I have watched all of the "popular" cooking RU-vid channels for years, every week and to say your channel is now aggressively into the rotation is an understatement. Keep doing what you are doing. The editing is great, your honesty, humor and personality is perfect for this style of video. Thank you sir. To the top you shall go.
Wow, thanks homie. That's super nice of you to say. This is pretty much all I do and think about. So to say "I'm glad you're enjoying the vidz" it is an understatement. Cheers.
That's for sure, the slop with sauce they give at British Chinese takeaways is terrible, better to do it yourself and it's quite easy, if you compare it to the takeaway standards lol
I learned about salt & pepper chips a few days ago and immediately made them. FLIPPING delicious. I'm pretty upset they haven't made their way to the US! Thanks for this enlightening video!
I think its outstanding that you have dispelled the myths surrounding American/British Chinese food. Its also fantastic that you gave a bit of historical perspective to the video.
Literally just discovered your channel last night, and you're quickly becoming my favorite chef here on youtube. Its not often that a cooking video gets you laughing while also being informative, well shot, and well edited. Way personable, too.
British chicken balls are usually more doughy kind of like what I'd imagine corn dogs are like (never had one just guessing) they pretty much always come with sweet and sour sauce, (sweet and sour chicken balls on most menu's)
@@vladbovdyr1858 sorry its not in the sause it comes with a pot of it, we also have sweat and sour chicken also which is kind of pop corn chicken in sweet and sour sauce, (i think its a starch coated fryed chicken but im not sure) sometimes also called Cantonese style sweet and sour chicken
Hope it's not just my experience, but comparing chicken balls to nuggets caught me out. All the chicken balls I've had were always about squash ball sized, which is way bgger than nugs, though maybe everything is bigger is yankland ;)
For chicken balls in the UK they use self raising flour for the batter which makes them very puffy. Crunchy outside and soft inside, sometimes mostly batter 😂. Pretty sure they precook the chicken before battering too. Ziangs food workshop is really good channel, they make authentic UK Chinese takeaway food.
Never heard of Chinese Mustard (Manchester,Uk) unless its a regional thing, which I wouldn't order anyway You are right about salt and pepper chips being a potato vehicle for everything else Chicken balls are the chicken equivalent of battered fish, its not a thin coating, its thick, which is perfect for dips
We have like a Chinese curry sauce over here dude. Not just Indian curry sauce. 😅 The chicken balls here are weird. Really thick batter, nothing like a nugg or tempura. Great vid 👊🏼
Adam, you always open new vistas for me. I'm fond of Chinese food in it's various incarnations...Traditional, Chinese-American, Chinese-Cuban, Chifa(Peruvian) but I never explored Chinese-British cooking. The shrimp toast I think we also have in the US but the rest was Terra Incognita. Thanks for this. Jim Oaxaca Mexico NJ-Boy retired to the land of the Sandunga (you did put chilies in it hehehe )
You did a great job here, my only minor criticism would be that the crispy chilli beef looks really dry in comparison to what you'd get from a chinese takeaway here. That being said, it could just be that the sauce settled in the bowl
In Canada, the chicken balls from a Chinese take out are round balls of dough covering a nice chunk of chicken, deep fried and served with sweet and sour sauce. What I saw here was just fried chicken pieces.
Salt and pepper chips kind of grew out of fish and chips, where I actually think it's important for the chips to be a little soggy. You're eating it with a shatteringly crisp battered and fried protein, you need some of that sog to contrast. Some more chef-y recipes like Heston Blumenthal's triple-cooked chips kind of miss this whole point for me.
The balls are usually covered in the sweet and sour sauce with pineapple chunks, as sweet and sour chicken. And as india and China are neighbours you get crossover foods, (like texmex) so in India they have manchuria curries and in China pork skin and squid in curry sauce. Colonisation in India and Hong Kong did cross things over, mre into India and less so into China but it did happen!
I remember Heston Blumenthal in one video mentioned that it’s salt (not sugar) that counteracts bitterness (actually, I think he said it makes bitter foods taste sweeter). So I tried putting it on grapefruit and in espresso. Both worked! Mind = blown (hold on, is this why salt makes all food taste better in the first place? Mind = double blown!)
What you made was essentially a "Munchie Box", everything fried with some sauce pots. Never heard of chinese mustard though and chinese curry is not the same as indian curry, think closer to katsu
Chicken balls are not a light tempura style batter, its a thick coating that goes golden on the outside but doughy on the inside. Chinese mustard isnt a thing in the UK that im aware of. Chinese curry sauce is far from Indian curry sauce. It got more star anise in for a start and its more chinese 5 spice flavoured. See you you can get a brand called "mayflower" and have a taste.
I love how you Say "they call it that over there" when it's probably the opposite like, american call corn flour corn starch, you call aubergine eggplants etc. No hate tho, love the video
His looked a lot better than most I've seen, but maybe he chef'd it up a little. Most I've seen are a bit of a soggy greasy mess. That layer of sesame looked like a really good improvement.
Do American Chinese restaurants really not serve chicken balls? They're ubiquitous here in Canada, easily one of the most popular "Chinese" items. Always served with sweet and sour sauce. And those are "nuggies" because chicken balls need about 15x that amount of batter.
Adam, have you ever tried Springfield Style Cashew chicken? It was invented in Springfield, MO. I used to work at a restaurant that made the BEST Cashew chicken. We didn't know back then that it wasn't authentic, LOL!
Having worked both in restaurants that made fries from scratch and used frozen fries... I do think making the fries fresh is better (as long as you do it right and do at least a double-fry - if you're doing thick fries, maybe even a triple-fry), but it's just a question of time and labor. I worked at a resort for a little while that made fries from scratch and they had 2 guys just doing that pretty much all day and barely anything else. Eventually they switched to frozen fries and the fries got worse, but not by so much to justify the labor to keep doing it by hand. Everyone talks about McDonald's fries - those come from a freezer, baby.
I've only tried one of these dishes, the shrimp toast. Great stuff! I'm definitely gonna make some of that curry sauce. Have you seen Lawrence "Lost in the Pond" Brown's channel? He'd get a kick out of this. And he's your neighbor! So would you say chicken balls are closer to nugs or "Cantonese Fried Chicken"? I love that stuff, especially the ginger forward batter. www.youtube.com/@LostinthePond
Amazing video! One nit pick though, salt & pepper seasoning usually doesnt have any five spice at all. Its usually just a mix of salt, garlic powder, and white pepper but technique was on point 👍
I've looked at a handful of recipes and videos (and menus from spots in London). There seems to be a spread of techniques in which spice is added to the chips. Some called for 5 Spice, others just black/white pepper, some even used cumin. I really like 5 Spice so I popped it in.
Hey man, I left a similar comment on your hotdog tier list video but it stands to reason you probably didn't see it- I love your videos and they're super well made, which is why it's incredibly upsetting to see you use AI images in any capacity. AI steals from thousands of other actual artists who aren't credited or paid for their stolen work and passes those frankenstien images off as something original, I know you said you'd tone it down but even using 1 or 2 images a video isn't ethical. I really recommend you educate yourself on the topic if you're still unsure about things after reading this, not because I want to dunk on you but because I want to keep supporting your work and this isn't something to just be overlooked and not thought about just because most of your viewers don't care. Much love, I really hope you see this and understand what I mean❤
We have that in the US, but I tend to see it more at Thai or Vietnamese places than strictly Chinese places. But we also tend to have a fair share of pan-Asian places that do multiple countries, so you'll see them there too. But Chinese places here have "chicken on a stick", which is basically just a take on Yakitori.
Do you folks in the Midwest not have shrimp toast? Growing up in NYC in the ‘70s, it was on pretty much every Chinese American restaurant’s menu, and was a staple of the pupu platter. Maybe it’s not quite as ubiquitous here anymore, but it’s still definitely around. If you guys don’t have it, I think that there’s a niche waiting to be filled! In any case, nice video!
I’m Aussie and I don’t mind a chip but why with Chinese and Indian food is beyond me. We have great Asian cuisine in Australia you should give some of them a go
orange chicken is just a riff on tangerine chicken, panda express didnt really "invent it" just adapted it. 14:45 we call it arugula instead of rocket for the same reason why we call it zucchini instead of courgettes. the italian immigrants influence.
Mate, the chicken balls are way off. They should be round and smooth like a corn dog. It’s a thick thick batter, so the chicken comes out like it’s basically encased in a smooth churro. They are weird.
Now that I think about it, pretty sure the batter texture is the same as what I remember having as a kid in a legit old school Hong King place in west London, but there the batter was on pieces of apple as a dessert dish, so my guess is this style of doughnutty chicken ball has its origins in an apple doughnut dish. Could be wrong though.
I see what you mean, cuz in the video her balls do look exactly like lil corn boys, but do a quick "Chicken Balls UK" search and look at the top 6 recipes. They all look similar to the ones that I made. I sifted through a handful of recipes and decided on the one in the video, but I might have to run it back to try both versions at some point.
I know the immigration thing was different in the UK, but considering that so many Americans love their Chinese & have never tried Indian food or just really don't like it - I think I now know why the British tend to prefer Indian to Chinese 'take away'. I'm sure it's tasty & all but I felt a little sick watching that... Thanks for the heads-up...
Those are a bit too tempura for chicken balls! Honey chilli chicken is always a winner? Sweet garlicky chicken with a bit of chilli and a horrendous amount of MSG for good measure
I don't have TikTok so this is the first time I'm seeing her video and it looks like a train wreck! It's nothing but fried food (and the "plating" is... something). There's certainly way more to British Chinese food than deep fried dishes, in fact the majority of dishes on my local's menu aren't deep fried but wok fried in the traditional Chinese manner. Never heard of chicken balls before; it must be a southern thing. Sweet and sour sauce in China does actually use Ketchup! Ketchup has been in China for over a century and it's a common replacement for the Hawberry paste. The version you made is a suuuuuuper cheap and quick version, but the proper sauce used on Sweet and Sour Pork (Guluroe, 咕噜肉) should also have pineapple juice and use dark sugar instead of white refined. Make that sauce, stir fry with pointed red and green peppers and onion, fry off pork slivers in the same manner you did the beef, and voilá!
I find this kind of video fascinating. Like this really is a typical order. The most bizarre thing is how weirded out you are by the curry sauce element and yeah it's not you but mad that chinese curry isnt a thijg in the USA
I don’t know if we still have chicken balls in Canada, but they were very popular in the 90s and nothing like the ones here. It was a ball of fried dough (a little bigger than a golf ball and tasting more like pancake batter than donut dough) with a pinkie-nail-sized cube of chicken inside. You were lucky if you bit into the chicken, it was that small. But the dough was soooooo good. It didn’t taste like any other dough I knew. I have a feeling it was made with chicken stock, but that’s just a guess. I know there had to be a twist. I’m getting so nostalgic thinking about it now 🙁
Cousin! Fortune cookies come from Japan. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_cookie#:~:text=This%20kind%20of%20cookie%20is,Inari%2Dtaisha%20shrine%20in%20Kyoto.
@@AdamWitt cheers mate - firstly sweet and sour everything including barramundi almost always with chunks of pineapple. Lemon chicken substitutes for orange chicken here, less sweet but sane concept. There’s a lot of lamb obviously (Mongolian, oyster, black bean sauces) … always with deep fried ice cream or a pineapple or banana fritter. Adam Liaw is a good chef to reach out to on Threads.
Jennifer Wong made a great series on Aus-Chinese food and what the local Chinese means to the community. Also my fave is combination satay. Aust with the Flower Drum and Chinese influences stretching back to the gold rush has some of the best and oldest China towns and restaurants in the world.
You cannot look at that video, then look at the chicken balls you made and think that they're the same thing - chicken balls have a much thicker batter more like a pancake. I've also never heard of Chinese mustard, but knowing what English mustard is like, you've put way too much in lol
