Being one of the important fruits of China鈥榮 age-old culture, the Chinese food and drink culinary art enjoys a high prestige both at home and abroad. The whole world looks upon eating a Chinese meal as a high-leveled enjoyment. The Chinese people whether living in or outside the county all share a proper sense of pride for such a rich Chinese food and drink culinary culture. Thus, to regard the Chinese food and drink culinary art as a culture, a science, or an art is entirely justifiable.
The Chinese culinary culture has a distant source and has become well established. The legend has it that the Chinese culinary culture originated with Yi Yin, a virtuous and capable minister of the Shang Dynasty (15th - 11th centuries B.C). It can be seen that China initiated the culinary art as early as the Shang and Zhou (11th century to 221 B.C.) times. With the growth and development of production and economy during various periods, the culinary techniques too registered step by step heightening and improvement—-from brevity to variety, from rudimentary to advanced stage, from day-to-day snacks to feasts, even to palatial dishes and delicacies. During about the time from the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 B.C.) and the Warring Stated Period (CA. 475-221 B.C.), to the Sui-Tang period the Chinese dishes began to be marked apart by Southern and Northern tastes. During the period of the Tang (618-907 A.D.) and the Song (960-1279 AD) dynasties, people went in a great deal for eating and distinct local colors were added to the Chinese dishes, such as the Northern food (”Lu” or the Shandong dishes), the Southern food (”Yue” or the Cantonese dishes), the Chuan food (Sichuan dishes), Wei Yang (Yangzhou) and the vegetarian foods. Records respecting each kind of dishes have been handed down. No matter the four oldest groups (i.e., the Sichuan, Cantonese, Shandong and Yangzhou groups) or the eight groups that gradually matured after the Tang and Song Dynasties (the Sichuan, Cantonese, Shandong, Yangzhou, Beijing, Anhui, Zhejiang and Hunan groups) or the Fujian, Jiangxi, Hubei, Henan, Liaoning groups, as well as the Muslim feasts prevalent throughout the country. Each of these famous groups has its own long history and characteristic traditional techniques; these put together have truly for the Chinese culinary culture produced a rich, sublime fruit borne out of the policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools contend.
Shanghai is China鈥榮 biggest port city. Since the Opium War and the opening of the five ports to foreign trade, it was thronged by traders from all over the world and was densely populated by the Chinese and foreigners, and the city became thriving and prosperous. In the wake of economic growth, the several big culinary blocs poured into Shanghai one after another. Till the 1920s, restaurants featuring the various kinds of dishes, like the Cantonese food, Sichuan food, Beijing food, Yangzhuo food, Ningbo food, Anhui food, Muslim feast, Tianjin food, Suzhou and Wuxi food and Shanghai鈥榮 local dishes together with Western cafes, numbering near a hundred, had emerged in Shanghai. So the saying “Satisfying eating is in Shanghai” is actually not coined by the Shanghailanders of today, but prevailed already some 80 years ago. Undoubtedly local people would enjoy their own food quite much. each of these sayings is correct, because in each place there are distinctly-colored regional culinary blocs and the delicacies of different tastes available in Chinese food, a fact acknowledged the world.
Forty years ago, Chinese food for many Americans was egg rolls, chop suey and drinks with paper umbrellas. Then it was General Tso’s chicken and sesame noodles.
But over the past decade, as large communities of people from India, Peru, Korea, Trinidad and Guyana have formed in New York and elsewhere, ideas of what Chinese food can be have expanded.
“I call them second-generation Chinese restaurants,” said Cheuk Kwan, who has directed a documentary film about the spread of Chinese restaurants around the world.
Dishes like chili-spiked, deep-fried chicken lollipops, which are a Chinese-Indian specialty, and lo mein topped with chunks of peppery jerk chicken are what Chinese food is now to many.
New York City鈥檚 first hyphenated version of the cuisine - after Chinese-American, of course - was Chinese-Cuban, which arrived in the 1960’s, when thousands of Cubans of Chinese descent came to New York after Fidel Castro’s rise to power.
Seafood soups, fried rice with pork, scallions and tiny shrimp, and chicharrones de pollo - chicken cut into small pieces and deep-fried in the Cantonese style - were and are standbys.
Over the years, as more Americans have visited China and more Chinese have immigrated to the United States, more authentic versions of Chinese food have come to town on a gust of hot chilies, Sichuan peppercorns and bean paste. Restaurants serving the cuisines of Taiwan, Shanghai and Fujian have opened in the city’s burgeoning Chinatowns - Flushing in Queens and Sunset Park and Homecrest in Brooklyn.
When New York’s young Korean-Americans go out for Chinese food, they often eat ja jiang mien, boiled noodles in a rich meat sauce, mixed with Korean brown bean paste and studded with Chinese fermented black beans.
In Elmhurst, Queens, La Union, a Peruvian chifa (slang for Chinese restaurant), serves platters of chancho, a Hispanic rendering of char siu, Chinese for roast pork.
The roots of these hybrid Chinese cuisines around the world are the same as those of Chinese food in America. Millions of Chinese men, most of them from the province Guangdong (formerly known in English as Canton), left China in the late 19th and early 20th century. Only men were allowed to leave the country, often by becoming indentured workers to companies in need of cheap labor in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and South America.
Professional cooks were usually not among the emigrants, so the earliest Chinese restaurants outside China were started by men with little knowledge of cooking and a desperate need to improvise with local ingredients. The dishes they came up with, like chop suey, have long since been dismissed as “not Chinese” by scholars of the culture.
But Chinese food has never been quite what outsiders think it is.
“The term Chinese food represents an area four times larger than Western Europe and the eating habits of more than a billion people,” Mr. Kwan said. “You could say that there is really no such thing as Chinese food.”
Eugene Anderson, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Riverside, and author of “The Food of China,” disagreed. “Chinese food is defined by a flavor principle of soy sauce, ginger, garlic and green onions” and methods including stir-frying and steaming, he said. “Once you get too far away from those rules, it is no longer Chinese.”
Sweet and Sour Pork, the ubiquitous and arguably the most well-known Chinese recipes in the world, is a classic Cantonese dish. Called 鈥滃挄鍤曡倝鈥 or 鈥goo lou yok鈥 in Cantonese dialect, sweet and sour pork is very pleasing to the palate because of the flavorsome sweet and sour sauce鈥搕he sweetness from sugar plus the tangy ketchup and sharp rice vinegar鈥搘ith the crispy fried pork pieces. The green and red bell peppers and pineapple pieces are just icing on the cake.
The secret of an authentic sweet and sour pork dish lies in the perfect balance of the sweet vs. sour taste of the sauce. To master this dish, it鈥檚 not about the technique of stir-frying nor the use of the freshest ingredients, although both are equally important and wouldn鈥檛 hurt. To me, the sweet and sour sauce is the soul of this dish. If you fail the sweet and sour sauce, you fail the dish. With that in mind, I will teach you how to make that perfect sweet and sour sauce and share with you the secret ingredients I use鈥(get sweet and sour pork recipe after the jump)
While traditional Chinese/Cantonese sweet and sour pork recipe calls for the use of rice vinegar and ketchup to bring out the sour taste, I also use plum sauce to add some extra zing, plus a few dashes of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce and oyster sauce to complete a harmony balance. They are my secret ingredients and do make a nice difference in terms of taste, in my honest opinion.
Other than the sauce, the frying batter is no less important. A great batter recipe promises crispy and crunchy coating for the pork. In my recipe below, you will also find the instructions and exact measurement to make the batter. It is simply awesome!
Rasa Malaysia鈥檚 Secret Ingredients for Sweet and Sour Pork:
- Plum Sauce
- Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce
- Oyster Sauce (my not-so-secret seasoning medium)
So, discard the canned pineapple juice or orange juice in the Americanized sweet and sour pork recipe. Do try out my secret ingredients above the next time you prepare sweet and sour pork.
Anyway, once you master the techniques of making sweet and sour sauce, you can pretty much whip up any sweet and sour dishes in a jiffy: pork, chicken, fish, or shrimp鈥ust don鈥檛 tell Panda Express my secret recipe! *wink*
Hunan cuisine shares many commonalities with its close, more well-known cousin, Szechwan cooking, both cuisines originate in the Western region of China. The climate there is sub-tropical 鈥 humid and warm enough to encourage the use of fiery spices to help cool the body, and to require high spicing of food as a preservative. With similar
climate, the two regions also share many ingredients 鈥 rice is a major staple in both diets, and chili peppers are an important part of most dishes. The two styles of regional cuisine are similar enough that many restaurants and cookbooks lump them together under 鈥榃estern Chinese cooking鈥 or simple refer to both as Szechwan cuisine.
There are some important differences, though. Hunan cooking is, for one thing, even more fiery than most Szechwan dishes. Szechwan dishes often include chili paste for rubbing into meats, or including in sauce. Hunan chefs include the entire dried chili pepper, with its intensely spicy seeds and rind.
The differences in the actual land of the two regions also has an effect on the differences in their cuisine. The Szechwan region is mountainous jungle, with little arable land for farming. The Hunan region, by contrast, is a land of soft rolling hills and slow rivers. Because of its fertile hillocks and valleys, the Hunan region has access to an amazing variety of ingredients that aren鈥檛 available to Szechwan chefs. Seafood and beef are both far more common in Hunan cooking, as are many vegetables.
The land, and the hardships associated with it, also give the Hunan more time to concentrate on food. Hunan cooking features complex and time-consuming preparation time. Many dishes begin their preparation the day before they are to be served, and may be marinated, then steamed or smoked, and finally deep-fried or stewed before they reach the table. The same attention is paid to the preparation of ingredients, and it is said that Hunan cuisine is the most pleasing to the eye of all Chinese cuisines. The shape of a food in a particular recipe is nearly as important as its presence in the final dish. Hunan chefs are specialists with the knife 鈥 carving fanciful shapes of vegetables and fruits that will be used in preparing meals, or to present them.
Hunan cuisine is noted for its use of chili peppers, garlic and shallots, and for the use of sauces to accent the flavors in the ingredients of a dish. It is not uncommon for a Hunan dish to play on the contrasts of flavors 鈥 hot and sour, sweet and sour, sweet and hot 鈥 pungent, spicy and deliciously sweet all at once. Hunan chefs are noted for their ability to create a symphony of taste with their ingredients. A classic example is Hunan spicy beef with vegetables, where the beef is first marinated overnight in a citrus and ginger mixture, then washed and rubbed with chili paste before being simmered in a pungent brown sauce. The end result is a meat that is meltingly tender on the tongue and changes flavor even as you enjoy it.
More and more, restaurants are beginning to sort out the two cuisines, and Hunan cuisine is coming into its own. Crispy duck and Garlic-Fried String Beans are taking their place alongside Kung Pao Chicken and Double Cooked Spicy Pork. But there is no battle between the two for a place of honor among Chinese Regional cuisines 鈥 rather, there are only winners 鈥 the diners who have the pleasure of sampling both.
My friend simmon’s family cooks a Chinese food at least once a month. It looks like a tradition. Everyone clears the schedule. He sister, parents, He uncles, He brother gather around the family kitchen to taste meal from the Orient. Yes, Chinese food. They really love it because it is easy to follow. One of our favorite is the sauces. It鈥檚 very delicious for our tongue. Our family can adapt with the variety of flavorful spices.
The main taste of Chinese food or Chinese cooking depends on the ingredients of the sauces. If you are fan of Chinese food, you must know it. These cooking sauces are used in a variety of delicious authentic recipes. Fried rice, for example, is made of spices and sauces that make the delicious taste.
Kids really like a delicious meal. There are a lot of Chinese foods for children. Try to serve the dipping sauce in a little bowl to accompany appetizers like egg rolls, spring rolls or pot stickers. Let them choose the bowl and you鈥檒l see their faces light up. By the way, there are so many different Chinese cuisine types of flavors that can be implemented into everyday menu. Some of the famous are sTheyet and sour sauce, garlic sauce, hot mustard and chili oil.
They use chili oil to enhance the flavor. Chili oil is made of chili peppers. Hot mustard and garlic sauce are delicious sauces. It is used for Chinese appetizers. And another favorite in Chinese food is sTheyet and sour sauce. If you interested with those sauces, you can try to give your family Chinese food for dinner. The sauces are easy to make.
Nowadays, the sauces have become very popular around the world because They can make it easily and it has a great flavor when you add to Chinese meals. It鈥檚 so adaptable. Chinese cuisine has become our favorite. You can try it out. Happy cooking!
Ingredients:
500 gms of Noodles
300 gms Soy Sauce
200 gms Ginger cut into small pieces
300gms Garlic cut into small pieces
Coriander leaves
1 Onion cut into long pieces
pre cooked chicken pieces -200 gms
Pepper & salt to taste
cloves, cinnamon, cardamom - each 3 pieces.
Preparations:
* Boil the Noodles when it is cooked well keep it a side, and let the water to drain
* Heat a little oil in a pan.
* Fry the cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, onions, cooked chicken pieces, ginger and garlic .
* Add the soy sauce and the pepper to it.
* After the soy sauce starts to boil add the cooked rice and mix it well
* Garnish with coriander leaves.
This simple salad features a delicious contrast between the tangy avocado and tender shrimp, and the sharp hot mustard paste really brings them together.
Prep time: 3 minutes
Cook time: 3 minutes
Utensils:
Pot, 2 bowls.
Serves 2
Ingredients:
1/2 cup shrimp, peeled, deveined, parboiled
1 avocado, peeled, cut into 1-inch cubes
Seasonings:
1 tbsp.light soy sauce
1 tbsp.hot mustard
2 tbsps.lemon juice
Directions:
1. Put a pot of water on to boil, parboil the shrimp meat, about 1-2 minutes (P1).
P1
2. Make the dressing by whisking all the seasonings together in a bowl (P2).
P2
3. Put the avocado cubes and shrimp in a separate bowl, spoon the dressing over them, combine to properly coat with the sauce.
4. Serve immediately (P3).
P3
If there’s one defining quality of being a major metropolis, a “world class city” if you will, it is undoubtedly having a hockey team that despite having tons of money and a psychotically loyal fanbase can never win the championship. CORRECTION! It is undoubtedly having heaps of access to cheap Chinese food, preferably of the all-you-can-eat dinner buffet variety.
Sure, you can go to any old strip mall and there’s even odds there will be a Pick-N-Mix inside it. But going to a Pick-N-Mix is like going to a McDonald’s for a hamburger - there is no聽adventure to be found! There is never the thrill of eating Shanghai noodles that may or may not have been shoelaces, there is never the occasional thought popping into your head of whether the spicy BBQ pork is, in fact, actually pork, and there is most certainly never the thrill of eating a dish that actually turns out to be tasty and delicious. This is because in addition to being boring, Pick-N-Mix also sucks the bag.
One such establishment I recently tried out is the imaginatively named聽Yonge Street Chinese Restaurant,located at 1290 Yonge Street (north of Davisville). The YSCR, in addition to being a cheap buffet place, also does freshly made dim sum and makes all their own desserts fresh - but I’m not here for that. I’m here for thebuffet, baby.
The only real way to grade a cheap Chinese buffet is to try as many of the dishes served as possible and then go pass/fail on each. If the restaurant serves up more winners than losers - congratulations! You may actually want to eat here again, possibly even when sober!
So:
Black Bean Beef: Solid black bean sauce. Veggies nicely cooked - still firm and crunchy but not too raw. Beef not amazing, but not objectionable either.聽PASS.
General Tso Chicken: Passable chicken. Sauce a bit too sweet, not spicy enough. Vegetables overdone.FAIL.
Spring Rolls: Unfortunately, like most cheap buffet places, the YSCR alternates daily between egg rolls and spring rolls - and egg rolls hold up a lot better underneath heat-lamps than spring rolls do. Spring rolls get mushy and limp. Like these spring rolls. They’re not bad tasting, implying that originally they probably would have been quite okay before put under the heat lamp for two hours, but…聽FAIL.
Spicy BBQ Pork: Absolutely horrible. Bland sauce, gristly, unappetizing pork, vegetables limp and soggy.FAIL.
Chicken Balls: I know, I know - how can you grade chicken balls? But you can - these chicken balls, unlike some, have decent-quality chicken in them. And the batter’s okay. PASS.
Steamed Rice: Nice and sticky. PASS.
Spicy Eggplant: I hate eggplant, but the sauce is really nice.聽PASS, if you like eggplant. I hope you people appreciate that I am SUFFERING FOR JOURNALISM here!
Sweet And Sour Pork: Pleasantly caramelized sauce on the pork, which for some reason is much better than the pork in the spicy BBQ dish. Veggies nicely done too. PASS.
Curry Chicken: A mix of unboned chicken and boneless chicken is not something I enjoy discovering on my third bite. Furthermore, the curry sauce is wimpy and does not even make me shed a single tear in spicy pain.FAIL.
“Golden Fried Potatoes”: Alternately known as “hash browns fried in sesame oil.” Which actually is just as good as it sounds. Delicious, cooked just right, and the sesame flavouring is fantastic with the potato. Probably very bad for me though.聽PASS.
Shanghai Noodles: Rubbery and overcooked. Lots of onions, though. I like onions. But those noodles - man.FAIL.
Steamed Vegetable Medley: It’s a steamed vegetable dish. What do you want me to say? They put vegetables in a steamer and steam them. There is literally no skill involved in making steamed vegetables.PASS.
Lemon Chicken: Excellent chicken, nice breading, good sweet lemon sauce that isn’t overpowering, and the vegetables are just right.聽PASS.
My free fortune cookie: “A friend is a soul shared with another body.” First off, that’s mangling the popular cliche, and second, it did not tell me my future even slightly! What a gyp!聽FAIL.
So, by my count that’s 8 good and 5 bad, so the Yonge Street Chinese Restaurant wins! I celebrate their win with a package of their homemade sesame cookies, which are excellent (they also make butter and peanut cookies, as well as a very sweet mango pudding). And I am alive, for I have聽tasted adventure. Admittedly, adventure in the form of cheap Chinese food. But adventure nonetheless.
1. What is tangyuan and why do Chinese eat it?
Tang Yuan or聽Yuanxiao is the special food Chinese people eat at the Lantern Festival .Lantern festival is also known as 鈥測uanxiao鈥 festival, which is a traditional festival in china. It is said that the custom of eating tangyuan originated during the Eastern Jin Dynasty in the fourth century, which became popular during the Tang and Song Dynasty. The round shape of the tangyuan is a symbol of wholeness, completeness and unity. What’s more, tangyuan in Chinese has a similar pronunciation with “tuanyuan鈥, meaning reunion. So people eat them to denote union, harmony and happiness for their family. <
2. What鈥檚 the difference between yuanxiao and tangyuan?
It is usually called as yuanxiao in north china while named as tangyuan in south china. It is small round聽dumpling balls made of glutinous rice flour with rose petals, sesame, bean paste, jujube paste, walnut meat, dried fruit, sugar and edible oil as fillings. The way to make Yuanxiao also varies between northern and southern China. The biggest difference is that the common method used in northern provinces is to pinches the fillings into even balls ,then put them on the basket which is filled with dry glutinous rice flour, and constantly shake them from time to time by adding water into it to coat the yuanxiao with glutinous rice flour. once the size is moderate ,it will surely have a rich fragrant taste both in fruit and rice! Meanwhile the method to follow in southern provinces is to shape the dough of rice flour into balls, make a hole, insert the filling, then close the hole and smooth out the dumpling by rolling it between your hands which will also have an amazing taste.
3. What can be used as fillings?
Yuanxiao can be classified into filled and unfilled ones. The filled yuanxiao are either sweet or salty. Sweet fillings are made of sugar, Walnuts, sesame Sweet osmanthus flowers, peanuts, red bean paste, or jujube paste. A single ingredient or any combination can be used as the filling. The salty variety is filled with minced meat, vegetables dried shrimp or a mixture. Tangyuan can be boiled, fried or steamed. It tastes sweet and delicious.
4. Tips on how to boil tangyuan?
1. Before putting yuanxiao into the pot, pinch the yuanxiao gently to have it cracked slightly which will surely help boil yuanxiao both inside and outside to have a delicious taste.
2. Use boiled water: fist put some water in the pot wait until it boiled then slowly put yuanxiao into water, but remember don鈥檛 put too many at a time otherwise it鈥檚 not easy to boil. Meanwhile use spoon to gently push yuanxiao around in one direction so that they cannot be stick together.
3. Add cold water: In the process of spoiling yuanxiao, every time the water boiled you are supposed to add some cold water in it, so as to keep the slightly rolling situation to insure the yuanxiao will be separated and the cover will not be broken as well. After boiled 2-3 times then wait for a while and you will have the yuanxiao ready for eat.
4. Distinguish whether it鈥檚 raw or cooked: you could use both you eyes and fingers: first look whether its cover is smooth while floating on the water surface or not, then use chopsticks to press down on them to see whether they are softer. If so, it鈥檚 time to eat the masterpiece you have just made!
5. Taken out of the pot quickly: After already boiled thoroughly if the yuanxiao cannot be eaten once only, it should be taken out of the pot in time, and put into pure boiled water, after cooling, put them in the plate for next time eating.
Modern China enjoys a worldwide reputation as the “Kingdom of Chinese Cuisine.” It has one of the world’s finest culinary traditions. The combined cuisines of China have often been compared to French cuisine as having made the greatest contribution to the world of food.
The vastness of China’s geography and long history has given birth to its distinctive culinary art. The immeasurable variety of natural ingredients, methods of preparation and cooking practices utilized in Chinese cuisine is unique. Food comes first for Chinese people.
Because of its vast territory and many ethnic groups, China is endowed with a fantastically large, mouthwatering variety of food. All local dishes have their own identifying features. The most famous are the eight cuisines, namely,Sichuan, Fujian, Zhejiang, Shandong,聽Guangdong (Cantonese), Jiangsu, Anhui and Hunan. The food from聽Beijing,Shanghai聽and Northeast China is also famous and distinctive.
Lamb and goat are much loved by the Muslims and Mongolians of the north, and their favorite dishes include lamb hotpots and barbecues. In northwestern Xinjiang province, home to the Muslim Uygurs, lamb and goat dishes, eaten with flatbread, reign supreme and conventional Chinese food all but disappears.
