicken dish, but it also kind of weirdly opens up the pores of the chicken skin and it will allow that flavour of the sauce to really penetrate the skin and go into the meat even more over time. And you can see even when I place these deep fried chicken pieces into that same sauce, how differently that sauce sits on the fried chicken skin versus the non-fried chicken skin. It sticks much more on the fried one almost immediately. That is why if you are going for perfection, using the double or quintuple or quadruple cooking method, I do touch more on braising in the actual braising course. But for this, all you need is to sort of caramelise that sauce for a good few minutes around the chicken before you then add your stock or water or whatever else, any other liquid. And you want it to be nice and sticky before that extra liquid goes in. I'm going to use the chicken stock from my poaching. You want to make sure that you cover your chicken, bring it to a boil and then let it simmer for at least 20 minutes. This has had about half an hour of braising time and now the sauce is what was really stock, has reduced right down. And what was the deep fry on this side of chicken here has a much darker colour, but also the texture of the skin is automatically looks softer and more almost wrinkled. From that deep frying process, so as much as I thought it was quintuple, it wasn't a quintuple. I think it was blanched, then dried. Yeah, I could say that's a cooking technique. I think the drying process is actually really important. So blanched, dried, then marinated and deep fried and then braised. If these were chicken's feet, the final stage, which would be to then take these out, pop them in the bowl or actually just keep them ready for service in a dim sum restaurant before you then steam this dish to finish. As you can see from the pieces that I'm picking out here, these slightly more shriveled pieces of chicken, very different in colour to the non-deep fried. Not to say that one or the other is going to taste better than the other, but what I'm talking about here is this like these additional layers of cooking technique, which really make up the basis of this course, this cooking course. So I'm going to put a whole load of sauce over these and what the steaming process does, if you were making that sort of dim sum style steamed chicken feet or wings, it's almost like a gelatinous bite around the fat from the chicken, that this extra steaming process, fifth part of the cooking process, is how we then finish the dish. Double cooking in Chinese is all about understanding how to get different textures from the same ingredients purely from the cooking technique itself. So these guys have steamed through and you can see the skin has kind of shriveled up even more, the whole thing will be very very soft, very tender, you know and that is what the steaming process does. So I think what's interesting to see if you put the two side by side, which you know it's exactly the same sauce, exactly the same flavour, but they do look very different in the way they have finished, because of that extra cooking process. So I'm going to go for a taste of these steamed, braised, fried, blanched wings, because it should really like completely fall off the bone. You can see that on camera how that bone is literally just slipping off the rest of it. I'm glad I did this. It shows that the cooking technique, how it changes this fatty meat from sort of process to process or technique to technique, weaving in and out of the different core Chinese cooking techniques to pull just one dish together. You want or you like, have enjoyed this learning process with me, then give us a like, comment, let us know what else you want to learn or you want me to experiment with, because that is the whole point of cooking full stop in my mind. Play with your food, try new things, test things out, see why and what these different cooking techniques do. Tastes like chicken feet.