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Welcome back to the School Walks channel. This video is a compilation of the top four Chinese takeaway dishes on the channel. Chowo main to crispy chili beef, sweet and sours, and egg fried rice. You name it, we've got it here on the school. Chicken chowine. Really simple. Chowain actually means fried noodles in Chinese. Tao me. So, first to set up your veg. I'm going to grab some pack choy. Just a few leaves of pack choy. Some chisum. That's like a vegetable heart vegetable literal translation. Chisum, red pepper, some bean sprouts, spring onion to garnish at the end.
Everything needs to be finely sliced. This fried noodle is packed full of veg with your pepper. Easy way to do it or good way to practice your knife skills. It's what we call the roll cut. Following the inside wall of your pepper. Long soaring movements. The W clock starting at 12:00 with your hardest vegetable, the pepper. And then your patroy and try some next to that. And your marinated chicken is going to go just after your bean sprouts. So, your chicken needs to be sliced nice and thinly and marinated. The marinade is really simple. It's what I call the classic Chinese marinade. light soy sauce, sesame, and a good pinch of sugar.
Roughly half a tablespoon of light soy, a drizzle of sesame oil, pinch of sugar. Give that a good massage through. Make sure all that sauce is taken up by the chicken. Then the only thing we're missing is your egg noodles. Your egg noodles. Most importantly, don't boil them. Just soak them in hot water for about 3 to 4 minutes until they're softened. They'll be nice and separate. Every strand of noodle needs to be separate from each other. Drain them and dry them on a clean tea towel. Once they're bone dry, they're ready to stir fry. Last thing, we're going to make up your stir fry sauce.
Very simple. We've got some gluten-free oyster sauce here. About half a tablespoon. And same again with your dark. soy sauce. And this will help color the noodles just to help further caramelize. About half a teaspoon of sugar. Coat the noodles nicely. Give that a good stir. And for some nutty sort of finish to your noodles, little drizzle of sesame oil. That should be enough sauce to just wrap around my noodles nicely. Onto the walking. Always get your walk to really high heat. Oil into the walk. My walk clock is ready. So, I'm going to start at 12:00 with my hardest vegetable, my red pepper. If you love your vegetables like I do and you've got
lots on there, you can cook your veg first, take it out, and then get back to your chicken and bring your veg back in later on. I'll show you that now. Smoking hot walk peppers in. Fold that through nicely. There's a few ways to cool your walk down. Firstly, stirring. Secondly, pushing and folding. Number three, what we call the walk toss. Long push forward, quick flick back. And lastly, the tummy and the head. Round and round. Back and forwards like this. Round and round. Back and forwards.
You don't want to overcook your veg. So, push that to the back. Allow space for your next ingredient. A little splash of oil and then your patch choy and chisam can go straight into the walk. Fold that through nice and gently. Keep that sizzle going. Never lose your sizzle. Really circulate that air nicely. Bean sprouts only really need about 30 seconds of flash frying. So just push that veg to the back. Allow space for your bean sprouts. And then again, just a drizzle of oil. smoking hot bean sprouts in. Fold your veg into it. Give it a tummy in the head. Round and round back and forwards and they'll collect nicely into that center of the walk. And then just push those aside.
Ready to finish off with your chicken and your noodles. And that just gives you a bit more space in the walk and allows your walk to stay at a really high heat when you're flash frying the chicken. Oil in the walk. Smoking hot. Once it's smoking hot, your chicken can go in. [snorts] Got to have that sizzling sound. Sear the other side. We're going to cook that chicken halfway through. Really smoking hot. Now we're going to start to finish off our stir fry quite quickly here. My noodles are now coming in. And you'll see the nice long strands of noodles.
I'm going to reintroduce my vegetables. Loads of edge there. And then we're going to go tummy and the head. Round and around. Back and forward. Round and round. Back and Back down on the heat. This time sauce goes in. And again. Round around back and forward. Round back and forward. And you just keep going with your tummy and the head every 20 seconds or so until those noodles take all that sauce up. You can see that sauce starting to caramelize around the noodles. Now, almost there. There's a little sauce sitting on the bottom of the walk at the moment. I just want to make that stick around the noodles.
Oh, it's a workout. Right, we're pretty much there. I can sense that starting to just about stick at the bottom of the walk. Once your noodles have that caramelized finish, your chicken cow man's ready. Lastly, spring onion over the top. Just take keep a little aside for garnish. And that spring onion will wilt and give it a little bit of added flavor. Time to plate up. Nice long noodles. Signifies long life in Chinese tradition, you know. If your noodles have been cooked nicely, there's barely any sticking from the base of your walk.
Should just have that smokiness collecting through each strand of noodle. Spring onion There you have it. Your chicken chowine home style. Got the smokiness from the walk. Great caramelization. That's a good chain. Now, there's numerous different ways of cooking crispy chili beef. It's one of the top most popular famous dishes of the UK. I would say it's almost like a an evolved version of sweet and sour. Definitely not healthy. Something for a cheat day. The main base for me is to get a base of ginger, garlic, and chili. And this will create a nice sort of homemade version. So, you want a fair bit of ginger and garlic.
Everything here needs to be nice and finely chopped up. So, rough chop my ginger. And I'm just going to sort of put this all into the same bowl because this will make the base flavor. Couple of big cloves of garlic there. Got some birdy chilies. Now, I don't want this dish to sort of blow our heads off. There's a little trick on how you can get the seeds out whilst keeping sort of rings of chili. And that's just to roll your chili like so.
You can see the seeds just start to sort of pop out of your tiny little chili. Seamless chili. Now, of course, if you have done that with your bare hands, just remember, don't scratch your eyes or anywhere else. Finely sliced rings of birdeye chili. Left a couple of seeds in there. That's okay. And that goes with your base flavor. Ginger, garlic, chili. If you want, you can add a bit of coriander stalk to that and you'll get a really nice fresh base flavor. We'll use the rest of the coriander and just pick that for garnish later. It's little things like this that
you can do at home that you definitely wouldn't get from a takeaway or restaurant. Fresh flavor from your coriander st. So, I've got my base flavor ready. I'm going to start on my beef. And we want nice thin strips of beef. Now, I've got a fresh bit of steak here, but traditionally in sort of Chinese restaurants, you might actually freeze your beef so that you can cut similar sort of lengths of beef out. Don't have to do that. You can just do it from fresh, too. So, we are doing it from fresh. You just want I want it quite sort of almost chunky strip. So, I'm going just sort of 3 to 4 mm thick. Then once I've got to this point where there's smaller pieces, even then I want to try and get them into as long a strip as possible. So
just open that up. And then these strips I'm going to sort of have so I've got good lengths of beef. Now, in the old days, my dad told me when they had the takeaway at 2:00 in the morning, someone comes in really drunk asking for a crispy chili beef. The old trick was just to get a bit of cardboard, batter it up as much as possible, deep fry it, and wrap it in a sauce. You get away with anything those days. This is actually a really good bit of sirloin steak. So, I'm not in any way like my father. That's true. [snorts] actually do. So, I've got nice long strips of my soy in there, which I can now marinate. And then all I have to do is batter that up with loads of corn flour, which I'll show you in a second, and then
make up a sauce. So, I'm going to season or marinade my beef first. Classic Cantonese marinade, light soy sauce, about a tablespoon or so of that. a teaspoon of sesame oil and a good pinch of sugar. Give that a good massage through and get all that flavor of the soy into there. And then I'm going to crack a whole egg into my meat. That egg is there to help bind the corn flour. Right. So, next up, we're going to season this big bowl of corn flour with a good amount of salt and pepper. And this is where what I'm trying to do is get a dry sort of dusty white consistency or batter around each strip of meat, which is why we have
so much corn flour in here. A lot of people ask me if it's excessive amounts. Yes, it is. It's excessive because it's a foolproof way of getting a really crispy finish on dishes like this. So, your beef can go into the corn flour and at first they might start to sort of stick together, but eventually they'll separate out. You can see that's quite sticky at this point in time. You want to massage that corn flour into the beef until each piece starts to separate out nicely. And this is by no means one of those sort of thick almost like bad fish and chips batters. This is really thin, super crispy. Now my pieces of beef are trying to separate out now. And you can see at this point I can start to pick out individual strands of beef.
That tells me that is going to be really crispy all the way around. So now I'm getting my separate pieces of beef. Just give it a light sort of shake before you just pop that onto a plate or a separate bowl just so that there's not sort of excessive amounts of corn flour going into the fryer. So when you're frying your beef, I'm going to do a double fry to make it really crispy. And it needs a little bit of time in between the two fries. Always check your oil first. Got some wooden chopsticks here. And you can see that's fizzing away almost instantly. So, that instant fizz tells me that the oil is at about 180° C. I've got a fair amount of beef here. So, I'm probably going to do this in two batches just so that it
doesn't overload the walk. If you overload the walk, then it will lose heat very quickly. And what I want is for each piece of beef to be nice and crisp. So, even after this initial fry, you can see how quickly the beef sort of crisps up around the edges. Drain that. It's not quite ready yet, but literally 30 seconds to a minute on a good heat for the first fry. Just before the second fry, we're going to make your sauce. As I say, it's very similar to sweet and sour, but you need that sort of sweet, sour, savory flavor for this. So, I've got some chinqiang black vinegar for my sour here. That vinegar made from that black rice husk. I'm going to go quite heavy on this. So, six spoons. To balance that sour out, we've got some honey
instead of that traditional sugar. I don't want it as sweet as I want it sour. So, I've got four spoons of honey. Give that a good stir through. Just melt that honey into the black vinegar. Three spoons of ketchup. Very typical Chinese ingredient or has become so over the years. And then lastly, about half a spoon of dark soy sauce. And that will really sort of deepen the color of this caramelized sauce. That's my sauce ready to go. And it'll interact really nicely with the garlic, ginger, chili, especially with that black vinegar in it. Kind of cut through. Now, on your second fry, you want your oil to be really nice and hot. You want it to be sort of instantly crispy. And this time the oil's hot enough. You
should be able to just pop everything in at the same time. Oh, there goes one. High heat. One minute, possibly two. Not too long, but I want it to get really crispy at this point. You can see that instant crisping from that second fry. My crispy chili beef is seriously crispy. Small amount of oil in the walk for your spices. Smoking hot spices go in. Fold that round nicely to cook it without it burning. At this point, if you aren't filming like us, it's probably best to get the extra fan on cuz that chili really hits the back of your throat.
Once that cooked through nicely, you get to smell that sort of garlic and the ginger. At this point, high heat and your sauce goes straight in. You can smell that black vinegar really hitting the bottom of that walk. I'm bringing a sauce to a vigorous boil. As soon as it's vigorously boiling, your meat can go in. And then it's one, two, three, four, five flicks through or w tosses through and serve up. Bit coriander to garnish. Quite like to actually throw that into it whilst it's still warm. Let those leaves wilt into the dish. You can see those chunks or strips of beef have kept their crispiness. You still got a nice color
cuz you haven't used excessive amounts of that dark soy sauce. Just enough to give it a good color. Crispy chili beef. Simple as that. Best part of any day. I never used to get why the British public love crispy chili beef so much. But I get it now. It has to be crispy, but that caramelized flavor, that slight tangle, that sourness from that black vinegar. Oh, the bowl of rice. Perfect. Classic sweet and sour chicken. Really simple stuff. So, you've got to get the deep frying process right. Going to start by prepping my veg.
Onion and pepper straight around. Probably won't use a whole pepper. Half a pepper will do. And a nice sort of dices of pepper. Same size onion. The key to a good sweet and sour. Making sure that the batter is nice and dry and crispy. Whole point of this is a little bit of onion, a little bit of pepper just to bring out that color in the sweet and sour. Everything needs to be the same size so it cooks at the same time. Pineapple chunks if you want to go classic sweet and sour. Feel like you're having your restaurant or takeaway dish at home. Now on to the most important part, the meat. Look, you can do this
with chicken, pork, or even prawns or squid. Anything will do. Tofu is even great. Most importantly, you want to get a dry, dusty white batter. And I'll show you that. Now, I've got chicken thigh here. Classically in Chinese cooking, we tend to use the thigh for stir fries or deep frying because it's got that little bit of fat in there and just has that extra moisture. Extra tasty. That's the way we like it. Good chunks of chicken. So again, similar sort of dice sizes to the onion and pepper chunks. Make sure every piece of chicken is a similar sort of size again so that it cooks at the right amount of time when you start to deep fry. So every stir fry or deep frying process in Chinese cooking will
have a marinade and then a sauce that goes on top. To marinade your chicken or pork or whatever you're cooking for this sweet and sour, we've got some very classic ingredients. Light soy sauce, sesame, and a pinch of sugar. I always say if you remember those three things, light soy sauce, sesame meal, pinch of sugar, you're guaranteed to make your food taste Chinese. We're going straight into the chicken. We've got light soy sauce, and we just need roughly a tablespoon of light soy sauce. Uh we can get a teaspoon or so of sesame oil. Make sure it's pure sesame oil and you'll get that real sort of nutty flavor. And then your sugar. A chef's pinch of sugar.
Roughly half a teaspoon. We like to think that everything has its own sweetness. So you're trying to accentuate that sweetness with that pinch of sugar. We'll give it a good mix. And then we're going to add your egg to it as well. The egg is there to help bind that corn flour and create this very dry sort of dusty white batter. And this is what makes a really crispy finish but without that sort of greasy sort of almost bad fish and chips batter around the chicken egg. Now this is the most important part of making a proper sweet and sour homestyle is corn flour or potato starch. You need a lot of it to make sure that every piece of chicken comes out nice and separate and doesn't all stick together. So your corn flour
just goes straight over the top. And I'm going to use the whole bowl of corn flour here. People using my book has sent me messages about this and saying something's wrong. Why do you need two 300 g of corn flour? Well, this is why you want to make sure that you sort of massage that corn flour in. Take a little time with this couple of minutes and really sort of separate out each piece of chicken, pork, meat, or even tofu, whatever you're cooking into your sweetening salad. You can see now I haven't got pieces of chicken stuck together. Moreover, every piece is separate and dry and dusty white.
Really important for a good homestyle sweet and sour pork or chicken. You really want to go in depth with corn flour. There is a little trick. If you apparently you filled a whole swimming pool with corn flour, you can run across that swimming pool, but you wouldn't be able to walk across it. And that's supposedly a fixotrophic entity. So anyway, uh the corn flour that's done nicely, every piece nice and separate. All I have to do now is make up my sweet and sour sauce. Classically, in the really old days, sweet and sour would have been just dark soy sauce, a little bit of something sour, some vinegar, and some sugar, and that's it.
But sweet and sour as we know it is much more red. And in the really bad takeaways, bright red. But for me, that red comes from your secret ingredient, ketchup. Make sure you use a good ketchup, of course. Uh, so we got ketchup, uh, some sugar, and some rice vinegar. And essentially, it's the same amount of ketchup, vinegar, and sugar that makes a great sweet and sour sauce. I put a little dash of dark soy sauce into there as well, just to sort of deepen that color. Make people know it's cooked at home. Same amount of ketchup, vinegar, and sugar. If you want to use one spoon, less washing up, start with your sugar first. So, one, two, three, four spoons of sugar. This is definitely not a healthy dish. Um, but
hey, it tastes good. vinegar next so I don't have to worry about washing again. One, two, three. It's kind of slipping off the spoon. So, four there. Okay. And then, uh, your ketchup again. Four spoons. One, two, three. Perfect size rakin. Look at that. Give that a good mix through. The sugar will melt obviously in the walk, so don't worry about it melting or sort of melting through whilst you're mixing. It might still be a little bit grainy. You can see the brightness of that red is currently the same color red as my bowl. So, if I just put a little dash of dark soy sauce, which has this like caramelized soy sauce texture, it will completely change that color red
into more of a maroon red color for me. Slightly more palatable. Next up, deep frying. Now, a lot of people are a little bit scared of deep frying at home. We are a school after all, so here's some safety tips. First of all, never fill your oil more than halfway up the walk or pan, whatever you're using. Never more than halfway up. Secondly, it's got to be a high heating oil. So, vegetable oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, just not olive oil or sesame oil cuz they've got very low smoking points. Wooden chopsticks or implements are really useful with deep frying because when I pop it into cold oil, nothing will happen. But on hot oil, it will fizz up straight away. You see that fizzing? Your oil's hot enough. It should be at around 180° C on that fizz.
No fizzing yet. Definitely not hot enough. So, I've got my fizz. and ready to start frying. Next tip, when you're frying these sort of spiders, we call them spiders webs. They're really great because they can pick up things very easily or a slotted spoon will do the job. Um, but the difference between a spider or Chinese sort of skimmer and a slotted spoon is that we've got very, very small surface area on this skimmer, so we won't pick up any excess oil. That's the biggest difference. Next up, when you're actually frying, don't put too much meat or tofu, whatever you're cooking into the fryer at one time. If you overfill that oil with your meat, then it will
lose a lot of heat and you won't get a good deep fry from it. You want to make sure that there's enough space for that chicken to really fry up straight away and seal nicely. It's good to do this in batches. Has some kitchen towel on a baking tray ready. Need a kitchen towel. Some baking tray. So, it's good to have some kitchen towel on a baking tray ready. So, when it is cooked and absorb all that excess oil, you can see here now we've got that nice sort of crisp outer edge from that very light corn flour batter. golden brown. That's the color you're looking for. Give that a good shake and then continue cooking however much chicken you've got. When sweet and sour is being cooked from
real kids, very difficult to have much sweet and sour on the plate when added to dinner time. Once we just dig into it like this, tastes great already. Fried chicken. Right. So, my chicken's fried nice and crispy. It's still hot, ready to go. So, I'm going to pop that onto my walk plot. You can see now I've got my onions, my pepper, some chunks of pineapple, if you wish, my sweet and sour sauce that will bubble up and caramelize very quickly, and then lastly, your deep fried chicken that will just toss into that sweet and sour sauce three or four times to finish off the dish. So, on to the finishing. It's a quick stir fry essentially.
Very, very quick. High heat is what you need. So, get your walk on a really high heat and add a little oil. Now, with this type of stir frying, you don't really need to know too much about the walk other than high heat and how to flick it. So, when you flick your walk, it's a long push forward and a quick flick backwards. Outside of that, just stirring through is all you need. smoking hot oil. Your first ingredient goes in your onions. Fold that through nicely. Break up any pieces. Get a slight charred finish on it. You can see that it's got a lot of dry smoke there. So, practice your walk toss at this point. Long push forward, quick flick back. That'll bring all that smoke up
here rather than in the walk. Make sure you get your extractor on. Next up, your peppers. It's just cooking out the grassiness of those veg. You don't want to overcook them. Keep them nice and crunchy. Now you can see I barely got any oil in that walk at all. I'm going to add a very small drizzle of oil just before my sauce goes in. The sauce is going to go in on a really high heat. Don't waste any of that ketchup mix. You can see it's vigorously boiling. Once that sauce is vigorously boiling all the way through and bring your veg into it, your crispy chicken. Whoa. Hello. Your crispy chicken is going to go straight
in at this point. And I can smell that vinegar coming off the walk. Straight in. And this is when I would recommend two hands flicking it through. One, two, three, four, five. Like this. And then switch your hob off. Sweet and sour chicken. Ready. It's straight out. I can see Lena cameraman drooling over this. You honest? So am I. Of course, if you want some steamed rice on the side, if you want to garnish that, a little bit of green's nice. I'll head over to our garden. Shall I? See if the recipe says picked coriander. You literally pick the coriander leaves. Nice and simple. Do the cheffy thing. Crouch down.
Always makes you look more chefike. You can see how beautiful that sweet and sour looks. It's got that red, but a little dash of that dark soy sauce just deep into the color. Makes it a little bit more authentic. Sweet. Sour. Time to taste. Crispy hopefully. I'm quite happy for the cameras to keep rolling on this so the guys don't get any of themselves. Perfect. Really simple. Quick cooking. Got to keep it crispy, not greasy with sweet and sour chicken. Like this recipe. Tell us what you want us to cook next in the comments below.
I know we've got a numerous fried rice recipes on the channel, but we've been asked a few times for a simple fried rice, but we've [snorts] but we've been asked a few times for just a simple fried rice. So, we've been asked a few times for just a simple fried ride recipe, but more importantly, how to perfect your fried rice. So, I'm going to talk a lot about the heat and how to change the heat with the walk to get that perfect fried rice. First off, I'm going to crack and beat my egg. Of course, in takeways and restaurants, you have a whole load of beaten egg ready. You can just cook a fried egg into your fried rice, too.
Either way, absolutely fine. The first thing you cook in your fried rice is always your egg. Now, when you start your walk, you want your walk to be on a really good heat. I'm going to start with a fair amount of oil. It's about half a tablespoon or just over and on high heat. Wait for your walk to be really nice and hot over the top. swirl. That's immediately smoking up, which me which makes me know that it's definitely hot enough. When it's hot, your egg goes in. Pour it in carefully and it'll bubble up slowly and then just bring your heat down slightly and push into your egg. At this point, don't stir too much. Just swirl it around and swirl it around. You can see now because I've taken that heat down, it's not burning my egg.
Push that to the back to allow space for your rice. Bring your heat back up. High heat, smoking hot. Your rice goes in. Day old rice is best. Most importantly, not sort of too watery or wet rice. So, wants to be dried out a little. And we're going to push into it. At this point in time, I'm not changing the heat at all. I'm just sort of moving the heat around with my ladle. Push into it to separate out the grains of rice. If you feel at any point that you're getting sort of a slight char or burn on any grain of rice, that's when you need to cool your walk down somehow. There's numerous ways and
if you've seen the rest of the videos you'll know my ways of calling your walk down. The first one stirring the second one pushing and folding pushing and folding. The third one which is really useful for a fried rice a walk toss long push forward quick flick back. And you can see because of the right amount of heat it's skipping around the walk but it's not burning. It's still got that nice whitish sort of color. My peas, they're frozen peas. Straight in. Nice and simple. At the point when your rice grains are sort of separating out nicely, flick those through. And I'm just going to season this very naturally with a bit of light soy sauce and some sesame oil. And you can see that constant movement,
but more importantly, no sticking at the bottom of my walk. And still my rice grains are nice and white and they have no sort of charred or burnt color. Light soy sauce and sesame oil. Not too much on a high heat just as I pour the sauce in so that it skips off the bottom of that walk. And I'm just going to bring that heat down a little so that my rice doesn't burn. A little drizzle of sesame oil. And that sauce, if it starts to stick a little, just give it a good scrape on the bottom. Now, we know that our rice is cooked nicely when I sort of make a little hole. And you see the little grains of rice jumping up. Dancing rice.
Okay. Once you've got dancing rice and you haven't sort of charred your rice, then it's ready. Now, this is why fried rice teaches you about walk cooking because if you've understood your heat and you've gone up and down and at the right times, then you should finish with a clean walk. That's how to make a proper egg fried rice. So, it really is very simple. Most importantly, the color is good. Doesn't look burnt. It's all about heat control. All cooking starts with simple techniques. If you like this recipe and you want to learn more, don't forget subscribe to our channel.
