This is a story about how difficult it can be to make recipes for international replication, and why – when in doubt – you should always trust your judgement and your senses over a written recipe, even if you otherwise like the source.
As many of you know, we recently moved from China to Thailand. Whenever you move, it always takes a bit of getting used to where and how to buy the ingredients you need – and that goes double for international moves. Luckily, Bangkok is probably the best place for us to do what we do outside of China – there’s a fantastic Chinatown, a lot of the produce is quite similar to south China, and when in doubt we can send stuff from Taobao here. Basically, we’ve been able to cook here without many snags, which is awesome.
Now, for our recent video on how to use Dried Shiitakes (out a couple days ago), one of the recipes we wanted to include in the video was stuffed shiitake mushrooms. Awesome dish, totally in our wheelhouse – we barely even left any time to test the recipe because we were just that confident in it. After all, Chinese meat mixtures are something we’ve made practically a million times – they were one of the very first things me and Steph ever learned how to make really *well*, and a recipe featuring a meat mix was even, like, the second video ever on this channel.
So we settled into our first test… hand mincing and vigorously stirring the meat filling like we always do. It’s always a little bit of work going that extra mile, but hey, you’re rewarded with a juicy, bouncy filling in the end. And stuffed shiitakes are one of my absolute favorite dishes in the world, so you can’t help but get a little excited for them.
But after steaming? They… sucked. We forgot to marinate the mushrooms (gah, easy thing to forget), but the biggest issue was the pork filling. The filling wasn’t bouncy and juicy – it was dry and kind of… mealy. Stuck to your teeth when you bit into it.
In a word, wrong.
So thinking about where things might have gone awry, I thought back to all the musts when it comes to meat emulsions – fresh meat, cool environment, vigorous mixing. I was a little lazy with the mixing (we’ve gotten less obsessive over the years on that front), but I should’ve still been in the same rough ballpark. Regarding temperature, while Bangkok is hot, it’s basically the same as summer in Guangdong, and we usually run the A/C while we’re cooking anyway. That left the pork.
Looking at the bag, it dawned on me that the meat that we’d purchased had probably been previously frozen pork. In China, frozen meat stalls are popular at local markets too (cheap meat from USA and Brazil!), but thinking back to our walks through the Khlong Toei wholesale market here… in Bangkok they seem to like to thaw out the frozen stuff before purchase. Not to mention, the pork that we used was actually from our freezer, so this was actually pork that’d been frozen twice! No wonder!
So this time, I decided to go to the supermarket to pick up some pork. Down the road from us is a Big C, which’s a Thai hypermart that’s owned by Carrefour. And while I *hated* going to Carrefours in China (they’re designed like a maze, worse than an Ikea), in fairness they always had some quality pork. So I went to Big C (a more pleasant experience by and large), grabbed some of our trusty ham/leg cut of pork, and we tested it again… confident that the filling would come out bouncy and juicy like usual.
Nope. Same problem – dry, soft, mealy.
Ok. Now we were starting to get a little worried – Big C pork definitely wasn’t the answer. That said, generally speaking, in China at least it’s markets where you get the good stuff, not supermarkets (Carrefour pork and beef aside). So who knows? Maybe the supermarket stuff was actually previously frozen too, and with our beginner-level Thai we just didn’t see it on the label?
So we resolved to go back to the market, but this time I didn’t do it blindly. I scouted out our local market, and if you get there early there definitely *are* shops that sell freshly slaughtered pork – you can tell from the bottles of fresh blood that they sell on the counters. But to really make sure no stone was left unturned, I decided to enlist the help of our neighbor here, who’s a vendor at the local night market. Thai cooking also has a similar concept for these meat mixtures – they call it “bouncy pork” (‘หมูเด้ง’). So between my painfully rudimentary Thai, her slightly better English, and a healthy assist from Google Translate’s ‘conversation’ feature… I described to her our problem.
She immediately understood. Waved her hand and told me in English “yes, many market pork is not good”. She walked with me one morning to the market (as she has to go anyway), and led me to a specific vendor. This was one of the fresh pork vendors that I’d seen earlier – perfect. The vendor grabbed a cut of the pork and told me that this was the cut that you use to make หมูเด้ง, the bouncy pork. That cut? The ham/leg, same as we’d always used in China. Effusively thanked them all, went back to test. *This time* I was confident.
But… while it was *better*, at its core it still had the same textural issues.
My mind was spinning. This pork was gaslighting me. Tried to search YouTube for Thai bouncy pork recipes… they all used food processors as a base. Maybe that was my problem? Or maybe the Thai bouncy pork just… isn’t as bouncy sans additives? I seemed to remember some of the snacks here didn’t seem to have *that* juicy of a filling. Or maybe this was why all those classic Teochew dishes like Guorou – in China stuffed with pork – were stuffed with seafood here? Or maybe it’s a breed thing? Or maybe it’s a time-from-slaughter-to-market thing? Maybe we should just throw our hands in the air, and accept that we just… *can’t* make juicy Chinese meat fillings here in Thailand?
Chinese Cooking Demystified
This is a story about how difficult it can be to make recipes for international replication, and why – when in doubt – you should always trust your judgement and your senses over a written recipe, even if you otherwise like the source.
As many of you know, we recently moved from China to Thailand. Whenever you move, it always takes a bit of getting used to where and how to buy the ingredients you need – and that goes double for international moves. Luckily, Bangkok is probably the best place for us to do what we do outside of China – there’s a fantastic Chinatown, a lot of the produce is quite similar to south China, and when in doubt we can send stuff from Taobao here. Basically, we’ve been able to cook here without many snags, which is awesome.
Now, for our recent video on how to use Dried Shiitakes (out a couple days ago), one of the recipes we wanted to include in the video was stuffed shiitake mushrooms. Awesome dish, totally in our wheelhouse – we barely even left any time to test the recipe because we were just that confident in it. After all, Chinese meat mixtures are something we’ve made practically a million times – they were one of the very first things me and Steph ever learned how to make really *well*, and a recipe featuring a meat mix was even, like, the second video ever on this channel.
So we settled into our first test… hand mincing and vigorously stirring the meat filling like we always do. It’s always a little bit of work going that extra mile, but hey, you’re rewarded with a juicy, bouncy filling in the end. And stuffed shiitakes are one of my absolute favorite dishes in the world, so you can’t help but get a little excited for them.
But after steaming? They… sucked. We forgot to marinate the mushrooms (gah, easy thing to forget), but the biggest issue was the pork filling. The filling wasn’t bouncy and juicy – it was dry and kind of… mealy. Stuck to your teeth when you bit into it.
In a word, wrong.
So thinking about where things might have gone awry, I thought back to all the musts when it comes to meat emulsions – fresh meat, cool environment, vigorous mixing. I was a little lazy with the mixing (we’ve gotten less obsessive over the years on that front), but I should’ve still been in the same rough ballpark. Regarding temperature, while Bangkok is hot, it’s basically the same as summer in Guangdong, and we usually run the A/C while we’re cooking anyway. That left the pork.
Looking at the bag, it dawned on me that the meat that we’d purchased had probably been previously frozen pork. In China, frozen meat stalls are popular at local markets too (cheap meat from USA and Brazil!), but thinking back to our walks through the Khlong Toei wholesale market here… in Bangkok they seem to like to thaw out the frozen stuff before purchase. Not to mention, the pork that we used was actually from our freezer, so this was actually pork that’d been frozen twice! No wonder!
So this time, I decided to go to the supermarket to pick up some pork. Down the road from us is a Big C, which’s a Thai hypermart that’s owned by Carrefour. And while I *hated* going to Carrefours in China (they’re designed like a maze, worse than an Ikea), in fairness they always had some quality pork. So I went to Big C (a more pleasant experience by and large), grabbed some of our trusty ham/leg cut of pork, and we tested it again… confident that the filling would come out bouncy and juicy like usual.
Nope. Same problem – dry, soft, mealy.
Ok. Now we were starting to get a little worried – Big C pork definitely wasn’t the answer. That said, generally speaking, in China at least it’s markets where you get the good stuff, not supermarkets (Carrefour pork and beef aside). So who knows? Maybe the supermarket stuff was actually previously frozen too, and with our beginner-level Thai we just didn’t see it on the label?
So we resolved to go back to the market, but this time I didn’t do it blindly. I scouted out our local market, and if you get there early there definitely *are* shops that sell freshly slaughtered pork – you can tell from the bottles of fresh blood that they sell on the counters. But to really make sure no stone was left unturned, I decided to enlist the help of our neighbor here, who’s a vendor at the local night market. Thai cooking also has a similar concept for these meat mixtures – they call it “bouncy pork” (‘หมูเด้ง’). So between my painfully rudimentary Thai, her slightly better English, and a healthy assist from Google Translate’s ‘conversation’ feature… I described to her our problem.
She immediately understood. Waved her hand and told me in English “yes, many market pork is not good”. She walked with me one morning to the market (as she has to go anyway), and led me to a specific vendor. This was one of the fresh pork vendors that I’d seen earlier – perfect. The vendor grabbed a cut of the pork and told me that this was the cut that you use to make หมูเด้ง, the bouncy pork. That cut? The ham/leg, same as we’d always used in China. Effusively thanked them all, went back to test. *This time* I was confident.
But… while it was *better*, at its core it still had the same textural issues.
My mind was spinning. This pork was gaslighting me. Tried to search YouTube for Thai bouncy pork recipes… they all used food processors as a base. Maybe that was my problem? Or maybe the Thai bouncy pork just… isn’t as bouncy sans additives? I seemed to remember some of the snacks here didn’t seem to have *that* juicy of a filling. Or maybe this was why all those classic Teochew dishes like Guorou – in China stuffed with pork – were stuffed with seafood here? Or maybe it’s a breed thing? Or maybe it’s a time-from-slaughter-to-market thing? Maybe we should just throw our hands in the air, and accept that we just… *can’t* make juicy Chinese meat fillings here in Thailand?
There was one route left before giving up though.
(continued in pinned comment below)
3 years ago (edited) | [YT] | 1,423