Welcome to the fourth season of the podcast COOKING WITH BRUCE & MARK. We've changed things up a bit. We've still got a one-minute cooking tip. And we'll still let you know what's making us happy in food. Otherwise, we're focusing each podcast episode on an interview, a recipe, or a taste-test.

This week, come into our kitchen as we make chicken "char siu" in an air fryer. Admittedly, we're a bit crazy: turning a classic Chinese barbecued pork into one for boneless skinless chicken thighs--and then getting them crunchy in an air fryer.

We love that classic flavor, which we can only get with a classic Chinese ingredient: fermented red bean curd. You'll probably need to find it at an Asian grocery store, although we've found it at Walmart! Or you can order it here.

Speaking of ordering, our brand-new cookbook is THE LOOK & COOK AIR FRYER BIBLE: 125 recipes with 704 step-by-step photos. Click the title to get your copy!

Thanks for being with us. Here are the segments for this episode of COOKING WITH BRUCE & MARK:

[00:58] Our one-minute cooking tip: Whenever you turn the oven on, think about what else you can cook at the same time.

[01:30] We're making chicken "char siu." For the recipe, please sign up for our newsletter on the splash page our website here. Or find the recipe on our website under the blog for these podcast episodes.

[17:19] What's making us happy in food this week: homemade crème de cassis and French press coffee.

Hey,

I'm Bruce and this is the podcast cooking

with Bruce and Mark

and I'm Mark Scarbrough and together with Bruce we have written over three dozen cookbooks and Now I have to say welcome

And now what we're doing is we're concentrating on a single thing in each episode.

We're going to start with a cooking tip, the famed one minute cooking tip.

Then we're going to go on and do some.

thing in the second segment, whether that is cook a recipe, have an interview, talk about food, and then

So we might as well get started.

Our one minute cooking tip.

Whenever I turn the oven on, I think about what else I can make at the same time.

If I'm baking potatoes to go with a steak, well, I'll throw a tray of eggplant slices in so I could have eggplant parm another night.

Is this a one minute cooking tip?

Or a lesson in how to be OCD.

If I'm baking lasagna, maybe I'll throw a few sweet potatoes in the oven so I have them for a salad at lunch the next day.

Saves time, saves electricity, and allows me to have something to eat beyond the meal I'm currently making.

I guess that's our one minute cooking tip.

Think what else you can cook in your oven.

In this episode of the podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark, we are going to actually make a recipe.

So we're going to go into the kitchen and pull together, believe it or not, an air fried version of chicken char siu.

Most people know char siu as pork, or it's pork char siu, but what?

is char siu in Chinese markets.

It's usually pork, right?

And it's barbecued and it's hanging in the front of the store or in the back of the store.

We often call it street meat, but yes, street beast or street meat.

Yes, exactly.

And lately I have found packaged, ready to grill Chinese marinated pork and chicken labeled char siu.

And yes, even in my local supermarkets, I have something that The big Y, which is a big New England chain.

But usually that stuff is just sweet soy, almost like teriyaki.

And maybe they put some red food coloring in it.

Okay.

We're going to make a traditional marinade.

We're going to put it on untraditional meat using chicken.

And we're going to make it in an air fryer because you know, we're all about air frying with all our air frying books.

You know, all about all that stuff.

So here we go.

Let's get started.

So I've got a big.

bowl here.

And you need a big bowl.

Don't pull out some little salad bowl.

You need a big mixing bowl, or as my mother would call it, or as my grandmother would call it, a big stirring bowl.

You need a big bowl.

We called it a salad bowl when I was a kid, because that was always the biggest bowl we had

And that was like the biggest mixing bowl we had.

Okay.

Well, anyway, you need the biggest thing you have.

And here's what we're going to put in here.

We're going to start with a quarter cup of hoisin sauce.

Now, if you don't know about hoisin sauce, That is a, well, it's supposed to be a sweet potato paste,

It's barely been made with sweet potatoes in the last, uh, how many dynasties?

I don't know.

A lot.

But you can find it in even supermarkets.

It's hoisin sauce.

And then we, I'm going to add a quarter cup of brown, what brown sugar?

What is this?

Well, I like, I like using light brown sugar in this, but I think dark brown sugar probably is a better choice.

I just have this thing about light brown sugar.

What in the hell is this stuff?

Mmm, , a third of a cup of red fermented bean curd.

What?

Wait, what?

Mark is asking me what it is because there's not a, there's not a word of English on this bottle.

What?

This bottle is all in Chinese, a little square bottle.

So, this is...

Tofu, but it's not stinky tofu.

Oh, well, thank heavens.

If you know about stinky tofu, uh, well, it's not what this is.

This is tofu cubes that are brined and preserved and, sometimes it's called tofu cheese.

It comes In, oh, that didn't make it sound better.

. It comes in, uh, varieties that are red or white.

Most Americans don't know what it is.

So what is it?

It actually is one of those foods that I think could have been on Fear factor.

Remember that show where people would have to eat all sorts of gross things?

Yeah.

Well, I'm fear factored right now.

A third, a cup of red fermented bean curd.

So it's basically you start with fresh bean curd and then they, they age it and ferment it with salt, with rice wine.

flavorings.

Um, actually in Cantonese, it's a called foo ee.

And,

oh my gosh, please don't write in about that pronunciation.

I can feel the idiocy of that pronunciation, but do go on.

And it is used mostly as a flavoring agent, not as a main protein.

It's salty.

Mostly the red comes from red rice yeast.

That is the ingredient that.

Turns it red.

Okay,

so, so, okay, so what am I supposed to do with all this stuff?

So you're gonna take a fork and I want you to mash up that fermented bean curd red cheese with

You're doing good.

So it's a smooth paste.

Is it's supposed to look like something in a baby diaper?

Is that what it's supposed to?

Well, I guess if your baby's having bloody, yeah,

I was about to say, if it's coming out red, Seek medical attention.

Did you know the woman in TikTok, maybe you don't, as I do this, who always says, everybody's so creative.

Everybody's so creative.

Notice how that looks like something you never want to eat, but we're gonna.

That's what I feel like.

I feel like she said, notice how that looks like something, yeah, you don't want to eat.

Well.

Okay,

so now I'm going to pour into that a third of a cup of soy and I'm not gonna keep mixing.

No, you could stop.

And I'm not using low sodium soy in this.

Why?

This is a marinade.

This is a brine.

This is a salty dish.

And to balance that soy, I'm using two tablespoons of honey for a little sweetness.

And I'm putting two tablespoons of Shaoxing wine, which is a rice cooking wine.

And one.

Teaspoon of Chinese five spice and Mark, what is five spice powder?

It's

a traditional like five spice powder.

It's a traditional mix of cinnamon, sometimes cardamom, fennel.

There's a star anise.

Honestly, there's as many versions of five spice as probably there are Chinese home cooks.

I know when you go in the store, you just see this bottle of five spice.

But you know, the thing is you can buy a little tiny jar of it.

in almost any supermarket and it's worth having.

It'll last a while.

So I would just go in and use this last ingredient.

Uh, red food coloring.

Isn't that cancer?

No, it's actually usually insects.

It's that carmine red.

And it's made from ground up, dried insects.

So we really are at fear factor.

Okay.

So a few drops, it really gives it that beautiful char siu golden red that you want.

Okay.

So mix those up.

Let's get all that mixed up.

Okay.

There, that's good.

This seems wrong.

I mean, I don't know.

I don't know why it seems wrong to me.

You know what seems wrong, and this is interesting.

Notice how there's no garlic, there's no ginger, except for whatever ground ginger is

The holy trinity of Asian cooking, of Chinese cooking, and it's none of those are in here.

Was that

racist?

That felt racist.

Was that racist?

The Holy Trinity of Chinese cooking?

I don't know.

Is that?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Um, let's skip over that.

Okay.

Because maybe garlic, ginger, and scallions is the Holy Trinity of Armenian cooking.

Well, maybe it is.

Okay, now we're going to pull out a cutting board and we're going to pull out a knife.

And we have one pound of boneless, skinless chicken thighs, and I'm only cutting off the large blobs of fat because quite

So I'm just slicing off some of the larger pieces, but I'm keeping the big chunks of chicken thighs whole.

And now we're going to Add them to that marinade you just made.

I believe the

culinary term is plop them in.

We're going to plop them in.

We've got this in here, and I've stirred it around a little bit.

And now what we're going to do is cover this in plastic wrap and set it in the fridge for six hours.

Um, you can do it up to 24 on the day ahead.

Okay, when we stick this in the fridge, great.

Okay, in it goes.

Now, talk to me about this red fermented bean curd.

Where in the world does one find this?

I found it in the little town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts in a Japanese, uh, grocery store and he

Okay, that's great.

Um, any Asian...

So if you live in Oregon, you just drive to Great Barrington, Massachusetts

and If there is an Asian supermarket near you, they should have it.

And if you don't have one near you, you can go online.

There are so...

Many online Asian markets from yammybuy.

com to gogofresh to posharp store.

So there are just Google red fermented bean curd.

You will find square jars without any English writing on them.

And that's what you're looking for.

And why is this a secret?

There's an umaminess to this tofu there when, you know, umami being that other sense that's not

But without it, there's a huge difference in taste.

Right.

Okay, and let me say one more thing before we get on to air frying this.

We're going to actually have to cut away and let this marinate.

Before we get on to air frying it in a minute, let's just say for a minute that we did use the Shaoxing wine, the rice wine.

It is traditional in Chinese cooking.

If you don't have Shaoxing, the best substitute is dry sherry.

because it has a slightly woody flavor to it.

It's the better substitute than vermouth or any kind of white wine.

If you want to dump the alcohol completely from the dish itself, then what I would suggest that you use is a little bit of

Some people say you should use unsweetened prune juice for a Shaoxing substitute, but I always think that's too far.

But you can dump the alcohol from this, but just be mindful of the fact.

That most of the alcohol here will cook out.

Well,

not all.

And plus the food's not going to absorb that much alcohol to begin with.

And then what it might have will cook off, but okay.

We're going to come back after this has been marinated 24 hours and cook it.

Here's the air fryer and it is going, it's at 400 degrees and we are heating it up.

Now this is really debatable.

And a lot of people debate this endlessly, and we have a theory, because we've written so many air frying

You want to talk about that?

It's called Do It.

Basically, do it, and I get questions all the time in our Essential Air Fryer group on Facebook, where

I get questions on our YouTube channel with the air fryer recipes all the time.

They say, well, my recipe says I don't have to, or my new air fryer says I don't have to.

All

the online gurus of air frying say, you know, essentially put the crap in there and turn it

on.

And they're telling you that so that they think you're making your life easier.

And are they?

Well, sure.

You're making your life easier, but you're not making your food better.

And it doesn't take but two to three minutes at most for an air fryer to heat up.

So heat it up.

You want that little sizzle on the bottom, on the cooking tray.

You want the instantly to have.

The marinade, the coating, whichever on it to start to set, not blow off.

What we've discovered is that this has nothing to do with the recipe we're making now, but that lighter coatings

So you really, really want to heat your air fryer.

So we've got this thing up to 400

degrees.

I'm going to open the drawer, and I'm going to lay these Chicken thighs in there.

Using kitchen tongs, he said.

The chef wants to use his hands.

Always.

Your hands are the best tools you have in the kitchen.

Gross

fingernails.

Gross food safety.

So, using kitchen

tongs.

And if they touch, it's okay.

If your hands touch?

No, if the chicken thighs touch.

And you just don't want to make a...

solid wall of them.

So as long as air can get around, that's okay.

If yours is not big enough to fit all of your thighs in there.

Oh, are we still talking about cooking?

Then you're going to have to do it in batches.

We're using...

Oh, are we still talking about cooking?

So ours fit and because I have this like super sized giant double vortex thing which is really pretty

Okay, so 10 minutes are over and these are pretty sizzly

already.

They're blackened on the edges, which is nice.

That's because all the sugar that's in it and the fat we left on the

chicken.

There's sugar in the hoisin.

There's the honey that we've put in it.

Brown sugar.

Yeah.

There's the brown sugar.

And then there's that.

Red fermented bean curd going on.

So it's blackening up like char siu, except again, we're using chicken thighs and we're air frying it.

So this is so weird.

We're using a very traditional marinade, but a very non traditional meat.

And a very non traditional cooking method.

Yeah.

And method.

So I'm going to turn them and each one of these, Oh God, you can see, look at that beautiful,

It looks a little lacquered.

I've seen recipes.

Where people insist on brushing them with more honey at this point.

We're saving back some of that marinade and brushing it on.

Now, I think that's overdoing it.

Personally, after testing this recipe a number of times, I think the flavor is best to just turn them.

So, back in and another 10 minutes and then they'll be done.

Okay, so we're done.

And let me just say that, uh, remind you that if you're gonna make this recipe...

Uh, two things.

One, the recipe itself exists in the program notes to this episode, so you can just look down in the player,

And two, let me also say that if you have to do this in batches, Put the remaining chicken thighs back in the

And I want to say something about people who are going to write and say, can I make this with chicken breast?

The answer is, can you?

Of course you can.

Will it be good?

Not in my opinion.

This is something that really requires the dark meat, the juiciness of the dark meat, the fat of the dark meat.

You're cooking this a long time.

20 minutes is a long time for a boneless flattened out skinless chicken thigh, but you want that lacquer on it.

You want this.

Beautiful golden edges that we have quit talking.

All right.

I'm going to slice up one.

Really honestly, stop talking.

Okay.

And now we are going to taste

this.

Yeah.

Um, I'm sorry.

I'm stepping away because I'm blowing on it.

I don't want to blow into the mic

Mark has this theory that you shouldn't blow on your foods.

I'm surprised he's even blowing on the spoon,

but it's too hot.

It just came out of the machine, but you know, in the, in the spirit of a podcast, here we go.

This to me tastes like Chinatown.

Yeah, it is an amazing.

Replication of flavors without the pork.

It's salty, it's sweet, it's umami.

What I want to do with these, because there's a lot of them here, is I want to slice them up and I want to make

The stir fried rice noodles with...

The homemade char siu chicken and some scallions and garlic and a little splash of black soy sauce.

Oh God.

That'd be so good.

Let me just say before we step away from this actual cooking adventure, which I had

And the red food coloring.

Oh God.

Optional.

Optional.

Oh God.

Anyway, um, let me just say that again, this recipe lives in the show notes of whatever player you're looking at this on

And let me also say that there is a video of Bruce making this on Tik Tok.

So if you join our Tik Tok channel, Cooking with Bruce and Mark, you can actually see Bruce make these.

Not as we did here.

It's a very fast cut video.

What?

It takes like about 90 seconds to get the whole thing done.

So it's a very fast cut video, but still in the, unless you'll get the idea of how it goes,

you'll see what that red tofu cubes look like.

Yeah, you will.

So there you go.

There's a cooking.

episode of Cooking With bruce and Mark.

We got so many listener requests that we returned to cooking podcast episodes.

And so here we are.

Some people said that they missed the cooking spicy content.

So I hope that we've given you spicy content here.

I'm a little over the top.

And let's move on to the typical last section of our podcast.

What's making us happy in food this week?

Homemade creme de cassis liqueur.

Mark is an amazing gardener, and many of you may know this, and he has these beautiful blackcurrant bushes right outside

So I mushed them up and I steeped them for three weeks in a bottle of Everclear, which in case you don't know is like 190 pounds.

proof grain alcohol, anybody who's been to college knows what Everclear is, anyone.

And then I strained that out in a jelly bag and I mixed it with simple syrup and it is delicious.

It is wild.

I just say that I'm going to say one thing about this, that I'm a total renegade.

Because when I planted those black currant bushes in New England, they were illegal.

You couldn't have black currants.

And I'm not exactly sure what the legality of it, but it was, at the time, illegal.

So it was like growing pot in my garden.

It was a total illegal substance, allegedly.

Like, someone's going to arrest me for black currants.

What's making me happy on Food This Week is French press coffee.

I don't know if you ever have a French press at home.

But I love French press coffee.

Explain what it is.

So, right, a French press is a, um, coffee maker where you put the grounds in the bottom, it's a glass carafe, you

over the grounds.

You put the plunger in the carafe.

You wait.

I like really strong coffee, so I wait five or six minutes.

You push the plunger down, the grounds go to the bottom, and then you pour off the coffee from it.

And the coffee is super smooth, super delicious.

I'm having a great time having French press in the mornings, and I'm enjoying every

And let me just say that French press does require a very coarsely ground coffee.

You do not use the same grinds that you would put in a drip pump.

It must be a very, very coarse.

They'll all slip through the filter and it's a mess.

And also, let me just also say, since I love French press coffee, that it is a real mess to clean up.

It's ridiculous.

I line a colander with paper towels, and then I have to pour the grinds into it and keep washing the carafe

And that's because we live in the country and we're on spetic.

If you're not on septic, coffee grinds won't really hurt it.

too much if you cut some down the drain, but not where the septic is.

I don't even know about septic.

I mean, non septic.

I don't even know.

We've lived so remote for so long on septic.

I don't even know about real town.

Yeah.

Your, your town.

Yeah.

Your town probably wouldn't like it if you were dumping coffee grounds down there.

No, probably not.

But, um, okay.

Anyway, so there you go.

That's.

That's our show, uh, in the fourth season, our first episode of Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

We actually cooked the dish live.

It took us a while because we had to let that chicken marinate, so it's been kind of a labor of weirdness to get, to get to

And we still have our group, Cooking with Bruce and Mark on Facebook, so please go to

We post episodes, we post videos, we talk about recipes.

So we'll see you there.

And we'll see you back here for another episode of season four, cooking with Bruce and Mark.