A Taiwanese-style supper.
Super delicious, super easy,
so flavorful, and it would be really fun
to entertain with this meal,
and it cooks up pretty quickly.
I'm gonna start with shrimp toast,
one of my all-time favorites,
and I've got a lot of ginger,
oh, about an inch, inch and a half of ginger root.
Four scallions, coarsely chopped,
a fat clove of garlic, a small handful of cilantro,
a drizzle of toasted sesame oil,
and some soy sauce, drizzle of each,
'cause soy sauce is your natural salt.
Two teaspoons, about two teaspoons,
of corn starch,
a little white pepper,
and then in a dish, we're going to crust half
of the toast, so I have six pieces of white slicing bread,
we're gonna cut those corner to corner
after they're coated with the shrimp
and the sesame seed,
and then when you plate it,
every other toast has this coating
of toasted sesame seed on it, it's delicious.
And one egg white also goes in here,
helps keep everybody together.
We're gonna shallow-fry them,
and I've got it heating up between medium and medium-high.
I've got a transfer tray
so that when we're done cooking the first batch
of shrimp toast, they can drain over here, okay?
Now, we're just gonna zip these guys together
into a thick paste,
coat the white bread with the shrimp paste,
just like this.
A nice, even layer, you can mount it up a little bit.
And then, with half of them,
press them gently,
but get an even coating,
into the toasted sesame, just like that.
And then, when we cut them, (audience applauding)
then you're gonna cut them corner to corner,
just like this, and when they're all together,
cook half at a time in the oil.
We have some working in the kitchen,
I'll show you what that looks like.
This is just the first course.
Guess what we're making next?
We're gonna make a Taiwanese-style meat sauce
that you can make with pork or beef,
or even chicken if you like.
I have pork cooking up here
and we're gonna serve it instead of over spaghetti,
over Chinese egg noodles.
So, it'll be like a spaghetti meat sauce dinner,
but Taiwanese-style, after this.
(audience applauds)
(upbeat music)
Okay, so for the meat sauce and pasta,
kind of like Taiwanese spaghetti and meat sauce,
we're gonna start by browning mushrooms first,
about a half a pound.
I used maitake, or hen of the woods.
We have our shrimp toast,
all I did was take store-bought sweet chili sauce
and put that alongside.
That's our appetizer for this dish.
To the half-pound of mushrooms that we browned first
in a little bit of high-temperature cooking oil,
over medium-high to high heat,
I then add a pound of ground pork,
or you can substitute, as I said, ground beef,
or even ground chicken.
Now, we're ready to add salt,
but we're not going to add kosher salt,
we're going to use soy sauce.
So, we're gonna use a combination
of dark soy sauce, which is a little thicker and sweeter,
couple of teaspoons of that,
and light soy sauce, which has a higher salt content,
but it's thinner, you could see through it a little easier,
it's more translucent.
Then, we're gonna put in a sprinkle of light brown sugar,
star anise, cinnamon, cloves, Sichuan pepper,
five spice powder has so much flavor
in so little an amount.
One teaspoon of this,
and the flavor will permeate this dish immediately
and just be so fragrant and delicious.
We're going to add a little stock or bone broth.
These are fried shallots
and we're gonna sprinkle those in.
So, the flavor in this meat sauce,
a lot of that flavor comes from this.
This is Shaoxing, it's a Chinese-style sherry
or Chinese cooking wine.
This is rice wine.
If you can't find this, again,
you can order it online,
you can get it at, a lot of the larger spirit stores here
in New York have it, so wine and liquor stores.
But, if you can't find this,
just use dry cooking sherry,
it's delicious with this dish, and it gives
the sauce a really particular flavor, it's fabulous.
So, I'm gonna stir that together
and drop our Chinese noodles.
I'm gonna drop the egg pasta in,
when we come back, we'll toss this together and serve.
(audience applauding)
So, I drain off, whenever you're cooking pasta of any kind,
this is a quick-cooking Chinese egg noodle,
a long noodle, right, made of egg,
so it cooks very quickly.
Always under-cook by one minute
from the cook time on the package
because you're going to toss the pasta
with something hot, in this case,
our Taiwanese meat sauce. (audience applauds)
So, along with our Taiwanese-style meat sauce
that we're going to put
into our family-style pasta bowl here,
along with that, we have shrimp toast
with a store-bought sweet chili sauce.
(audience applauding)