So I have a question you all that’s a little awkward to execute in poll form: which cuisines do you consider your kitchen ‘set up’ for?
Let me explain what I mean. The other day I was perusing /r/cooking, and there was a thread there asking what’s become a pretty common question on the forum: which things, in your opinion, are never worth to make at home? And after the usual answers of ‘puff pasty’ (agree) and ‘deep fried anything’ (disagree, but understand), there were a few commenters chiming in with the answer of “Stir fries”.
It’s something that we’ve definitely heard before – people trying to follow one of our recipes, bemoaning the fact that they’d need to purchase like fifteen new ingredients from their local Asian supermarket (and potentially even have to fiddle with a portable burner), then throwing their hands up in the air and saying ‘yeah, not worth making at home’.
But like, millions of people *do* obviously make Chinese food at home all the time – the difficulty isn’t something intrinsic to the cuisine, it’s because said commenter’s kitchen just wasn’t ‘set up’ for making Chinese food.
And that’s obviously ok, right? A channel that I like binging now and then is Obi and Salma’s MiddleEats – despite the fact that our kitchen is *completely* not set up to make Egyptian food and the like. I was chit chatting with him a bit over on Reddit, and I sort of felt like that stereotypical AllRecipes commenter that changes literally everything about a recipe before giving it five stars:
“Hey man, loved your Yellow Rice recipe, it turned out absolutely fantastic. Ended up swapping the Loumi for Cantonese preserved lemons”
“Awesome to hear, seems like a sensible substitution”
“I also swapped the butter for lard, cut the tomatoes because I forgot to buy them, swapped the lemon juice for some homemade preserved lemons, hit it with a slug of fish sauce, and added a whole can of chopped up Cantonese fried dace with black beans because I thought it’d be delicious. Awesome recipe.”
“…”
Because our kitchen isn’t set up for Middle Eastern food, I primarily watch their channel for inspiration, tips on technique, and to just… learn stuff. Ditto with something like the always illustrious De mi Rancho a Tu Cocina – unless we start nixtamalizing our own corn, our kitchen just can’t quite fit in Mexican food (even though we obviously adore the cuisine).
Generally speaking, I think that if you want to make something properly authentic, most people’s kitchens can probably fit in… two cuisines. Maybe three. For us, our kitchen is set up for (1) Cantonese (2) Southwest China and (3) the American south. For *most* dishes within those three cuisines, we can make do without any special sourcing or expensive trips to the supermarket.
Of course, certain cuisines are also closer to others. If your kitchen’s set up for Cantonese food, you can actually make a number of Japanese dishes provided you grab just a small handful of other ingredients. Ditto with American food and, say, France. And obviously there’s a lot of interoperability between different Chinese cuisines as well.
I’m starting to ramble, but the point is – next week we’re going to have a video on how to ‘set up’ a kitchen to be able to cook Chinese food, so we were curious to see what cuisines y’all were set up to do, and maybe also how many of you might watch us in a similar way that I watch some other international cooking channels (i.e. for inspiration a bit more than instruction).
Chinese Cooking Demystified
So I have a question you all that’s a little awkward to execute in poll form: which cuisines do you consider your kitchen ‘set up’ for?
Let me explain what I mean. The other day I was perusing /r/cooking, and there was a thread there asking what’s become a pretty common question on the forum: which things, in your opinion, are never worth to make at home? And after the usual answers of ‘puff pasty’ (agree) and ‘deep fried anything’ (disagree, but understand), there were a few commenters chiming in with the answer of “Stir fries”.
It’s something that we’ve definitely heard before – people trying to follow one of our recipes, bemoaning the fact that they’d need to purchase like fifteen new ingredients from their local Asian supermarket (and potentially even have to fiddle with a portable burner), then throwing their hands up in the air and saying ‘yeah, not worth making at home’.
But like, millions of people *do* obviously make Chinese food at home all the time – the difficulty isn’t something intrinsic to the cuisine, it’s because said commenter’s kitchen just wasn’t ‘set up’ for making Chinese food.
And that’s obviously ok, right? A channel that I like binging now and then is Obi and Salma’s MiddleEats – despite the fact that our kitchen is *completely* not set up to make Egyptian food and the like. I was chit chatting with him a bit over on Reddit, and I sort of felt like that stereotypical AllRecipes commenter that changes literally everything about a recipe before giving it five stars:
“Hey man, loved your Yellow Rice recipe, it turned out absolutely fantastic. Ended up swapping the Loumi for Cantonese preserved lemons”
“Awesome to hear, seems like a sensible substitution”
“I also swapped the butter for lard, cut the tomatoes because I forgot to buy them, swapped the lemon juice for some homemade preserved lemons, hit it with a slug of fish sauce, and added a whole can of chopped up Cantonese fried dace with black beans because I thought it’d be delicious. Awesome recipe.”
“…”
Because our kitchen isn’t set up for Middle Eastern food, I primarily watch their channel for inspiration, tips on technique, and to just… learn stuff. Ditto with something like the always illustrious De mi Rancho a Tu Cocina – unless we start nixtamalizing our own corn, our kitchen just can’t quite fit in Mexican food (even though we obviously adore the cuisine).
Generally speaking, I think that if you want to make something properly authentic, most people’s kitchens can probably fit in… two cuisines. Maybe three. For us, our kitchen is set up for (1) Cantonese (2) Southwest China and (3) the American south. For *most* dishes within those three cuisines, we can make do without any special sourcing or expensive trips to the supermarket.
Of course, certain cuisines are also closer to others. If your kitchen’s set up for Cantonese food, you can actually make a number of Japanese dishes provided you grab just a small handful of other ingredients. Ditto with American food and, say, France. And obviously there’s a lot of interoperability between different Chinese cuisines as well.
I’m starting to ramble, but the point is – next week we’re going to have a video on how to ‘set up’ a kitchen to be able to cook Chinese food, so we were curious to see what cuisines y’all were set up to do, and maybe also how many of you might watch us in a similar way that I watch some other international cooking channels (i.e. for inspiration a bit more than instruction).
3 years ago | [YT] | 2,181