- It feels like a tarp.
Hello, everybody. Welcome back.
It's your girl Merle, and today,
we're going to be trying to make vegan drumsticks out of...
(drum rolls)
yuba or tofu skin.
I haven't had a recipe that came this highly requested
from you guys since we did the TikTok wheat chicken,
so I think it's gonna be a good one,
and I also think you guys really like chicken?
And it is yet another brilliant recipe
from our friend Woon Heng, who if you remember,
introduced us to the vegan unagi in our last video.
So anyway, without further ado, let's get cooking.
Yuba is made from the lining at the top of boiled soy milk,
which is just protein, like it is pure protein.
I'm using the frozen yuba
because that was what Woon Heng recommended.
Woo! That is satisfying, baby.
It feels like a tarp or like a plastic bag.
♪ Do you ever feel like a plastic bag ♪
♪ blowing through the wind ♪
(screen beeps)
So I'm gonna take one of these,
I'm gonna fold it in half,
and I'm gonna start slicing it into one- to two-inch strips.
I love trying these recipes
'cause I'm introduced to so many new, to me, ingredients.
And now that we've got these strips here
in this big old bowl,
we're gonna pour about three cups of water over them.
We don't wanna drench them in water
'cause then they'll lose their seasoning.
And I'm just going to toss them a little bit
so that they can get equally rehydrated.
Then, once we've got the texture where we want it
and they're all rehydrated,
we're gonna take them out a couple handfuls at a time,
and we're gonna wring these out
so that we get most of the water out of there.
Okay, so now we've got our strips all dried and sliced up.
So we are going to add in some seasoning.
Vegetable bouillon, ground black pepper, some salts,
a little bit of sugar, and some Chinese five spice.
And lastly, we're gonna add a quarter cup of water
and three tablespoons of corn starch.
Then we're gonna go ahead and mix that up with our hands.
Now we're gonna whip together a little cornstarch slurry
by combining some cornstarch and water,
if we don't spill it all over the countertop first.
Now, for our drumsticks,
Woon Heng used sugarcane, raw sugarcane,
but I'm gonna be using lemongrass stalks
'cause I couldn't find any sugarcane near me.
We'll take our drumstick,
and I'm gonna just put a little bit of our slurry on there
to help it stick, and I'm gonna take one strip here,
one at a time, and I'm gonna wrap it around,
and nothing is gonna go wrong.
And I'm going to keep the wrapping a bit thicker at the end,
so it mimics an actual drumstick,
and we're just gonna keep doing this
until the cows come home.
And this is definitely a bit time-consuming,
but I could see if you made a big batch of these at once
and then froze them, they would be really worth it.
It looks pretty good.
Okay, so I managed to muster four drumsticks
out of all of that,
and they do not look anyone near as beautiful
as Woon Heng's do, but you know what?
I tried.
So now we're going to take some plastic wrap,
and we're gonna wrap them all up nice and tight,
and then we're gonna refrigerate them for 30 minutes.
In the meantime, we're gonna mix together some water,
soy sauce, molasses or dark soy sauce for color,
and maple syrup.
All right. So now these have been refrigerated.
You know what? They look pretty good.
I gotta give myself a little more credit.
Let's paint.
Oh no. Don't you dare come undone.
No! Please.
You stupid, stupid drumstick.
Stay together.
Once I've got my drumsticks covered in the sauce,
I'm gonna go ahead and place them
in the basket of my air fryer.
In you go.
And we're gonna cook these at 325 degrees Fahrenheit.
That's 160 degrees Celsius.
And now we wait.
Okay, we're done.
Woo! Look at these.
Okay. I'm gonna give myself a pat on the back.
And I'm sorry for what I said to you earlier.
You stupid, stupid drumstick.
Oh my gosh. This is so cool!
Wow, I am...
Color me impressed.
If I presented this to someone, you know,
maybe they would think
it was like some kind of like stuffed meat tube,
like street food.
I don't know what street, but whatever.
I don't care. It still looks really cool.
I almost don't want to eat them, they're so pretty.
Okay. I see what you're doing here.
The texture of this and the overall experience of eating it?
Holy moly.
This texture, I gotta give this like a 9.5 out of 10.
There's even like a skin to it.
I'm adding this to my arsenal
of when people are skeptical of vegan food
and I want to make them something
that they're gonna like, this is it, baby.
This is it.
Imagine slathering this in barbecue sauce.
Do I have barbecue sauce?
Damn it.
Thank you for sending me this recipe.
I am so excited that this is part of my life now.
Thank you, Woon Heng, for being a genius.
Send me what you'd like me to make next
'cause, I mean, you got a high bar now.
We gotta even top it somehow.
Yeah. I'm gonna go buy some barbecue sauce.
(upbeat music)