Yan can cook
Martin Yan visited Ann Arbor today and gave a cooking demonstration at a local appliance store. It was a busy day, but I’m glad I took some time to go to this. His cookbooks were my entree into Chinese cooking, and I really have enjoyed the TV shows of his that I’ve seen (not many). I also learned some things today—a quick way to debone a chicken, and a good solution to a problem that comes up in stir frying. Typically the food gets dry after a while as it absorbs the oil. I usually add more oil, but it can end up being quite a bit of oil. Yan keeps some stock/broth around and adds that instead, which is a smart idea.
As with all Chinese cooking, more than half of the demonstration consisted of cutting, and he demonstrated some neat techniques. One I can’t quite believe, which involves dicing ginger and garlic by smashing a piece of garlic or slice of ginger and then kind of smearing it with the knife at the same time. I’ll have to try it, but I can’t quite see how that would work. He also showed a neat way of cutting a red bell pepper by continuously slicing and rotating it (almost like peeling, except cutting all the way through), as a prelude to julienning (making sticks).
He passed around a brochure of his cooking school in Shenzhen, where you can visit China and learn to cook at the same time (a very big, lavish place).