It is well known that every chef specializes in different styles of cooking.
Even if you have mastered the skills of several cooking schools, when handling banquet dishes, you still need to set the main tone of the banquet.
Occasionally, some dishes from other schools are added to enrich the taste of the banquet without affecting the main flavor of the entire banquet.
Zhao Fuyu naturally knew this very well, so when cooking the Quan Frog Banquet, he had already considered the tastes of the diners present and focused on a cuisine style that was absolutely suitable for the public.
Cantonese cuisine!
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Known as one of the largest schools in Zhongzhou, Cantonese cuisine can be said to be a collection of cooking techniques from all over the world.
It even blends the essence of Chinese and Western cuisine, and its flavor modification allows many foreigners to enjoy it without having to worry about taste issues.
Pay attention to clean but not bland, fresh but not vulgar, tender but not raw, oily but not greasy, with "five flavors" (fragrant, loose, soft, fat, thick) and "six flavors" (sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, salty, fresh).
In terms of cooking, stir-frying and quick-frying are the main methods, as well as braising, frying and roasting.
It is also very seasonal, with lightness in summer and autumn and richness in winter and spring.
It can be said that after Zhao Fuyu decided on the main theme of the whole frog feast, the dishes to be made jumped out of his chest one by one.
Because after all, Cantonese cuisine is extremely outstanding in Zhongzhou in terms of cooking frog ingredients.
There are techniques for cooking and there are many recipes, which naturally makes Zhao Fuyu feel a little more relaxed.
After finishing cooking the porridge base of the frog porridge and still leaving the frog belly, we immediately started to marinate the frog's frog claws and half of its front legs.
Different from ordinary braised food, Zhao Fuyu's braised food does not completely follow the path of Cantonese cuisine.
Instead, a lot of sauce methods have been added.
Seasoning packets based on five-spice seasoning, including more than a dozen spices such as hawthorn, tangerine peel, and cumin, were put into the soup pot and started to marinate. A small package of red yeast rice was also specially prepared for the purpose of coloring. .
Of course, sugar color is also an indispensable part. Basically, if you want the gloss of braised vegetables to be good, sugar color is indispensable.
But the taste of these things alone is not rich enough.
Zhao Fuyu specially boiled coriander, celery, scallions, onions, shallots, ginger slices, and garlic granules into a cooking oil. After the clear oil was slightly heated, he could put these ingredients in and fry them slowly over medium-low heat.
Fry until the aroma comes out. When these ingredients are all brown and slightly brown, but not yet black, you can pick them all up, stuff them into a food bag, and put them in the brine pot to continue to work.
As for the remaining cooking oil, you can add spicy sauce, Pixian Doubanjiang, and soybean paste in a ratio of 1:1, and continue to stir-fry over medium-low heat until fragrant. This will remove the beany smell in the bean paste, leaving only After the sauce is fragrant.
Then add the star anise, cinnamon bark, angelica root, cumin, peppercorns, xiangguo, and the grass fruit that have been smashed and seeds inside that have been soaked in hot water, and stir-fry continuously.
Stir-fry until the aroma comes out, then turn off the heat and pour in a tablespoon of dark soy sauce. Use the remaining heat to stimulate the aroma of the dark soy sauce. Then use the hot water in the stew pot to stir-fry all the spices and sauces in the pot. After several times, pour it into the brine pot.
At this time, add oyster sauce, light soy sauce, salt and pepper to taste.
One thing you must know is that because it is braised, the taste of the brine must be relatively salty. It is not enough to make you feel that it is paired with rice. At least you must taste that the bacon is still relatively salty after passing through the water. The saltiness of lean meat.
This is considered more appropriate.
Then you need to wait for fifteen minutes for the marinade, stir-fried spices and sauce to be fully integrated, and cook over medium heat.
After fifteen minutes, you can put the prepared frog claws and half of the front legs in. When the water surface bubbles slightly, you can immediately turn to low heat and slowly marinate.
The time doesn't need to be too long, generally about seven to eight minutes for bullfrogs.
These two ingredients, even though they are cut from a frog as tall as a man, are about the same size as an average whole bullfrog, and only take about eight minutes.
When the marinating time is up, don't open the lid after turning off the heat. Instead, continue to let the ingredients simmer inside for at least an hour.
Only in this way can the braised food be fully flavored, and even the aroma, umami, and braised food can be absorbed into the bones.
Only in this way can the finished braised food be considered to be truly delicious.
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Turn off the heat of the braised pot here, but Zhao Fuyu is not idle over there. Although most of the frog meat needs to be fried and cooked, it does not mean that some things cannot be done in advance.
Especially in front of two large plates of baby leg meat, Zhao Fuyu, who had already thought about how to handle these ingredients, naturally needed to cook them in advance.
After taking half of the plate, it was already a large bowl full of frog meat. Zhao Fuyu naturally wanted to make it in advance.
Add a little bit of base flavor, stir in some of the juice from onion and ginger cooking wine, then add white pepper, a little salt, and keep rubbing until all the flavors are absorbed.
Pat some crispy fried powder (a mixture of egg yolk, starch, flour, and glutinous rice flour) on it, then soak it in water, pat on some crispy fried powder again, and then throw it into the oil pan for crispy frying.
The temperature of the oil pan cannot be too low, at least above 170 degrees, and the time cannot be too long, otherwise all the juices of the frog meat will be fried.
Therefore, Zhao Fuyu's hands and feet were extremely fast.
Even with Ye Xiu's eyesight, which was beyond the limits of human beings, he could only see some afterimages, as if there were countless palms on the oil pan.
By the time he came to his senses, Zhao Fuyu had dropped a basin full of frog meat into the oil pan at almost the same time.
It can be said that if you ask ordinary chefs to imitate such cooking methods, they may be able to ensure that the pot is cooked at the same time, but to be able to accomplish such a great feat by one person so quickly, the difficulty will increase many times.
Fry at a temperature of 170 degrees for two minutes.
The oil temperature cannot be lowered. Even when the pan is started, the oil temperature must be higher, exceeding 170 degrees, to ensure that the fried ingredients will not absorb the oil.
After such a set of actions, the frog meat is golden and crispy, and even if it is rolled and bumped randomly on the oil-absorbing paper a few times, it will show a strong aroma of fried food.
No need to continue cooking, just sprinkle a little pepper and salt, and you can enjoy it as a delicious dish.
But since Zhao Fuyu was going to make a full frog feast, there was no reason to serve it so simply.
In fact, although it is an all-frog dish, Zhao Fuyu also uses a lot of other ingredients. This is also a problem caused by the elegant characteristics of the frog's meat...
