19:38
So there you are. Excuse me. Let's do that again. So hello. I'm Fuchsia Dunlop. Um and I'm cooking on the School of Walk channel and I'm doing a recipe from my latest book which is called Five Tastes the Magic of Flavor in a Chinese kitchen. It's all about the wonderful flavors of China and how to use seasonings to create gorgeous flavors with often very little effort. And the dish I'm going to do today is um it's from Yunan province from a place called Nakali. Um and it's just a very simple stir fry. And the thing that's really interesting about it is that apart from the sort of maybe more conventional Chinese seasonings of chili and garlic and ginger. Um it's also got mint leaves
and um in Chinese cooking generally you don't use that many herbs. I mean coriander um you know pill a bit but in Yunan province you start getting all those herbs that you find in neighboring Vietnam you know the cuisines of Southeast Asia and um so this dish has a particularly Yunan flavor because of the mint leaves which will be added to the walk at the last minute. Um so I'm going to start off by cutting the beef. So I'm going to cut it into very thin slices for walk cooking. And with beef, um, it's always ideal to cut it a across the grain of the meat because then you get more tender slices. Um, with chicken, because it's very delicate meat, it doesn't matter so much. Um, this piece of meat is already cut sort of to make
it a bit difficult, but I'm going to cut on a diagonal to try and get very thin slices a bit across the grain so that they're nice and tender in the walk. The thing with cutting, so with a fast stir fry dish, it's really important to have the cutting as even as possible. So, um, you know, ideally the slices will be quite thin. But the most important thing is that the thickness is about even because then you don't want a situation where some slices are so thick that they're still raw when the thinner ones are cooked first. So, evenness is the most important thing here. And this dish, it's from a beautiful guest house in a place called Nakali
near Puar where they make the famous Puar tea. Um, and it's a family guest house. And I stayed there for a few days. And um, oh, such lovely people. And they made their own fermented tofu and all their own pickles and used local ingredients. It's on the Teahorse Road. It's the route where people used to take bricks of tea from Yunan where they were produced to other parts of Asia. There we are. So, here's the beef which is sliced as evenly as possible. And now I'm going to add some marinade. So, a little bit of salt and then um a bit of dark soy sauce. And this will give it a lovely rich color. and some light soy sauce. Um, which will give it a beautiful savory flavor. Then to keep the meat nice and silky,
I'm just going to mix that in. It's easier to do this by hand. Actually, you can do it with a spoon if you like, but this is the easiest way to get it nice and evenly coated. And so, I'm just going to add a little starch and water, um, wet starch, which is going to help keep the beef nice and silky. beautiful silky mouth feel. So, a little bit of potato starch and a little bit of water. And I will mix that in as well just to clothe the meat. And there we are. That's the beef ready. And now I'm going to prepare the pale, the accompanying ingredients. And it's really just some lovely aromatics to give flavor to the beef. So, um, a couple of red chilies. And you don't want the really hot bird's eye chilies
here. You just want, um, you know, a bit of heat. and that beautiful red color. So, I'm just going to pull out the seeds. In fact, these are pretty huge chilies, so I might just use one and a half. So, the book is called the five tastes. Um, and that's because um unlike in the West where we have four classic tastes, in China you have five tastes. So, sweet, salty, sour, bitter, but also sin or la, which means pungent and spicy. So, seasonings like pepper, ginger, chili, they all come into that category. And um with the book I've tried to sort of give ideas for using different combinations of flavors. So there's kind of sour and hot, numbing and hot, what dishes where you sort of match up sweet tastes and spicy tastes.
And this is um a classic sort of hot and savory dish. So we've got all these lovely aromatics um and a bit of heat from the chili, both dried chilies and fresh chilies. Um and also the aromomas of um ginger and garlic and the mint, you know, fresh at the end of the cooking. And these I'm just going to see how hot the chilies are to um to see how much I need cuz the idea of this dish is not to blow your head off. So I think one and a half will be fine. So, I'm just going to And you see again the Chinese knife looks very heavy and clunky, but actually you can use it for very delicate cutting as long as you hold it properly with your thumb tucked away behind. So, it's nice and safe. So, here are the fresh red chilies,
which will give a beautiful color. And then just a few dried chilies for a different sort of heat. And those ones I'm just going to cut in half. and they're soaked in water. And that's a little trick because if you add dried chilies to hot oil, it's really easy to burn them. Like they just burn in a second. But if you just either soak them or scrunch in a little bit of water just before you cook, it just buys you a little time so that you can get the flavor out of the chilies without burning them. So that's really useful. And then um some garlic. And with the garlic, um, one trick to get the garlic out of its skins is to give it a little gentle little pat with the cleaver and then the skins will be easier to get off.
And one thing that's really interesting about China is they use so many garicky vegetables, many more than we do in the West. So you have, you know, clove garlic like this, but also garlic stems which are the most gorgeous vegetable and garlic chives, pickled garlic, um, and all kinds of sort of leaks and, um, other members of the garicky oniony aliium family in different parts of China. Okay, these I'm just going to slice. And that's one thing that I learned when I was at cooking school in China is that you can have a kind of harmony in a dish if you cut everything in the same way. So here I'm cutting the chilies into slices and also the garlic and the ginger. So they used to say which means cubes with cubes um you know threads with threads, slices
with slices. And that just means that it just looks nice and it feels nice in the mouth when things are cut into the same sort of shapes in the same dish. And also of course with the beef it's sliced. So having sliced aromatics feels kind of nice too. Bit of ginger as well. You know, you don't have to waste the ginger peel. You can smack it, use it in marinades or add it to a stew. For a stir fry, you don't want the skin because it has a less nice mouth feel. It's a bit coarse. So, for stir fries, you generally want to take off the skin of the ginger. And then I'm just going to cut it into these are called, by the way, daen thumbnail slices because, well, for obvious reasons. Um, and I'll cut the
ginger into thumbnail slices as well. So, ginger, garlic, crushed chili, and um, and then mint. So, these stems of mint, they're quite thick, so I'm just going to take off the little spriggy bits. Um, I don't want the coarse stems in this dish, but if the sprigs are nice and delicate, you can put them in. Oh, and the smell of mint already coming out. And it's, you know, in Chinese thought as well, because beef is a more kind of coarse meat and the flavor is a bit heavy, you often use sort of aromatic. So you find that with beef and, you know, lamb meat, um, you often find coriander, garlic to be eaten with them, um, spices like, you know, star anise and Chinese casio or cardamom. And that's to sort of refine
the flavors of the meat. And that's what the mint is doing here as well. And already, you know, that combination of flavors, it's just giving it a more kind of, you know, flavor in the direction of Vietnam because actually Yunan borders on Vietnam and so there's a whole overlap of flavors and ingredients. There we are. So, I'm all set and now I just have to cook. And the most important thing really when you're frying um meat or fish, stir frying, you have to season the walk. Um, if you're using a non-stick walk, this doesn't apply, but if you're using a traditional Chinese walk, you need to get the surface really hot first and then pour in some oil, swirl it around, let it get really hot, and then pour off
that oil and you create a kind of non-stick surface. And if you don't do that, um, you will find that you put the meat in and immediately it sticks everywhere and you get a sort of crust on the walk. And not only will you start getting, you know, the risk of of having burnt tastes in the dish, um, but also um, if the walk surface is a bit crusty, it's more difficult to move the food around. So, it's a really good idea. So, I'm going to pour in a little oil and let it get really hot and carefully swirl it around the whole cooking surface. Um, and this creates this kind of magic non-stick surface. The funny thing is that I think um you know when you watch someone stir frying, you know, people see Chinese chefs all very dramatic and all
the fire and everything and it looks like something simple and fast, but it's actually very technical and all these little details that people thinking about and they won't, you know, if a chef is cooking, you know, Chinese chef is cooking, you won't know what's going on and what the particular sensitivities of the heat and the walk and so on. But um here we are. So now I have a nice hot surface ready to go. And the first thing that's going to go in is my dried chilies. And they're they're a little bit damp, which is going to buy a bit of time, but I'm going to put them in literally as soon as I put the oil in because otherwise they'll burn. So, I just want them to sort of um start smelling delicious and slightly
darkening but not burnt. And then I'm going to put in all the other beautiful aromatics, the um ginger and fresh chili and garlic. And this is called um chaos, stir frying fragrance. And you're waking up all the lovely flavors of these aromatics um in the hot oil and use your nose to see when the flavor of the garlic and the ginger are sort of ripening. And again, you don't want to burn them. You just want them to smell delicious. Lovely. And now I'm going to put in the beef. And here just separating out the slices. And can you see that the beef is slipping around the surface of the walk because I created the non-stick surface by seasoning it first. And that's really important. And just those few extra seconds of heating it with
some oil, pouring off the oil into a heat proof container and then adding fresh um fresh oil for actually cooking. That's um having a nice delicate stir fry. And you want the beef to be just cooked. So, it's pretty much there. And at that very moment when the beef is looking just done, I'm going to put in all this lovely mint and um just give it a lick of heat. So, you want the leaves to be wilted. Oh, and then this lovely smell. So, you added to all the ginger and garlic and chili is now that lovely fresh green fragrance of the mint. M. And now it's all sizzly and the beef is just cooked and everything is smelling utterly delicious. And now I'm going to turn it onto a plate. And it's really that easy. Weekday supper dish,
bowl of rice, maybe a vegetable as well, and you've got something really delicious. And it just smells gorgeous with the freshness of the mint and the ginger and the garlic and the chili. And look at those colors, too. A little taste of yunan in your kitchen. Okay. Well, the most important part, of course, is the tasting. Let's see if it's up to scratch. So, smells good. Ques and sort of cutting the beef sort of across the grain really helps and cutting it thinly really helps to keep the slices tender and then that lovely hint of mint and a bit of heat from the chili. And um yeah, so this Yunan dish is from my new book, Five Tastes, Magic of Flavor in a Chinese kitchen. and it's out now and it's all full of lots of sort of
easy and I hope really delicious home recipes. Um anyway, um it's been lovely being a guest cook on the School of Walk channel and don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe.
