- You said bell peppers and beef, there's no beef in here.
So you wouldn't really call it bell peppers and beef now,
would you?
- Yes, I would.
- Well, it's not.
- It is when you're broke, all right.
- [Chef] Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode
of Anime with Alvin.
Today, we are gonna be tackling the bell peppers and beef
from "Cowboy Bebop".
I'm not sure who keeps arranging my food like this,
but the first thing I'm gonna do is cut these ball
of bell peppers into a thin little strips.
So in the first version of this dish,
we're actually gonna replace the beef with mushrooms
because mushrooms in the show are a lot cheaper than beef,
and you can get that same meaty texture by using mushrooms.
And for the stir fry sauce,
I'm combining together three tablespoons of oyster sauce,
half tablespoon of cornstarch,
two teaspoons of Shaoxing rice wine,
and one tablespoon of soy sauce.
And that'll be the sauce for our stir fry.
Now, I don't think you're allowed to have a wok
with open flame in space,
so we're gonna use an induction burner
with a little bit of oil in the pan till it's smoking,
adding the mushrooms, adding some salt
and just letting them cook down
while you rub your hands together.
It doesn't do anything, but I was cold.
Towards the end, I do like a little bit more sesame oil
just to give them some more aroma, more browning,
and then these come out, reset with a little bit more oil
and in goes the bell peppers.
So these cook down a bit,
and then I added a little bit of garlic
with a little bit more sesame oil.
If you add in the garlic too early, it burns
and we don't want that.
So after a couple seconds of working the wok,
the mushrooms go back in.
Mix them around, cook them around for a little bit,
and then we can finally put some sugar
which I like to add for flavor
and a little bit of the sauce we made earlier.
And this is where things get fun.
Everything's smoking, blazing, quickly moving,
steam's going in your face,
everything's smelling super good,
and that's the beauty of wok cooking.
Everything comes together really quickly and it's awesome.
Even though we're not even using the open flame,
I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out.
And so this is our first version
of the bell peppers and beef,
but with mushrooms instead of beef.
Let's take a bite and see how it is.
Ooh, oh, this is good.
I would actually make this and eat the whole thing
on a day-to-day basis, which I'm gonna do right now.
But we should probably try this with actual beef.
So this is some flank steak.
I'm cutting them in the little thin strips
to match the bell peppers,
and I'm going to warm up my hands over the wokie
'cause I get cold kinda easily.
Same treatment as before though,
a little bit of oil to get the pan smoking hot,
in goes the beef, and this is an induction burner
so we're not going to get massive amounts of heat,
which is why there's water at the bottom of this pan.
I think water is stir fry's number one enemy,
so I'm really just trying to shake things
to get all that steam out and not over cook the beef.
And we run it back.
A little bit more oil, bell pepper is in ,
cook it around until it gets a little bit of color,
lightly brown, add some garlic, stir it up again,
add the beef back in, everybody gets know each other.
Add some sauce.
Watch as a lot of sauce creates a lot of steam.
Inhale all those great smells.
One more time, add a little bit of sugar
for that extra flavor and ta da,
this version of the beef and bell pepper stir fry is done
and with actual beef this time.
So let's see how it is.
Oh, pretty solid for having this in space.
I would be pretty happy,
but I do have one more version to show you guys.
This is a Chinese dish called chun jiao rou tiao
which roughly translates into spring peppers, meat strips,
but this is my grandpa's recipe
and I do wanna make it like the way he did.
So I'm taking that same flank steak,
cutting it with a huge cleaver
into a really, really thin strips.
And now I'm seasoning the beef with a little bit of salt,
white pepper, chicken bullion powder, and mixing it together
until I realized that this bowl is a little bit too small.
Adding in some soy sauce, some sesame oil,
some Shaoxing cooking wine, some egg whites
and some cornstarch.
And this when you mix it together,
creates an almost flavor shield around the beef.
And if you can see I'm mixing this pretty rapidly
with chopsticks to try and aerate
and almost fluff up this mixture.
These are Longhorn peppers,
not the same as the green bell peppers,
but they are what my grandpa used to use.
They're very spicy and I'm cutting them on a diagonal
into very thin strips.
After that, we're gonna make a quick cornstarch slurry
with a little bit of chicken stock and some corn starch.
And now we are off to the races,
which means we are going to go outside
where it is absolutely freezing.
I've been wearing a hat this whole time,
but we do have a nice, beautiful open flame,
which will emulate what real wok cooking should be like.
So after getting that oil smoking,
gonna cook these Longhorn peppers for under a minute,
just so that they get a little bit of color.
After that, going to fill it up with a little bit more oil
and essentially shallow fry these beef strips.
Now that coating from earlier
is going to help separate them, create a nice shield,
almost a crust for these beef strips.
And this will also flavor the oil we fried it in
so that after that these beef strips are drained,
we can reuse that flavored oil to fry up some garlic slices,
prep that peppers, throw back in those beef strips
from earlier, everybody kind of gets really happy
in this huge wok.
And after that, throw in a little bit of sesame seeds,
mix it up for less than a minute,
then some of that corn starch slurry.
This is gonna help create a sauce for this dish.
Finish with a little bit of sesame oil.
After that, this dishes done.
45 seconds of fire, smoke and absolute chaos.
I had so much fun and I'm gonna go back inside
cause it's freezing and I'm not going to tell Andrew
about what we just did just to create
as much confusion as possible.
But I'm very proud to present my version
of chun jiao rou tiao.
There's probably things I could have done better,
but I do hope I made my grandpa proud.
Let's see.
Oh, okay, here we go.
Yes, this is exactly what I was looking for.
It tastes exactly like the restaurants
I used to go to growing up
and it tastes like how my grandpa used to cook it.
It's spicy, it's delicious, it's sweet.
The heat from the wok is giving these things
such nice flavors.
Wow, I'm actually so impressed with this.
Okay, everybody else has gotta come and eat this
because I'm really proud of it, and I wanna go get water
'cause this is very, very, very spicy.
(bright music)