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