Chinese Takeout Tips

If you have trouble making restaurant favorites, check this out.

If you like cooking, and if you like Chinese food (either cuisines from China like Sichuan or Cantonese, or just Americanized takeout style), you should read The Woks of Life. It’s a fantastic cooking/travel/culture website run by a Chinese-American family, and I haven’t found any better place for recipes that will yield restaurant-style results, as well as more obscure homestyle dishes.

While some of these recipes require a large number of ingredients, very few of them are “exotic,” really. Most of the individual ingredients will be pretty familiar. But there are some cooking tricks that are not necessarily obvious, and which a lot of online recipes don’t include. Many of these recipes are either for healthier versions of restaurant dishes, or they’re attempting to reverse engineer the dish without actually knowing how it’s made. The Woks of Life website, however, enabled me to start making a whole bunch of dishes I previously thought I could only ever have from a restaurant.

Here are a few of the tips I’ve learned. I know cooking is a little far afield from my mainstay issues, but I cook from scratch every day, and I’ve learned a lot doing it for years, so I enjoy sharing it. 

1. A little bit of baking soda will tenderize sliced beef for stir-fry. There is no other way to achieve that “Chinese restaurant beef and broccoli” beef texture. Beef treated with baking soda loses some of its “beefiness” while gaining a wonderfully tender, slightly chewy/bouncy texture. I can’t think of any western preparation of beef that will yield meat like this. If you use cheap or old meat, it might not be too good. If you use good quality beef (flank steak is ideal, and it should be fresh) it’s just like a good restaurant.

2. Milk tea/bubble tea/boba tea/Thai tea are not made with equal parts strong tea and milk, as most recipes online will instruct. The key to that creamy, rich, intensely sweet taste and mouthfeel is condensed milk. A tall glass of strong tea, and two or three tablespoons of condensed milk (and a splash of evaporated milk if you want) will do it. You can buy the tapioca balls at H-Mart or on Amazon, too.

3. Chinese takeout dishes that include chicken broth, like egg drop soup or the sauce for shrimp and lobster sauce, are not using liquid chicken broth from a can or carton. They’re using broth made from chicken powder, basically bouillon. (Like this, from Lee Kum Kee.) Western or Latin American chicken cubes or bouillon often contain onion and parsley. Chinese chicken powder brands are usually just chicken (and salt, sugar, and MSG, but all of them are basically that.) My wife and I got some Knorr chicken powder produced only for the Chinese market (she is from China), and it is the best version of this ingredient we’ve ever had. The canned broth is less salty, but even if you added extra salt, it would just taste different.

In cooking a lot, I’ve found one way to enhance the chicken powder for certain dishes is to fry it in oil or butter on a low heat until it froths and slightly browns. (You should do the same basic thing with tomato paste; frying it in some oil makes it sweeter and richer, and takes away the acidic/metallic flavor it has straight from the can.) Sometimes I toast rice in this fried chicken powder/butter before cooking it, and sometimes I make a Chinese chicken-broth-based soup by adding water to the fried, rather than “raw,” powder. It adds a flavor element that’s hard to describe but very nice.

Here’s what the chicken powder looks like when you lightly fry it:

And here’s my homemade Mongolian beef, using the baking soda tenderizing method for some sliced flank steak:

And here’s a soup using the fried chicken powder broth. It’s our version of a Yunnan dish called “Crossing-the-bridge noodles.”