Tag: appitizer

Salt and Pepper Calamari – P.F. Chang’s Recipe

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Calamari Steaks

For most people, making Tender Calamari is not an easy chore.  Even restaurants struggle with it.  When you get it in rings, it’s slices of the body on those six inch squid, so it tends to be very chewy.  When you get all eight of the legs and tentacles, you are just getting the lower half of the same squid.  Understand?  Top and Bottom.  No matter what you do, Cooking Calamari like this isn’t ever going to make it any less chewy, and tenderizing them with a mallet is just ridiculous.  So you need another solution, and here it is; Calamari Steaks!

Thumb Smith's Food and Drug

This isn’t just a good alternative; it’s the best way to turn out Tender Calamari.  It’s not chewy this way at all.  It’s soft yet Crispy and very flavorful.  In fact I can eat an entire plate of it cooked this way, and you will to if you haven’t already.  Oh, and if you can’t find it at your local grocery or seafood market, tell them to order it for you.  How do you think I got these?  Smith’s Food and Drug just pitches me a phone call when ever anything I ask them to order arrives.  No extra cost to me, and they get exactly what I want, when I want it.  It’s sweet!

Anyway, the Salt and Pepper Calamari recipe can be found at various restaurants around the globe.  I think the most popular menus include P.F. Chang’s Salt and Pepper Calamari (my personal favorite), and Typhoon’s, which I don’t like at all.  So today I’m going to model P.F. Chang’s.  If you’ve ever had their recipe, you know it’s to die for.  So let’s dive right in to this Tender Calamari recipe and get started.

Salt and Pepper Tender Calamari video tutorial by PoorMansGourmet.

Tender Salt and Pepper Calamari Ingredients:Calamari Sauce Ingredients

2-4 Calamari Steaks Thawed and sliced
1-2 Green Onions thinly sliced
2 Pinches of Margarita Salt and Pepper

Marinade:

1 egg white
2 tbsp canola oil (any oil is fine)
1 pinch of Garlic Powder
1 pinch of Ginger Powder (Curry powder isn’t bad either)
½ tsp Soy Sauce
½ cup of Corn Starch

Calamari Dipping Sauce:

1 pt Hoisin Sauce
½ pt Black Bean Garlic Sauce (or Bean Curd)
1 pt Orange Chili Sauce
You can also add a little bit of sugar soy and vinegar if you’d like.

After ½ hour of marinating the Tender Calamari, dredge the slices through Potato starch, or cornstarch until it is evenly coated, then fry at 375 degrees for 1 ½ minutes.  Be sure to separate each piece with a spider or a slotted spoon while frying.  Then toss the Tender Calamari in a bowl with Slices of Green Onion and season with Salt and Pepper to your taste.

Chicken Lettuce Wraps


Chicken Lettuce Wraps are Easy-Peasy
Not japanesey

Anyone that has had a Chicken Lettuce Wrap that didn’t just adore it must’ve been a RETARD! This is usually a dish prepared as an appetizer and is very often reinvented with substitutions of ingredients that were never even intended to be in the original recipe when this dish was created; so the bottom line is, if you are reading this, consider yourself lucky because I personally have made thousands of these from scratch when I worked for the king of Chicken Lettuce wraps.

Curiosity Killed the Chicken Lettuce Wraps

I spent about an hour today reviewing other posts, recipes and YouTube videos just to see how well everyone else was doing when it came to presentation of their recipe and different versions of the Chicken Lettuce Wraps. Needless to say, I wasn’t impressed and I was very disappointed; wrong ingredients, substitutions, bad form in procedures in the cooking and more or less just plain inexperience. Now I understand substitutions because everyone more or less has their own personal tastes and also the lack of availability is a factor with ingredients when it comes to shopping for Chinese in a regular grocery store. But what bothers me the most is people putting name brand resturaunt titles on their recipes even though they’ve clearly changed most everything about the recipe itself. Of course they’re trying to gain a wider audience and more exposure which is fine, but I’m saying you’ve got no business teaching about something you are putting a resturaunt name to if you just don’t have the experience! Have the decency to give it a new name and make it your own or step the “F” off! Everyone has their own version of  Chicken Lettuce Wraps just not the audacity to claim it’s P.F. Changs!