Chinese Soul Food Cookbook: Green Onion Pancakes

I grew up eating Chinese food quite often – at least a few times a week. And even today I’m eating a lot of it. All my life I’ve eaten home-cooked Chinese food from things my parents had when they were young and in recent years things my mom has learned to make via online recipes and YouTube videos. There are some things we’ll eat out at restaurants that I’ve never had at home and one of those things is scallion pancakes.

I was really excited when I received the newly released Chinese Soul Food, a cookbook by award winning food journalist and cooking instructor Hsiao-Ching Chou. The cookbook is packed with recipes ranging from dumplings to stir-fries. When I saw the green onion pancake recipe, or scallion pancake as I call it, and saw that it didn’t look too difficult I knew that was the first recipe I had to try out.

First, I made the dough using the dumpling dough recipe in the book. I just needed flour and water so that was pretty easy.

After mixing it and letting it rest, I quartered the dough to make 4 pancakes. The other ingredients I would need were scallions, salt, and olive oil.

You roll out the dough, brush the oil on, sprinkle salt and scallions on top. I never thought about how the scallions are inside the pancakes, but now I know! You roll the round pancake up like a thin burrito and then coil it around like a cinnamon bun. Then, you use your rolling pin to roll it back out to a circle so the filling is really inside the dough now.

The cookbook says you can freeze the pancakes for up to 2 weeks as long as you don’t cook them. So I decided to save 2 for later and only fry up 2 of them. I put a little oil in the skillet and then fried the pancakes until they were golden on both sides.

The whole process was easy but a little time consuming with the rolling. But, the delicious scallion pancakes as a result was worth all the rolling! There was a dipping sauce recipe to go along with it but I didn’t end up making that this time around. I just used soy sauce for dipping. The only thing I would change for next time is I would add a little more salt, but it was still good and when dipping it in the soy sauce it ended up working out.

The pancakes came out looking so good and delicious. Definitely less greasy than when you order it at a restaurant so that’s always a plus. I’ve already fried up and eaten the 2 that I put in the freezer – they’re that good!

I’m looking forward to trying out some more recipes from the cookbook. Chinese Soul Food was released January 31 and is sold wherever fine books are sold, including Amazon.

*This book was sent to my complimentary, but all opinions are my own.*