Welcome to issue #005 of the 🔒 Cookbook Confidential 🔒! Each week, I send 1 private newsletter with private recipes, guides, and drafts we're developing for the book.
If you want to help shape our efforts in making a timeless Cantonese cookbook, join our community of 450+ members. You’ll get a digital copy once it’s ready, as well as full access to our weekly Cookbook Confidential and our private group chat. Founding Members will also have their name in our cookbook acknowledgements, and a signed physical copy.
Cantonese cuisine traditionally employs a bunch of different fermented and preserved ingredients. Preserved foods are fading away with our generation, but they embody the authentic essence of nuanced Cantonese flavors, reminiscent of our grandparents' cooking.
To recreate the dishes and flavors we love from generations past, we have to venture beyond soy sauce and oyster sauce.
In this newsletter, we’re taking a look at the three main types of Fermented Bean Curd, some of the most impactful ingredients you can add to a dish.
While Fermented Bean Curds might look intimidating or unappetizing, they’re flavor bombs packed with umami, often compared to “Chinese cheese”.
Fermented Bean Curd is 100% worth getting acquainted with. It’s a key ingredient in some of the most popular Chinese dishes: Char Siu BBQ Pork, Chicken Feet, Steamed Spare Ribs, Stir Fried Ong Choy, and many more!
To help you learn how my dad uses Fermented Bean Curd, this newsletter is divided into 2 parts:
#1 - A video primer on Fermented Bean Curd
#2 - A 5 minute recipe: Lettuce with Fermented Bean Curd (one of my dad’s staples!)
The video featured in the newsletter is an excerpt from our Mini Masterclasses (Module 10: Elements of Flavor - Funk.)
We plan on doing lots of deep dives into Chinese ingredients in our cookbook, and we’ll most certainly be including Fermented Bean Curd.
Since one of the goals of this Substack newsletter is to workshop content with you, let me know in the comments if you have any questions or are confused by anything in the video!
Watch the video above and leave a comment below :)
Lettuce with Fermented Bean Curd
Serves 4
2 minutes prep, 5 minutes total
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Made With Lau to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
