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 Mapo tofu! Sorry for bad presentation.  One thing I don't understand, but maybe someone familiar with mapo tofu knows more; but is it just me, but when I order mapo tofu, it's very different from the recipe that the Chinese Cook Demystified channel covers. Theirs (the channel I mentioned)/mine is usually redder; way spicier (I love spiciness, "I fear that my food is not spicy enough!" etc), and when I don't gently caress it up, less soupy. But when I order it, it turns to be more of a dark brown, has corn for some reason, barely mild, and typically soupier; and the tofu feels way too soft. Is this a normal variation on mapo tofu? I've tried different restaurants but haven't really found one that makes it where it tastes as satisfying as the one I can make myself. At least as far as I am capable of judging.
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Oct 22, 2022 01:44
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 01:21 |
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droll posted:Re: spiciness at restaurants I've learned over the years that I'll often get White Boy version of their dishes. They make some judgement calls and it's different to what they'll make for other people. I learned this when I had bun bo hue at the same place 1 week apart with a different server taking the order. I'm ordering from Canada from restaurants in my city! Sorry if that wasn't clear.  And presumably yeah, I follow the recipe here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfsZwwrTFD4 I do increase the amount of pork (and tofu) because minimum pork comes in 600g packages and I don't know how to store pork for future use.  (recipe usually calls for like 35g which is tiiiny, I use closer to 100g and then make burgers with the rest; as you can probably tell from the picture I use like 400g of tofu, and eyeball double everything, so usually like 3-4tsp of the chili powder and 2-3 tbsn of the taosted & grounded sichuan peppercorns).I've tried asking for more spiciness when ordering in ubereats, rarely works sadly.
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Oct 22, 2022 02:11
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droll posted:Wrap up the pork into little mapo size bundles or whatever and just freeze. It's such a little amount that it defrosts and cooks in no time at all. I keep little parcels of pork in the freezer for mapo on the regular. I'll try this! I kinda had an aversion to freezing preportioned ingredients because of cooking shows like Kitchen Nightmares and the "Is it fresh? No it's frozen" interactions that occur made me think I should avoid it. 
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Oct 22, 2022 02:25
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Grand Fromage posted:It's fine, wrap it well and toss it if it's freezer burned. The only bad thing with freezing meat is it can mess up the texture (mostly if it's a second freeze), but for this use that doesn't really matter. Alright! Thanks for the advice, I'll try it next time I get more pork for more mapo. Any suggestions of some noodle recipes that might work well with shirataki noodles? I'm trying to diversify my keto diet more and shaking things up by re-exploring Chinese and Japanese cooking, and I noticed I don't notice the "weird taste" shirataki noodles allegedly have, so I want to explore them more. I liked the shoyu ramen recipe I adapted well enough even if it wasn't "proper"  because of the noodles.
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Oct 22, 2022 02:38
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mystes posted:Aside from otherwise being bastardized, if they're trying to make it not spicy, they could be using doubanjiang that doesn't have hot peppers in it which isn't red like normal doubanjiang, so the whole dish will have more of a brown color. That's what lovely Japanese mapo tofu uses, for example. Which is hilarious and ironic as its depictions of (authentic) mapo tofu in anime that got me interesting in making it! 
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Oct 22, 2022 03:32
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Pork also has more fat iirc which is better if you're doing keto like me.
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Oct 22, 2022 14:20
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Is this doubanjiang? I'm in a different supermarket than usual and everything is different and the labels don't match.  As an aside, how wary should I be of various sauces that are past their best buy date and were unrefridgerated? Some are still in sealed jars with the plastic seal still on but some I had opened at some point but left in my cupboard. Sesame oil. (opened) Shaoxing wine. (opened) Black bean garlic sauce. (still sealed) Chili in oil with black beans (opened) spicy chili crisp (opened) chili garlic sauce. (opened) Maybe some soy sauce somewhere. I am thinking of chucking these and buying new sauces for recipes I'll actually be cooking soon if its safer.
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Oct 22, 2022 18:27
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Grand Fromage posted:This is red oil doubanjiang from the biggest brand in Pixian. It is perfectly adequate for most uses. There are more aged versions that have more funk and flavor--look for a bag with the same brand (the three yellow diamonds) for the one year aged stuff. Excellent thanks! quote:The sesame oil may have gone rancid like any other oil depending on how old it is. Alrighty out it goes! quote:Shaoxing also loses its flavor over time. If they're more than like a year old I'd get new ones, it's not a safety issue but a flavor one. The rest are fine, though I don't know what chili garlic sauce is. Here's some pictures: (BB sometime in 2021)  (BB sometime in 2021)  (BB sometime in 2020)  quote:Keep in mind that if it's made in China, the date printed on it will likely be the manufacturing date, not an expiration date. Expiration dates are 99% bullshit anyway but if you buy something and the date is from three months ago, that's why. Oh its more like these were things I had bought a while ago and forgot about them because I didn't use them very often. But yeah for sure it says Best Before.
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Oct 22, 2022 19:20
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gently caress yeah didn't overreduce this time. (smaller bowl as I have a different meal for my main dinner)
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Oct 24, 2022 23:28
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That reminds me, should sesame oil be in the fridge after opening or left out? Not sure what kind exactly, this kind: https://www.amazon.ca/Kadoya-Pure-Sesame-Oil-5-5/dp/B008K0Y3FK/
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Oct 25, 2022 22:12
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Doom Rooster posted:If this is actually attempting to be doubanjiang, it is very bad at it. But it is delicious.  I thought this stuff was the real stuff until I checked in this thread.
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Oct 26, 2022 23:14
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Doom Rooster posted:This is the normal good stuff. Goddamnit I had a chance to get the aged stuff but I had no idea what it was and was afraid to ask a store clerk!
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Oct 28, 2022 04:28
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Is there a difference between Lao Gan Ma and sichuan chili oil?
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Nov 2, 2022 18:23
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fart simpson posted:yep. chili oil usually is just what it says on the tin, lao gan ma is a brand with a half dozen or so condiments at least. lao gan ma is less spicy and they have other things added in like dried beef or tofu or nuts and a few others So for making Dan Dan noodles I want to try to find a jar that just says sichuan chili oil?
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Nov 2, 2022 20:51
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I like enamelled for regular frying/stove stuff. My sauce pan with the honeycomb pattern (Hexclad?) has been pretty good for mapo tofu actually, but I'm just using it temporarily until I get a portable gas burner. 
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Nov 24, 2022 03:58
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That certainly looks like a fungus.
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Feb 17, 2023 02:47
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I have embarked on my midlife crisis. Soon(tm) I think I might want the locking wok ring instead of the metal circle thingy, it slides around a little.
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May 16, 2023 22:29
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My seasoning adventures begin and I only burned my fingers a couple of times! It burns!  Butterfly.  The Center invades the East!  Almost there.  Then I begin seasoning.  Here I kinda hosed up, I didn't turn off the heat to do the second layer, with the little cloths you see in the back it resulted in a sort of chemical smell and I immediately discarded the rag. I think I saved it, I turned off the heat, switched to a paper towel to spread around the oil and then resumed. This time for the third layer I more carefully turned off the heat, waited to cool down a bit, and then applied the third layer. Result!  Hopefully I didn't screw up. It's too dark now to try a 4th layer or to experiment with cooking something, but maybe tomorrow!
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May 19, 2023 01:58
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I checked on my doubanjiang I got like last summer and it was in my cupboard, it doesn't look like it grew any mold and it was unopened but the seal on it has bulged outwards; in other foods isn't that usually a sign of botalism, is it safe in this case?
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May 20, 2023 02:01
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Haha my diet tends to wax and wane in cycles of what sort of food I'm into.
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May 20, 2023 04:10
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I went through four cannisters of butan in two days (mostly because of seasoning and then needing to reseason the work), is there an adaptor to make the gas burner work with a larger tank?
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May 23, 2023 20:39
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I just realized I can make those deep fried breaded pork burger things I see in Japanese cuisine with my wok now 
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May 29, 2023 15:08
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My impression was that having a hot stove/flame is nice to have but ultimately your technique counts for more?
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Jun 5, 2023 15:34
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Something something people from guizhou like their Spice, sichuan people don't fear Spice, and people from hunan fear that there is no Spice.
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Jun 6, 2023 17:12
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It seems baffling to me that Japanese mapo tofu can be bad when it looks so amazing in anime?
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Jun 7, 2023 23:17
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SwissArmyDruid posted:Somebody once told me that the Japanese palate can be summed up by five flavors: soy sauce, mirin, salt, sugar, and dashi. And that most Japanese cooking is a function of those five ingredients, just in different proportions. I mean maybe but when I look at what authentic sichuan mapo tofu looks like in cooking videos and what I make myself and then look at like, the mapo tofu scenes in Food Wars or Heaven's Feel they look accounting for art style basically identical? I'm not sure how the flavours can be radically different. Are the recipes actually different? Like to be clear anime isn't real life but if it looks the same across virtually every depiction in Japanese animated media I think it isn't unreasonable to think that's maybe the version of mapo tofu the animators are used to when they eat Chinese food; so either they're going out of their way for authentic chinese food in Tokyo or wherever they're located or mapo tofu in Japan is probably not that bad and maybe its just bad luck? I know sure as hell in Montreal and Ottawa I've yet to find a good dish of mapo tofu that looks like the authentic version. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 15:41 on Jun 8, 2023 |
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Jun 8, 2023 15:39
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mystes posted:Japanese mapo tofu typically has essentially zero spiciness and it may have some other weird stuff added sometimes Which again, would be weird to me, because all of the depictions in Japanese media has it as insanely spicy.
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Jun 8, 2023 18:14
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I just discovered this amazing channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nghpQMF6SOk The dude is insanely charismatic, like a Chinese Gordon Ramsay, very funny and informative and the recipes seem great and I want to try them out. "Calm down."
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Aug 4, 2023 00:37
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SwissArmyDruid posted:The most infuriating part of that video: "you'll get cancer", loving.... Asians and "you'll get cancer". The absolute level of backwater juju ignorance on display. I refuse to take medical opinions from anyone that believes a fan running while you're sleeping will kill you. He said the opposite, I think maybe one of his customers interjected and said that and he responded sarcastically "Thanks for your input  " and then he talks more about it a minute later about how you'd really have to screw up for anything unhealthy to happen to you from cooking with oil?
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Aug 4, 2023 02:07
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I think it might've been a little unclear because its a little unfair to the video to stop watching because of what the random customer in the back was interjecting because it's like 15s out of the total.
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Aug 4, 2023 15:05
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On one hand my dad is kinda similar, he's always telling me the latest health risks from xyz as a result of some latest study hes read about how Japanese potato farmers live to 150 so I should switch to an all potato diet, so there's definitely a certain kind of person who consumes that sort of Woo nutrition science and repeats it as fact. I don't think this is specific to China, though I imagine China might have their own flavour of this sort of thing.
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Aug 4, 2023 16:41
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 Peanut butter noodles on konjac pasta (following the "You Suck At Cooking Video") sans chili crisps because apparently mine expired back in 2022!!! I also followed the Chinese Cooking Demystified Video on Pork dumplings but I didn't like, package them in wrappers because of Keto but I kinda wanted peanut butter dumplings as well so here's my attempt at deconstructed peanut butter dumplings. Should've 250% more peanut butter sauce for the amount of pasta I made instead of merely 200% more. I had doubled all the measurements but seems like not enough.
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Aug 10, 2023 19:39
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Made some mapo.
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Dec 19, 2023 00:29
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Eeyo posted:Other dumplings that freeze well: baozi (steamed buns) and zongzi. May I present Pineapple Pizza Baozi
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Dec 29, 2023 20:31
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mystes posted:incidentally, pizza baozi (pizaman) are a staple of japanese convenience stores for whatever reason I wonder what would distinguish a pizza baozi from a hotpocket. Decoration? Ingredients? Oven vs Deep fried?
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Dec 29, 2023 21:17
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I've bought some of those pre-skinned garlic buds but they seem to get moldy very quicky? Should I also just freeze them like with sliced scallions?
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Dec 30, 2023 21:17
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Gotta say as also someone who watches a lot of Ramsay I also internalized the "fresh never frozen" mindset. I basically never get frozen meat/protein and try to pace my shopping so i basically use what I eat before it goes bad like with lettuce, cucumber, guac, etc. But also like my freezer isn't very large and what would I even put in it? I could maybe stack some frozen steaks or at most 2 chickens but then there's the huge pain in knowing when to put them in the fridge to thaw. There was that one video by Ramsay where he had like a 10 minute challenge to make ramen and it didn't seem very authentic to me, and he boiled the miso! The most i've been able to prep is when I make a large batch of mapo tofu (around 700g of tofu) which lasts about 3 meals, or oven baked* hamburger/sausages which usually lasts me about a week in the fridge. *Baking hamburgers/sausages is just way easier to clean up and way more consistent results. Overs the years I wasted a lot of foods like lettuce from just never getting to them on time so I've been trying hard the past like 2 years to be more careful and not waste anything. Speaking of, bumping this, how do you preserve garlic? Can you just freeze them as well? The preskinned ones I can get seem to go bad on me very fast and they come in too big of a package to use in time.
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Jan 3, 2024 17:00
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Jhet posted:You can freeze garlic, yes. Toss those in the freezer tightly wrapped and you can pull out what you need and it'll defrost on the counter in like 20 minutes. Thanks, what do you mean by lightly wrapped though? I assume not tossing them all into a single ziplock bag, but maybe divide them into portions I'll likely use (~10 bulbs at a time) into their own ziplocks? Its funny how much I've also thought MSG was "bad chemicals" because of the way as a kid I saw how Strongbad said "MSG'D!!!!" like its was a weird food preservative but then when I started looking up Chinese and Japanese cooking videos I realized "Oh its just all natural purified seaweed crystals?" and I went and got a bag of it.
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Jan 3, 2024 17:23
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Jhet posted:MSG is in tomatoes and mushrooms and a whole bunch of food naturally. It's just another salt that makes poo poo taste good. Don't skip all the anti-Asian people 1980s racism too. There's a ton of it in the MSG hate. It's also on Doritos. Gotcha, thanks. And yeah my confusion about wrapping is more that I don't know what a food wrap is but I'll look into this!
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Jan 3, 2024 17:37
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 01:21 |
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Pollyanna posted:Any reason I shouldn’t just slice up inches of ginger and smash some garlic flat, then freeze those? Same with slicing up a bunch of scallions and pulling those out as needed too. I actually don’t know how badly aromatics and vegetables deal with being frozen, so…maybe that’s a good thing to check. My personal superstition is smashing the garlic destroys some of the barrier between its essence and the surrounding world, and needs to be cooked immediately before its like, food-energy disperses. I actually seem to think ginger is alright to leave on the counter, slicing off the less-good bits; the exposed parts get oxidized but you can just slice off those parts?
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Jan 5, 2024 17:24
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