Oil blasted shrimp

[youbao daxia
I just love watching Chinese cooking videos. I brought lots of them home from China, but to my surprise I found there are many clips uploaded on YouTube, ripped from Chinese dvds or vcds. The videos are very unlike the trendy chef-lifestyle videos you have in the West, where the focus is on close-ups of the chef's face and cooking gear instead of on his or her cooking basics. Chinese chefs take their time, sometimes even real time, to show their knife techniques and cooking skills.

Everything is shown step by step, the cutting preparations and the final assembling and stir frying moves. You sure can learn a lot about Chinese cooking by watching these videos! As not everyone understands Chinese, I have translated the directions they give in the video, so you can watch the techniques, and read the directions for assistance. Try for yourself! View more of my Chinese cooking playlist at YouTube...


This is a rather easy recipe, with great flavours enhancing the tastyness of shrimp. You will need: 350 grams raw shrimp, with heads on, but cleaned; 25 grams soy sauce; 5 grams spring onions; 15 grams Chinese rice wine (Shaoxing wine); lots of [vegetable] oil; 25 grams of sugar and 15 grams of Chinese vinegar.

First: dry the shrimp and fry them briefly in medium hot oil (the Chinese call this 60% hot), take out; then turn up the heat and fry them again in hotter oil (70% hot). There surely is a lot of oil in the wok. You can see the really big ladle with holes in it, like a strainer, with which the Chinese chef scoops out all the ingredients in one go, he also has a large container at hand for pouring in the excess oil when necessary. OK, pour off all the oil and add just one or two tablespoons of oil in the pan, then add the shrimp, rice wine, sugar, vinegar, soy, spring onions and stir to combine. Don't fry too long, take out and arrange prettily on a plate. Chef of this video: Chen Yongqing from Hangzhou.