Juewei has become a semi-regular stop for us since they opened last November. What we’ve found is that they make the smoked chicken we enjoy on weekends, so we’ll drop by and pick one up ($17.99) with some side dishes.
Along with usually some quail eggs and yuba….in fact, the woman who runs the place just starts packing the yuba when I walk in the door!
And recently, we saw that they added a spicy braised beef….I dunno the name because the Missus orders it in Mandarin.
And of course the chicken.
Now, you may ask if we just eat everything as is…..well, sometimes. The yuba is a great side dish as is the beef. Though that chicken can be up to four meals. Here’s what we do.
We make baos with the meatier parts of the chicken and also with the beef. I have a microwave tortilla warmer pouch that I found does a good job of warming up the baos! I also will crisp up some of the skin in the air fryer for textural contrast.
For some reason, this winter – early spring we’ve been eating a lot of Zhou…which is what the Missus calls it. I have always called the dish using the Cantonese name; jook. The Missus had found the quite popular 20 minute congee recipes posted on Instagram and TikTok where you freeze the rinsed rice for 8 hours. After working thru the recipe a few times, I found an approach that we prefer. The porridge seems to come out a bit creamier and it only takes a couple of hours to freeze.
I rinse one-third cup of rice. I tend to prefer Koshihikari rice….yes, it’s a bit more expensive, but to me, based on the starch content worth using. Plus, we tend to use higher quality rice when cooking at home anyway. I then place the rice in a small metal mixing bowl and cover with one cup of water and freeze.
When I’m ready to make the porridge, I take out a donabe; a Japanese clay pot which I have. I place the metal mixing bowl on the stove and heat briefly to melt the edges of the ice. I then place the donabe on the stove, move the rice-ice and melted water into the donabe and add three more cups of water, heat, and bring to a simmer.
I then get my kitchen shears and slice the chicken carcass in half. I can make two portions of the porridge. I trim excess meat off the bones; usually from the thighs and drumstick…the breast and some of the thigh meat has already been used to make the baos we had previously. I chop the meat up into pieces. I separate the bones and place that in the porridge. While the Missus grew up eating plain boiled Zhou in QingDao, my mom used to make jook using turkey bones after Thanksgiving. Turkey Jook is very popular “back home”. Kathy from Onolicious Hawaii has a page and recipe on Turkey Jook here.
Because of flavor of the smoked chicken is quite strong, the flavor transfer is done fairly quickly. I then add in the meat, usually some green onions, white pepper.
The rice gets creamy in about 20 minutes, 30 minutes max.
The Missus likes some minced bitter greens along with the quail eggs in Hers. I like to add a little shoyu, yuba (of course), takana (pickled mustard greens), and kimchi garlic shoots, if I have them.
If there’s any chicken skin left; I’ll crisp up in the air fryer and top off the porridge with that.
Juewei has indeed become a regular stop for us because it provides us with additional options and ingredients for comfort food meals.
**** Juewei has closed
Juewei Food
4690 Convoy St. #103
San Diego, CA 92111
Current Hours:
Sun – Thurs 11am – 11pm
Fri – Sat 11am – Midnight
The texture of the baozi dough was not as fluffy as I enjoy; but it had a hint of sweetness and was not bad. We enjoyed the pork version more….pork here is mighty tasty. There were hints of sesame oil, ginger, soy sauce….not sure how easy it is to get it in Genoa, but this was pretty good overall.
There were some things I quickly noticed. The liner was very wet, so I started turning over the XLB and guess what? Four of the six had wrappers on the bottom that were cracked and all the "soup" had leaked out. This will also tell you what I thought of the wrappers; too thick, brittle, lacking the slight delicate texture I enjoy. I'm truly not expected anything like I had at 
Looks like lunchwagon tonkatsu, eh? It had been over fried, the breading hard, as was the dried out pork. It could have used some flavor; you know, five spice, soy sauce, a good pre-breading marinade. If it was brined or marinated, I couldn't tell. 
And while the rice was on the dry side and the sauce for the chicken was a bit heavy in the oil department, this was pretty good overall. The skin while a bit on the chewy side had nice flavor and as a while the chicken had been nicely poached as the flesh was quite tender and there were hints of winey-gingery-“fowlness”. One positive for having a rather oil heavy sauce was that it clung nicely to the chicken.
These seemed a bit over-stuffed, but heck, that shrimp was so good, I ain't complaining about proportion this time around.
Well, this was decent sized portion. The chicken was haphazardly chopped with pieces not completely sliced thru. Unlike the rather 
Sadly, this was just as bad as the version I'd had here 
Well, in terms of the chicken and sauce this was a pleasant surprise! The chicken had been nicely sliced, only two pieces with bones were on the plate; one wing and one part of a leg. The chicken was so moist and tender. But the highlight was definitely the sauce. It's usually too watered down; but this one had a good amount of ginger, but was both aromatic and not over-powering. It had a good amount of seasoning, but the star was the ginger. The chili sauce was way too sweet for me.
As for the other parts. Well, just by looking at that boiled egg you can see the greyish tone to the yolks which means it had been boiled too long. So yes, there was a bitter-sulfuric tinge to the dry and crumbly yolk. If you look closely, you'll see a piece of white-grey matter in the yolk. I took that out and didn't eat it.
