Although you love home cooking, do you find the food in a good restaurant tastier? Restaurant dishes prepared by a professional chef always have their own unique taste. Chinese food, Korean food, Japanese food: all have their own flavor characteristics in a real restaurant. If the restaurant has a secret recipe, then it is more able to retain the loyalty of its customers. Have you ever entered the back kitchen of a quality hotel or restaurant: do you know how Chinese chefs cook? Do you know how they cook delicious, authentic Chinese cuisine? Today we will dive into one of the mysteries of professional Chinese cooking, by discussing how we make a “mysterious” stock, called “milk-white soup base.”
In addition to pursuing a higher level of cooking techniques, Chinese chefs are also constantly exploring and innovating in other aspects. We know that the basic flavors are sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, and salty. Chinese chefs will incorporate several flavors into a dish, and you can taste contrasting flavors at the same time, but it will not taste bad. This is something that a chef with a good grasp of taste can achieve. For instance, when you eat sweet and sour pineapple pork, you will first sense the sweet and sour taste, and after you swallow the food, you will have a light salty aftertaste in your mouth, because the taste ratio of this dish is 5:4:1 sweet to sour to salty. If a certain seasoning is added in too great an amount the dish will only have one flavor.
Freshness
In addition to the taste, in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant, there are unique cooking methods. Have you ever had Chinese soup made from scratch by a professional chef? The first characteristic of Chinese soup is freshness. The freshness of soup is the combined taste of the ingredients in the soup stock itself, released in the soup.
Growing focus on health and nutrition
Because of the continuous progress of society, chefs are always developing new dishes, so customers’ requirements for dishes have become higher and higher, and people have begun to pursue healthy, delicious and nutritious food.
If a restaurant only uses additives, such as MSG, to make dishes delicious, the restaurant will become obsolete sooner or later. So some restaurants will have such a slogan: We promise not to use MSG. Then, this restaurant must have a healthy way to make dishes without MSG, that relies on the chef’s skill to make a more delicious taste than simply adding MSG.
Making soup base from scratch in the professional Chinese kitchen
In professional kitchens, there is usually a large soup bucket that contains the soup base for today’s cooking. It’s not really soup yet, just a soup base or stock. When chefs cook a certain soup, they get the “soup” of the dish from the soup bucket, and then add the ingredients from that recipe for a second cooking. If this is a vegetable soup, get the base in the soup bucket, bring to a boil, and add the vegetables. Or in some stir-fries or braised dishes, add these soup bases, then you will get a more delicious taste.
Professional chefs make their soup stock from scratch. This is often a simple but time-consuming task, while taking great care of the cleanliness of the utensils. Otherwise, the soup base cannot be preserved long enough. It is best to choose stainless steel soup buckets or earthenware containers for cooking. I learned a few ways to make these soup bases in New Oriental Cooking School, and these methods probably won’t be used in home kitchens, because only restaurant kitchens need so many soup bases, and the cost and time of these soup bases are more suitable for Professional kitchen production. But if you want to try it, of course, you can reduce the proportion of ingredients appropriately.
Making your own soup stock is a great way to make use of things you would ordinarily throw away, such as the bones of a chicken. You can save a lot of money making your own nutritious stocks, and these can be frozen in sealed containers until needed.
“Mysterious” Milky White soup base
Why is this soup base called milk white soup? First, no milk is used in the making of this soup. However, since the finished product is very close to the color of milk, we call it “milk white soup.”
Making “milk-white” soup base
First, we have to choose the ingredients: chicken feet, pork bones, chicken and duck bones (breastbone), pork legs, chicken wings, pork fat and lean meat, green onions and ginger. Why do we choose so much meat? Because these meats are rich in collagen, when collagen hits heat, it turns the soup white. So this soup is not only white, but also rich in nutrients.
After we wash the ingredients, we come to the next step: cutting. For large pieces of ingredients like pork elbows and hocks, we need to cut it into smaller pieces to facilitate cooking, just cut it into the size of your fist. If you used a whole chicken, of course you will need to cut the chicken into large pieces as well. In short, cut the ingredients into fist-sized pieces.
Then we put all the ingredients and the whole green onion and ginger into a clean stock pot, and add water, until the ratio of solid ingredients to water is 1:3 or 1:4. This means that if your solid ingredients are 10kg, you need to add 30kg or 40kg of water, if you want the soup base to be thicker, you can choose the ratio of 1:3.
After using high heat to boil the water, we skim to remove the scum on the surface. Then simmer over medium-low heat for 30-50 minutes.
Finally, remove the ingredients and strain the soup stock. A simple soup base is done. These ingredients have been cooked for a long time, the chicken and duck meat have become very soft. However, the pork has not become meat residue, so you don’t need to discard the pork, you can pick out the meat in good shape for new cooking, if you choose.
In the professional kitchen, we discard all the solids: we do not serve this to customers, but in your own kitchen, you can use the pieces of meat that are not cooked down if you choose.
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