- The thing with cooking with color is that
by the end of this video,
my hands are going to be rainbow-colored.
Hey, everyone, it's Inga.
As many of you know, I love animation.
I especially love Pixar movies.
I also love making dishes inspired by different colors.
And today,
I'm gonna be doing something a little bit different.
I'll be picking five colors from the color palette
of Pixar's "Turning Red," an attempt
to make a three-course meal
using only those five colors.
Quick color palette breakdown.
We have a burgundy red shade.
We have a brighter vermilion shade of red,
then we have a rosy petal pastel pink,
and a lavender periwinkle.
And then we have green.
The reason I'm choosing "Turning Red"
is well, one, I love the movie.
It's one of my favorites right now.
I relate to the main character, Meilin, so much.
And two, I just think it has such like a vibrant
and fun color palette that is going to be challenging,
but exciting for us to work with.
As you can see, these are not the easiest colors
to work with
because I'm trying to use only natural-colored ingredients,
but we're gonna try and do it.
So let's get started.
(instrumental music)
To begin with, I want a lot of red,
and for this first dish, I'm thinking red dumplings.
It's just gonna be this super vibrant red
on the outside.
And to get that red,
I'm going to use this beet powder right here.
I actually used it to make pancakes in my 24-hour series.
I'm gonna make some beet water right now
just by adding the beet powder over here.
I'm gonna add in some hot water
which will help this dissolve.
Right in here, I'm going to add in my flour slowly.
I'm just gonna go in with my hands
because this is how I make it at home.
I have my own family recipe.
My grandpa made this for me a lot as a kid,
just felt really appropriate to do this today.
This is now formed into a dough.
I'm just gonna sprinkle my counter here.
Red is actually a really important color in Chinese culture.
It represents so many things
like joy, luck, happiness, just good fortune.
And I think that's part of the reason
it's like the main color,
it's literally called "Turning Red."
I've been kneading this for quite a while.
And look at this hand,
this is the power of beet, everybody.
So now what I'm gonna do is actually let this rest
for a little bit for around half an hour or so.
We'll be right back after this has rested.
All right, we're back with a rested dumpling dough.
And this is what my grandpa taught me.
I'm gonna roll it out into a log.
And then we're going to section it off into little pieces
before we roll them out into wrappers.
I'm gonna cut these little bits out now.
I cannot tell you the amount of times
I've watched my grandpa make this.
This is what he does,
and he does it like so much faster
than I'm doing it right now.
We're just slowly rolling out the edges here.
You wanna thin out the edges
because that's the part that's gonna fold together,
but you don't want it to be so thin that it breaks.
So this is the first wrapper, it's around this big.
I'm gonna continue making some more right now.
So I'm going to keep doing this
and we'll be back when I finish all of it.
All right, we have our dumpling wrappers rolled out.
We're gonna go ahead and take one now.
And I actually already have some filling here.
This is a dumpling filling that I grew up having.
It's my grandpa's recipe.
Grandpa passed to mom, passed to me.
I have a video on this, so you can go check that out.
We're gonna go ahead
and just scoop this into our dumpling wrapper here.
I always end up being too greedy here.
I'm going to just put some water around the edges
and then just fold it in like so.
It's like pleating it.
And you see, the beautiful thing about homemade wrappers is
that it really just does stick together so easily.
And there you have a beautiful little beet dumpling.
Green in the movie, I feel like kinda represents the mom.
Mei's room is also green,
where she's this super vibrant red.
So it's almost like she's trying
to break out of this system that she's in,
like how I think her mom wants to be calm
and collected, and she's like, "But I am emotions!"
So the red and green I think
is a very interesting contrast there
between her and her mom.
My mom and I actually make dumplings together.
By the time I make one, she's already made like five.
So let me finish up here
and then we can bring the steamer in
and get these going.
I'm back.
I have my beautiful bamboo steamer here.
It's huge.
So normally, I would actually steam with parchment paper
or if I have some sort of steaming cloth
with me at home.
But today, to fit the theme of red and green,
I'm gonna steam it over cabbage.
All right, so this is looking good.
Now I'm going to put my dumplings right on top.
I made like really big dumplings.
I was really excited about the filling.
So now I'm gonna put these right over the pot,
closing in.
This is gonna take a couple of minutes to steam,
probably a little longer than expected
because I made them so big,
but I'm excited to see how these turn out.
Woo-hoo!
Look at how beautiful that red is!
So I'm gonna plate this on here.
And I also have some chives and chili oil.
I think I'm just excited because I'm hungry.
Why did I make them so big?
What am I gonna do?
Can I fit them all?
Look at how big this is.
Oh my God.
Here you go.
This is what it looks like.
All right, I'm gonna put some chili oil right in here.
And once again, to fit our color palette,
we're gonna add a sprinkle of green in the form of chives.
So Meilin and her mother are one.
And there you have it,
that is the first dish of our three-course meal.
But for now, we're gonna go ahead
and work on our second course.
We're back.
And I have moved on
to the main dish of our three-course meal,
it's called hong shao rou.
So the first step I'm doing here is just
melting some rock sugar in some hot oil.
This is to help caramelize the pork belly
which we're going to add later.
The pork belly here has already been blanched
for a few minutes.
This is looking kind of melted.
You can see that the sugar has now become little puddles
of golden brown.
So this is where I'm gonna add in the pork belly.
So I'm gonna let this just sit for a little bit.
What I thought was really cool too, about "Turning Red"
and the foods featured in it is that the team
and the art team specifically,
actually put a lot of effort into doing research
for everything you see in the film.
I was also talking to the director, Domee Shi, briefly,
and she told me that most of the dishes
featured in the movie are a combination
of Taishanese and Cantonese cuisine.
Another thing that I forgot to bring up earlier
about the dumplings is that the dumplings featured
in "Turning Red" are actually an homage
to her mom's background from the north of China.
It is a beautiful golden brown.
I have both light soy sauce and dark soy sauce.
So adding both of those in,
and also some rice wine,
I believe this is Shaoxing rice wine.
Now I'm just going to add in the water,
and I know that's a lot of water,
but we're gonna be braising this.
We're going to be cooking this down
around like 45 minutes or so.
So I'm going to let this do its thing,
and we're gonna get started working on our rice.
So again, to stick with the color palette
that we have today, I'm thinking we can make purple rice,
which I have done before, I only ate purple foods
for 24 hours.
To change it up a little bit,
and I'm actually going to dye my white rice
and purple cabbage.
What we have here is just sliced purple cabbage
that we've boiled for 15 minutes,
and then steeped again for 15 minutes.
I'm gonna use this liquid to cook my rice.
So I'm gonna first strain this.
I'm gonna go ahead and put my rice in here first.
And then we're just gonna fill this up.
It looks like I put like so much food dye in here,
but this is really, truly just purple cabbage itself.
Gonna let this rice cook.
I think pork belly's pretty much done,
and we can plate this up.
I have some cilantro here on my plate.
So now we're going to plate up our pork belly.
So we're going to just place that on here.
We're serving this up family style, hence, the plating.
That's why I'm plating everything in.
I'm not eating this all by myself, I promise.
Or maybe I am, who knows?
I'm only going to put one bowl of rice for now
just so you guys can see what it looks like,
but this is my purple rice.
Look at that.
Here's our second course.
We have one more course to go through.
Gonna be dessert.
It's gonna be sweet.
It's gonna be fantastic.
So BRB.
I'm thinking donuts.
So remember that one breakfast scene
where Meilin's mom, Ming, prepares the congee,
the breakfast porridge.
And then she also has this little box of donut holes.
So there's like both Eastern and Western food on a table
which is something I feel like I grew up with.
So fun fact, the donuts
from their movie are actually from Tim Hortons
and they actually have this product called Timbits.
So today, I'm going to make something kind of like Timbits.
So even before I go into making the donut holes,
I'm going to make some homemade sprinkles
because we really wanna be sure
to get those colors right.
I'm gonna be making both purple
and green sprinkles with different food colorings,
natural food colorings.
Purple, we're doing ube.
And then for green, we're going with this pandan extract.
So we're gonna get started
by having some powdered sugar here,
and to this powdered sugar,
I am going to add in a tablespoon of water
and I'm going to put in corn syrup.
The thing with cooking with color too, is that
by the end of this video,
my hands are going to be rainbow-colored.
So, oh!
Accidents happen, and that's okay.
I think we have roughly a teaspoon of ube extract here.
Ooh, okay, see.
I was afraid that I was going to put too much,
but I feel like this should be okay so far.
So for those of you who are not familiar
with the flavor of ube, it's kind of like vanilla,
but also like coconut-ish.
So here's what we have so far.
I'm going to now put this in the piping bag,
so then we can pipe out our sprinkles.
This is the part where you need real steady hands.
Okay, here we go.
I'm gonna pipe these into straight lines
and then we're gonna have to break this up
into sprinkle form.
I think I'm pretty much finished
with my purple sprinkles here.
I'm going to now do the same thing
with my pandan extract, the green ones.
And we're just gonna fill the rest of this up.
We actually need to dry this for around six hours or so.
Luckily, I have an incredible culinary team
who has already prepped some for me.
So I'm gonna swap these out.
And then we can go into making the donut holes.
Now to make the actual donut batter,
I'm gonna start with some flour,
and then baking powder, sugar, and salt.
Dry ingredients in one bowl,
and then wet ingredients in the other bowl.
I have some milk here.
I'm gonna plop in my egg yolks, one egg yolk.
Put in a little bit of vanilla extract.
Whisk this really quickly together.
Now I'm just gonna combine the two together
until we have a batter.
I'm gonna go into adding my melted butter here.
And this batter is more of like a clumpy thicker batter.
I think this looks pretty good.
It is now a very sticky dough.
So now that this is done,
I am going to start frying my donut holes.
Frying station is now ready and set up.
So I have a little ice cream scoop here.
This is what I'm gonna use to scoop out my donut batter.
Woo-hoo.
All right, it's in, it's in, it's in.
This just really helps make sure
that it's all evenly sized.
These don't have to be in here for that long,
just around two minutes or so,
until they're a nice golden brown.
Okay!
These are now a beautiful brown,
so I'm gonna take them out before they burn.
So now I'm gonna go ahead
and finish frying up the rest of this.
And then we can go into decorating, making the glaze.
My donut holes are ready and they've cooled down.
Gonna set this here for now, while I work on the glaze,
which we will make into a light pastel pink,
which actually apparently, the pastel pink colors
and purple were inspired by "Sailor Moon."
It's like very dreamy transformation.
The film is supposed to be set in the early 2000s.
So it's kind of like that boy band,
pop culture, fun tween energy.
So we're just going with that kind of vibe here.
Light pink is sort of the running theme
that we also see in "Turning Red."
You remember those like pink clouds
that kinda poof up when Mei turns into the red panda?
It's kind of like a transformation thing.
It's very dreamy.
In order to try to make this light pink,
I am using a combination
of both strawberry powder and beet powder.
Give this a gentle toss
just to make sure all the colors are in here.
And then now, I'm going to add in my milk.
When I was a teenager, of course, I was into boy bands.
I feel like everybody goes through that phase.
Did I have posters on my wall at one point?
No, because my mom wouldn't let me.
But did I wanna go to a concert and sneak out?
I didn't sneak out.
I asked for permission. (chuckles)
Oh yeah, it looks really good.
I'm gonna dip my donut holes in here
and then we're gonna sprinkle some purple
and green sprinkles on there.
Look at that.
Beautiful!
Before it dries up,
I'm going to quickly sprinkle some green
and purple sprinkles on here.
All right, amazing!
I hope Tim Horton is proud.
Here we are, our final course for our three-course meal,
these beautiful pink purple green donuts.
I think it's time to bring everything else in,
so you guys can have the full picture
of what this entire meal looks like.
Okay!
Here we have the whole meal and all five colors,
burgundy red, vermilion red,
lavender periwinkle, pastel pink,
and emerald green.
Playing with natural food coloring
can always be a little bit intimidating
and you never really know what to expect,
but I feel like the colors really came through.
Dumpling's obviously amazing.
Oh my God, homemade wrappers are chewy and cute.
And this sauce, oh my God.
Pork belly.
Look at how shiny it is.
Because it's been braised, it's so tender.
And eat it with some rice.
Mm, this purple cabbage hack is just incredible.
Last but not least, gotta try my donuts.
Very good.
It's like freeze-dried strawberries.
Oh my gosh.
Thank you guys so much for watching.
I had so much fun.
If you have a movie you love
and that you want us to try cooking with their colors,
let us know in the comments below.
Otherwise, we will see you next time.
Bye.
(instrumental music)