S2 • E21 Sep 9, 2009 30m
The actual cooking may not be the most difficult aspect of Anna and Kristina's latest cooking challenge, but understanding what all the unfamiliar ingredients are. They are tackling six recipes from "Chinese Kitchen", a cookbook that strives to provide its users with knowledge to cook authentic Chinese cuisine, and not the Chinese fast food that so many North Americans know as Chinese food. They admit that the actual cooking will also be a challenge, as food is more than just sustenance within the Chinese culture and as such it will be difficult to impress their guest chef taster, television chef Martin Yan. In the five hours of cooking, they are preparing basic cooked rice, hot & sour soup, sweet & sour pork, shrimp marinated in green tea leaves, beggar's chicken, and glutinous rice cake. They are most concerned with the chicken dish - the most difficult in their estimation - and the rice dessert, as Chinese cuisine is not known for its sweets. For the shrimp recipe, they taste test green teas to see if there is a difference between tea made with loose leaves and tea made with tea bags, which is generally made with what is considered inferior tea. And they test which material makes the easiest to handle chopsticks.
