barbecue
Making ribs and potato salad on the Fourth of July!
Ah, the Fourth of July. The big holiday to celebrate our independence from the British – and I’m in China. Well, though I am far away from home, it is that distance that makes me go so far to learn how to cook! I was craving delicious BBQ ribs and potato salad, which is typical Fourth of July fare. I had never made it before, but I did a little bit of research online, made a few modifications, and came up with a couple delicious recipes! Here is the product of what I spent yesterday afternoon cooking:
The labor altogether probably took me about three hours, but it was well worth it! Here are what you need to make both the potato salad and the ribs.
Ribs Ingredients:
- 1-1.5 kg of pork ribs
- Bottled BBQ sauce (I used Heinz)
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1 tsp Ground black pepper
- 1 tsp Ground red pepper
- 1 tsp Garlic powder
- 1 tsp Salt
Potato Salad Ingredients:
- 5 medium potatoes, peeled and chopped
- 1 white onion chopped fine
- 1 bunch of celery chopped fine
- 1 big teaspoon of mayonnaise (The more the better usually)
- One big teaspoon of mustard
- Salt to taste
- 1 tsp ground pepper
Let’s get to how you make these delicious dishes! Let’s just start with the potato salad:
Potato Salad:
To make the potato salad, start by peeling and chopping your potatoes into chunks. Next, boil the potatoes in a pot for 15-17 minutes. Drain into a colander and let cool for a few minutes. In the meantime, chop the white onion and celery fine. Once the potatoes have cooled a bit, combine the potatoes with the chopped celery and onion, the mustard, the mayonnaise, and the salt and pepper. Mix together until the mayonnaise is well distributed. I only used one big teaspoon for my salad because I don’t like excessive mayo – You can even double up on it though if you want it a little creamier. Put it all into a bowl and wrap it in plastic, and put it in the fridge for 30 minutes – 1 hour to chill it. Delicious!
Next, let’s move onto the ribs.
To make these mouthwatering ribs, start by combining the brown sugar with the salt, pepper, red pepper, garlic powder, and the brown sugar in a bowl and mixing it all together. Pour it out onto a tray or some kind of surface and spread it out. Wash and pat dry the ribs with some paper towels. Then start by dipping the ribs into the rub, and be sure to get each rib well coated on both sides with the rub. Cover your cooking tray in aluminum foil. Once all the ribs are coated, pop them into the oven at 150 degrees celsius (300 Fahrenheit) for 2 hours. When they are done, pull them out and remove the foil and then cover them with your bottled barbecue sauce. Brush them with a sauce brush to get them well coated. Place them in the oven for 5 more minutes, remove and brush the other side, and cook for an additional 5 minutes. Then remove the ribs, let them cool for a few minutes and enjoy this delectable Fourth of July treat! Feel free to check out the recipe video for both of these dishes from my YouTube channel below!
Eating some late night Chinese Barbecue in Shenzhen
One of the coolest things about China is how vibrant things can be late at night. Of course, it depends what part of the city you’re in but in most parts, there is usually a late night area with street barbecue that runs into the late hours of the night, sometimes as late as 3-5 AM! It was about midnight last night when we developed some strong barbecue cravings, so we decided to head down to one of our local barbecue spots at Dafen here in the city of Shenzhen. Chinese saokao (烧烤, or barbecue) is absolutely delicious, and I intend to show you just how delicious! First, have a peek at some of the things we had to eat that night:
We went to our local barbecue spot (In truth, it was our first time going there since we moved to this new part of town) and checked out what they were offering. We stacked up everything in the basket and gave it to the laoban, and watched them cook it.
The first thing to sample was an appetizer. We had ordered some dried squid with wasabi and soy sauce, known as youyu (鱿鱼). This had the consistency of something like beef jerky, but with a seafood flavor. When you dip it in the wasabi and soy sauce together, it has a real kick to your nostrils!
The first two things I had tried were the enoki mushrooms (金针菇) and shiitake mushrooms (香菇). I love all shrooms, as they help you to see life clearly! Barbecued mushrooms are no exception, especially when they are topped with special lajiao. After that came tofu (豆腐)that is covered in some kind of spicy orange sauce and also barbecued. Very delicious – much tastier than plain old tofu, that’s for sure! Following the tofu was some spring onions (韭菜) that were delightfully tasty and flavorful. Of course they were covered in oil and barbecued, so they tasted much better than raw!
Next up was some koi fish (开心鱼). Now I really had no idea what exactly this skewer was when I saw it. I thought it might be dried shrimp that was barbecued. When we got home and looked it up, I was surprised to find out that it was in fact koi fish.
Upon trying this dish, it reminded me a lot more of fish jerky than anything. Overall a nice fishy flavor with that dried chewiness that we so love in jerky.
The last couple dishes were chicken and fish. The chicken (鸡腿) was fantastic. The meat was nice and juicy and tender, some of the skin was crispy, and the lajiao had my mouth on fire at the same time. The fish, which we found out was actually called Ribbonfish (I had thought it was just mackerel) was the best dish of the night, however. The skin was very crispy, the fish meat was pleasant and soft, and the best part is they took out the bones. I rarely eat fish in China because of the strong presence of bones – which I hate! Any Chinese fish dish where the bones are removed is worth 5 stars to me!
Above are the chicken and fish dishes – click the pictures for a bigger view! That was all we ate that night, and my was it good! The total for the bill came out to 62 RMB, or $9.48 USD! What a steal! Check out the video of this Chinese barbecue adventure on my YouTube channel, below! Please subscribe if you enjoy the content! What do you think of Chinese barbecue? Do you enjoy it? Please let me know in the comments!
Walking around Laojie’s (Dongmen) food street in Shenzhen
Last night was epic! We took the MTR train from Dafen to Laojie (8 stops, about a 15 minute ride) which is home to some of the best shopping and food in Shenzhen. For my YouTube video channel I made a video sampling a few foods, and touring around the area.
Laojie is a beautiful place. Lots of beautiful women, amazing street barbecue and other foods, what could be sweeter? After getting off at exit D with a couple friends I met up with my girlfriend and we started walking around. I apologize for the low quality pictures, I was filming most of the time and I completely spaced out on taking some high res photos! These are all video grabs from this week’s video:
I hadn’t been to the food street that many times so we got lost for a couple minutes, but we found it pretty quickly. While walking there, we ran into an outside barbecue that was serving up youyu ( 鱿鱼 , squid), and yangrou (羊肉, lamb). We couldn’t resist the temptation and we all got a few skewers. The barbecue is well priced, too. You can get 4 skewers of squid for 10RMB ($1.50 USD) or 2 skewers of lamb for the same price. The squid was nice and chewy not overcooked, with lots of spices added. The lamb was delicious and fatty, and for me that’s great because I love animal fat. (Not in excess, of course!)
After devouring our skewers, we headed off to the food street. We got there around 9:45 which is pretty late for laojie. Although it is very easy to find street barbecue going until 3-4 in the morning in Shenzhen, Laojie is a bit of a different case. Around 10:00 it appeared that lots of vendors were starting to close down, but lots of people were still serving until we left (Around 10:45) I bought some lotus root (藕片) and some potatoes. There isn’t much to say about the potatoes except that these ones were actually a little bit overcooked (These were leftover at the end of the night) but still pretty tasty. However, they were a bit too salty. The lotus however was very good. Lotus has a really interesting texture and it is probably the crunchiest vegetable I have ever eaten. It’s somewhat comparable to the crunchiness of an apple.
After walking around a bit more and having some delicious leng mian (Cold noodles, 冷面 ) we decided to take the train home since it was early enough (The train stops around 11:30 and it was only around 10:45) and called it a night. Please check out the video of the food crawl below, and if you like it please feel free to subscribe to my channel 🙂
Chaoshao: A sweet and delicious Chinese pork dish.
Today I felt like writing about one of my favorite Chinese foods. The Chinese are celebrating labor day weekend, so traffic in the city is out of control. I’m on the 21st floor but all I can hear are mass numbers of horns honking from the street below.
But that won’t stop me from updating the blog! Today we returned to our same laoban from last week, the one that makes killer 猪杂汤粉, pork noodles. We ordered our usual, the noodles, but also ordered a few other things as well. From a separate street stall we ordered 20 RMB worth (~$3.09)of some chaoshao, 叉烧, one of my favorite Chinese pork dishes.
Chaoshao is basically Chinese style roast pork, covered in an incredibly sweet and flavorful sauce. The sauce contains things like soy sauce, spice powder, honey, ginger, garlic, etc. The pork meat is soaked in this marinade for many hours, and then slowly roasted over a cooking fire. Upon tasting this, your flavor receptors immediately go off. It is a great combination of salty and sweet, nice tender meat that isn’t dry. This meat is seriously, OUTSTANDING and I am sure could win awards back home. It’s so good we even combined it with our noodles.
From our noodle laoban we also ordered one other dish: 牛筋丸, or niu jin wan, also known as beef meatballs. The meatballs are 1 rmb each, at a combined cost of 10RMB for all of them (~$1.54)
The meatballs were absolutely outstanding. In China you will often find street vendors selling Chinese soups with vegetables where you can pick the things you want to add from trays (Vegetables, meats, etc) and have the laoban boil them together in a soup for you. Usually the meatballs and fish balls that you will find at these stands are processed factory foods with who knows what in them. I only order meatballs from this particular laoban because I know she does them fresh and from real beef. They were excellent.
When factoring in the cost of our entire meaty and delightful lunch, it only clocked in at 50 RMB, or about ~$7.72.
I’d like to leave you today with Episode 6 from my YouTube cooking show: The Tomato Herbs and Cheese Toasted Sandwich:
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