Crispy Rice Dome. (锅巴)

22 Replies to “Crispy Rice Dome. (锅巴)”

1. Hey guys, a few notes:

   1. Obviously, feel free to mix and match these two approaches. Want to make the square guoba, and smother it with Kung Pao chicken? Go for it.

   2. For the rice ratios, the ratio of sticky rice to jasmine rice can range from 1:5 to 1:2… depending on how sticky you want your rice to be. The stickier it is, the easier to shape. On the flip side, sticky rice tends to get a little harder than Jasmine after deep frying, so after testing we settled on that 1:3 ratio.

   3. A short grain rice (such as Japanese sushi rice) should be quite sticky on its own – sticky enough to do the job. That said, we never tested it. My best guess is that you’d probably still want a little sticky rice to be the “glue”.

   4. It’d be easier to dry and fry if your rice is cooked at a slightly drier ratio. If you know how your rice behaves, you can slightly cut the water when cooking it.

   5. Frying the rice directly in a wok is mimicking the traditional cooking method in a big wok. However, there’s another very common way of making guoba in China, which is to completely dry the rice and then deep fry it in very hot (~220C) oil so that it puffs up into a nice rice crispy. That’s a common method seen in restaurants as dried rice guoba is easy to store and the that needs for deep frying is short. We have an old video on the topic: https://youtu.be/fr6493AB1kA.

   6. Probably one of the most classic ways to make a ‘guoba dish’ is to simply add some water and make a sort of… ‘wok soup’. Apparently in Korea this’s also a common practice?

   7. Whenever I deal with chilis sans gloves on this channel, there’s always a chorus of people that ask how I deal with it (and if I’m crazy). Especially if I’m handling these sorts of soaked dried chilis, my hands do get ‘spicy’ like everyone else’s. If you want to work with gloves, I think it’s a nice idea – and probably best practice. What I personally do though is this: after working with chilis, I thoroughly wash my hands/fingernails three times – once with high proof liquor, once with detergent, and once with hand soap. I just… hate wearing gloves to cook, and that seems to work well 99% of the time for me and my skin. But you might be different!

   8. So in preparation for this video, I did a little poll on the community tab on what kind of wok y’all have (if you even have a wok). My guess going into the poll was something like 70% flat bottomed, 20% wokless, and 10% round bottomed. Interesting (to me at least) there were more wokless and round bottomed people out there than I anticipated! The final results were 48% flat bottomed, 32% wokless, 20% round bottomed. Should have also included a non-stick option, but hey.

   9. When you finish your ‘domed’ guoba, you might end up having a bit that’s overly scorched, a bit blackened. Totally normal. Either don’t worry about it, or scrape off the burnt bits with a knife if you’re making YouTube thumbnails.

   10. For the ganba, what we used in the video is Yunnan style beef ganba that we brought from the old Chinese Muslim community in Chiang Mai. This kind of beef jerky was traditionally a “travel food” accompanying their tea trade journey in the mountains. The southwest China has a pretty strong meat jerky culture and they’re awesome. This beef ganba is a bit similar to aged ham in a way that it’s also lightly fermented and have a nice funk to it. Similar to other Chinese smoked sausage, these ganba needs a hot water soak before using, which we didn’t showed in the video because it’s not applicable for the ready to eat beef jerky in the west.

   11. So, if you get your hands on some Chinese style beef ganba… you’ll need to soak it in hot boiled water for 15 minutes, then use a knife to patiently scrape off the surface fat and mold. Then wash it clean before slicing.

   12. We were mulling over different ways to substitute ganba for the video, settling on simply using the ganba we had and instructing y’all to use [insert beef jerky you have here]. Not sure if that was the right call or now, but it felt like one of those things with minimal downside risk? Like, if someone out there ended up frying some slim jims with guoba, chili & Sichuan peppercorns… it’d be a little on the junky side but I don’t think it’d be bad per se…

   So yeah. That’s all for now. Next video’ll also be out slightly later in the month (likely around the 22-23rd?) as we decided to take a couple days off here to partake in Songkran – feels like one of those things you gotta do at least once 🙂

2. My rice cooker is really good at providing a crispy bottom even when not asked

3. Holy shit the street food sandwich looks like the greatest culinary creation ever

4. Damn! I need this in my life!

5. I've made the ciba paste before with dried ñora and one or two thai birdseye… turned out quite well but obviously tasted a bit more… earthy thanks to the ñora. The colour was almost purple too!

6. Xiangling main intensified

7. Damn that's a lot of oil, not diet food I assume

8. 10:54: "The best part about making 锅巴 is knowing that 鬼佬 don't know how to, and it's important to make 锅巴, so that you can remind white devils that they can’t have anything good in life. They’re allowed to have processed cheese and milk, and fast food hamburgers. Hey, that's a pretty good 锅巴… Not that a 鬼佬 would know HAHA HAHAHAHAHA"

9. Isnt Guoba fried ganba just Rice jerky fried beef jerky?

10. I feel like there is unrealized potential to make a (gluten free) pizza out of this

11. Total food porn

12. woah. thats so much oil. i love chinese cooking, but how do chinese people stay thin and healthy with these amounts of oil. im aware that frying at good temperatures makes it so that the food doesnt absorb everything, but still. do you eat more lean foods in day to day life?

13. For once I know several good subs that I can get literally anywhere, because cured meats are still very much popular in Europe, yet jerky is not
    Maybe I can ask my butcher to cut some cured meat extra thick to get that texture…

14. your expression eating it at the end is the best!!! 😀

15. yaay! I have the same exact thin cast iron wok as the grandpa at 1:30

16. Guoba get them

17. I think bresaola (and similar things like viande de Grissons) might be good as a sub for the meat. Something like pastirma might work if you want to incorporate the spices into your flavor (lots of chili and garlic, which is typically Chinese, but also lots of fenugreek which I think is not. And maybe some sumac and…)

    Bresaola is available at most expensive delis in the US, including at a lot of grocery stores; it's also easily found online.

18. Why is that I am always hungry after watching your episode(s)? Also I wash my rice on high, delicate cycle, using Tide. Then tumble dry. ????????????‍♂????‍♂

19. Some high-end Japanese rice cookers have a setting specifically for scorched rice.

20. "this is guoba" my genshin playing ass: the stove god??

    joking aside indonesia also has similar dishes to this. usually people make it using the leftover, kinda burnt rice at the bottom of the pot when you make rice on the stovetop. unfortunately i'm not familiar with how you make it because it's gotten rarer due to the popularity of rice cookers, but people typically either eat it just salted or sweetened with coconut sugar. It's meant to be a quick snack and people don't usually add anything else to it.

21. After watching this… I'm gonna get me uh beer and some spicy food.

22. Omg this reminds me of sizzling rice soup… Havent had it in ages and the flavor and smell of the rice is so damn good. You guys have a recipe for that?

Comments are closed.