If I could only cook one dish for the rest of my life...

if there was one question that I get asked the most which generally happens when people find out for the first time that I love cooking they asked what is your favorite thing to cook which is pretty much the most basic question you can ask it's like the default question if you don't know what to say and that always that always screwed with me because it's nearly impossible to answer what is my favorite thing to cook well you know I love cooking everything but I think over the last few years I might have come to an answer definitely most recently and that would be your good old Asian noodle soups now when I say Asian noodle soups you know there's so many different Asian countries different Asian cuisines that do incredible noodle suits and they're all freaking delicious and they all have their own elements they all have their own techniques what I like to do is study them all learn them all go out and taste them all so I can come back and make the perfect version for me for whatever ingredients I have whatever ingredients are in season I would say if I could cook one thing for the rest of my life if I had to decide it would probably be a bowl of Asian noodle soup so that means I got to get good at it and I have been getting really good at it over the years and I want to teach you guys like my favorite variation this is something that I've been making over the entire winter so I'm gonna teach you how to make a very basic roasted stock and this thing is going to be so packed with flavor so there's so many different things you can do with it but generally what I do is turn it into a noodle soup like this once you have the base stock then it's all about just toppings it's like whatever you have in the fridge whatever type of noodles you have you can also hold off on the noodles but I'm gonna show you the basics right now and I've been doing a lot of videos on my Instagram just short little videos I'm working on a big bread class so I don't have too much time right now and I was gonna do a basic video on just stock on life by Mike G and then I realized you know what there's there so much more I can do with this pass just the stock meaning I can create a whole dish and show you guys so let's get into it there's a few different techniques and types of bone broths or stocks that you can make I'm gonna show you one of my favorites because it's just packed of flavor so when you go to make the actual noodle soup you don't have to add too much flavorings to get it tasting good so I've got half a chicken right here and what I'm gonna do is butcher this so boom we've got it butchered right there we're not gonna really get into the butchering right now then I take a roasting tray I add some parchment paper to save on the cleaning and I just sprinkle a little bit of oil on there and then I spread out all of the chicken pieces I did hold off on the chicken breast because chicken breast is not great for stocks because it dries out so it's not gonna be great to use later on so I will vacuum seal the chicken breast and save that just to cook on its own later but all of the other meat that will cook down and pull apart so we'll be able to use that in the soup so if you have any vegetable scraps you can add that to the mix right now just for extra flavor I had a few carrots like the inside of the carrots because I've been peeling the outside into salads and then I also had some mushroom stems which will add actually a lot of depth of flavor to your stock then I took a few shallots and just slice those up and sprinkle that into the action and then some spices I had a few cardamon seeds some coriander a little bit of clove I sprinkled some more oil on that just to get it nice and lubricated and I roasted that at 450 degrees for about 25 minutes and the whole idea here is we are building flavor to this stock so by roasting it you're really intensifying the flavor of all of those ingredients so when it comes out a lot of that oils rendered and you see you've got all of this color on at the skin of the chicken on the vegetables all of that equals delicious flavor into our soup I take all of that and add it to a pot make sure you scrape off all of the oil and all of that this off the bottom of the pan because that is extra flavor I add water to that to cover it and maybe a little more because it is gonna reduce over time crank the heat and bring that up the temperature and once it's at a simmer you're gonna let that sit for a few hours I like the four to six hour range for chicken if it's something like pork bones like bigger bones you can go overnight on that to really extract all of the flavor and the nutrients so one great tip I got from my friend Derek is that you can hold off on some of the aromatics till the end because you know we're all used to like chicken noodle soup at least over in the US and that's just like throw everything in a pot with the chicken and the vegetables and what happens is over time those flavors meld into one and it's not necessarily the greatest tasting flavor it's like you destroy the flavor of all of those vegetables over time so what I like to do is hold off on a few aromatics that I really want to pop with flavor so I take a few ginger slices and a few garlic slices and in the last hour that's just the last hour of cooking I'll throw those in the pot just to really infuse those flavors in a more subtle way so you can you can really taste them and they don't completely meld in with everything and lose their essence and then once that's done cooking and it's looking beautiful how dark and nice that looks we are going to strain off everything so you strain off the meat and the vegetables and you have this beautiful stock and then we'll let the meat cool and once it's cool we'll actually pick off all of that pulled chicken and there's a lot of meat on there on all of the bones on the carcass try to get as much meat as possible off of those bones now that you have your stock now we get to pick our noodles and our toppings so let's talk about the noodles and the best part about making this stuff at home is you could take a ramen style broth with toppings but you could replace the heaviness of the noodles which I don't tend to love to eat all the time with something like rice noodles which are so light or buckwheat noodles I like to go with rice noodles because they're one of the lightest noodles so I take them and I just soak them in water these are brown rice noodles and this will really soften them up so we only have to cook them for like a minute now for the toppings last night I actually roasted some veggies just for the week I had some beets I had some turnips I put them on some parchment paper with some oil and some salt and I roasted them at like 450 degrees and look how beautiful these look and that's just vegetables for the week but these make great ingredients in your soup as well so I think a little bit of roasted turn up in there will be delicious so I'll just slice those up into pieces and then I would say my all-time go-to ingredient in these soups is some baby bok choy and what I like to do with the bok choy is just blanch it so I chopped up the bok choy and just break it off the actual stem so I have the individual pieces and then I get a pot of water boiling and I blanch it for like two minutes and then put it into ice water so you really retain the value of your bok choy you really get some crunch and you get that freshness because bok choy if you just throw it in the soup it's going to overcook it's gonna be mushy and you're you're not gonna get the flavor that you really want and now one of my favorite toppings for these soups just to add a little freshness you've seen me do this before with ramen there's just slicing up some scallions really really thin really fine and then throwing those in some iced water which is really gonna crisp them up it's gonna neutralize that intense onion flavor and it just makes a great thing to put on top of your soup so now all we have to do is actually bring this soup together so I'm gonna pour in the broth to the pot and then what I like to do is just add a little bit of flavor and we did develop so much flavor with the roasting and the spices that we don't need too much so I'm just gonna hit it with a tiny bit of soy to get the saltiness levels right a little bit of Mir and will help it pop tiny bit of sesame oil my oils nice but any type of flavored oil will just add an extra essence that that will enhance your soup and then a little bit of homemade sriracha here you can use just chili paste or Chili's whatever you have I like a little extra spiciness and depth of flavor with the sriracha now we're gonna whisk that up get it incorporated and then I have some shitake mushrooms you can use any mushrooms and those can go in raw right into the soup and not only are those going to be delicious just little new bombs in there they add a ton of umami flavor just by throwing them into this soup and take that shredded meat off the chicken bones and then we can just add that right in there and that will just continue to melt into that hot soup so to plate this up all we need to do is cook up those noodles really quickly because we already soaked them for about 30 minutes to an hour so I just throw them in some boiling water for probably a minute does not take long put them into a bowl hit it with your toppings your bok choy your roasted veggies and then pour over that delicious broth and then the last thing of course are those scallions [Music] and you have what I think is just the perfect balance soup and what I love about making this stuff at home is not only can you control the noodle type I like the rice noodles they're lighter but also you can add whatever ingredients you want a lot of times when you go to like a ramen shop to me they're a little out of balance you know sometimes it's just too much meat there's not enough vegetable so here I can I can really work on balancing what I think is like a proper meal and this is something that I eat I would say every night you know in the winter especially I try to make stock once a week just have a big vat of stock and then I just have a bunch of noodles lying around actually just just put out a video it's very similar it's like having all these things around where you can just throw them together and make a quick meal because we're trying to feed ourselves that's the goal here it's not making the most incredible noodle soup that has ever existed it's just making something that you're gonna enjoy that your family's gonna enjoy your friends whoever it is this to me is perfect yep I think I would eat this for the rest of my life if I only had one option I think I would be alright with it and you know to be honest I'm sure there's a lot of cultures that they're doing that where this is what they have they don't have the intense variety like we have and they are eating simple noodle soups just well this isn't simple but you know what I mean so I hope you enjoyed that if you can master this type of noodle soup you're gonna be good you're gonna be impressing yourself and a lot of people around you and you're gonna be eating nutritious food so good luck remember to subscribe to life by Mike G my Instagram that is where I'm making quick little videos that are gonna help you out in the kitchens so I had the video on how to make the stock but I figured I would show you the whole thing because you guys deserve it so enjoy

Channel: Pro Home Cooks

Views: 1,991,466

Rating: 4.8921256 out of 5

Keywords: healthy noodles, asian noodles, healthy soup, easy ramen, japanese noodle soup, the perfect dish, rice noodles, enzyme tire spunk, chinese noodle soup, noodles, easy dinner idea, my favorite meal, cooking made easy, beginners ramen

Id: SqLsdGqzTJ8

Length: 12min 32sec (752 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 15 2018