Transcript: Chinese Cooking Demystified with Chris Thomas and Stephanie Li

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Oana Grigor and Natalia Polom for checking and formatting, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics and society, and food scene. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.

I am Kaiser Kuo. I’m coming to you again this week, from the lovely town of Shaxi in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province. It’s actually my last day here. I’m flying back to Beijing this afternoon after a month-long, unimaginably productive, thoroughly wonderful retreat with other members of my band, Chun Qiu — Spring & Autumn, which, as I’ve mentioned before, reformed earlier this year — reformed in the sense of putting ourselves back together, not, you know, changing our wicked ways.

A couple of days ago, we debuted a bunch of new material in unplugged form. But for fans of the band who also like our harder side, rest assured that there is a good range of hard rock and metal compositions that will be featured on the forthcoming album — still to be titled.

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By great good fortune, I am joined today here in Shaxi by two of my absolute favorite YouTubers, Chris Thomas and Stephanie Li, who host the amazing Chinese Cooking Demystified, which also has a great Substack, which I urge you all to subscribe to. I’ve recommended their YouTube channel and newsletter before on the program, but it’s just a thrill to have them both here in the flesh in Shaxi.

These two are just the best. You might remember back in February of 2020, in the depths of the Chinese COVID lockdown anyway, how they came to the attention of many people in the U.S., and the West more generally, where they were profiled in the New Yorker, talking about their experience cooking together and making their videos while under lockdown when they were then living in southern Guangdong province.

But more impactful for me, and what really made me want to get in touch was actually the video that Chris put out, setting people straight on what a wet market really looks like, responding, of course, to the early reactions to COVID, that focused on the now-notorious Huanan seafood market in Wuhan. The video countered the sensationalism with play in good sense, Chris narrating as he takes us around a typical wet market in a mask, and making many of us living, then in the U.S., quite envious of the quality of the produce and the seafood that was on offer. Immediately, I began to really delve into the work and follow what they were doing. And I hold them chiefly responsible for much of the weight gain that I had during the pandemic. Later, we connected via chat online. I’m just delighted that they could join me here in Shaxi, even if only briefly. Seriously, folks, their channel is just marvelous. And not just because of the demystification that it really delivers on as promised, and not just for the culinary erudition that Steph and Chris bring to the show, but also just for the infectious passion, the true love of cooking and eating, and the sense, still, of awe, of wonder, of respect that they have for the crazy, diverse, insanely delicious food that they talk about and teach you to make.

Chris Thomas and Stephanie Li, welcome to Sinica at long last. And welcome to Shaxi.

Chris Thomas: Thanks for having us here.

Stephanie Li: Yeah, great to be here.

Kaiser: So, first time in Shaxi, though, you guys now live in Yunnan. Tell us a little bit about that.

Steph: Yeah, we live in Yuxi on the south side of Kunming, kind of close. But it’s a proper city, not like Shaxi, like laying this in this ideal, like little 坝子 (bàzi) in Yunnan. It’s quite different. It’s a different scene here.

Kaiser: Yeah, but it’s not so far away. So, I mean, I will be back here a lot, so I expect that we will cook and eat together. And we cooked together last night, which was a delight for me.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, that was a lot of fun. Yeah, your friend-

Kaiser: Da He.

Chris: Da He — fantastic Sichuan cook that was putting everybody to shame, you know.

Kaiser: Yeah. I mean, I modestly put forward a couple of like dishes, and I made like a fish-flavored eggplant and a 红烧肉 (hóngshāoròu), but you guys, tell us about that dish that you made.

Chris: Yeah. So, this is just something that we’ve kind of been testing. There’s a specific Yunnan dish. Exploring around Yunnan, it’s been a lot of fun because there’s just so much diversity here within Yunnan.

Kaiser: I hear that of the 56 ethnic minorities, some half of them live here.

Chris: Yeah. But even that almost kind of undersells it because it undersells the diversity within Han cuisine as well, right?

Kaiser: Right.

Chris: And so there is one specific dish. It’s something that we’re working on for the channel, where there’s a small village called Puozhao, and it was on the old Tea Horse Trail.

Kaiser: Right, which you are on right now. We’re sitting on that trail.

Chris: Yeah, yeah, this portion of it. Yeah, so that one little village, it existed at the intersection of the old trail, and then also the Guo Dao, where a lot of truckers would come through because a lot of the old Guo Daos, they would kind of follow the old trading routes. And so, this one little village existed on that specific intersection. And so they have, I wouldn’t call it like a full cuisine, but they definitely have, let’s just say, their own little dialect of a cuisine, where they have about like five or six unique dishes. And one of them is, this one old kind of ​​马帮 (mǎbāng) dish called 杂菜锅 (zácàiguō). And so it’s a fun vegetable dish.

So, we’ve been kind of working on it, and you get a lot of, I guess, rock musicians together, and you know that everybody’s going to be making a lot of meat. So, it’s a nice kind of like chili oil-laced vegetable dish that can kind of complete-

Kaiser: There’s a meat base, though. I mean, there’s sort of-