On last week, I have mastered some of the basic Chinese food including scrambled egg with tomato and rice fried with egg, which are easy to prepare and easy to learn for beginners. For this week’s learning challenge, I decide to further challenge myself on cooking some more complex dishes. The dish that I decide to learn this week is called Stewed Drumsticks with Potatoes, which is a stew with potato and chicken, it is a very popular dish among the northern region of China and can be found in all ranks of restaurants.
The biggest challenge that I am facing this week is on preparing the ingredients, which is very crucial when cooking this dish. For some reason during the first couple of times that I cooked this dish, the chicken tastes weird like it is under cooked and that smell even spread to the soup. At first I thought that I probably didn’t wash the chicken thorough enough. However that weird smell still won’t go away and it didn’t help even if I removed all the chicken skin before I added the chicken. When I looked back at all the videos I found out that I missed one important step when preparing the chicken. In the videos, the chicken were rinsed two times separately, after the chicken was boiled during the first preparation stage, they were fished out and rinsed a second time with wine before they were added to other ingredients. This mistake relates me to one of the ideas we talked about this week, the misconception of learning. When I was watching the videos for the first time, I actively skip the preparation part for I had this preconception that it would be the same as the other dishes that also involves chicken and it would not alter the flavor too much. It turns out that for every dishes, even involves the same ingredients, different steps in preparation could greatly influenced the flavor of the dish.
Links:
Haozhe.blog 