Pings Chinese Food & Asian Cuisine
 Chinese cooking has always been closely linked to the vegetarian way of eating Vegetables in China, because of its climate, are easily grown, and therefore plentiful Culturally, Taoism and Buddhism have further added a tradition of cooking without meat to the Chinese way of life.
Happily, the Chinese have made a virtue of cooking with vegetables. With ingenuity and thousands of years of refining their cooking style, they have transformed grains, beans, and vegetables into a cuisine with almost infinite subtle variations of taste and color. Their primary cooking methods, stir-frying and steaming, are ideally suited to vegetables, for they allow them to retain their flavor, nutrients, texture, and color in the final dish. The Chinese employ this benefit further by taking extreme care with presentation, using the colors and textures of the ingredients to enhance the presentation of their dishes. A relatively simple recipe such as Snow Peas and Carrots with Ginger combines contrasting textures and colors with fragrant ginger in a light sweet-sour sauce to produce a dish that is as pleasing to the rye as it is to the palate. In addition, through deft use of sauces and spices, Chinese cooking can transform basic ingredients such as eggplant and cabbage into any number of dishes-spicy, mild, sweet and sour, pungent. The results, so different each time, reflect the multiplicity of influences that have made Chinese cooking so fascinating and endlessly enjoyable to cooks all over the world. Chinese cooking has been called exotic, different, difficult. It is exotic and different to the uneducated Western palate, but exotic in the most pleasurable of ways. It ranks as one of the great cuisines of the world, so anyone who is even generally interested in food would be remiss in overlooking Chinese cooking. Mastering it need not be difficult and in fact, the basic techniques of Chinese cooking are relatively easy to learn. The most common method of cooking is stir-frying, and that holds few mysteries: it is simply quick cooking over very high heat. This guide is for the beginner, although the more practiced Chinese cook will also find many recipes to enjoy. The range of recipes runs from very straightforward, such as Stir-fried Asparagus, to more complex dishes like Fourcolor Shui Mai, and wherever possible I’ve emphasized those recipes that are easy to prepare in the Western kitchen. If you haven’t cooked with a wok before, read through Chapter 1 for information on equipment and the techniques of stir-frying and steaming. This chapter also includes a glossary of the main ingredients I use in the recipes; a second glossary at the end of the book covers some of the less-essential vegetables, beans, spices, and oils. Wherever possible I have included suggestions for substitutions for ingredients that may be hard to find, and added a list of mail order sources of supply for equipment and ingredients. The menu guide at the back of the book will help you plan everything from an everyday meal to an array of party dishes. I do not use monosodium glutamate or other artificial additives because properly cooked Chinese foods simply do not need artificial enhancement I have substituted vegetable stock for chicken stock as a vegetarian variation on some traditionally meat-based soups and sauces. Although honey is generally not used in Chinese kitchens, I have shown it as an alternative to sugar, which many people prefer to avoid. It is a pleasure to bring you this selection of Chinese recipes; I hope they will bring you as much enjoyment as they have me. Chinese Food Simplicity
Some other ingredients and seasonings which would be useful to have around when you intend to cook Chinese include:
If convenience foods or frozen foods are admissible in good Western cooking, they can certainly also be incorporated in good Chinese cooking, provided they are pepped up with a proportion of fresh foods at crucial points in the process. Stir-frying
You don’t have to have a wok; you can use a cast iron skillet for stir-frying. Begin by putting your wok (or skillet) on a burner and turning the heat to medium-high or high, depending on your stove, until it begins to smoke. In a couple of minutes the wok will be hot enough to add the little oil called for in the recipe. At this point, any seasonings are added to flavor the oil-sliced ginger root, garlic, onions, dried chili peppers, and the like. Then start adding the ingredients as detailed in the recipe and cook for the minute or two or three noted, stirring and tossing constantly with a spatula and cooking spoon to make sure the food is cooked evenly and does not burn or stick to the pan. Then remove the wok from the burner and take the food from the wok. Vegetables tend to continue cooking in their own heat so remove them from the wok when they’re a bit crunchier than you really want. Because the food cooks so quickly, it is important to organize all your ingredients-have the vegetables chopped or diced, the sauce mixed and stirred, and all the other ingredients measured, chopped, and prepared–close at hand before heating the ‘wok. Once you have begun stir-frying, there won’t be time to stop and go back to complete a forgotten step because you must keep the food moving from the moment you add it to the wok. I find it helpful to have every ingredient ready in a separate cup or small bowl and line these on the counter next to the stove, or on a tray, in the order in which they will be used. That way I can be sure I haven’t missed something; and I have tried to organize the recipes that follow so you can do this too. |
Many people appear to have the impression that it is necessary to use a great many rare and exotic materials and ingredients in Chinese cooking. This is not so at all. The food materials used in Chinese cooking are for all practical purposes the same as those used in the Western style (the exceptions which exist merely prove the rule). As for flavoring and seasoning ingredients, so long as you have soy sauce, which is obtainable almost anywhere these days, you can cook Chinese. All the other ingredients and seasonings used are similar to or the same as those normally used in Western cooking, such as salt, pepper, chili powder, mustard, garlic, onion, spring onion (scallion), parsley, chives. An exception such as root ginger can be replaced by chopped lemon- or orange-peel shavings.
Stir-frying, the most common of all methods of Chinese cooking, uses very high temperatures to cook chopped or diced ingredients rapidly in a small amount of fat or oil.