Testing the Most Viral "One Pot" Tik Tok Recipes

I’m Puerto Rican and we place the cilantro on top of the rice as it cooks. The cilantro’s flavor is infused into the food as it cooks. You have to try it! For many years I watched both my grandmothers, aunts, and my mom do this, I was skeptical when I started cooking, but the cilantro’s flavor does get infused onto the rice and chicken (or just rice)!

For the noodle dish, the traditional recipe is called Yo Po Mian and I think the lack of depth is caused by the usage of soy instead of dark soy (or you can do a mix of both). The oil should also be poured directly over the aromatics instead of on the noodles so that it releases more flavor. Another super important detail to notice is that the traditional noodles used for the dish is wheat flour noodles (look up biang biang for the exact type). The noodles are the most important esp with a dish that has so few ingredients. Rice noodles are generally used for soups or strongly seasoned stir fry (just a general rule not always true) because they're pretty bland in comparison to the thick yellow, egg, wheat, and flour noodles.

I'm surprised they're mostly pasta dishes. When I think of one-pot my mind goes to curries, chillies, stir fries, and a couple mashed potato recipes

When it comes to Cilantro, leaves are for finishing, stems go in the pot. Pick the leaves you need at the end for garnish and toss those stems in the pot and you take advantage of what would otherwise be trash or compost.

The dark soy sauce was probably more important than you realized- it has some sweetness and depth in it, substitutions often say to add some molasses to soy sauce if you don't have dark soy sauce

The two worlds of one pot cooking: "Dump all into one pot, leave and return to simple goodness" vs "cooking is my only hobby and they forced me on this camping trip"

16:00 yes you missing the dark soysauce. It taste quite sweet and tangy which would round the dish up with all them aromatics.

I appreciate that particularly the pasta uses literally only 1 pot. Some of these are like cook the chicken put it aside, cook the veggies put it aside, cook this, cook that, etc and you end up with as many dishes but it took you three times as long to cook because you weren’t cooking all at once. And to me the draw card of 1 pot meals is the easy clean up/limited dishes

Lemon leaves! As someone who had a lemon tree, the leaves are far, far more aromatic than what you get from the peel. I would pick and clean about a dozen leaves to line the bottom of my steamer and cook small filets with dill or thyme.

You should've used the cilantro in the rice, removed it, and served with fresh. That infused flavor is unbeatable! I do it with my Mexican rice

During the chicken and rice recipe, I was like "wow, I can literally smell it through the screen! what the hell?" and then I remembered I have a cup of mexican corn chowder sitting right next to me that I was eating like 15 minutes ago 😂😂

Re: chili garlic noodles, Im surprised no one noted that the noodles he used were different from the ones she used, actually makes a big difference, flavor, chew, texture and absorption differential with other noodle. Still a okay job. 👍

That noodle dish with the hot oil would have tasted much nicer and less pungent if he'd used dark soy as the original recipe asked for, as opposed to normal soy sauce. Dark soy is a bit thicker and sweeter so it would have balanced out the other flavours, especially the vinegar, much better.

The chicken and rice recipe looks great! When I make rice with cilantro I separate the leaves from the stalk and put the stalks in the water. It infuses the water while cooking, and then I remove the stalks and replace with the fresh chopped leaves when serving

You love these recipes when you watch them in Tiktok or YouTube shorts, but it doesn't really get into the kitchen, because they're so short to rightly grasp the recipe. Thank you for doing this detailed video!

Dark soy sauce and regular have very different flavors so it’s probably worth it to try with the dark sometime!

the chili garlic noodle works a lot better in my experience if you pour the oil over the ingredients without the noodles, stir, and add the noodles after. That way you don't have half cooked half raw garlic and half tender half fried noodles.

When you used plain soy sauce in the chili garlic noodle dish instead of dark soy sauce you missed out on some important flavor ingredients. If you can't get dark soy sauce substitute 2 tsp regular soy sauce mixed with 1/2 tsp molasses and 1/8 tsp of sugar. Also some spicy chili oil would rock too!

5:08 I'd love a video on how you'd improve any of these meals, but especially this one. It's such an amazing meal concept

As a mom of four, I have made a different version of the last pasta dish a billion times since I first learned about it 10 years ago. Our version is a spinach artichoke version that uses broth instead of water (and has good doses of oregano and parsley). It is not the most sophisticated dish to come out of our kitchen, but it is a solid crowd pleaser. And cleanup is a snap.