Destination China

Flavours of China

Chinese cuisine has a long history, and is one of the Chinese cultural treasures. It is as famous all over the world as French cuisine. Chinese cookery has developed and matured over the centuries, forming a rich cultural content. It is characterized by fine selection of ingredients, precise processing, particular care to the amount of fire, and substantial nourishment. Local flavours and snacks and special dishes have formed according to regions, local products, climate, historical factors, and eating habits.

Each local cuisine has its own characteristics, but Chinese cuisine as a whole is divided into four major schools-Shandong, Sichuan, Huaiyang, and Guangdong (Cantonese). Four more can be added: Hunan, Fuijian, Anhui, and Zhejiang. Sometimes Beijing and Shanghai cuisine are also counted.

Guangdong Cuisine (Yue Cuisine)

Guangdong cuisine uses a great variety of ingredients such as birds, freshwater fish, snakes, and saltwater fish. It emphasizes freshness and tenderness. Representative dishes of the Guangdong cuisine are three snake dragon tiger meeting, dragon tiger phoenix snake soup, stir-fried shrimp, eight-treasure lotus-seed glutinous rice, fresh mushrooms in oyster sauce, pot-cooked soft-shelled turtle, and crisp-skin roast piglet.

Shandong Cuisine (Lu Cuisine)

This cuisine uses a wide and fine selection of ingredients. The plentiful dishes are cooked in many ways. Shandong soups are most famous, and green onion is commonly used as a seasoning. Shandong cuisine is best represented by its variety of seafood dishes, such as sea cucumber braised with green onion, braised snakehead egg, crab eggs with shark’s fin, Dezhou roast chicken, and walnuts in butter soup.

Sichuan Cuisine (Chuan Cuisine)

Sichuan cuisine dishes are famous in China and abroad for their spicy-hot taste and the flavour of Chinese prickly ash. Sichuan cooks select their ingredients with great care, use a variety of seasonings and cook each dishes are differently. Thus Sichuan dishes are known as a hundred dishes with a hundred tastes. Most common flavour include hot and spicy, five fragrances, mixed spices and sweet and sour. Famous Sichuan dishes include spicy pork shreds, diced chicken with peanuts and vegetables, bear’s paw, chicken cubes in mixed spices and fried carp.

Huaiyang Cuisine

Huaiyang cuisine includes dishes from Yangzhou, Zhenjiang, and Huai’an in Jiangsu Province. It focuses on the freshness of ingredients. Huaiyang dishes have a light flavour, retaining the original tastes of ingredients. They also have pleasant colours and pretty shapes. Famous dishes include beggar’s chicken, sweet and sour mandarin fish, chicken pieces with egg white, boiled salted duck deep-boiled and crabmeat in clear soup.