ChineseCookingDemystified
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Early Look: How much is "One Inch of Ginger"?
🕑 Added 2024-07-11 05:59:40 +0000 UTCJust a quick one before we head out for our next trip back to China. Hopefully it's not overly navel gazy - we often get questions about "inches of ginger", and wanted to use that as a platform to chat a bit about the 'theory' of writing recipes, if that makes any sense.
So... fair warning that this video is basically just me (Chris) chit chatting with the camera. No recipe or anything - and I'm not fantastic on camera - but hey. Hopefully it can still be useful to someone :)
Comments
Albert Nakano
I think the term that is most appropriate for that "following a recipe" but going with "feel" to finish the dish is fuzzy logic.
Paul Weiss
Having made a couple dozen of the dishes you two have presented over the years, I must admit that I’ve never once followed one of them exactly. However, I now use the wok completely differently from where I started, put ingredients together differently, have different ingredients in my frigo and my pantry, and so on. My “home base” is French regional cuisine, and even that has changed as a result of the exposure to the stuff you’ve published, and I don’t mean that I’ve gone fusion. It’s still a Gascon classic, for instance, but I’ll remember some technique that you (or the guy from Plao Cooking, whom I’ve also learned a ton from) have presented that gives me a textural nuance, or preserves the identities of ingredients, or subsumes their individual identities to create something interestingly new, and so on.
Abhayakara
This was great. Explained something I’ve noticed but never really put into words. Your mug is perfectly nice to see in videos. The camera loves both of you.
JG
Great video as usual, but just for some feedback, the noise in the background was a bit distracting. It's not a big deal and is probably barely noticeable watching on a phone or laptop with speakers, but in my case I was wearing headphones and kept having to look around to see if there were dogs or kids before realizing it was just the video.
Adrian Slider
I found this video useful, and I like having this sort of educational video mixed in with the recipes. Only complaint is that there was no puppy dog. Also remember that 1 mL water = 1 g! Water, soy sauce, vinegar, etc. can easily be measured by weight, no math needed. I'd bet all oils have essentially the same weight, too--somewhat less than 1 g per mL. But I expect that when you get into things like oyster sauce, mayonnaise, etc., they don't have a consistent density that's easy to work with.
Christian Tucker
Good video. Working through this ambiguity is essential to becoming a better cook because it forces you to think, taste, and react. My mom uses "enough" as a measurement. How much caraway do you add? Enough. Not the precision required for the industry, but exactly the skillset required for home cooking.
Ellen Bloomfield
As a baker, I use weights. Not only flour can be so variable. From year to year the protein of a particular field of wheat will have different properties. King Arthur is making the of flours test their shipments of wheat. And the mill and mix different wheats until they get their standard protein and starches they want in a type of flour. At home I mill some of my own flour. So I depend a lot on autolyse to help me get the right hydration for the particular wheat berries I grind.
Ellen Bloomfield
You can make a stew when your measuring cup is lost.
Alice Wonderchek
This was a great video! I do prefer recipes by weight and have even gone so far as to convert some of my favorite by volume recipes. The fewer dishes to wash, the better. Or in some cases, trying to find my measuring cups in the massive corner cupboard that's labeled "baking paraphernalia" leaves me wishing I could afford a kitchen remodel.
