thread of pictures of real chinese food

It's just like 100x better than what you can get in NYC Chinatown. And I was just there

Like the people are the same but the ingredients, how they cook it, what they cook it on, I think it all makes a difference

Maybe it's the heavy metals + chemicals

But every iteration is just better over here man

But still, congee. What is up with that? I like lots of the pickled things, so maybe the idea is to use congee as a vehicle for that stuff? IDGI though, would rather have a nice bowl of rice.

― quincie, Sunday, January 19, 2014 5:44 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

Yeah you eat the pickled salty things and drink the congee to take the edge off

It's like a chaser

It's an acquired taste

I like to just have congee plain by itself, it's really good for settling your stomach or if you're feeling queasy you know

xpost: there is definitely a Taiwan breakfast thing that involves an egg and a thin pancake/crepe type thing that I will try

I've had this it's really really good

scallion pancakes sound so good

http://i.imgur.com/DgatTcJ.jpg

You know what's even better than soup DUMPLINGS!? These lil guys

I have not had those lil guys, but I have had a bigger version (steam bun that gets crisped on the bottom).

Hard to imagine anything better than soup DUMPLINGS!, tho.

I have had "crummy" North American (Canadian) versions of scallion pancakes, for breakfast too, one of my favourite ways to start a day

Been pestering all administrative bodies to get my ass to China asap

The DUMPLINGS! I just posted are also soup DUMPLINGS! they have soup inside of them

It's darker grittier reboot of the soup dumpling

BTW some of the western food is better here than in America too

For example the fancy cheeses are imported from France where they're allowed to use unpasteurized milk

Like I have never really liked brie but my roommate bought some French brie and it was fantastic

China is turning me into a food libertarian

Bathe me in gutter oil

Think my heart just stopped

It's been nice, posting here

Please don't die before I get to Shanghai! That rhymes, see.

congee is nice warm comfort food. spiced with ginger and add a dash of pepper and spring onion what's not to like?

Surely you're being ironic

像你的婚禮當天的雨

I have a real chinese food cooking question. Say I am a real chinese home cook, and I'm making something that requires beef or chicken (or fish, or pork, whatevs) broth. What do I do if I'm not equipped to make that stuff from scratch? Do I get a can from the supermarket, or is there a frozen version, or do I go to my local brothmonger and ask for some plain broth to take home?

You can totally get a can from the supermarket! #nevercookedrealchinesefoodinhislife

Honestly have never been to a Chinese person's kitchen that didn't have this in the pantry

http://i.imgur.com/LNyVgTS.jpg

I don't think beef stock is a big part of Chinese cooking since it wasn't until recently that beef became a part of Chinese cuisine (iirc cows were too valuable in the field to use for food)

Pork bone soup is a big thing but I can't really recall if there are any recipes that call for only pork stock

Hungry now, FYI.

I suppose this is the thread where I confess that I've eaten chicken bouillon powder by the spoonful from the can :(

Isn't that called the #highlyfe?

Hmmmmm OK I'm think the answer is "go out for beef noodle soup, do not try to make at home." Which is fine because there are a couple of places to choose from within a ten-minute walk, and it costs like $7 USD for both of us WITH BEER.

Why would I cook this at home, is the real question.

Yeah seriously

I think there's more going on in beef noodle soup than just the stock

Much more

Yeah I'm being an idiot.

I think I turned a real chinese food corner recently: went out for indian and found using a fork kind of weird/awkward.

chicken stock
http://www.ocado.com/catalog/images-hires/11114011_H.jpg?identifier=1678083e7ff90bd404baad3f60bffa37

beef noodle soup at home
http://www.acrimonie.com/a/src/138973192542.jpg

I really don't think there's ever an economy in making your own stock unless you have access to a lot of bones and you are feeding 50 people.

I suppose this is the thread where I confess that I've eaten chicken bouillon powder by the spoonful from the can :(

well isn't that the basis for...

http://static1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130117092525/evchk/images/thumb/c/c6/17la2p3.jpg/480px-17la2p3.jpg

http://images.sbar.com.cn/2010/04/21/ee549d22215dd5b1340fcf5e9e507a3c.jpg

^^^ I love greens prepared like this. I have not managed to replicate it at home very well.

I thought of this thread yesterday when I was buying some steam buns from a department store food hall and the guy selling them assured me, "no MSG, no chicken powder!" And I'm thinking "but chicken powder is a *good* thing, right?"

i think you could make yourself a nice beef noodle soup by following basically

-- get some fatty but not too fatty beef, preferably with some bones. don't be too picky about what beef is going in there. short rib would even work. and you can put some beef tendon in too, if you like that.

-- boil beef briefly, drain water and clean beef with cold water.

-- hot oil, add white part of scallion, whole cloves of garlic, pixian bean paste, a tiny amount of sugar or a small amount of tomato, add in beef, let it brown and get dank on the bottom of the pan, add in star anise + cassia + sichuan peppercorn + salt + maybe some dried chilies if you want it spicy.

-- cover everything in water and let it boil away until your beef is reduced to a pieces that can barely withstand the pressure of a chopstick squeeze.

-- optional but not fully recommended: strain your stock and remove the beef, freeze the stock and scrape off the pearly white fat from the top, reheat.

-- grab some flour and a big bowl, add eggs and water and salt and make dough, knead it until it's barely kneadable anymore, roll it out, cut it into strips, rolls the strips flat or however the hell you want to make noodles.

-- boil noodles in separate pot of salted water, take them out and give them a rinse so that they won't affect the perfectly balanced viscosity of your soup with floury thickness. put in bowl. if you're feeding a bunch of people, the noodles can chill in the bowl for a while, don't worry.

-- optional: get some fresh greens and let them barely cook through on top of your stock, just dunking them in and out with chopsticks.

-- cover cooked noodles in bowl with dank brownish red (red from the bean paste!) beef stock, agitate to destick the noodles.

-- put greens on top, put beef on top making sure to equally divide fatty or white skin sort of pieces and tendon pieces if those are in there, put pickled mustard greens on top, put a sprinkling of green scallion on top which should be leftover from putting the white part in the oil.

-- provide black vinegar when serving to allow the individual diner to balance the fattiness of the stock with the acidity of the vinegar.

it sounds like a lot of work but i promise it's not.

shopping in the west, i can't bear the price charged for lamb but careful supermarket shopping or a kindly butcher can provide you with very, very cheap lamb bones that are still fairly meaty. brewing up a milky white rich as fuck lamb soup threaded with boiled off shreds of meat and then turning it into a welcoming home for your simple noodles and a bit of vinegar, amazing. and i like doing this thing i learned from a qinghai restaurant where they prepare a tomato base in a separate pan, just cooking down some tomatoes, bit of salt, bit of cumin, bit of chili, and then mixing tomato mixture + lamb soup + maybe some stirfried lamb liver or other lamb pieces + noodles in a bowl.

oh, cilantro with that lamb soup, of course. heaped with cilantro at the end.

and the availability of the type of chicken appropriate for making stock is... the situation is not the same in china, you get a lot of old, old chickens that can't be turned into anything but stock. throw it in, head and all and boil it for an afternoon, then add some goji berries or whatever other sorta medicinal and tasty elements at the end: good to go.

and pork bones, man, if you're not in china, somebody somewhere is just throwing away perfectly good pork bones that you could be making a simple stock with.

i think the chinese home stock situation is a lot less complicated than you're all making it out to be. they just boil bones and meat! there's like serious chinese stock recipes but you're not going down that road, you're not clarifying anything! you parboil and clean whatever you're going to boil, bone or meatwise, then let it ride.

quincie the veg there is tung choi 通菜 it's very soft (the stem is hollow). fry the veg in the wok with a bit of shrimp paste and garlic (and a tiny bit of chopped chilli) is all you need. takes 5 mins.

Hah up north we call that 空心菜 (hollow heart vegetable)

通菜 seems more elegant though

Excellent home cooking tips, thanking u!

I'm definitely gonna give it a go when I'm back in the states, dylannnnnnnn. Right now I'm in a super under-equipped kitchen in a rental apartment (even making rice was a struggle until nice landlady lent us her rice maker), so I'm not gonna undertake much in the way of cooking adventures here (here = Taipei, I'm here for another two weeks before Shanghai). But I'm c&p your recipe/instructions for use back in DC. I have good access to inter'l/"ethnic" grocery stores in the DC 'burbs, so I should be able to made this bones things happen.

Ken c, did not know about shrimp paste thing. I never know what the saucy stuff is. Oyster sauce, sometimes? I dunno but I have yet to run into sauteed green stuff here that I don't like a lot. Had some pea shoots that were so good I swear I might give up pork for them. Not really but I mean, close.

oh dylannnnnn and anyone else, I posed this question to dayo on 77 borad, any insight?

Hey dayo do you know anything about Dandong? Should I go to there after N. Korea y/n (it would mean less time in Beijing and also more $$$).

― quincie, Wednesday, January 29, 2014 10:56 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Don't know anything

Now that dylannnnnn has resurfaced, you should ask him

I believe he's been to at least one of the NK border towns

― 龜, Wednesday, January 29, 2014 11:32 AM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://pic6.nipic.com/20100330/2590383_154854004777_2.jpg

lol http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-laLziW8cjpU/TzhrIJUpq3I/AAAAAAAABlE/BjpANfJ-Nxk/s1600/IMG_7493_watermark.jpg

Not really getting the cheese part of that!

I've had that exact dish fyi

is this a Real Chinese Food y/n

Had 腊八蒜 today, garlic cloves soaked in black vinegar

http://i975.photobucket.com/albums/ae232/daggerlee/SH/AD6B7F51-DBC4-4B05-A471-575A682BAEDF_zpsuhs5rba4.jpg

http://i975.photobucket.com/albums/ae232/daggerlee/SH/79B82362-DDD6-43C6-8B4E-B16493DA38B9_zpsff09gpu0.jpg

The 腊八 refers to the date on the lunar calendar when you first start to pickle 'em

Apparently if you pickle them at any other time of year they won't turn green

In the second pic, that is what a clove looks like when bit straight through

It's unbelievably green actually

I'm gonna count it xp

i think it is as real as it gets. yeah the one that didn't link shows much better cheese

Here buddy

http://i.imgur.com/1oJ6xq1.jpg

Harold McGee explains the coloring behind laba garlic:

To start off: news that an old kitchen worry has now been explained in full and converted from a worry into an opportunity.

I hear every year from cooks who have been alarmed at seeing normally pale garlic turn bright green and even blue, sometimes when the cloves are pickled whole, sometimes when they’re chopped and cooked with other ingredients. I’d often been puzzled by little blue-green specks when I made garlic bread with loaves of sourdough, but I was really rattled the first time I puréed raw garlic, onion and ginger together in a blender to make chicken in yogurt from Madhur Jaffrey’s “Invitation to Indian Cooking.” When I fried the purée the entire mass turned turquoise blue.

I asked a couple of Indian friends who happen to be plant biologists whether they knew what was going on. They said they had never seen the blue purée, because Indian cooks don’t grind onions and garlic together. They grind or chop them separately and usually fry the onions first.

For them, blue was the color of an American shortcut. For me it’s been a reliable curiosity every time I cook Ms. Jaffrey’s happily efficient recipes for chicken and cauliflower and okra, one that goes away as the purée browns and I add turmeric and the rest of the ingredients.

As I learned from one of my regular food-chemistry reads, it’s not necessary to see these color changes as problems. The northern Chinese think of them as attractive and auspicious. They make an intentionally intensely green pickle by aging fresh garlic heads for several months, then peeling the cloves and immersing them in vinegar for a week. The resulting Laba garlic pickle is served with DUMPLINGS! to celebrate the New Year.

According to chemists at the China Agricultural University in Beijing, aging the garlic gives it a chance to accumulate large quantities of one of the chemicals that generate the color; fresh garlic doesn’t green much at all. And a strong green color develops in Laba garlic only with acetic acid, the main acid in vinegar (also found in sourdough), because it’s especially effective at breaching internal membranes and mixing the cell chemicals that react together to create the green pigment. The pigment itself turns out to be a close chemical relative of chlorophyll, which gives all green leaves their color.

Glad that Harold McGee is as excited about DUMPLINGS! as the rest of ILX

^ that's the one

going to include hong kong borscht in this bitch too
http://s3-media2.ak.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/-8degCoqy-LVr2BFycyHiw/l.jpg

the red one obvs.

蒸水蛋
http://news.xinhuanet.com/food/2007-04/24/xinsrc_57204042410304212932269.jpg