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Day With Mei

Chinese-American pantry recipes

ice cream

red bean ice cream in rocher shape

Sweet · January 17, 2024

Red Bean Ice Cream

Beans in ice cream are commonplace in East Asian countries like Singapore, China, and Japan. This red bean ice cream recipe teaches you how to make it at home from anywhere in the world. You will need an ice cream…

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Sweet · December 15, 2023

Triple Toasted Vanilla Ice Cream

This vanilla ice cream is anything but boring with 3x the toastiness and all the same ingredients as the classic. That is: toasted milk, toasted sugar, and toasted vanilla bean. Yes, you can toast vanilla beans! It lends a smokier,…

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Hi! I'm Mei, a Chinese-American recipe developer seeing familiar foods from a new perspective.

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Maple Bourbon Sichuan Bacon (川味腊肉) Ice Cream big Maple Bourbon Sichuan Bacon (川味腊肉) Ice Cream

big thank you to @t1bg for the flavor idea 🙇‍♀️🥓🍁🥃
Tinned Fish Talk 🎣 King Salmon Cheeks from @wildfi Tinned Fish Talk 🎣 King Salmon Cheeks from @wildfishcannery 

King salmon cheeks are a cut you can’t get anywhere else in a can, it’s rare to even find at a fishmonger, much less a restaurant. Fish cheeks are rare because they are so small and labor-intensive to harvest. There’s only two per fish so you can imagine how much it takes to fill a single can.

The good news: this is one of the most uniquely pleasurable experiences I’ve had from a tin of fish. The bad news: there is a very limited quantity that sells out almost immediately each year (sorry!) For transparency, they sent me this tin ($44) but know i’ve been a continued customer and all opinions are my own.

I chose to warm up the unopened tin in hot water so the natural fat and collagen are even more luxurious—like a fatty, unctuous scallop. King salmon has a relatively mild flavor and richer texture compared to sockeye or coho. Wildfish Cannery is a one-of-a-kind operation here in North America with a tight-knit supply chain that hand-packs fish caught locally in Southeast Alaska. I hold a special respect for their culinary approach, the cannery is a direct opposition to the category’s commodity reputation.
2 weeks later, we have Sichuan larou! In the pre 2 weeks later, we have Sichuan larou! 

In the previous video, I cured pork belly in salt and spices for several days then set it outside to dry. I smoked it with apple wood pellets and cooked off a piece to taste.
How do you keep traditional foods alive? Sichuan How do you keep traditional foods alive?

Sichuan bacon season is back! Larou (Sichuan bacon) is a cured pork belly process similar to pancetta. It’s first seasoned with spices and salt in an equilibrium cure, hung outside to dehydrate, then (optionally) smoked. The earliest records of this wind-cured meat date back to the Zhou Dynasty roughly 3000 years ago. 

In Sichuan you can buy larou everywhere. In the US no one really makes it at scale. I grew up in the US making it with my family every winter season out of that necessity. Funny enough I’m the only one from my generation still carrying it on, and I’m the one farthest from home.
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