Hey guys, a few notes: 1. Apologies, we screwed up and forgot to show the steaming of the seitan in the video. After those three hours, place the seitan in a bowl and steam over a high flame for 8 minutes. 2. I imaging most of you guys will be working with a similar sized wok+steaming tray set-up as us (or a touch smaller)... but if you have a *larger* plate/wok set-up, you'll need to slightly extend the cooking time. 3. If you're halfway through making the Liangpi but you don't feel like steaming the day of - at the 3.5 hour mark, dip out the liquid. Then cover, and place in the fridge. The next day, simply stir the batter thoroughly before steaming, as the starch'll have obviously settled a bit more. 4. One of the more important aspects of liangpi making is that it steams over some rapidly bubbling water. If you have a relatively strong gas stove like we do, you can swap the flame to low as you're placing the sheet on (to minimize jiggling at the critical moment that it sets), and then immediately crack back to high. If you're working on something like an electric stove, unfortunately you wouldn't have the same level of heat control (though induction would likely be ok) - in that case, simply keep things at a rapid boil. The liangpi would be *quite* as even or pretty, but texturally they'll be great. 5. That Qinjiao chili powder from Shaanxi *might* actually be made from Kashmiri chili, or at least a very similar cultivar. There’s still a bit more research we have to do regarding chilis/chili varieties in the Northwest. But regardless, again, Gochugaru or a similar red/fragrant powder would also work well. 6. Sorry that the uncut video for the liangpi steaming was a little less helpful than our usual 'uncut cooking' video, and a little more... behind-the-scenes-y. There was a lot of moving pieces trying to figure out how best to film everything in our kitchen (as we're usually on that table on our balcony/patio). In any event, that's all for now, might edit a couple more notes in in a bit :) Off next week to do some traveling in the north of Thailand, back in two weeks time
So my relatives make their own sauce at home and told me the secret (they're from just outside Xi'an). You'll want to steep some Sichuan peppercorns, star anise, and 2 bay leaves in hot water. While this is steeping, add salt, some msg, and a bit of sugar so everything dissolves. Once it's steeped enough (usually after 20-30mins), you can add enough black vinegar to your preference, plus a bit of soy sauce. The resulting "water" is your base sauce. Add a few tablespoons of this sauce, some chili oil, sesame oil, and garlic water, and that's it! (Sorry, no sesame paste for me, I'm firmly in the "no-sesame-paste liang pi" camp)
So yeah! A spice water is definitely another classic approach (perhaps we should've had an aside in the video, as IIRC that might be the sort that Xian FF serves in NYC?) - Steph just absolutely adores sesame paste liangpi. For the sauce itself, she was actually specifically mimicking a Shaanxi vendor that used to sell freshly made Liangpi outside of her university, their mix was based around a fragrant chili oil + sesame paste + garlic water.
@@ChineseCookingDemystified Xi'an FF has been....less than stellar the past few times I've visited (last time I went was in 2019), but I do believe they used premixed spice water like you say. I do like sesame paste but I find that in liang pi, it makes an otherwise refreshing dish a bit too cloying for me.
@@tracer.s 1 cup boiling water, 1 cup black vinegar. 10-15 sichuan peppercorns, 2 bay leaves, 3 star anise. Salt and sugar to taste, 1 tsp msg/chicken powder. 2 tbsp soy sauce
@@Koenigg99 thank you for your prompt response. I'm literally walking up to my stovetop as I type this! I already tried just eyeballing it and the sodium wasn't quite right (I also just finished my batch of homemade chili oil, darn 🙃) I'm excited to try it out!
From what you showed in the video, it doesn't look very hard at all; perhaps people say it's "laborious" just because there are several time-consuming steps.
I can buy wheat starch and gluten separately, as a powder, What would we the benefit of the whole kneading and "wet-pressing" out the gluten/starch mass versus just using fixed amount of the powdered products?
I'll add that if you wash a lot of flour to make seitan but you don't have the energy to make liangpi so often, you can make wine with the starch ! Cook the starch using any method you like, add a mold based saccharifier like nuruk, koji rice, angel leaven yeast packets, or red yeast rice, then add some yeast (wine yeast or bread yeast), and let it fermenta few weeks. Depending on what ingredients you chose, it will make a very nice wine similar to a rice wine/makgeolli/nigori sake, except using wheat starch instead of rice
Wow that sounds great! I'm having trouble finding videos/articles on wine making using leftover wheat starch, do you have any recommendations? Also, could you elaborate on the starch cooking method? Should you boil it thoroughly? Do you have any advice for a beginner saccharifier (cheap and/or small quantity)?
@@laurentd.3001 I have not seen any video showing this with wheat starch. Jeff Rubidge has done a lot of videos on mold based grain wines like makgeolli but he usually uses the traditional glutinous rice as the starch source. Different starch types are saccharified differently by the enzymes. Jasmine rice seems to have a higher % of it that doesn't get turned liquid by the enzymes than glutinous rice. Wheat starch appears to be closer to jasmine rice than to glutinous rice in that aspect, a pretty big % of it remains at the end. Right now I'm on my third time doing a wheat starch wine. The main difference I have found with rice based wines is that when using wheat starch, it's not in grains, so it's not as easy to separate at the end. It clogs the bags. What I have found to work for the separation is to first use a nut milk bag to remove the bulk, and then a cloth bag with a weight on top to filter the fine stuff For the saccharifier, I have tried koji twice, it works well but it's kind of a lot of work. It requires you to cook the concentrated starch water in a dry-ish way (on a skillet by example), then cut it up into cubes (scissors is fastest), then sprinkle with Koji spores, incubate 2 days in a 25-30°C humid environment for the koji to grow, and only after that you add the starch, wine yeast, and water to a carboy for the alcohol fermentation stage. This way is very cheap, since you use so little spore. My koji spores have cost me about 15€ and have lasted years in a cupboard without any issue, allowing me to do lots of different projects. The less labor intensive option that I'm currently trying out is angel rice leaven packets that I found on amazon (9€ for 8 packets). It skips the first stage of fermentation of growing the koji, so you add it to the cooked starch at the same time as the wine yeast. It's still bubbling so I don't have results to share on it, but it seems to be fermenting just fine so far. I used one packet for the starch from washing 1kg of flour, that's quite a bit less starting material than the directions say (one packet for 10kg of rice). I have not tried nuruk and red yeast rice, but it should work. Jeff Rubidge has videos with both (using rice) if you want to see them used. Regarding the cooking, it's a bit of an open question. Hoping to make the filtration easy at the end, l have so far cooked the starch in a skillet, trying to recreate "artificial rice grains" by pulsing the cooked starch in a food processor. I can't say that the goal of making the filtration easy has been achieved though. Maybe it would be better to just boil it until it seems cooked. If you want to see some photos of one of my attempts here are some (in the "The Seitan Appreciation Society" Facebook group): m.facebook.com/groups/MakingSeitan/permalink/6833057986714737/
I just made this and it was astounding. I was skeptical going through all the steps but everything turned out and when combined, I was left with an amazing bowl of food. The dish is some amazing alchemy for sure! The recipe was very well written...not to mention the two videos!! Thanks for teaching the world about such a great dish!
I work at a restaurant where I'm assembling liangpi on the regular. The seasonings/sauces are largely the same but we do dilute all the sesame, garlic, etc with this like dark watery sauce that flows to the bottom.
I have to admit that I didn’t know that liangpi and Tibetan yellow laphing are basically the same thing. I mean, they tasted the same, but I just didn’t put the pieces together until recently. I have made laphing a few times, and it’s not that difficult, just time consuming. You do need to have space in your kitchen and being organized is a big plus, but I succeeded without those two things, so I think anyone could do it well. Just on a side note, I remember watching a RU-vid video a few years ago where the creator demonstrated making the noodles in a microwave instead of the standard steam/water bath setup. I tried to find that video several times but I couldn’t find it again. Has anyone else seen it?
Given the proximity of Xian to the trade routes to the highlands, and the city was under Tibetan control at one point, it is inevitable that gastronomic exchanges would happen.
These seems very similar to the process of making wide rice noodles for Thai-Chinese dishes like pad see ew or drunken noodles. Those are with rice flour instead of wheat starch, of course, but the "pour it into an oiled pan and steam" process seems very similar. I've usually done those in a cake pan balanced over a pan of simmering water rather than floating them like this, but in the past I've found that it ends up being really important that your stove is level or you end up with a thin side and a thick side. I'm wondering if this floating method could be used for those as well, since it seems like it would be self-leveling.
Foodgeek did a test of autolyse with and without salt (for bread baking, to be clear) and found no meaningful difference between the two so yes, this still counts as autolyse
From my experience, it's basically the same. Recently, I've even mix yeast in too and let it autolyse in the freezer, lol. Works, but slight less ideal.
Huh! if the Liangpi water-starch mixture is just... water and starch, could one possibly just mix together corn/potato/other starch with water, and then follow the rest of these steps to get similar results? Or is there a particular quality of flour starch that makes Liangpi what it is? Great video as always!
I tried this and was almost perfect! But the noodles turned out quite mushy/broke very easily when stirred in the bowl. Any ideas what went wrong there? Maybe undercooked, overcooked, or suboptimal batter ratio?
For those viewers who live close enough to Vietnamese communities, they have rough equivalents which I actually prefer. Definitely one of those, "if you like this you'll probably also like this" kinda situations.
This process reminds me of the traditional process of making Banh Cuon flat rice noodle wraps. The traditional way of making them is a lot like what you guys show here, but when my Po Po discovered nonstick pans, she never looked back. I wonder how well that would work with this wheat starch noodle?
So i have a question, as the noodles are basically a starch water slurry, could i as a gluten intollerant person make a glutenfree version by just mixing starch with water? Maybe a mix out of different starches?
Yeah, it would be interesting to see the difference to using some starch (wheat, corn, potato, rice and/or tapioka) directly instead of making it from flour yourself this way.
Thanks a lot for this video!! I am lucky that Delhi has a Tibetan quarter where I go once a month. It's damn cheap too!!! And I am not sure I could ever hope to compete with the aunties there. But I have saved your video and will definitely make it once I move away from this city
FINALLY I've been wanting this video for so long!! I gave this a try a year or two ago and was sort of disappointed with the results so I'll be eager to give your version a go sometime soon :)
I used to get a little take out container of this almost every day for lunch when I worked across the road from my city's China Town... Always thought it was some sort of rice noodle with pressed tofu... Absolutely fascinating to see the process behind this, thank you!
Sent this to a friend of mine when you posted the Patreon preview and she immediately tested me on my pronunciation of 凉皮儿 lol. Thanks for the recipe. I'll need to give it a try in the next few weeks!
Thanks for the recipe, just a question. Would there be any difference if I use wheat starch mixed with water and skip the whole process of washing the dough? In that case, do you have any idea of the ratio starch:water? Thanks
oh man, I have been waiting for this for a long time. ugh, my mouth is watering now. great job guys. I have tried many times to make this wonderful dish but I don't have the wok or the steaming plate. need to grab those ASAP and make some. will tag yall with the finished product. Now if yall can make Black vinegar Peanuts my wish list is complete/
My fav. I tried making it at home and the noodles and gluten turned out great (it was a major operation for me at least) but I couldn't get the ratio of the sauces right. Might need to try again. Great vid!
Just made some really nice seitan for a vegan gulasz and was wondering what to do with the leftover starch. I was glad to see that my favorite cooking channel had already a really easy recipe for all that starch! Thank you for your amazing work.
Another excellent video from you two! You definitely have the best Chinese cooking channel on YT. The noodles are a bit labor-intensive but it would make a great project for a teenager with some supervision.
So, as someone with IBS, I always view your recipes involving raw garlic with a certain amount of wistfulness. Do you think that there's any way to at least hit SOME of the notes of garlic water with cooked garlic? I usually sub raw garlic with garlic confit, but that doesn't really work with garlic water since the confit will be oily.
Thank you so much for this! I didn’t make seitan at home, due to the waste of pouring out the water when washing the seitan. Thank you for this video and the detail explanation
The process of steaming the noodle sheet, sheet by sheet, remind me of that time I tried making Thai layered dessert, except that I had to steam one layer onto another onto another to make it 9 layers in total.
YESSSS!! ive made this before and i crave it all the time! liangpi is absolutely worth it and i love having the seitan with it (or just seitan ij general lol). it's a win/win! the hardest thing that keeps me from making it has been not having any way to steam the starch where I am. but its by far my favorite noodle to make at home. so glad you guys shared a recipe for it, i cant wait to try it yall's way :3
Or you can go back to the Hot Pepper Soup video and take inspiration for how the gluten is treated in there: just tear it up into the still boiling water and cook till floating, if you want a more rustic-looking dish.
We tried to make it at home some time ago, from some less precise recipes and... it just didn't come out, at all. We had two main problems. First probably has to do with what you guys say at the beginning of the video, we let it rest overnight before draining the water. At the end, we were working with some pancake-like thick batter which is obviously miles away from the runny batter you show in the video. The second problem, however... The batter had an aggressively sour taste and smell. It was like 10-12 hours had been enough already for it to spoil. We didn't get any of the noodles right, but even if we had we would've probably thrown them away because they tasted very badly, whereas the one we get outside tends to be pretty neutral. Any idea of what could've happened?
In the video, it’s stated that the starch water should rest 3-4 hours maximum before removing the separated water (the liquor). Sounds like yours was over fermented.
About overresting the batter: After making it once or twice and logging the amount of flour in the dough, water used for washing, and volume/mass of the batter after resting, wouldn't it then be feasible to rest the batter much longer and then remove water to reach the expected batter weight? That might make the process a lot more flexible in terms of time. Alternatively one could weigh the gluten (google says wet gluten is about 30% water content)) and determine the dry starch expected to wash out, such that you could simplify the process using store-bought wheat starch or starch left to dry from previous gluten washing endeavours. With that information you could then calculate the target water content in the batter for ease of replication! ... now I *have* to try it lol
Hmm... I want to say "probably not". But maybe... vacuum seal, resteam, then slice? It'd be entirely experimental Lasts 2-3 days in the fridge but you need to re-steam to heat up
I was just wondering if that could save time. Is that blasphemous of me? I wonder what ratios of wheat starch to water equals Steph's 3-4 hour washing water rest...
In this time of rising prices and continuing uncertainty... that rant certainly has its time, Steph, and this is the right time. :) Also, what if I have dog tongs? Or an actual cat? :D
Dog tongs will work in a pinch. Actual cats are not advised - generally speaking, you shouldn't use cats when working with temperatures in excess of 50C, and here we need to pull the tray out of the boiling (~100C) water
Would I be able to wash the dough to separate the starch and gluten with a mixer on the lowest setting with a dough hook attachment? I wonder if that could take out some of the labour XD
Unrelated question-Im watching an old OG Iron Chef episode and Chen makes something called "aurora sauce", which apparently is mayonnaise, ketchup, condensed milk and...gin. Is this an actual sauce used in Sichuan food? A strange artifact from British colonial times maybe? I was truly baffled
just foun'd you, but agree making own noodles great, ho fun noodles easier, can adjust with different combination of starches. But I have a question on the Mother starter and Starter for CharSiu bao. Is it a choice between the two and use only one. 2nd Question can you use potassium bicarbinate. 3. question on Regular Bao, i have problem getting consistent, verrrry thin skin peel on the Bao. As in my homeland. is it the combination of varietal starches, and bicarbinate. Any info helpfull.
easier than baozi!! that's quite a claim I have to say I disagree with that ranking at least from the perspective of simplicity of making, baozi are a couple hours from start to finish, with even a little breadmaking know-how baozi are dead easy. Perhaps yeasted breadmaking does require a bit more skill but it's a skill that a lot of folks already have! & the actual cooking process is way simpler IMO maybe someday I'll brave starch-water noodles of some kind.... -paprika
Thank you for these videos and your channel! I have improved my skills at traditional Chinese cooking over the last year, mostly because of these videos. As well as trying over and over again, finding the balance of spicy levels from the crushed red pepper and funky levels from the oyster sauce and fermented bean sauce. I still prefer sitting down at a restaurant, but my recipes are getting closer to their high standards of flavor and quality! Thanks again!
Of course if people aren't appreciated for their craft they will find hacks to deliver a low quality result with less effort. It is sad but lots of developing countries face this issue. General public isn't rich enough to afford authentic things and if there is no government assisted program like in Italy which keeps old cheese making methods alive then it will slowly die.
First had this a couple years ago in Germany cologne and got addicted. The only problem, there seems to be only one place anywhere in germany that has them on the menu o.O
nah, the water does the cooking and unless you are at high altitude (like denver or mexico city) water boils at 100c and will not get any hotter until the water is gone. so a roiling boil on electric is the same as gas
My small rant is that most of the western crowd making seitan really try hard to avoid the spongey texture going for the more meaty dense style. But traditional seitan is like how you see here. More tender and definitely more light and a little spongey. It really holds onto sauces this way and is worth a try at least once. You can buy it pre-made but obviously if you make it you also get the starch water for the Liangpi
Can the noodles be steamed (and/or cut) ahead of time for serving later, if so how long? Also, would lining the plate with parchment paper make the removal process easier? That's a bit pricy but I'd rather have a full sheet not be torn.
I made this recipe the other day, but had a bit of trouble with the texture of the noodles. They tore very easily, so that by the time I was done mixing the bowl, they were practically small squares instead of noodles. Do you know where I might have gone wrong? The process was new to me, so I couldn't diagnose if it was a batter issue, or a cooking time issue, or a cooling issue, etc.
I’m surprised to hear flaxseed oil listed in the chili oil section, but it definitely seems a lot more accessible than extra virgin canola oil, or even Indian mustard seed oil
