How Chef Eric Sze Is Changing the Game for Taiwanese Food in NYC — Eater New Guard

authenticity means jackson to me the word authentic right now to me means that whatever i like because what's authentic to me doesn't mean it's authentic to you even if you grew up in taiwan if you grew up in taipei your go-to pig's blood cake is a steamed pig's blood cake dabbed with chili sauce little soy paste peanut milk and cilantro is my experience more authentic than yours no it's not whatever i like or whatever i want to serve that's authentic to me and authentic to us we're in chinatown where this is uh what where are we we're in grant street and uh elizabeth going to deluxe meat market i get all of my meat from chinatown chicken some of our pork is from deluxe meat market best market in new york city don't at me fix session meat section boom do you want me to grind it up or what no no i'll just take them as is it's really cool when you get to work with the next generation of chinese kids danny understands what i'm trying to go for even though he does have some restrictions given to him by his predecessors he tries to go above and beyond that's good thing we came early at noon time it's just boxing you out i think it's very important for me to buy from chinatown directly is because it was a place where i always went when i was homesick during college when i just come to the states it gave me a level of comfort and the more time i spend in new york the more connected i feel with the chinatown community we opened up 886 in 2018 july of 2018. so it's been two and a half years even though i only counted as a year and a half because of a pandemic so on baxter street getting noodles this is fresh noodles i've been getting since just giving away all my secrets today kenny can i get 40 pounds please yeah thanks so they make them in-house every morning super fresh delicious bouncy slurpee cute we have a new restaurant coming later this year it's in greenpoint brooklyn for that restaurant we're recipes developing right now and there's one recipe that i think is really cool it's a whole chicken deboned with the skin on intact and deep fried we're definitely still finalizing the recipe for it but i think we're pretty damn close it's very important for me to showcase chicken raised by the chinese farmers it's a different flavored chicken the meat isn't as quote unquote tender it's not the conventional tender but it's still delicate and delicious everything's intact the feet the head don't freak out but also you know the guts there's still a little bit of excess fat here but you can tell how yellow it is you know americans they go through the labor of devonian entire birds and then they make turducken i don't know man it's questionable leave it to the taiwanese kid to show you guys how to respect your own labor and right now i'm going to press down on the chicken to loosen the spine before we spatchcock sounds good right it's like a massage and now we take off the spine you always want to aim for the chicken ass this is the chicken ass in taiwan we call it the seven mile fragrant so it's so fragrant you can smile from seven miles away the most annoying part of this process is trying not to [ __ ] up the chicken because one mistake the whole thing is pretty much ruined i'm romanticizing it as like a five order a night kind of thing first come first serve that's such a [ __ ] to do i've practiced for so long and it still takes me like 12 minutes for a chicken i've never seen anybody put a whole deboned fried chicken on the menu it's just something nobody does because it's so [ __ ] time consuming another thing we need to do that we haven't done you see this is the leg but right here there's a small pocket because we're using a wet dredge the wet dredge will go into this pocket and steam instead of fry so what we need to do is to flatten it so that there's more surface area we are marinating the chicken super simple salt sugar msg white vinegar and some baijo alcohol in chinese cooking kind of gets rid of the gaminess of protein this is sweet potato starch it's a blend of both thick and thin just so when we add water to it not all of it is just going to be liquid we're going to make a wet batter so the perks of having a wet batter is that you are able to get a crust that is shatteringly crisp instead of something that's more crunchy it's it actually shatters as opposed to a dry batter it's something that's a little bit more crusty taiwanese fried chicken is a blend of both wet bridge and dry bread korean fried chicken uses potato starch instead of sweet potato starch so that's kind of the difference but it's very much inspired by both this is vinegar and here i have a little bit of baking soda so what baking soda does is once it goes in and we add vinegar to it it's going to create a bunch of carbon dioxide that'll help bubble up the crust and make that shatteringly crisp crunch that we want as you can tell it's bubbling up right now immediately all the carbon dioxide is being created all right we're ready to fry hold it up by the feet that's gonna fry for about six minutes and we're gonna let it rest for a bit and then it's gonna fry again for about three minutes double fry so we're gonna throw it back into the fryer for the second fry this is when the skin really crisp up we're hearing texture i'm gonna break it into half first this is the white meat and this is the dark meat what we're gonna do is slice it like this horizontally so each piece has both white and dark you don't have to choose fry is good it's just a some starch has gone into it but you know this is what it is it's still an r d we're still working on it [Music] this is a whole boneless fried chicken sausage time this is all the beautiful stuff we picked up from deluxe meat market taiwanese cuisine is an amalgamation of all these different local and regional cuisines of places that have colonized taiwan well as far as i know taiwanese sausage is largely influenced by the portuguese and the time that portuguese colonized taiwan back in like the 17th century so this is the fatty ground pork that's like a 50 50 blend this is the ground pork shoulder that's like a 90 10 blend fat back is surprise fat from the back of the pig as you can tell it's more solid it's great for cooking this is what they put in ramen stock for tonkotsu ramen that thickens everything up it's just large unrendered solid lard this is actually not on the menu yet it took me two years to get to this current recipe for taiwanese sausage i want to make my own tiny sausage because the ones i found outside even with some wholesalers who are dedicated to making taiwanese sausage i couldn't find one with the exact consistency that i liked the current version that we have is a baijo garlic tony sausage all right we got some sugar we got some msg some sodium nitrite pink salt it helps fend off bacteria garlic powder nice big jug five spice how do you know it's taiwanese if there's no five spice if you look at the technique of tammany sausage it's emulsified meat stuffed into hog casing it's unique in asian food so by joe same thing we're gonna pour it in doesn't have to be too much it really helps take away kind of any off taste you get from the pork and because it's brining alcohol kind of kills some of the bacteria that will eventually develop so we are good meat is nice and emulsified ready to stuff as you can see it's like a paste you can't really even tell the fat from the regular meat now it's ready natural hog casing [Music] the goal is to make about 500 every week depending on how good we get at it i try to not hang them for longer than 24 hours the pink salt starts to really penetrate the sausage and it becomes just a little bit too salty the cantonese style sausage the la chang is is hung for anywhere from two days to a week you're just curing it at that point these are only air dried you still want the bounciness of the meat these guys have been hung for about a day these were made 10 minutes ago as you can see the skin really dries up that's what gives it the like snappy texture [Music] we're going to poach them first for about eight minutes and then deep fry them for three minutes in they go we are still one of the only taiwanese restaurants in new york there seriously is only a handful like less than a handful especially in manhattan me being taiwanese there is this invisible pressure placed on myself on really representing my heritage and my culture and my people whether i like it or not everything is a reflection on taiwan at least to new yorkers and i don't take it lightly this is taiwanese sausage house made with a fermented chive puree we're about to put the pig's blood cake on the menu pig's blood cake known in mandarin as sushe gao it's a wildly widely popular dish in taiwan it's kind of like the bagel of taiwan everybody eats it it's super traditional taiwanese food impossible to find in america at least done well and so i sought out looking for fresh pig's blood because you have to make it with fresh like liquid pigs but took my de braga rep about a month to get it to me which is crazy i think why we didn't do it in the beginning was because we didn't think new york was ready for it i was very constrained by my perception of what people would like from taiwan but now i don't really give a [ __ ] sticky rice this has been soaked overnight just to loosen it up a little bit and rehydrate it the blood helps coagulate with the sticky rice and the sticky rice releases some starch into the blood and it becomes something entirely different a little bit of salt a little bit of sugar soy sauce and trusty little guy every single recipe the most important part is to soak each individual grain in the blood it's crazy how it smells like nothing right now the only smell i'm getting is the soy sauce and the baijo that just goes to show how fresh the blood is so now we're gonna drop the pig's blood cake into the steamer it seems about like 30 minutes the steaming process coagulates the blood while cooking the sticky rice in the end makes it a single block [Music] there's the blood that's coagulated and then this is the rice that's been cooked it has to cool overnight just so everything kind of chills out gets to mingle with each other in the fridge and it becomes a more solid block once it chills voila it is gorgeous you see this it's all just rice it's rice and blood it's pretty much it if you look at the cross section here this is what you're aiming for to somebody who is skeptical about pig's blood cake i would say try it once if you don't like it spit it out it's fine i believe everybody has the right to choose what they want to eat but i think especially in this in such a global society we live in today you need to try it at least once before you declare that you don't like it we're cutting into triangles because it gives it more surface area so the sauce for the pig's blood cake it's not super traditional we have sambal fish sauce sesame oil and soy paste the whole idea behind it is i wanted something that's sweet a little bit funky but also very fresh and spicy so we're also adding thai chili thai basil lots of scallion lots of garlic lots of cilantro it's a dish that is best enjoyed with a couple of drinks [Music] this is the spicy stir-fried pig's blood cake [Music] what would i tell baby eric about owning a restaurant other than trying to persuade myself out of it would be trust yourself i think that's a very important lesson because for the longest time i was thinking about what other people would want and this really all ties back into being authentically myself i think the beauty of opening a restaurant in new york is that there's so many people that are willing to be educated on your food and your culture to open a restaurant thinking about what other people would want out of your culture is a pretty pretty big misstep and a missed opportunity honestly and i did that for a year almost until the pandemic happened and now i'm just like i'll do what i want and i've never been better

Channel: Eater

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Keywords: 886 restaurant, chef eric sze, taiwanese food, taiwanese restaurant, taiwanese food nyc, taiwanese restaurant nyc, eric sze, nyc taiwanese restaurants, nyc, nyc food, what to eat in new york, taiwan food, beef noodle soup, fried chicken, taiwanese cuisine, taiwanese sausage, cooking with blood, NYC Chinatown, NYC Chinatown market, professional chef, Taiwanese chef, best chefs nyc, best nyc restaurants, eater, eater.com, food, restaurant, dining, dish, foodie, chef, food show

Id: O5xjobO_kts

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021