Sweet & Sour Pork From Wuthering Waves | Arcade With Alvin

Hello there, welcome back to another episode of Arcade with Alvin, where today we're going to be making the Sweet and Sour Pork from Wuthering Waves. In the game the dish's description is as follows, because of its sweet and sour and crispy taste, the dish is very popular with children and also known as kids delight by the people. Perhaps the heartfelt smile of happiness on the children's faces when they taste the sweetness of the dish is more satisfactory than the dish itself. Now I can agree with this, as a kid I loved eating this both the American and the Chinese traditional style, and today we're going to be doing both. I want to thank Squarespace for sponsoring this episode and supporting the BCU from the very beginning. I'm excited to announce my new website, B-A-B-I dot S-H, or as I like to call it, Babby Dutch. The ultimate destination for all things BCU. There's all the recipes from my videos, exclusive new recipes, you can search by genre or ingredient, you can even toggle between U.S. and metric, and scale the serving size. We heard your feedback about everything you wanted from the site, so that's what we did. You can get 10% off your first Squarespace order by visiting squarespace dot com slash babish. The recipe from the game states that this is made with four raw meat, four flour, one premium gold incense oil, and one sweet and sour sauce. Now the description of this oil states that it's an advanced ingredient used to cook special dishes, and it's an extremely rare seasoning with an unrivaled aroma that fills your nose once the bottle is uncorked. Now to me this almost sounds like truffle oil, so that's exactly what we got. We're going to transfer this into a similarly ornate bottle so that we can match the game as close as we can, and get started on the game recipe. I'm going to heat a good amount of this oil in a pan, and while that's getting hot, I'm going to dip just some cut up pork loin in flour, and once that's all ready to go, I'm going to pan fry these little slices until they're nice and golden brown. Now truffle oil is more of a finishing oil, it's not really used to cook, but what happens when you start cooking with it is that a lot of its delicate aromas do go away, so if you do want to just make sure that all that intense flavor is not as intense, you can turn on the heat a little bit, which is what we're doing here. Once these pork slices are ready to go, they're going to be drained, and then we're going to finish by adding in sugar and black vinegar, which is what comprises the sweet and sour sauce according to the game. Once that has nice and sticky and reduced, I'm going to toss back in the pork until it is glazed all over, and then I'm going to serve that on a plate. Now let's give this a taste. Hey, for a dish that only has four ingredients, no seasoning, no marination, and no real instructions, this is actually pretty good, especially if you put a little bit of salt on it. It's a nice little snack that Tony and I finished off camera, but I really want to get to those more built out recipes, so here we go. First we're going to start with the American style sweet and sour pork, a dish that you might find at Chinese American takeout places, something that's a crowd favorite no matter where you go. First I'm going to break down this whole pork shoulder, it has skin and bone on it, so I have to make sure to remove those. Once that's all done, I'm going to take the meat and cut them into little chunks, making sure that they're not too thick, but I'm not being too careful with the sizing because these end up getting fried in batter and sauce and that's all delicious to me. Now first we're going to have to take this pork and mix it with a marinade. For our one pound of pork shoulder, I'm going to combine four tablespoons of soy sauce, one garlic clove that has been minced, half an inch of ginger that also has been minced, half teaspoon of baking soda, one tablespoon of cornstarch. Once it's all nice and ready to go, that's going to get saran wrapped and put in the fridge to refrigerate for at least 15 to 30 minutes. While the pork marinates, I'm going to prepare our vegetables for this. Now typically you'd find things like green bell pepper, red bell pepper, and onion inside a takeout style American sweet and sour pork, so that's what we're going to do. We're going to cut these into approximately one inch pieces, both lengthwise and widthwise because we need to sort of match the end size of the pork and from my memory, it's kind of these big chunks that kind of hold up in all that sauce and frying, so that's exactly what we're going to do. Then we're also going to mince up one garlic clove and another half inch of ginger. Okay, probably the most important part of the recipe is the sauce. Now for this sauce, we're going to use half a cup of sugar, third of a cup of white vinegar, a quarter cup of pineapple juice, a quarter cup of ketchup, a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce, a tablespoon of soy sauce, a teaspoon of oyster sauce, and two tablespoons of cornstarch. A recipe that both involves American and Chinese components from things like the ketchup to things like the Now I believe that sweet and sour pork is usually kind of a little reddish when you look at it in the food court, and I think that comes from the ketchup, which both adds a nice sense of flavor from the tomato, some sweetness, and some sourness, so I think that works perfectly. Alright, our pork is marinated for about 30 minutes or so, into which we're going to toss a little bit more cornstarch to give it that batter, crusty-like feel before it goes into the fryer, adding a total of about three more tablespoons worth. Next, we're going to move these little pork slices into frying in a 350 degree oil bath. Just going to fry these one at a time until they're nice and crispy and golden brown on the outside. Single fry here, not doing any double fry techniques because this is going to get sauced eventually. Once these fry, they're going to go onto a tray lined with a rack and some paper towels to drain, and I just want to appreciate these little craggly bits. In a lot of Chinese cooking, we use cornstarch to fry rather than flour, or at least to mix a bit, because cornstarch doesn't have gluten, so that when it it doesn't really develop that toughy, gluten-y structure that can absorb a lot of liquid later on, so you kind of end up with a drier, craggly-looking fried result, which is what this is. Okay, onto more stir-fry action. We're going to use a large wok, heat up some more of that golden oil that we have from before, and saute our vegetables until they've gotten a little bit of color on the edges. Then we're going to also add in a couple of these pineapple tidbits from the can that we got the juice from, because that's going to add some nice sweetness and some color and some flavor. Once that's all ready to go, I'm going to add in the sauce that we had from earlier and get that reducing and coating all the vegetables. Once it's simmered for about three minutes or so, I'm going to add in a cornstarch slurry just to tighten and thicken that sauce up. Once that is bubbly and starting to look pretty good, then goes in all of the pork slices that we fried up earlier, tossing and turning until everything is nice and glazed and shiny. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward technique, kind of a home-style American-Chinese version of sweet and sour pork that you can find in restaurants and food courts. I think this looks pretty good. Now we must eat this with rice, because on its own it is still a little sweet and sour, so we have some rice that we seamed off to the side, and yeah, our American-style sweet and sour pork is ready to consume. Very good, tastes almost exactly like the one you get from the restaurant, but just a little fresher because we just made it now, and just overall a crowd favorite, as can be seen by everybody that came down to the studio and ate a lot of it. Now this version is quite good, and will do the job if you want sweet and sour pork, but my favorite version of sweet and sour pork is the Chinese version of the dish, called Tang Cu Li Ji, which almost translates directly into sugar, vinegar, and Li Ji, which is a certain cut of the pork that is more like a tenderloin. Now this cut is often used in this dish because of its tender quality, so once it fries up, even though it has a crispy outside, the middle stays soft. But I really liked Chef Wang Gang's recipe, where he actually uses loin meat instead of tenderloin meat. First by cutting the loin into pretty thin slices, and to emulate the tenderness of tenderloin, because if you can't find it, or if it's a little bit more expensive, he uses a hatching technique, where he uses a cleaver and cuts pretty deeply, but not all the way through each piece of meat. It's almost like a Hasselback pattern, really tightly close to each other. And then he rotates the piece of meat 90 degrees and cuts little strips, so that way each piece of pork has little hatches cut into it, which makes a little bit more tender, and also increases the surface area for both sauce and batter absorption. After I've done this for about a pound of pork loin or so, then I'm going to go ahead and make some scallion garlic water. Now this is also a very fun technique that you might not have seen. Sometimes the flavor of scallion and garlic can be quite harsh, especially when minced up, and when dealing with a large amount of food, it's not really easy to get that flavor mixed in if you just use the vegetable itself. So what we're going to do is take the side of a Chinese cleaver, smash the garlic really down, and also smash some scallions. Just kind of break it up, no chopping necessary, and throw that into some water. Then I'm going to use my hand to kind of mix that around a bit, almost emulsify this, to mix this and coax out the juices from both the scallion and the garlic into the water. And after squeezing that and sieving that, we now have the garlic scallion water. A nice refreshing seasoning used for a lot of dishes, almost used to take away the gaminess of meat, but also to infuse the essence of freshness of these vegetables. We're going to use half of this water to coat the pork, because a lot of Chinese cuisine does involve adding some sort of de-gamifying liquid to raw meat that's been prepared, such as cooking wine, but in this case garlic and scallion water. It kind of helps the freshness a bit and prepares it for the next level of seasoning that we're about to do. Now instead of making a batter directly into the pork, we're going to make this batter separately. So in a bowl, I'm going to add in 80 grams of potato starch and 50 grams of cornstarch. I'm going to slowly drizzle in some water and mix that together until it is somewhat the consistency of really tough play-doh or wet sand, if you break it up. Then I'm going to slowly add a quarter cup of vegetable oil slowly to this mixture, and once that's all combined, it should almost resemble kinetic sand, where if you combine it together, it stays together, but the moment you let go, it kind of oozes and pools away. I like to think of it as almost fresh mozzarella that's slightly warm. Once this little ball is ready, that is going to go directly onto the top of our pork, and then we're going to mix it in the water from the scallion and the garlic, plus the pork, to help that turn this into a batter. Now this sauce is going to be very different than the one from the American style. For this sauce, we're going to combine 160 grams of sugar, 6 grams of cooking wine, 8 grams of white vinegar, 15 grams of rice vinegar with one garlic clove that has been minced, and about 100 grams of soy sauce, kind of adjusting that to taste, how salty you want it. The sweet and sour for this recipe purely comes from sugar and vinegar. There's no ketchup, there's no pineapple juice, so this sauce is definitely a little bit more on the brown side, which is the clear color distinction between the two dishes. Once that's ready, we're going to fill up our wok with oil and then bring it outside to heat up on a wok burner. Once the oil has reached about 350 degrees or so, we're going to go ahead and fry each one of these pork slices that has been battered, cooking them in the oil until they're nice, golden, and crispy. Pretty simple. Taking them out, letting them drain on a tray with some paper towels and a rack, repeating the whole process until every single piece of pork has been fried to a nice golden brown perfection. Then we're going to drain the hot oil from the wok very carefully, and while there's still a little bit of the oil coating the wok, we're going to add in the rest of our scallion garlic water and our sauce and stir that around until it has started to boil violently. Then we're going to add in a cornstarch slurry using judgment and making sure that it is not too thick but also not too thin, adding in a bit by bit until it's ready for the pork. Then I'm going to toss in all these pork slices at once, throw that around, do some tossing until it's nice and glazed, and finish with a little bit more of that premium gold incense oil, which should hopefully add a nice little truffle flavor to the final dish. Now that we're back inside, I'm going to finish plating this up with a sprinkle of sesame seeds, and for some color and flavor, just a little bit more chopped scallions right on top. Now this version of sweet and sour pork, the traditional Chinese style, is heavily inspired by Chef Wang Gang's dish called Tang Su Li Ji, a dish that I grew up with mostly in at restaurants and always liked because well, what kind of kid doesn't love fried stuff that's a little bit sweet and a little bit sour? And the game was correct, eating this dish did put a smile on my face. Now let's give this a try, with rice of course. I like this version a lot more compared to the American one. There's nothing wrong with the American one, but for something that tastes a little bit more complex, a little bit deeper, and doesn't rely as much on too much sugar to kind of carry the flavor of the dish, I like how craveable this thing is. There's a lot of vinegar and a little bit of sugar to kind of counter that. There's a certain Chinese saying that kind of talks about how sourness in a dish can press down on the sweetness, and the sweetness is also pressing down on the sourness, and it's so delicious, it kind of makes the rice go down really quick. Xia Fan is kind of what they say, where when you eat this kind of dish, all you want is a bowl of rice to make that go down, and this is exactly that kind of dish. What's interesting is that ketchup is actually used in a lot of Chinese kitchens for sweet and sour dishes now, but you'll still find traditional ways of using just vinegar and sugar for a lot of things, and I think for this dish, it is definitely one of the best. There's a little bit less remaining in this one compared to the American-style one, but hey, everybody went home with a little bit of each, and all was good that day. Thanks again to Squarespace for sponsoring today's episode. From websites to online stores to domains to analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for you to build your online presence. All of my websites over the years have been with Squarespace, and I'm excited to share the new one, BABI.SH. We were able to use Squarespace's website builder and custom integrations to create a site that provides a powerful cooking experience. If you want to try Squarespace for yourself, you can start your free trial today by visiting squarespace.com slash BABI.SH to get 10% off your first purchase.