- [Alvin] Thank you to Bokksu
for sponsoring this episode.
Bokksu is a premium Japanese snack subscription
that works with family businesses all over Japan
to deliver a new theme of treats every month.
Here are some of the snacks
that I got this month.
Pretty cool.
And if you wanna taste these snacks for yourself
or give a subscription as a gift,
head to the link of the description,
and use code ALVIN to get $15 off your order.
(speaking in foreign language)
(food sizzling)
(speaking in foreign language)
(suspenseful instrumental music)
(speaking in foreign language)
(food slurping)
Hello, there.
Welcome back to another episode
of "Anime with Alvin."
Today, I'll be making the feast
from "Spirited Away" that Chihiro parents
eat when you first start the movie.
I'm a fan of al the Miyazaki films,
and I have to say that "Spirited Away"
is one of my favorite movies of all time.
A lot of the food seems
to be inspired from Taiwan.
So for this episode,
we'll be making five Taiwanese-inspired dishes,
the first of which is Taiwanese sausage.
I'm gonna start by cubing four pounds
of whole pork butt
along with one pound of pork fat back.
Taiwanese sausage is a little different
than normal American sausage.
It has a different kind of seasoning,
and is usually a little bit sweeter,
and not as dried.
Our version of Taiwanese sausage is inspired
by two sources this time.
Sago Fiona and the YouTube channel,
Happy ingredients.
Once all the meat has been cubed up,
I'm putting them on trays
so that they can sort of freeze up in the fridge
for a little bit
'cuz we still need to grind it
like normal sausage.
Moving on to our second dish,
grilled mochi sticks.
Now, it's not mentioned exactly
what every single dish
on that massive feast table was,
but I'm guessing it's an inspiration
from Taiwanese street markets.
I was able to visit those magical markets
many years ago and to this day,
it still remains one of my favorite,
and strongest culinary memories.
I remember eating grilled mochi sticks
the first night I was there,
and it was definitely one of my favorite
things I'd ever eaten.
So I'll use that as an excuse
to make them.
Quite simple, actually.
Just combining 500 grams of glutenous rice flour
with 500 grams of water
starting to incorporate and microwaving
in 30 seconds to one minute intervals
until the whole thing is smooth,
and relatively bouncy.
After kneading it for a little bit,
I'm putting it into Saran wrap
in order to wrap it into a more cohesive shape.
This gets repeated until we have
two back-to-back packages
of this rice, sticky,
gooey awesomeness.
After hanging out in the fridge
for about one to two hours,
these are now ready to be sliced and stick.
I'm cutting these into approximately
half inch sticks,
not lengthwise, the diameter of a square,
whatever, not that's,
I was not good at school.
I'm placing them on a sheep pan line with a rack,
covering the wooden parts with foils
so that they don't burn in the oven.
Usually at the night markets,
these are grilled over charcoal or open flame.
But in order to make a lot of these,
we decided to use the oven.
If we grill them too early,
they'll be a little bit tough.
So we're gonna save this right before we eat.
One of the dishes on that feast table
definitely seems to be
some sort of roasted poultry.
From the movie visuals,
it seems to be a little too small for chicken.
So we're going with Cornish hens.
First, I'm combining one cup of kosher salt
with two tablespoons of baking powder,
and rubbing all of the hens inside and out
with this mixture.
This not only seasons the Cornish hens,
but allow the skin to dry out,
letting us get a more crispy skin
after the roasting process.
We're now gonna put these little birds
into the fridge
until they're ready to be roasted tomorrow.
It's gonna be a long two days.
Back to the sausage.
Our mixer parts have been a little chilled,
so has our meat.
So we're now gonna start by grinding this
into ground pork.
Please enjoy as you wash
the satisfying clip of meat
being grounded into long strands.
The meat was in the freezer for about 20 minutes.
We don't want them rock hard,
but we don't want them too soft
or else the fat will be
a little difficult to deal with in the grinder.
After the meat has been ground,
I'm gonna season this with
three tablespoons of sugar.
One and a half tablespoons of Kosher salt.
Two teaspoons of white pepper.
One and a half teaspoons of onion powder.
One teaspoon of black pepper.
Three quarters of a teaspoon of not five spice,
but 13 spice,
and half a teaspoon of ginger powder.
Yeah.
There's a lot of seasoning that goes into this.
Once this is mixed, you can see that I'm sort of
slamming the meat down
into the stainless steel bowl.
This is a technique my grandpa used to do
when he used to make meatballs.
I've also seen some chefs in Asia do this,
but essentially,
we're emulsifying the meat mixture
by slamming it.
Usually, this task is assigned
to the apprentices,
but the modern technique is this.
So use a stand mixer.
So we're gonna put the meat mixture
in a stand mixer and use the paddle attachment,
and emulsify this for a few minutes.
This is where the liquids finally go in.
I'm adding in three tablespoons of soy sauce.
One tablespoon of Shaoxing cooking wine.
Three tablespoons of corn starch,
and about two and a half ounces
of ice water.
Once to solid mollified,
you'll notice that this is sort of like,
a pink paste reminiscent of McDonald's
chicken nuggets, if that video is real.
But now that the meat paste is ready,
it is time to take on the ever so
intimidating task of making sausages.
Viewer discretion is advised.
Unless you're into that sort of thing.
Please enjoy this circus of footage.
Rachel and I were trying to figure out
how to make these sausages work.
We soaked casings made out of collagen
in water for about five minutes
before putting them onto the meat extruder.
But as you can see things,
things are taking a little bit of time
as we work through our mistakes.
Yeah, let's just,
let's just say we had a great time,
and we also did not have a great time.
If you're a sausage maker out there
or if you've made sausages
in your life from scratch, I salute you.
This stuff's not easy.
This actually does take
quite a good amount of strength,
control and dexterity in both hands,
which is why we have two people here.
Once the sausage mixture has been extruded
along the whole length of the casing,
it's now time to tie.
This part's also quite tricky
because in order to roll these sausages,
and get them tight,
the instructions require
that you alternate directions
in which the sausages are twisted.
Having never made sausage before,
I decided to reinforce our twists
by tying knots around them with butchers twine.
But after approximately one hour
of the most hilarious time we've probably had
in the studio and way too many sausage jokes,
we have our links,
and we are putting them on a coat rack
in order to dry them correctly
for about one day or so.
I gotta say, not bad.
I mean, I ain't no glitzy gladiator or anything,
but those look pretty solid.
Moving on to another dish.
In the movie, one of the dishes that the father
was seen clearly taking onto his plate
seems to be a sticky rice dumpling of some sort.
There've also been articles that say
this is actually an ancient animal
from many, many thousands of years ago.
But I'm gonna go ahead and say that,
we should probably do the dumplings instead.
We're taking inspiration
from traditional red meat steamed dumplings
from Taiwanese cuisine.
Using two recipe sources,
one from Cookpad and one from the Walks of Life.
I'm starting first with the meat filling,
Dicing of eight ounces of Shiitake mushrooms,
and half cup of pre-cooked,
and rinsed bamboo shoots for the stove.
I'm sauteing the mushrooms of the bamboo shoots
for just a few minutes in a tablespoon
of neutral oil
until the water has started to come out,
and the vegetables have started
to brown just a little bit.
This mixture now gets added
to two pounds of ground pork,
along with half a large shallots,
and fore cloves of garlic.
Two teaspoons of Chinese five spice powder.
Two teaspoons of white pepper.
One teaspoon of kosher salt.
One teaspoon of sugar.
And two tablespoons of soy sauce.
Giving this a nice mix
until everything is evenly combined.
I'm setting the meat mixture of aside
so we can make the wrappers.
In a bowl, I'm combining a few starches,
approximately one cup of wheat starch,
three quarters of a cup of tapioca starch,
and three tablespoons of corn starch.
This starch mixture
now goes into a sauce pan
filled with boiling water.
Approximately one and a fourth cups.
This is a similar process
to making Choux pastry.
Once the water is hot,
the starch goes in and you have to constantly
stir until no lumps remain.
At this stage,
it might be a little dry with a few lumps,
so I turn off the heat and let this set
and steam for about five minutes
in its remaining heat.
Once five minutes are up,
this now goes onto a table
where I'm kneading it until smooth.
I'm just gonna go ahead and say,
that I've never actually kneaded
a baby's butt before,
but I would imagine
that the sensation is quite similar,
and enjoyable.
I'm rolling this dumpling dough
into a large long tube
so that we can satisfyingly cut them
with a bench scraper
into hopefully even segments.
Once we have
a little dumpling wrapper army lined up,
it's time to make dumplings.
Making sure that the rest of our
dumpling dough boys are protected by Saran wrap.
I'm starting by using
a small rolling pin and kneading one of these
little babies out into a large circle.
The dumplings in the movie are quite large.
I've never really made massive dumplings before,
so this is actually quite fun.
Usually when I make dumplings
with my family at home,
I get criticized because I put way too much
meat filling in my dumplings,
and they eventually,
well, they don't look good
after they've been boiled.
Let's just say,
you'll know which ones I had made
not in the good way, but today,
I will put as much filling in my dumpling
as I want.
Because that is the name of the game.
In order to crimp the dumpling together,
I'm putting a little bit of water
around the edges and forming them
into a rough circular shape as per the movie.
I'm also cutting two little ears
from what it seems to be on the dumplings
in the movie as well, so that we have
a little cute dumpling bunny, I'm gonna call it.
I think making dumplings is something
that is often done with a lot of people,
usually family or loved ones.
I grew up personally doing it with my mom,
my grandma and usually other family friends
around the dining table.
It's less about actually making dumplings,
and more about just inviting people over
that you love and just chatting,
usually gossiping about what's going on
in everybody's lives.
So for our dumpling-making session,
I pulled in Kendall and Rachel to help
while we talked some trash
about everybody in the studio.
Just kidding.
We're all cool.
Once our collection of oddly differently
shaped animal dumplings have been made,
it is now time to get ready our steamer.
For the bottom of our steamer,
we place down parchment paper,
which has little holes cut into them
in order for a steam to pass,
and ventilate through.
These dumplings are quite large,
so two of these babies go on each level.
Stack 'em up and get ready to steam.
We first started with a wok.
Pouring in a lot of water,
and letting it steam, but I didn't think
that it was gonna give us
the coverage that we needed.
So instead, I swapped to putting
the bamboo steamers
on top of a pot of boiling water.
These are quite large, so we did steam them
for about 15 to 20 minutes or so.
Yeah, one broke.
That is definitely,
that's how you know that's the one I made.
That's the sign.
But the other ones seem quite promising.
Back to our sausages.
To cook our sausages,
they get placed into a hot bath
of barely simmering water for about 20 minutes.
These need to be slowly cooked
or else things would go bad.
After they're cooked,
we're just gonna take them out on, oh God,
that, that is not good.
There is now one less sausage for the final shot.
Probably a couple things
we could have done better
in the sausage-making process,
which is why I'm glad I have backups.
These are professionally made Taiwanese sausages,
but my friend and chef Eric Sze
of 886 and Wen Wen in New York.
He's Taiwanese and actually serves these
at his restaurant,
so you can guarantee
that these are the real deal.
I'm cooking this very similarly
in barely simmering water for about
15 to 20 minutes
until the casings have tighten up,
and the meat is cooked through.
After patting off excess water,
these get finished in a hot pan
with a little bit of oil
to crisp up the skin.
The color is quite beautiful.
I know that Eric has spent many months,
and possible years developing his recipe,
and as we line them up perfectly on a tray
side-by-side,
I think we can tell
that there is a clear difference
between a professionally-made Taiwanese sausage,
and a home cooks.
I think there's something to be said here
about when something is better at a restaurant,
it's better to just pay for them.
Our Cornish hens have been dried out
for about one day or so.
The skin is a lot more taut,
and they're ready to be roasted.
First, little quick brush of neutral oil
to help the heat get in faster and they're off
to a 500 degree oven for about 12 to 15 minutes.
To finish these off,
I'm brushing this with a quarter cup
of soy sauce and two tablespoons of sugar
mixed together as sort of a flavoring,
and a darkening color
for the end of the birds.
Back into the oven they go.
For only about five minutes this time,
and for our final dish
in the "Spirited Away" feast,
King Crab legs.
Now these are some big ones.
I like these.
Now we shall go again to the stove.
These usually come pre-cooked or par cooked
so we only have to cook these
in a pot of boiling water
for about five to seven minutes
with two tablespoons of kosher salt.
I decided to do crab legs
because at buffets or parties,
that's kind of the thing that I feel like
a lot of my Asian parents,
and their friends usually go for.
It's a symbol of luxury,
but it's also a symbol of gluttony
because if you eat that at a buffet,
that's probably the only thing
that they're gonna eat to get their moneys worth.
But once our crab legs have been cooked through,
it is now time to assemble the entire feast.
First, our pile of Taiwanese
inspired red meat dumplings
filled with a pork mushroom,
and bamboo shoot filling
wrapped in crystal dumpling wrappers.
Second, a pile of professionally,
and well-made Taiwanese sausages
from my friend Eric.
Then our Alaskan King Crab legs.
Next, we have our soy sauce glaze
roasted Cornish hens.
Wow, that's a lot.
That's a lot of ends.
And finally, our pile of grilled mochi sticks,
which we boiled in the oven quickly for about
two to three minutes per side
until both ends got crispy,
and everything is nice and sticky.
After a little bit more rearranging and plating,
I presented you our version
of the feast from "Spirited Away."
One of the first things we see in the movie
once Chihiro and her parents
enter the spirit world,
and for the sake of accuracy,
I will take on the heavy task
of eating like a glutton,
just like her parents do.
First, a grilled mochi stick
served with a sweet soy syrup
that we made last minute,
as this is usually what is served
to accompany the mochi.
Followed by a Taiwanese sausage,
which is usually served with scallions,
and raw garlic as a compliment.
A King Crab leg 'cuz why not?
Then picking up a whole entire
roasted Cornish hen for myself.
And finally, a large steam dumpling.
This is the kind of plate
that you might make for yourself if you stumbled
upon a beautiful and wondrous buffet
with no one watching,
and the only thing left to do is eat.
The dumpling filling is very nice.
The meat is tender, juicy,
and the skin is still a little bit bouncy
after all that steaming.
Quite like it.
And the Taiwan sausage,
wait hold up.
I'm gonna just.
I'm gonna eat this down here
for just privacy reasons.
Yep.
Confirm the Taiwanese sausage is still as good
as I remember.
Eric's recipe is pretty bomb.
Just gonna take a whole bite
out of this Cornish hen.
Yeah, I definitely overcooked this.
Not bad, but could be a little bit juicier
as it is a bit dry.
But I have to say
that whether this is because of nostalgia
or because of flavor,
my favorite is the grilled mochi stick.
There's something about crispy chewy things
with a sweet sauce that I just can't get over,
but it would not be fair
if I was the only one
eating like a pig in this episode.
So Kendall, Rachel,
everybody in the studio,
please come and enjoy this feast with me.
We made a lot of food today in the studio,
and this is a feast that needs to be shared
with friends, family and loved ones.
And you don't see this on camera,
but after the shoot,
I definitely forced everybody to take home
way too many crab legs, dumplings,
Cornish hen, sausages and mochi,
whether they liked it or not.
I'm gonna go take a nap now.
(soft instrumental music)
Thanks again to our friends
over at Bokksu for supporting this episode.
I think it's pretty cool
that I can get authentic Japanese snacks
that are usually hard to find,
delivered from across the world.
The first Bokksu you get is Seasons of Japan,
and after that,
there's a new theme every month.
This month we received Autumn Kouyou,
representing Japan's fall flavors.
Some of my favorites were the Red Bean Manju.
The Iburigakko smokey chips
and the Japanese Yuzu Financier.
In every box,
there's also a cute little culture guide
that tells you more about the theme, the flavors,
and where the snacks come from.
Bokksu also makes a really great gift
for any friends who love snacks,
and trying new things.
Click the link in the description,
and use code ALVIN to get $15 off your order.
(upbeat instrumental music)