Name: Chinese Mixian Is the Next Big Noodle Soup | Food Skills
Uploaded: 2018-01-16T02:04:20.000Z
Duration: 3 min 24 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This restaurant is dedicated to mixian noodles.

They're rice noodles that originated from Yunnan Province in the southwest part of China.

Yunnan borders Myanmar, Vietnam, and Laos, so there's a lot of Southeast Asian influence

In New York, there are many different kinds of noodle shops.

We have soba, we have ramen, and we have pho, which is one of my favorites.

What makes this noodle different from pho—or other noodles—is the broth, and the ingredients

The texture has a little more of a spaghetti feel, but it's all made out of rice, so you

The ingredients are so seasonal, that as you eat each bowl you can sense the season change

The mixian noodles are made 100 percent out of rice and water.

They're slightly fermented, so they have a hint of sourness to them.

And because of the fermentation, when we cook them they're also a little springy.

It adds a good texture to the broth or sauce.

The "Grandma Mixian" is inspired by Lijiang, which is a very old town.

We make a very wholesome broth that takes about 24 to 36 hours to cook.

It consists of chicken bones, duck bones, and lots of different aromatics and spices.

As it slowly simmers and evaporates down, the broth gains more and more character.

We confit chicken thighs in their own chicken fat, so it's very tender and juicy.

And then we also make our own house-fermented chili, with fresh long hots, a little Thai

chili, garlic, and ginger all mixed together.

We also make a black-garlic oil with black sesame and roasted garlic, so it has a very

We have cilantro, different kinds of seasonal pickles, and then one of the most important

ingredients is the pu'er steeped-tea egg.

In Yunnan, they grow different kinds of edible flowers—they love flowers—so we added

some flowers and some perfume-y flavor to the whole thing.

I really understand and love the classic, traditional kind of mixian found in China.

But I come from an American fine-dining background, so I went to a different part of Yunnan and

I wanted to share the variety and the diversity of Chinese cuisine.

Chinese food is very-seasonally driven, because we were all farmers and peasants.

We would go to the market, we would buy ingredients, we would stir-fry them, and we wouldn't have

So it's very fresh and ingredient-driven.

I want to do more as a chef in New York to share that part of Chinese cooking, and to

tell a newer story about Chinese cuisine.