Here is another soup that I discovered I love drinking during a trip to China for a holiday. It is Hot and Sour Soup. This is how Chef Lau, who used to run a successful Chinese restaurant in New York made it.
Chef Lau used 21 ingredients to cook his Hot and Sour Soup. If you are new to Chinese cooking, preparing so many ingredients for a soup can be intimidating. However, if you break down the steps to parepare and cook it, you will realise that it is not such an arduous task after all.
I am happy to discover that Lotus, where I often buy my groceries from, do supply mix mushrooms. This pack weighs 400g.
You do not have to use all the types of mushroom mentioned in Chef Lau's recipe. Here is another version from Dana with no mushrooms. Her recipe included two secret ingredients that her uncle used in his Chinese restaurant. They are dried mandarin peel and lily flower.
Check out this article if you do not have Sriracha Hot Sauce in your pantry:
I usually remove the pork ribs from my soup to create another dish. Learn from Chef John that you can make your soup more aromatic if you roast the pork ribs first. Check out the second dish he cooked with the pork ribs.
I usually mix a few table spoons of water with sugar (or honey), garlic oil, soya sauce (or oyster sauce) to flavour my pork ribs. The sauce will thicken once the liquid is reduced.
I cook green, red and yellow peppers almost every week, so, I need to discover different ways to serve them.
So far, I have used them to cook:
-Sweet and Sour Pork dish -four different stir fry dishes by changing the sauces used -add celery to leftover stir fry dishes to change the flavour -use any leftovers to make Korean Street Toast or as toppings for my pizza
This is my latest discovery. I add any leftovers from my Sweet and Sour Pork dish to leftovers from my Ayam Percik dish. They blend in very well in flavour.
I discovered Brahim's Percik sauce from TESCO (now known as Lotus). When it was sold under TESCO, their site was very informative as it included ingredients in the paste and cooking instruction, which you can also read off its packaging as follows.
I usually make my decision to buy prepacked paste based on the ingredients used and whether it is easy to cook with. By looking at the table I have created based on the above packaging instruction, you can see that it takes only 3 steps and 2 ingredients to cook this dish:
If you are going to use Brahim's method, it is best to keep the remaining sauce in the fridge till it is ready to be used.
That was how I cooked it till I discovered that I can cook it with my airfyer. I marinate my chicken tighs with the whole packet of sauce in a round metal container and keep it covered overnight in the freezer. The following day, I removed the cover and placed the container, without thawing it, in my air fryer to cook for 15 minutes. Then turn the chicken over to cook for another 15 minutes. I then pour the chicken in a pot or wok and add just enough water to make sure that there is enough liquid in it to simmer till the chicken is tender. It is ready when you see that the sauce has reduced and thickened.
You can read my cooking instruction more clearly from this table.
Should I use drumsticks to cook this dish, I will cut each drumstick into 3 sections. I use the middle portion for the Ayam Percik dish and the bony ends for making soup.
When I bring some Ayam Percik dish to the bike shop to eat, I usually pack it in a metal container because I can heat it up by steaming it in a mini electric pot.
Don't throw away the sauce as you can add it to your rice to eat. It is very flavourful. Sometimes I mixed the sauce into my rice to reheat in a mini rice cooker.
If I served Ayam Percik dish for lunch and there is some leftover for dinner, I can change its flavour by adding it to my Sweet and Sour Pork dish. I can enhance the flavour further by adding BBQ and black pepper sauce to it.
I was inspired to do this after checking out how chicken fajitas dish is cooked.
If I am to use pork to cook a version of it, I will most likely just be cooking the Sweet and Sour dish with strips of the meat and add the Percik sauce to taste.
So, if the peppers I bought are large enough, I will prepare all three different dishes on the same day. They are:
1) Sweet and Sour Pork 2) Stir fry dish 3) Korean style toppings for toast or pizza
The Korean style toppings can be served for breakfast while one will be served for lunch and the other for dinner or stored in the fridge to be served the following day.
Have you ever purchase green, red and yellow peppers at the market? It is very difficult to find them in similar sizes. So you are likely going to have more of one than the other to cook in your dish.
I used to get my source of peppers in similar sizes from TESCO till Lotus took over. For a family of small eaters, I can cook two different dishes with them. One of them will be Sweet and Sour Pork. If you cut peppers the way I do, you will notice that their curved ends are usually thicker in porpotion. These are the parts that I used to cook this dish.
I tried cooking it with a ready made pack of MasFood Sour Sweet Paste but I did not like how it turned out.
I still prefer it cooked with the following liquid/sauces:
-Mahsuri Spicy Sweet & Sour -Tomato Ketchup -Plum Sauce -Juice from canned Pineapple Slices -soya sauce to taste -*Worcester sauce (only if the sauce is not sour enough after cooking)
I usually buy pork tenderloin as the meat is tender. The pork used in this dish should be deep fried but I do not like the idea of using lots of oil. So I sliced the tenderloin into 1 finger thick cutlets and pound it flat with my meat mallet. I discovered from watching how Koreans cook in their restaurants that it will be less messy if you place a plastic over the meat or add corn starch to it before pounding.
I then marinate it piece by piece in my magic sauce:
I add cornstarch to the meat once it is thoroughly mixed with the sauces. The marinated meat can be stored in the freezer till it is time to be used.
As the meat has been pounded thinly, it does not require a lot of oil or time to cook. For the sweet and sour dish, I only need 3 peices of pan fried cutlets but I usually fry more so that it can be eaten like pork chop for lunch.
For dinner, I will use a pair of scissors to cut each cutlet into 1-2cm strips.
When it is time to heat them up to be served, I can break an egg over the meat to fry before serving, thus changing its flavour.
I tend to cook more sauce than is required for the dish.
I can use it to add flavour to my:
-leftover rice and prevent it from drying out when I reheat it. -pork cutlets -deep fried chicken -fried fish.
-fried rice.
If I do not have the time to prepare the pork to go with this dish, I will use stored bought chicken nuggets. I air fry a small portion of them with garlic oil in a round metal container until both sides are crispy, which is for about nine minutes. Crispy Chicken Finger is our favourite choice to go with it.
As I do not like the idea of serving the same dish for lunch and then dinner, I sometimes use the ingredients as toppings for the Four Cheese Pizza 285g that I bought from TESCO/Lotus. I quarter it up air fry two slices at a time for seven minutes in the air fryer.
You can see 2 methods for preparing the crispy pork for the sweet and sour dish in the following table.
You can see how the cutlets are prepared and deep fried for cooking "Crispy Sweet and Sour Pork" from this video.
These are the ingredients the chef used to cook the sweet and sour sauce.
This is how the Sweet and Sour Pork dish with bell peppers, pineapple and onion should be cooked. The deep fried pork should be the last ingredient to be added to the sauce to prevent it from becoming soggy.
Other ingredients I have added to cook it are:
-1 cucumber deseeded and cubed -1 tomato deseeded and cubed
