Top Chinese chef’s YouTube cooking series stirs up buzz – and bickering
Andrew Wong of London’s two-Michelin-star A.Wong teaches the basics of Chinese cooking to home cooks, but not everyone agrees with his views
In a new YouTube series for home cooks, chef Andrew Wong – owner of A.Wong in London, the first Chinese restaurant outside Asia to earn two Michelin stars – is not afraid of flouting convention.
While cutting the spring onions, he pokes fun at chefs who arrive at his restaurant with big heavy bags of knives: “Like, what are you going to do with all those knives?” he asks, explaining that in China, chefs usually use just two knives: a heavy cleaver for meats and a lighter one for cutting vegetables.
He tells home cooks not to bother making their own rice paper wrappers: “We, in the restaurant, have attempted to make it ourselves. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. It’s too hard.”
“You’re going to get all these people [say], ‘Don’t waste the water’ … I get it, you don’t want to waste it, there’s flavour in there. Yes. But … I’ve seen where they dry these shiitake mushrooms in China … they’re an incredible product, but some of these products are still dried on rooftops with flowing traffic going past them,” he says.