The Kitchen: Multi-course Chinese meal in one hour

Details for a class I taught on June 23, 2023 at the The Kitchen.

While this class was initially advertised as a five-course Chinese meal, we actually ended up doing a tiny bit more.

If you attended the class, I hope you had fun!

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me through Instagram or through my contact form.

Themes

This particular multi-course meal is prepared with efficiency and cleanliness in mind. The sequence of dishes are collected in a manner to enable a person to prepare all the dishes pretty quickly and with minimal cleanup required at the end.

This is accomplished by:

  • Re-using the same sets of cooking equipment without the need to reset (i.e., clean) the equipment in between.
  • Ordering the dishes from low heat to high heat, so there’s no need to alternate between heating up and cooling down, which is wasteful in terms of time and (thermal) energy.
  • Building the dishes up from low mess to high mess, mitigating the need to clean in between preparations.

Equipment

There are three main cooking vessels:

  • A pot full of water for boiling and blanching
  • A pot for the rice
  • A wok or pan for cooking

Other tools that are useful include:

  • A bunch of mixing bowls
  • A stirring implement
  1. One-pot rice with sausage and mushroom
  2. Smashed cucumbers
  3. Szechuan cold noodles
  4. Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce
  5. Chicken (or tofu/mushroom) stir fry with broccoli
  6. Egg drop soup

The dishes are ordered to optimize cook time and minimize the mess created.

At no point is the cooking medium emptied out or cleaned during the meal preparation.

The same pot of water gets re-used: first to boil noodles for the Szechuan cold noodles, then to blanch vegetables for the Chinese broccoli and Chicken with broccoli, and then finally as a soup base for the egg drop soup.

Subtitution

This time around, I used a vegan-friendly Oyster sauce (similar to this), made from a mushroom base. This allowed me to prepare a truly vegetarian Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce and a tofu or mushroom with broccoli stir fry.