Hey guys, a few notes: 1. First time I ever had these noodles in Guangxi, the first thought that came through my head was “is… is this the Guangxi version of Pho?” The rice noodles that’re used are *very* very similar. 2. It also hits a similar spot in my soul as Pho, if that makes any sense. Pho is *much* more complex of a soup, obviously, but there’s something about slurping down a bowl of soupy rice noodles that just… brings us back. So if you’ve ever been a little intimidated at the whole process of making something like Pho Bo at home, this dish could be a nice middle ground. 3. Last Pho-related musing - I feel like there’s gotta be some sort of connection between the Longlin Chicken Soup Rice Noodles and Pho Ga. Longlin is right on the border of Vietnam, and the name of the dish is ‘Ji Fen’ (鸡粉) - chicken rice noodle - while Pho Ga would literally translate to ‘rice noodle chicken’. Given that Pho Ga is (correct me if I’m wrong) from rural North Vietnam, my current hypothesis is that historically chicken and rice noodles might’ve just been… a thing… in that area of the world. In the 1950s, the border between China and Vietnam began to formalize and tighten up, allowing the dish to evolve separately within the Guangxi/Chinese and Vietnamese trade orbits. Or maybe the Longlin soup came from Vietnam, or maybe Pho Ga came from Guangxi , or maybe it’s just a case of convergent evolution (after all, chicken soup + rice noodles isn’t exactly a fanciful idea). 4. One thing to note about the Guangxi Char Siu - this is some meat that’s specifically designed to thinly slice and toss in soup. Keyword? Thin. This is some pretty dry meat, so a thick slab of it’s going to be like chewing on cardboard. Thin and mixed with soup though? Perfect. (I also enjoy munching on it as a snack…) 5. There’s another approach to cooking the Char Siu - directly deep frying, without cooking the pork in its marinade. We found the cooking-in-marinade approach to be the most flavorful, and as I said it’s supposed to be a bit dry anyway. But if you like, you can also rinse off the marinade and deep fry directly. 6. Again, feel free to swap in the Cantonese Char Siu. The Guangxi style Char Siu is a fun project (and I’ll definitely be making it again), but it’s not imperative or anything. 7. For the pork bones, be sure to get your butcher to chop it into pieces in order to expose the marrow. First time that I ever made pork bone soup in China (back in the day, following a Dunlop LoP recipe actually!) I neglected that step and was like, ‘wtf is this ginger soup?’ 8. Feel free to swap the pork bone soup for a chicken soup or a combination stock. If you’re a vegetarian, I’d skip the Char Siu and use a kelp/daikon/napa/dried shitake combo for the soup. There’s definitely a few more notes in me, but I gotta Zoom with my parents. Might edit a few more in in a bit.
It’s a version of ‘hủ tiếu’ (kway teowa), a popular noodle soup in southern Vietnam where there’re a lot of Chinese Vietnamese. Cambodian calls it Phnom Penh noodles. I like more than pho growing up in South Vietnam.
My ancestral family is from the rural of north VIetnam where there really wasn’t a border between China. Even if there was a man-made drawn border with China, it was de facto non existent. So you’re right. That area cultural and food wise is very similar.
@@deathpyre42 Not overly familiar with Saimin (it rang a bell, but I had to google it), but there's also a Teochew style of Char Siu that uses Hongzao (the ingredient that we discussed in the recent Fuzhou sweet & sour video). If it's very pink, it might be a variant of that? That said, apparently most of the immigration to Hawaii historically came from Zhongshan, so the smart money would probably be that it'd be a variant/evolution of Cantonese Char Siu
Your channel is truly a gem for anyone who is interested in chinese food. Thanks for also explaining so many cultural aspects around the food. I have not been able to stop thinking about Guilin Mifen since I visited China six years ago. But finding recipes in any language I understand has been basically impossible. If you ever want to do more rice noodle dishes from the region, I hope it'll be the Guilin Mifen. They were mind blowing and I crave them all the time. Keep up the good work! Greetings from Denmark
Hey, this is extremely tangential to the video but I thought you guys might get a kick out of it. The restaurant I’m a line cook at just started running a Yu Xiang eggplant special, but using Portuguese languiça sausage as the meat flavoring, plum as the primary sweetener in the sauce, and serving it with deep fried Portuguese sweet bread as a starch. It is some fusion shenanigans but it’s still super cool! I also have celiac disease (really severe gluten allergy), but I got to try the dish by making my own GF Yu Xiang sauce adapted from your recipe! You guys do such great work and as someone with such a prohibitive food allergy it really is a blessing to be able to have your recipes and explanations so I can experience these flavors, because sadly I’ll never be able to get the real thing. Thank you, Steph and Chris! Y’all are the best
My wife has celiac too! So we can't get shaoxing wine and have to use a substitute. Fortunately soy sauce can be not only substituted, but improved upon with tamari. What barriers do you face?
@@timmccarthy872 Yeah definitely a lot of decent tamari out there. I’m always sad about the fermented bean pastes, pretty much all of which have wheat flour in them. So that’s no dobanjiang, no doenjang, no sweet bean paste, the like. It’s less the big stuff and more the stuff that just has a little four in it that’s harder for me to swallow, for whatever reason.
I'm sorry for your celiac disease... but look on the bright side, there is whole worlds of cuisines out there that is completely gluten free. Southern chinese, South Indian, SE Asian, West and East african, south american.... no wheat no worry.... seems like wheat is a thing of the north where they grow well.
Great recipe. Personally when I prepare dried pho noodles, I find that soaking them for 20 mins in hot water and then flash boiling them for 1 min yields a tastier noodle than just straight up boiling it in hot water.
I do a cold soak for about 90 mins before flashing them in boiling water for about a minute. I don’t remember where I found this info-i wanna say My Name is Andong’s pad thai video or its comments-but I find that a cold soak leads to firmer noodles, which I very much prefer to super starchy, falling apart noodles. The cold water hydrates to the noodles without activating the starch, making them firmer. This is especially good for stir fries, since you want the noodles to have a bit more body to stand up to that constant mixing and high heat. For a soup I don’t think it would matter much as long as you rinse that surface starch off the boiled noodles so they don’t turn your soup into a slurry!
@@ScrewedTimeLord 20 mins for a soak in warm tap water and over an hour in cold water. All depends on how much time you got! I tested it (used hot tap water because I was pressed for time) and the result was basically the same as a long cold soak.
@@Koenigg99 cool! That’s super good to know. I work in a kitchen so I really only cook on my days off when I have plenty of time. I’ll usually do like, an hour cold soak, then 20 mins warm soak, then boil. I doubt it actually makes a difference but it sure makes me feel smart haha
I have to add, the rice noodles in my hometown : Ipoh, Malaysia, has amazing textured rice noodles both for soup or stir fry. Other states have tried to emulate the quality but fail. Famously prepared as Sar Hor Fun (soup based) and Char Koey Teow or Wat Tan Hor(stir fried)
Oh 100%, Malaysia has some *excellent* rice noodle dishes. Basically from 0:08-0:22 I was trying to think of the most famous places for rice noodles rather than my favorite per se :) Like, Guizhou and Yunnan also have some fantastic rice noodle dishes... but I think people've probably heard of them even less than Guangxi!
@@Jumpoable my hometown has a large number of Hakka and Cantonese descent Chinese. But Ipoh's water source used comes from underground rivers and limestone hills. Likely why they get superbly smooth texture. Even beansprouts from here are famous.
before i comment on the rice noodle, wanna say this is an amazing channel that goes way beyond recipes and is really a kind of scholarly archivalist project of chinese food and history. you repeatedly show intense curiosity and a tenacious willingness to do the work necessary to get complete answers to your questions. there is video after video on your channel where you go after things that even most chinese chefs would not know... like what is oyster sauce and how to make it, and that was just incidental to the dish you documented. the video on those canned fish, apparently the first canned food in china, was totally engaging and i finally cracked open that can that had been on my shelf for a year or so so, about the rice noodle, i've spent some time in guilin, nanning, and yuling, and was blown away by the rice noodles in guilin. just like the locals i immediately wanted them every morning and it didnt cross my mind to eat anything else for breakfast. just a couple years ago i could get a very good bowl for 5rmb, (that's less than a dollar), and it included the charsiu pork you demonstrated as well as another roast pork, the long bean that was mentioned and about a dozen more things, every one of which was excellent. i did try the rice noodles in nanning and yuling, but after guiling rice noodles, i found them, by comparison, lacking-- but only because i'd been completely spoiled by the rich extravagance of the guilin way of doing it you do give a good way to prepare a very simplified version of the dish at home, but in my view the real thing is probably obtainable only in guilin. thank you again for all the amazing work on this channel
3:33 I live in Northern California and i've... consumed the CostCo char siu. It's very dry and bland, tastes like very lightly sweetened soy sauce without the complexity and it kinda looks like i'm eating a dried beet. Would not recommend if you can help it.
I love clear broth type soup. Especially when you’re not feeling great or don’t want to have that heavy feeling after eating. Comfort food! Btw, You just gave me a crazy craving for Vietnamese duck and fresh bamboo noodle soup. Thanks 😞. 😉
The region of Guangxi down to north of Vietnam, Xishuangbanna, Laos, Shan state of Myanmar, Dehong in Yunnan and lastly Thailand, are all a part of historically and ethnicly connected people. The Zhuang, Dai, Shan, Lao, Tay, Nung and Thai people share similar culture, language, and culinary history
Thanks for another inspiration and a bit of enrichment to my life. I've been fermenting long beans to keep ahead of the crop, and a couple of scoops of the results added to the soup very nicely! Thanks for the prompt at the end, Steph.
I made it and it was absolutely delicious!!! Thank you so much for the recipe Guanxi’s Charsiu is an amazing discovery! So easy to make and it tastes amazing 😍😍😍😍
@@ChineseCookingDemystified my husband is asking me to try to make it with chicken breast… do you think applying the same technique could work well? Or do you have something similar that you think could work to produce thinly cut slices of tasty well marinated chicken breast?
one of the core ingredient in most of Guangxi, especially Nanning rice noodle is the 酸笋 (sour bamboo shoot) which I think you should definitely introduce this. It is made by placing peeled bamboo shoot in a pot and filled with clean water and be fermented in cool and shady places for a week, the bamboo shoot will become sour and have a very special aroma that many people may feel it is pungent by itself, but absolutely delicious with beautiful smell when stired fried with other ingredient and aromatics like Fermented Black Bean or/and garlic to make 老友 Old Buddy flavour dishes/rice noodles. I really hope you can introduce this in future videos!
Unfortunately, people can't seem to get fresh bamboo shoots, which always held us back in the past. But we do wanna do laoyou soon, probably still using the package ones.
I used to eat a similar dish in Vietnam (Hanoi) for breakfast, but it had very little broth (maybe an inch or so at the bottom but it was incredible) and it was sweet and sour, kind of reddish, with peanuts and chillis. It was hands down the best food I've ever tasted. I can't remember the name of it but it was sold by only 2 vendors at the back of Dong Xuan market. I never saw it elsewhere :( Edit *Phở tíu is what it was called!*
That looks very similar to a Vietnamese noodle dish except we swap the BBQ pork for shrimp and pickled bamboo for pickled mustard. I can't wait to try this!
Saw a youtuber vlog from Mong Cai on the northern Vietnamese border. You can literally see the city of Guangxi the buildings and industry just across the river from this Vietnamese border town. There are tons of Chinese entrepreneurs on the Vietnam side doing some of this kind of food. Fascinating video. Interesting area in Vietnam.
I lived in Taiwan for over 9 years. Noodles were an every day part of our meal plan. So many options. Thank you for taking me back:) Great video. Keep up the good work! Happy Cooking, UB
Yeah, finally got around to it myself. Excellent! I found that the broth needed a bit more salt than the 1/8 t they suggested, but I am a bit of a sodium head.
In Ipoh, Perak in Malaysia, we have Kai Si Hor Fun (shredded chicken flat rice noodle). Ingredients are Hor Fun Shredded chicken with skin Prawn Siew Yoke Char Siew Chives Chicken fats The broth is very tasty with chicken carcass, fry the prawn head & shells with other ingredients. Free range chicken is use to get the best taste...
When I use those dried rice noodles I usually soak them in hot (not boiling) water for 30 minutes and they pretty much become like fresh noodles so when its time to cook them it only takes about a minute in boiling water. I know its not as quick as just boiling them for 8 minutes but I do think it tastes and has a better texture.
I’m from Guangxi. I lived there for 7 years…. I don’t really remember any distinct dishes of the region. I remember lots of rice noodles, some nice community bbq around Chinese New Year, and multi color rice zongzi around Dragon Boat. I remember eating either red bean buns or rice noodles soup for breakfast. My ma would send me down the street to buy fresh rice noodles in the morning. In the summer, she used to make this sour yogurt like drink. I was too young to remember much but I know she would simmer milk and other stuff and then put them in mason jars and put them in the fridge. I could later grab one and drink it. It was a slightly thick and tart drink. It was so refreshing in the heat! I wonder if anyone would have an idea of what it was?
This dish really reminds me of Japanese ramen, except that there's rice in the noodles - it's almost like the no-nonsense original version of ramen! Also in the Japanese 1980s Ramen-themed movie Tampopo there is actually a scene with a Chinese-Japanese chef talking at length that you CAN'T make a good ramen soup without using the water from his home province Guangxi. With that excess amount to detail you gotta believe him. I mean... it's water.
it's honestly a little funny to me, as someone that can taste difference in water based on location, the chef might be onto something. Water in my hometown in poland tasted really chlorinated, almost like pool water. The water in the mountains when i drank from a spring had an alkaine taste, smelled like rotten eggs. I live in denmark and the water tastes a little salty, sometimes bitter, but in the previous town I was in, it was fresh and crisp.
@@alexgade4512 in germany, i get to taste a difference in tapwater at basically every location i've tried, even within my hometown, which is probably just bc of the pipes, but still its pretty insane if you think about it
While i find most of your ingredients really hard to source in my neck of the woods, i LOVE that you provide metric measurements, esp. for the spice mix! :thumbsup: !
Just chanced on your channel. Great job. I enjoy the bit of food history that you dish out besides the lovely food. So little is known about the real street food in various parts of China. Please keep the videos coming
Coming from japanese cuisine and hearing about all these new ways to prepare food and new ingredients is pretty cool Like, the pork name sounded a lot like chashu, but the end result looked completely different and super interesting
Yeah chashu has its origins in chinese char siu but the modern recipe is a very different thing. Ramen in general is a relatively recent addition to japanese cuisine that has its origins in restaurants operated by chinese immigrants
Hooray for my hometown!!!! I'm spending summer holidays at home and I can have rice noodles breakfast lunch and dinner. The successful commercialisation of snail soup noodles from Liuzhou in dry form has spread our noodle culture around but there needs to be more
New sub here, as an anglo aussie guy with a new set of knives (birthday gift) and heaps of spare time due to lockdown, I am really looking forward to having Chinese cooking demystified a bit because it's basically magic at this pointm as far as I know. :D
I've been going to SEA since the mid 70's and remember my first street food meal. We called it "Monkey Ball" soup because of the meat balls "kuaitiao luocheng". Lol
What really makes me respect u fully, is bcs you're different from others American who racist to Asia without knowing it. I love u brother. Goodluck for ur career!
On your #3 musing. One thing I notice is majority of Phở Gà in the West just use beef stock and sub the meat with chicken. There was only 1 place (out of the gazillion I went to in the West) that used a stock that tasted like chicken stock but the spice mix was still the one for beef. Actual proper Phở Gà places in Vietnam not only use chicken stock but also a different spice mix (I also reconfirmed this with someone I knew who used to serve both Phở for a living). That makes me think Phở Gà and Phở Bò are actually 2 different noodle dishes that just happen to use the same kind of rice noodles. So I would not be at all surprised if any of your Phở Gà origin hypotheses is true.
I’m sure it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but I kind of merged the Guangxi Char Siu spices you used with Way of Ramen’s method of making Chashu tofu. He got it from a vegan site, I believe, but I don’t remember which one. It’s not char siu or even chashu. Not even close. But I thought it tasted darned good anyway. I was lucky enough to have some pickled bamboo shoots from a previous Asian grocery run, so I thought, why not try this? I thought it made a really nice bowl of soup. I’m not vegan or even fully vegetarian, but it’s good to have options.
Looks so good...! Is there some characteristic of this soup that makes it breakfast-y? Is there anything defines appropriate breakfast/lunch/dinner foods in China in general?
There's a lot of wild bamboo in the west, the problem is there aren't many stores that have it. But, there is a lot of wild bamboo and/or you can plant your own. Here's a great video explaining how to preserve your spring time bamboo shoots so you can store it till the following years shoots come up. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-N2NkUUPjikM.html How well do you think you could pickle self dried bamboo?
Now I know what to do with my pickled bamboo shoots. Thank you. Someone bought me a jar to make up for eating all my zha cai. I'm like thanks, but how do I use this?
You should really use the Mandarin names of these dishes more often, and write them in Hanyu Pinyin along with Hanzi. Or whatever language (Cantonese, Minnan, Wu, etc.) is more native to those dishes. If "Ramen", "Japchae", and "Pho" are commonly accepted without translation, so should noodle dishes from China.
I feel like I've had this somewhere, maybe Guigang or Guiping, but it would have been many years ago. In any case, rice noodle soups all over the south and south-west tend to be pretty damn good!
