Chengdu people’s favorite boiled cabbage, how to make the soup delicious?

1. Preparation and recipe of boiled cabbage

Zhihu famous dish, oh no, Sichuan famous dish!

The main feature is that the cabbage is ordinary, but it is extremely delicious after being cooked with "boiling water"

The biggest feature of this dish is the "boiling water" in it

It looks as clear as boiling water, but it is actually extremely delicious

Today I will use this dish to explain from a principle how we make soup and the difference between clear soup and thick soup.

Let’s talk about the dish first

This dish is mainly divided into three steps: processing the cabbage, making the clear soup, and simmering the cabbage

Processing the cabbage

For cabbage, only take the fresh and tender cabbage heart, and then tear off the tendons on the surface of the cabbage to avoid affecting the taste

Blanch the processed cabbage and put it in ice water to chill. This step mainly removes the leafy vegetables. The unique raw and bitter taste prevents the cabbage from overcooking due to residual heat.

Then squeeze out the water attached to the cabbage during the processing, so that the soup can be flavored during the simmering process without affecting the concentration of the soup. Divide into four, cut and set aside.

Let’s start making soup

First prepare a pot of cold water, simmer the blanched meat ingredients with onions and ginger over medium heat, scooping out the foam on the soup noodles during the process.

After simmering for two or three hours, when the flavors of the ingredients are all integrated into the soup, scoop it out.

At this time, the soup is already very delicious, but not clear enough. Clear soup is needed to make it clear.

Dissolve the minced lean meat in water, pour it into the prepared soup, and heat over low heat. (Relying on the adsorption capacity of protein to make the soup clear)

The red liquid in the white bowl is lean meat minced in water

After the lean meat foam turns white, take it out and throw it away (lean meat All the flavor has been absorbed into the soup). Repeat this step three times until the soup is clear.

At this time, the soup is as clear as water. The clearness of the soup is mainly due to the low fire used during cooking and the adsorption of impurities by the minced meat. Some chefs will also use relatively fine gauze to filter it several times.

Use the prepared soup to simmer cabbage

Pour the prepared clear soup into the processed cabbage, seal it with plastic wrap, put it in a steamer and steam it for 2-3 Minutes allow the cabbage to be cooked but not rotten and to absorb the soup.

Pinch out the cabbage, put it on another plate, and pour some clear soup on it again. This is another extreme point of this dish, which maximizes the umami taste of the dish.

The above is the process of making boiled cabbage

It seems to be a simple three steps, among which the step of making soup is a great test of the chef's skills and understanding of soup making.

The combination of ingredients, the method of blanching, the amount of firepower when making soup, any detail will lead to the failure of this pot of soup.

So, what skills do we have to master to make good soup at home?

2. Selection and processing of ingredients for making soup

First of all, let’s start with the selection of ingredients.

Master Ren in the video said something like this

“The soup will not be beautiful without ham, the soup will not be fresh without chicken, the soup will not be fragrant without duck, and the soup will not be thick without elbow. ”

This sentence tells several factors that a pot of qualified soup needs to meet - delicious color, fresh aroma, fragrant soup and thick soup

To achieve these characteristics requires a variety of different characteristics. The ingredients complement each other, and secondly, the synergistic effect between various umami substances in different raw materials is used to enhance the umami taste of the entire dish. Taste multiplication

This phenomenon of a sharp increase in taste can occur when two or more different taste substances of the same taste are mixed together. For example:

When ammonium glycyrrhizinate is mixed with sucrose, the sweetness becomes 100 times that of sucrose

When 9g MSG is mixed with 1g inosinic acid, the umami taste is equivalent to 60g MSG.

Essentially, these four points basically come from the natural pigments, umami substances, fat, and collagen of the food ingredients.

For example, although the taste of old meat is not as good as that of tender meat, due to the long growth cycle, more umami substances (fat, amino acids, sugars, nucleic acids, etc.) will be deposited in the body.

When we usually eat braised pork, stewed pig trotters, and roasted crucian carp, the soup that sticks to our mouths comes from the collagen in the ingredients. If you want to achieve this effect, you can add pork. Skin, chicken feet, and pig trotters contain ingredients with a lot of skin and fat.

I would like to mention here that collagen, whether applied on the face or eaten, has no beauty effect and may clog pores and make you fat

So let me summarize , that is, when we are choosing ingredients, we need to try to choose ones that are fat, old, and thick-skinned (which is different from choosing a boyfriend).

After selecting the ingredients, let’s process them

First let’s talk about the difference between clear soup and thick soup

Clear soup: blanch or soak to remove the odor After that, bring it to a boil directly and then turn to low heat to make the soup

Thick soup: After blanch the water, put a little oil in the pot, stir-fry the ingredients until fragrant and stir out the oil, or fry them directly and then simmer them over high heat. Soup.

(I have written about blanching and thick soup before, and a portal will be attached at the end of the article)

In addition, for example, we bought a cow bone and prepared it to cook beef. The soup can't be stir-fried like the meat, right?

At this time, I can bake it to stimulate the fragrance and roast the fat.

Last time I went to eat Xibei, I ordered big bones, ate the meat, and asked the waiter for a bag to pack the bones, and make soup and eat them with noodles the next day.

The diligent and thrifty cook

When you have cut the ingredients, put the soup in the pot, and adjusted the fire

Then the question is, how should this soup be cooked? How long does it take to stay up?

I really can’t answer this for you, because I don’t know the age of your meat, the content of umami substances in your body, etc.

But I can tell you. One way is to dip the meat in salt and taste it, and suck the bones to see if there is any flavor left. If there is no flavor anymore, the ingredients have been squeezed out, and the soup is ready.

These soup ingredients can be mixed with some water and eaten as a dip. It is also very delicious and is not wasted.

The cooked soup can be used to replace MSG, make noodles, boil brine, etc.

Make homemade stock cubes

Stew as above After cooling the large pot of soup, pour it into a rubber ice cube box and store it in the freezer.

Squeeze out one pill at a time, which replaces MSG and tastes more delicious.

3. Let’s talk about how to make the soup fresh and the meat tender.

After talking about making soup, let’s talk about how to make the soup delicious and tender when simmering the soup at home.

The first method is to choose two ingredients to match

When my mother makes pork rib soup, she will buy a pork bone and some pork ribs, and then use the pork bones to make the soup. Add the ribs. When the ribs are cooked, season and serve. This way you can eat the meat and drink the soup.

Secondly, if you have a pressure cooker at home. You can buy ingredients like keels, which contain meat, bones and fat.

Pork spine, fat or thin with bones, is the best choice for simmering soup.

Add an appropriate amount of salt when frying to lock in the umami flavor in the meat, and then use a pressure cooker for 15-20 minutes.

Because the pressure cooker can speed up the penetration of umami substances and cook at high temperature and pressure in a short time, this achieves the effect of tender meat and delicious soup. As we all know, salt is added after simmering soup, and salt is added before braised vegetables

Because salt can denature proteins, and high concentrations of ions will reduce the solubility of proteins, we must add salt after boiling soup to avoid the umami taste. The object fingers couldn't blend better into the soup.

On the contrary, when stewing vegetables, you need to add salt first, so that the vegetables can retain their own taste first, and then let the taste of the brine slowly come in

Use seasonings to supplement the umami flavor

We want to ensure the texture of the meat and the taste of the soup. These two points are contradictory, but we can reasonably use some reliable seasonings to make up for the lack of taste of the soup.

As mentioned above, umami substances are fats, amino acids, sugars, and nucleic acids. Some seasonings directly extract these substances and make them into seasonings, so sometimes it is a simple and good way to add seasonings.