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Welcome back to School of Wok's channel. It is great to be back and this course is covering all the ins and outs of double cooking. Whether that is just blanching and poaching, roasting, deep frying, and braising. That is what double cooking is about. Changing your textures through these cooking methods. Lesson one in double cooking, blanching or poaching. I've got a whole bowl of chicken wings here. I think they're a great way to show you lots of different methods of piecing together the different cooking techniques that you can kind of bring in and out of each other to create different textures out of the same ingredient. The first cooking technique is very, very simple and that is blanching these wings. I'm
going to put all of my wings in for a 2 or 3 minute boil or blanch in this boiling water or stock. I've actually got some chicken stock here cuz hey, it'll add more flavor to the wings themselves. So, they can go all straight into my boiling hot stock. When I'm blanching chicken wings like I am today or a bit of pork belly or some sort of fatty meat, duck breast, whole duck, it's all doing the same thing. You're you're tightening up that fat. You're sort of bringing any fatty impurities up to the top so you get all this scum at the top of the stock. You essentially that tightening up process just allows you to then dry your fatty meat out before you then move on to the second cooking process,
whatever that may be. So, if I just show you one wing winglet from that instant heat or that seal of that boiling stock or water, that looks a lot more plump already than it did when it was raw. You know, so it kind of just sort of sits upright a little bit more. And that is exactly what you want from your blanch. I'm going to remove all those and during this session, we will cook these blanched wings in various different ways. The traditional method of cooking this sort of steamed basket of chickens' feet that you get in a dim sum restaurant, that dish is the epitome of double cooking because it goes through a blanching process, a drying process, deep frying, marinating,
braising, and then cooled again to then steam to finish, which is I find fascinating. I've swapped the chickens' feet out with chicken wings, mainly because not everyone likes chickens' feet. I get it. Uh and wings are much more readily available, and everyone loves chicken wings. I mean, if you don't love chicken wings, there's something wrong with you. Right, I've taken the majority of the wings out. These five winglets I'm going to leave in here continue poaching as opposed to just blanching. Blanching is like an immediate like seal using hot water or boiling water. Poaching is a longer process to be able to cook your meat through or your food through, and also soften allow that meat to kind of tenderize over that time of cooking
through poaching. With chicken wings like this, they take a minimum of, let's say, 10 minutes, but 20, 25 minutes really is far as you need to push them. The longer you poach something and the slower you cook it, the softer that meat will become and the more likely it will then fall off the bone. Now, when you're poaching your meat, I don't like to waste when I'm cooking at home or cooking it at all anywhere, to be honest. And the stock that I'm boiling it in or any water, over time, if you're cooking a lot of meat, it will essentially kind of make a natural stock anyway. So, make sure that you skim any of that scum off the top of that boiling water. We're going to let these five or six chicken
wings poach for at least 10 minutes. And whilst we're doing that, we'll start to flavor this stock, this water, which will also in turn flavor the chicken. So, I've got a whole load of fennel seeds here. These are all like whole spices that make up five spice essentially. So, fennel seed, star anise. I don't need all of that. Like, three or five or six. A couple of cinnamon twirls, about four or five cloves. I've got some fresh bay leaves here from my bay leaf tree outside. They can go in. Sichuan peppercorns, not highly essential, but why not? Let's add some flavor to that as well. A little bit of numbing spice, but you get a mellow spice in a poaching liquid. Something to note when you're poaching, if I were to fry something
like these Sichuan peppercorns or toast them dry in a dry pan, you'd get a very intense flavoring from these peppercorns. But, when you're poaching something, you get all the mellower parts of what you're cooking will kind of impart flavor into the stock and the meat or whatever it's cooking inside. And whilst those wings are poaching, I'm just going to chop up a whole load of ingredients ready for my various different dishes that I'm going to go through in this lesson, this master class, see? With the pickling liquid, I'm going to marinate the wings in. I'm going to use uh a little bit of chopped up garlic. I'm going to use some of this pickled chili.
It's like pre-pickled chili. You can actually buy in the Chinese supermarket. I love this ingredient. It literally is salt, water, garlic, cooking wine, and red chili. And that's pretty much like It's an easy way to bring some added flavor to your dishes. Garlic here, I'm just going to finely chop. I've got some ginger I'm just going to finely chop up as well to go next to my garlic. Almost forgot what that was. Um And again, I'm just kind of bringing everything together so I can kind of take you through the core cooking processes rather than focus too much on the ingredients. My chicken wings are pretty much cooked. So, I all I've done is add a couple of good pinches of salt into the stock, and that's been boiling away for
about 10 minutes. I'm going to quickly make up the pickling liquid for these poached chicken wings. So, I've got some rice vinegar here. I need enough to cover so I'm I'm going to use the whole thing. I'm going to salt and sugar this. Fair amount of salt, and then some sugar, similar amounts. Let that dissolve properly first, and then have a little taste. You want a sharpness from the vinegar, but a nice balance of sweet and salty and sour. Before I then start to add any garlic or pickled chili or any other ingredients that you want to, you know, add to this pickling liquid.
Good amount of saltiness. Needs a bit more sugar, so let's go for double the sugar to the salt. Give that a mix through. Meanwhile, whilst that's dissolving, um I can start to pick out my poached wings, which you'll notice when you're poaching anything, the fat softens very quickly. But I want these wings to be cooked through, but not too soft, cuz the traditional way of cooking this with chicken feet is that it still has a bit of a gelatinous bite to The other strange thing about this dish for those who aren't used to it is that it's served usually cold, so the chicken's feet are cold pickled. So, I'm going to pop them straight into some ice cold water. And as I said, all these wings have had is a poach.
I've actually gone for about three to one sugar to salt, so 3 tsp of sugar, 1 tsp of salt in that. Um let's say 2 to 300 mils of uh rice vinegar there, a whole load of chopped garlic, and then all of this pickled red chili can go into that pickling liquid. And then once your wings have cooled down, I'm just going to take the wing tips off, just so it's a bit more presentable, but no reason why you can't pickle the tips as well. We'll just pop those in separately. And then whilst we're cooking the rest of the wings in various different double cooking method ways, then these will pickle and take in all that lovely flavor.
I've got some Sichuan peppercorns as well, which will add flavor to that pickle. Why not? It's there. All right, got some sesame oil over the top of my pickled wings. And then, I'm just going to douse that in the pickling liquid to finish this off. Here we go. That is poaching. Tada! Don't forget, this is only lesson one. Tune in tomorrow for lesson two, which is blanching and roasting.
