Cooking Up Quick and Easy Chinese Favorites with Chris Toy '77

hello everyone i know people are just joining so i'll give folks a couple minutes or a couple seconds here to join i can see our attendee number climbing excellent well thank you everybody so much for being here today um oh i can take these out my name is sarah cameron i am bowdoin class of 2005 and a member of the bowdoin alumni relations team here at the college um a couple of logistics before we dive right into it uh closed captioning is available at the bottom of the screen um you'll notice that our closed captioning service uh it spells bowdoin incorrectly so as we are working to fix that please just feel free to chuckle at that obvious mistake um you can stay up to date on our live and pre-recorded events we have lots of stuff going on many events just like this um by visiting us online at the bowdoin family and friends website and we also send out a monthly newsletter bowdoin beyond the gates and you can find a lot of great information there as well and we are going to take some questions towards the end of the program i'll come back on about 10 minutes left to go and we'll start answering some questions so feel free to use that q and a box at the bottom now a little bit about chris before i turn things over we are thrilled to be hosting chris toy bowdoin class of 1977 for this virtual cooking demonstration after graduating from bowdoin chris went on to earn a master's degree in teaching from brown university he's a retired teacher principal and international educational consultant chris learned chinese cooking from his mother in his family's home and restaurant kitchens and has been teaching asian cooking for 30 years in addition to teaching at local kitchen stores chris teaches adult education classes around bath maine where he lives with his wife joan who is today's camera woman thank you joan chris's cooking incorporates straightforward methods fresh ingredients and unique flavors which all draw people together to enjoy great food in one another's company um chris recently published this book easy chinese cookbook um restaurant favorites made simple it's available online at the bowdoin bookstore and through most major retailers um it's a great book so i would encourage you to pick it up our family has used it a lot already and you can find chris online at christoy.net and follow his youtube cooking channel so without further delay chris thanks for that long introduction uh we have a lot to get through just a couple things before i really get going and that is i'll be moving back and forth between different recipes so i'll try not to lose you but i'm going to try to do all of this inside of an hour so this could be pretty interesting i should have thought of that before i decided what i was going to cook on the menu tonight is an appetizer which is going to be egg rolls and um we're also going to do a stir fry with shrimp and we're going to do one of my daughter's favorite types of chicken it's a boneless cast iron broiled chicken and um i'll talk about each of those as we go along uh the thing that's going to take a little bit longer is going to be our rice so let me talk about that my wife likes basmati rice so that's what we're going to have and figure on a half to a quarter cup per person and you want to make sure that your pot is at least two thirds more than the volume of the rice and the water so that you can get a get a nice head of steam and what i want to do is i measure this by touching the top of the rice and it should the water should just cover the first joint of my index finger so i need a little bit more water here so we'll do that and i just kind of give that a shake so it kind of evens out some people say you should rinse the rice and in the old days that was absolutely true because there were you know critters and sand and things like that but what i remind people today is that a lot of the rice that you that you eat is called enriched rice and enriched rice basically means that there have been vitamins that have been sprayed on the rice to enrich it and so if you rinse it off you're actually rinsing off the vitamins so if you're old-fashioned rinse it if you want to keep the vitamins don't rinse it what i've done is i put the rice on high i've covered it up you want to make sure it's covered as soon as it begins to boil we're going to put it on its lowest setting and we will not take the cover off until 15 minutes have gone by because the rice cooks by steaming not by boiling so we'll keep an eye on that and this is why you want the pot to be a good size pot so that it can get ahead of steam all right so that's the rice so that that's going uh the next thing that i'm going to do is i'm going to marinate our chicken so i like to use boneless thighs what i like about thighs is that they have a lot of fat you can kind of see the marble of the fat there and that what i like to say in my classes is fat is an acronym it stands for flavor and taste f-18 so we'll get the fat and what we're going to do is we're going to put in some very basic ginger and garlic flavoring and what we'll do is we'll take our garlic and this is garlic from our garden so this is nice and fresh and i just hit that with the side of the cleaver by the way you got to have a cleaver can't do this with a skinny knife and then we'll just just peel that garlic right off like that and then we'll do the fun part which is we just take it and we just hit it and slide the uh slide the uh the cleaver so we'll just break it open just like that there we go we'll take the garlic out and we just slice so we've got that and then we'll just what's nice about the side of the blade is that it makes it really safe to use because i can use the side of the blade to control that cutting edge so we're also going to use ginger and what i like to do with the ginger is just cut it so that the grain is really short and then we'll just take it and we'll smash that once again there we go and you can also use your cleaver has cut a hole in your bag so ginger and garlic for flavoring so this is going to be essentially a teriyaki type flavoring all teriyaki is is salty and sweet so i've got some soy sauce a little bit of soy sauce and some honey in the spring early spring what i'll do is i'll use some maple syrup instead of honey which is pretty good and i'm going to give this a little bit of a kick so this is sriracha tomato ketchup for a little heat so you can use your favorite flavorings to make that sauce and we'll just seal that up and when you marinate keep in mind that the original purpose of marinating was to uh preserve and uh kill off any bacteria you don't depend on that now but what we know is that if you're going to marinate meat if you want to marinate quickly do it at close to room temperature not all night but just for a few minutes it'll marinate faster that way and if you put it in the refrigerator it actually will slow down the marinating process because when you refrigerate fat it solidifies all right so here this has started to boil so let me turn that on to low and we just just put that right on the edge there we go like um 15 minutes and if that keeps boiling what i can do as long as i keep that cover on and i keep that head of steam i can actually turn that off all right there we go put that on low all right so our rice will be ready in about 15 minutes and even though the rice is done we can just turn it off and leave the cover on and we'll be fine at the end of our our time so let's get the insides of the egg rolls going so what i'm going to do is i've got a nice cast iron wok here and i'm going to preheat that and for the filling what we're going to use is some cabbage that i'm just going to shred here another great use for my cleaver chris we have a question coming in here what kind of soy sauce are you using okay i use something called wad john sun and um that's just uh that's a kind of a generic chinese brand but um i know that people like kikomon is good i would recommend that you use um just a regular soy sauce not a low sodium soy sauce what i found is when i use low sodium soy sauce i just add more soy sauce because it doesn't have as much flavor and if you if you need to um go gluten free uh there there are gluten free soy sauces and all that means is that they've been they've used they haven't used wheat to uh to ferment the soybeans what i'm doing now is i am shredding up some carrots here and i've got some some cabbage as well and we're going to add some garlic i'm only going to need one of these that's a big one all right and some ginger so the classic flavoring here we go nice chris we have a question coming in um sarah has a stainless steel walk should she switch to cast iron in my opinion she should switch to either cast iron or carbon steel stainless steel is okay but you really can't [Music] you can't season it because it's so hard it's not it's not the surface isn't very porous so it's a it's hard to uh to do that uh you you could possibly um season the cast iron but you really have to work hard at it so what i've done is i've put a little bit of oil and i like to use avocado oil because it it gets hot without burning and i'm going to soften up my carrots and some cabbage that's in there with the flavorings now here's what's nice about the wok is that any of the oil goes right down to the middle which is the hottest so if i push everything else to the side i can put in my meat and in this case i think the recipe calls for uh the pork this only looks like pork this is actually turkey so and if you wanted to you could go vegetarian and you could get extra firm tofu and you could crumble that up into it so you can see i can now mix this in stir frying is a dry process i'll talk a little bit more about that but we're just going to soften this up all right let me turn that off for now all right chris doug and ivy are wondering should is this a good first chinese cooking experiment for them oh yeah is this a good easy recipe to follow it is it is um i would avoid trying to do three at once just pick one and then try that there we go all right so this is just about ready and what's what's nice as you can see if you look really closely is you don't want a lot of liquid all right because the um the vegetables themselves will give some liquid off all right so let's let that rest a little bit so let's talk a little bit about the oil that i'll be using for the deep frying of the egg rolls i'm just going to use um some regular vegetable oil i don't need to use the avocado oil which is pretty expensive but also the avocado oil will get up to 500 degrees before it smokes so you you only want to get to like 350 degrees to deep fry so just regular vegetable oil is good for that so let's head over here and i'm going to show you how to roll the egg roll all right so these you can get right in the grocery store they're usually in a refrigerated case and the biggest challenge on these is just getting one but there we have it so i like to use a baseball metaphor i think that's the right word so home plate first second third pitcher's mound and what i'm going to do is i'm going to take probably three tablespoons of the filling and i'm going to put it in an egg roll shape right across pitcher's mound in the infield all right i'm going to i'm going to interrupt myself a little bit what i'm going to do with the rice just so you'll know is i am going to shut that right off all right i can keep that covered and if i did it right it should be done in a few minutes so i'm painting the bases with water now you want this to be the glue so use a fair amount of it and what i'm going to do is i'm going to take first and third i'm going to pinch them together right over pitchers mound just like that then i'm going to take home plate i'm gonna tuck it up behind pitcher's mound to give it some height and i'm gonna roll the in field up to second base and there we have one you want to see one more sure here we go baseball diamonds some filling there we go if there is some water in there in the wok because the vegetables don't take the water if you can avoid it all right just like that and then we'll paint around the edges there we go and since you know second base is where it all gets sealed just kind of make sure you've got some in second base first and third overlap just a little bit don't overlap too much otherwise you'll get a short um egg roll right up like that and yes you can make your own egg roll wrappers if you have a pasta machine or if you're really patient and you want to roll it out but there you have some egg rolls so let's let's get ready to cook these guys all right so what i want to do is i've got about an inch of oil and i want to heat this oil up so it's the right temperature you don't want it to be too cold you don't want to be too hot so what you'll do is you'll take a wooden chopstick or a wooden spoon or something wooden and you'll just put that right in and if it's hot enough you'll see that the bubbles come up around the the chopstick all right don't do this with a plastic chopstick it won't work and if it catches fire it's too hot but if it doesn't bubble you've got to let it heat up otherwise the egg rolls are going going to kind of hang in there too long so that's well heated so what you want to do and this is just a little trick that i learned after cooking many many egg rolls i finally figured out what to do before you put it in you want to flatten it a little bit and the reason you want to do that is so that when you go to turn your egg roll it won't go belly up on you so now what we can do just like launching at bath iron works we'll just slide that right in the oil is hot enough and just like pancakes when it turns brown around the edges see it's turning light brown around the edges you can just flip that over and it doesn't have to be really deep because you are going to be flipping it over and what that took maybe like five seconds or so and then probably two or three seconds and you'll just kind of look and that's brown nice and golden brown and i have this little tray here which is great for um for draining it keeps everything warm and if there's any oil or anything like that it drips right in but you'll see the because it's only in there for a few seconds it doesn't absorb a lot of oil if your oil is not hot enough it'll have to sit there for a long time so it's two three four five seconds we'll just flip that over maybe i was a little bit quick on that but that's okay um a few more seconds on that chris if you're making your own egg roll wrappers what kind of flour do you use wheat or rice and is it a recipe like pasta it's exactly like pasta um so yeah so use your egg and flour mixture and uh i think in yeah in my book i have a recipe for how to make your own wrappers if you want um but it would take all the time that we have so these guys are done that didn't take very long i'm going to shut that heat off and before i bite into that i can let them cool off a little bit let's do a quick um duck sauce so duck sauce has no duck so don't worry about that and but it was originally made for um for cooking diet so that's why it's called duck sauce and what i'm gonna do today is i'm gonna take equal parts of crushed pineapple which is nice and tangy and you can use pureed whatever fruits you like to do this and we'll take some apple sauce and if it were fall we already ate them all ate it but from last year but in the fall if you have homemade applesauce that's like the best way to go and what i'm going to add to that is some balsamic glaze and this is a chili glaze and you can get this right in the in most grocery stores i'm going to put like maybe a tablespoon right in there and we'll just mix that up and that is duck sauce it's really easy and it tastes really good and you know what's in it there's no extra chemicals or anything like that if you don't have balsamic glaze you could use regular balsamic vinegar and cut that in half with if you have like a tablespoon of balsamic put in a tablespoon of brown sugar so equal parts but this is good to go so if this is an appetizer oh let me show you this this is kind of fun you can um when you're going to plate this these uh these egg rolls if you cut them at a 45 degree angle they make perfect scoops so it's just rude for me to like take a bite so here's the scoop let's scoop it up just like that mmm it's good it's kind of hot looks good what about baking egg rolls can you do it and if so what temperature you can and i would do it at probably like four four fifty four seventy five the air doesn't have the same amount of heat transfer as the oil also they won't get as crispy so my my bias would be to uh would be to fry them but you can um spray them with oil and then put them into a preheated oven all right so i'm switching over now fair warning i'm going to preheat my oven to 500 degrees and a high broil and what i'm going to do is i'm switching over i'm getting the chicken ready so this chicken is nice and marinated temperature and i've got this nice cast iron riddle and i have a big one for if you are all here well not all of you but if you have if they have more people they have bigger ones but this is a lodge which is kind of nice i think it's a 9 inch and what i'm going to do is i'm going to preheat this right up under the broiler so it's as close as it can get to the broiler um with room to fit the chicken and i'm going to slide that back under there i'm going to preheat that so that it gets so that the cast iron gets really hot and what's nice about doing that is that the the cast iron will actually sear the bottom of the chicken or actually sear whatever it is you're cooking and then you'll be able to broil the top and you won't have to flip it you won't have to flip the chicken at all which is great while that's heating up i am going to get my wok ready for some stir-fried seafood there you go and with the with the wok if it's a well seasoned walk really all you have to do is just wipe it out with a warm cloth just like that easy peasy and uh let's heat this up when you stir fry you want to have what's called hot wok cold oil or cool oil not super cold before you start stir frying you want to make sure that all of your ingredients are lined up and ready to go so let's get things lined up this is really tempting here sitting here so let's get our aromatics going and that's pretty simple you guys know this dance already so we have some garlic just destroy that garlic we have some ginger and then we'll just pop that up and by the way you can grow garlic everywhere pretty much this garlic is from our garden it's already nice and dried and put up for the winter and you can actually grow ginger but in in this area you need to put it in a pot because it's a tropical plant so let's line this up we're going to put this here all right so we're going to have some onions so let's make some bite-sized onions these red onions are nice they're robust if you um don't like onions too much uh the yellow onions are a little more mild so we'll put this over here chris did you peel that ginger uh you don't have to that's yeah you can you can save yourself a lot of time you don't have to peel the ginger um you know you could rinse it off but you know when you just when you smash it like that and you chop it up it doesn't really matter this is bok choy which is part of the mustard family it's a very mild cabbage chinese cabbage what i like to do is i like to cut it at an angle and when i cut it at an angle what that does other than looking cool it exposes more of the interior of the uh of the vegetable to cook so it cooks faster and so you don't have to leave it on quite as long go and let's see pepper so this is a sweet red pepper and i'll just you can see it's good to have a i don't know if i like this pepper joe leghorn hi joe is asking what are your favorite varieties of garlic um i like we grow what's called a hardneck german red hard neck or is it a german redneck i don't know but anyway yeah um it's a good keeper and what's really great is that it's um the hard neck grows escapes so in the spring uh these scapes pop up and you can use them for cooking what i'm going to do with the shrimp is i'm going to peel the all shrimp so this is a medium shrimp and what i do and this is where you want to have a nice sharp sharp knife is i cut the shrimp in half like this and what that does is it sets the shrimp up so that it curls when you uh when you stir fry it and it makes a little like a tortellini no not a tortellini a rotini and what we know about the rotini shape is that it's really good for holding on to sauces there we go and uh these are these are um these are large shrimp got away there we go all right so let's um let's do this and uh i think it's been long enough on on the rice so that we could live dangerously and let's look at the rights all right is it going to be soggy is it going to be burnt or is it going to be fluffy here we go right so the rice works fortunately so we don't have to cancel the rest of the class walk is heating up so now i'm going to i told you i was going to be jumping around i'm going to check over on the on the chicken so let's look at this so this is the cast iron all right and i'm gonna check to see how hot it is so if this this is avocado oil just just a touch and if that smokes a little bit which it is that's good so it's the cast iron is hot enough so i'm going to put in just a little bit more oil and we'll just kind of brush that on all right so where's our chicken all right so this is where it's good that the chicken is not cold put this on react sibling that's what you want there you go and we're going to put this right under the broiler and this will be done in about six minutes which is about how long it'll take us to do our stir fry so this is heated up we'll put in a tablespoon of our avocado oil so the first thing we want to do is we want to put in our aromatics which is our ginger and our garlic now you have to be ready because if if i didn't have everything ready and i tried to go get something ready i'd end up burning things because it literally comes down to seconds in terms of timing so let's put in our ginger and garlic we'll get that spread and as soon as that starts to brown and it's going to be the garlic that's going to start to brown we don't want it to burn because it'll get bitter let's put in the thing that we want to cook the next longest which will be our onions there we go and i'm going to turn on this pan here just so i don't set things off it's been known to happen all right so you know maybe like a minute or so on those onions now the onions aren't done but the thing to remember is that the onions are going to continue to cook so let's put in our peppers there we go really i just want them to kind of get some flavor there all right another minute or so so this is going to be the fun part so here's our shrimp okay so just a reminder everything that i've put into the wok is at room temperature what i tell my students is that you got to remember that humans didn't have freezers and refrigerators except for the eskimos for most of the time that we've been here on earth so all of the traditional recipes do not assume that things are refrigerated so get the things out of the refrigerator so you hear that sizzling sound you want to make sure that that sizzling sound is constant if the sizzling stops it means you've overloaded the stir fry and you can kind of see see how the shrimp has started to curl all right so now we're going to put in things are going to move pretty quickly now so the shrimp is almost done there you go so now yep i just put in the bok choy and i just really want to just kind of lightly blanch that so this is going to have a sesame flavor so what i'm going to do now is let's put in a little bit of soy sauce so the stir frying once you start putting in the sauces the stir frying is done because when you put in liquid it starts to cool things down all right and i'm going to put a little bit of hot sesame oil a little heat not too much unless you really love it and then i'm going to make a little bit of a glaze of this put in about a tablespoon of cornstarch and since this is not we're not trying to make a roux we're going to depend on the ingredients to break that up and you're going to see that it immediately creates a glaze here we go and we can turn this off we'll put in our scallions will be a garnish and a few sesame seeds and these are black and white ones you can't buy them like this but you can buy a bottle of black ones and a bottle of white ones and just sprinkle those guys on so you've got a nice little nutty flavor there right so i think i've been talking for about six minutes since i put the chicken in so that's off that's off all my surfaces are off and let's take a look at the chicken chris while you're checking the chicken can you tell us um how to find a good quality avocado oil um so the grocery stores are actually carrying avocado oil california avocado oil is pretty good stuff and so i would i would go with that if you if you want what you can do actually is you can find avocado oil blends and um like avocado and a light olive oil is pretty good the thing to remember though is that if you mix oils you can really only use the use it at the lowest temperature oil right it doesn't like average out you can't take a you know a 350 degree oil and a 500 degree oil and just average it what will happen is if you try to go to the 500 the 350 will burn so so it depends on what you want to use it for all right so here's our chicken and so let's uh let's cut into that and you'll see that is done that is completely done if it weren't quite so hot i would taste it but i i don't think i'd be able to talk there we go and when i when i slice up the meats whether i'm using it for stir fry or just to serve i always cut across the grain all right this one here means the email or the recipe that we emailed around to people um i think for the stir fry had an egg in it when do we use the egg and what does it do for the dish so what you can do with the with the egg is if you scramble that up you can actually just put that in for the stir fry so usually that's used with like fried rice we'll have egg in it and what you do with the egg is you stir fry it separately and then you put everything else in after the egg has been solidified because remember i told you that stir frying is a it's a dry process so you don't want to put everything in and then put the egg in last so let's um let's plate this just for fun so here's some rice in terms of plating rice is usually your base so put some rice in there here's our curly shrimp it's a little bit spicy and some chicken there we go so let me turn this off there we go so oh let's turn this off too thank you joan set the house on fire everything is off and um it actually took me less than an hour with some prep so that's okay so anyway let me try this shrimp spiky so there you have it egg rolls sesame shrimp we had some duck sauce and we have um some of my daughter's birthday chicken cast iron chicken excellent thank you so much chris um a couple questions coming in about the recipes um we emailed some recipes around yesterday to people that had um pre-registered as of yesterday afternoon i'll follow up tomorrow um with um another email and share these um recipes that we did and also we noticed that we forgot a second page of the egg roll recipe that will be necessary so i'll be following up um and uh if you did not receive that first email or think that you have been left off in some way um please email us at alumni.alumni bowdoin.edu and we'd be happy to send those over so thank you so much chris this was wonderful i think everybody is probably hungry i will boldly speak for everyone on the call um so thank you and uh oops uh mary has just tuned in um i will also let everybody know if you'd like to go back and um um this webinar again or share with family and friends um it will be posted to the bowdoin website i'll share that link with you in the email as well so um you can go back um stop as you go along and catch up with the chopping and all of that so um but thank you all um thank you everyone for joining us and most of all thank you so much chris this was really wonderful thank you bye

Channel: Bowdoin College

Views: 637

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Bowdoin College, Bowdoin, Alumni, Bowdoin Alumni, Chris Toy, Easy Chinese Cookbook: Restaurant Favorites Made Simple, cooking, chinese cooking

Id: oF60pGDAsrI

Length: 48min 4sec (2884 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020