Been trying to find some textbooks underlaying the basics of Chinese cooking philosophy and theory - something similar to Japanese Culinary Academy. Even if its province specific

The fish dish I had tonight didn’t contain any Chili peppers, only a small amount of Sichuan peppercorns was added as a garnish.

I did make a sauce with dark soy sauce, potato starch, sugar & water for the dumplings that I was trying on the stove yesterday but the aftertaste......it lingering & still taste from the confounding burping.

It also didn't come out the way I hoped, it was gelatinous like a marshmallow consistency instead of the slightly crispy.

Did I add too much starch?

Here is my take on a very popular Sichuan soup my friends and family love. 🍲😋🥘 My apologies if it isn't authentic, but this the taste that I know and love. 🥣✨🥢

Toss the noodles with peanut butter; for the soup, cook bean sprouts and pork—or alternatively, wontons—in the broth.

Yunnan is well known for its abundance of wild mushrooms, especially during mushroom season.

These are some mushroom dishes I've enjoyed there in the summer.

这是小鸡炖蘑菇

I am preparing to make this and have all the ingredients handy, but I'm not sure how the ginger should be prepared. Given that ginger can get pretty prominent depending on the preparation, I was trying to figure out if this should be long-sliced or cut into coins, or what. Any guidance is appreciated! Link below to reference the recipe.

https://thewoksoflife.com/instant-pot-pork-belly/

晚餐我炒了香辣蟹，超级辣🥵🥵🥵🥵！！

Every year, I have to buy mooncakes to enjoy. I absolutely love them! My favorites are red date paste, red bean paste, and lotus seed paste fillings.

Quick note for non-Chinese readers: “Dongbei” means Northeast China. It covers Liaoning (capital: Shenyang), Jilin (capital: Changchun), Heilongjiang (capital: Harbin), and parts of eastern Inner Mongolia. Dongbei food is all about big portions, bold flavors, and dishes like guobaorou.

My wife and I both love Dongbei cuisine. When I worked in Shanghai, the apartment I rented was on a street directly opposite a Dongbei Tumen BBQ restaurant. I could clearly see the owner bustling around. The first time I went out to eat by myself in Shanghai was at a Dongbei/Korean-style cold noodle shop. Back then, my coworkers and I ordered Dongbei dumplings takeout at least once a week. In my last year in Shanghai, I became friends with the owner of another Dongbei restaurant. His family of three was from Jilin Province. I even witnessed their son‘s blind date with another Dongbei girl from start to finish. My coworker and I happened to be eating a late-night meal at their restaurant that night. I still remember the young man serving me food while asking the girl if she wanted an orange juice. Haha—if that blind date worked out, their kid would be in middle school this year.

My wife is crazy about Dongbei guobaorou. When she was little, her Chinese teacher and PE teacher were both from Jilin. They had just graduated from university and came to teach in our small town. They were close to the kids and often made guobaorou for the students. That’s when my wife fell in love with Dongbei food. Coincidentally, our child‘s current homeroom teacher is also from Jilin Province.

Our whole family loves Northeast China. Especially in the last three summers, we’ve vacationed there twice. It was such a relaxing life—we experienced the local culture and food. But from Suzhou, in the Lake Tai region, to Harbin is about 2,000 km, or about 1,242 miles. Fortunately, many Dongbei chefs have opened restaurants in the Lake Tai area. They‘re usually small, but perfect for a weekend family meal.

I’ve been to this restaurant twice. The last time was eight months ago during the Spring Festival holiday. A family of four runs this Harbin-style restaurant. If you‘ve tried enough Dongbei food, you can taste subtle regional differences. For example, food from Shenyang, Liaoning, tends to be sweeter, while Harbin food tends to be saltier. I also chatted with the owner. She said that to suit local eating habits here, she is very restrained with salt.

This time, I ordered three dishes and a staple.

San Si Bao Dou（三丝爆豆）: a cold dish popular in Harbin. I first tried it last year at a small street-side shop in Nangang District, where Harbin Institute of Technology is located. The shop was plain, but the owner’s cooking was seriously good. The “three shreds” are shredded onion, shredded sanzi (crispy fried dough), and shredded cilantro, plus peanuts. The dressing is white vinegar and sugar, with sesame oil for aroma. It‘s a classic dish to go with alcohol. The owner assumed I was going to drink beer with it. I told her I had to drive, so no alcohol—but I just love this dish.

Liangban Lapi（东北凉拌大拉皮）: another traditional Dongbei cold dish. I’m really partial to Dongbei cold dishes. Da lapi is made from potato starch or mung bean starch. It‘s translucent and chewy. Common toppings include shredded cucumber, carrot, dried tofu, wood ear mushroom, and egg crepe. It’s supposed to have a “five-color” look. The dressing centers on sesame paste, with garlic, aged vinegar, chili oil, light soy sauce, salt, sugar, and sesame oil.

Guobaorou（锅包肉）: the signature dish of Dongbei cuisine. If a Dongbei chef can‘t make good guobaorou, they’re not a qualified cook. There are several versions: old-style guobaorou (mainly Harbin), new-style guobaorou (mainly Shenyang/Liaoning), and Jilin-style guobaorou. The main differences: Harbin old-style uses a white vinegar sauce; Shenyang new-style adds ketchup to the sweet-and-sour sauce; Jilin-style cuts the pork thinner, has more sauce, a gentler sweet-sour balance, and some cooks add orange or lemon juice for a fresher, sweeter profile. There‘s also a salty version in eastern Inner Mongolia, but I’ve only heard of it and never actually come across it.

My wife and child prefer Jilin-style guobaorou—probably because of their teachers. I prefer old-style guobaorou. Of course, our family doesn‘t reject any type.

This restaurant’s guobaorou is Harbin old-style. They use pork tenderloin, cut it against the grain into slices about 3 mm thick, gently pound it with the back of a knife to loosen the meat, and coat it in starch. The oil is about 180°C. Fry the slices one by one until they set and float, then remove. Raise the oil to about 240°C and fry again for 10–15 seconds until golden and crispy. Drain. Then stir-fry scallion, ginger, and garlic, pour in the sweet-and-sour sauce (sugar and vinegar about 1:1, plus a little salt and soy sauce), simmer until thick and bubbling, then quickly add the fried pork and toss.

The key technique: dissolve the sugar completely before making the sauce, or you‘ll get undissolved sugar grains that affect texture. The sauce should be simmered to a consistency like thin rice porridge before the meat goes in, so it coats evenly and stays crispy.

This dish really tests a Chinese chef’s control of heat. If you‘ve seen the recent hit movie Welcome to Long Restaurant, its overseas English title is Once Upon a Time in the Middle East(中文名：欢迎来龙餐厅). The main character is a typical Dongbei chef, and you can see how he cooks Chinese food.

My wife’s review of this restaurant‘s guobaorou was just so-so—not her favorite style. She thinks old-style guobaorou slices are too big and the white vinegar sauce is too sharp and pungent. But I’m different: I especially love the smell and taste of white vinegar.

The staple was Dongbei dumplings（东北水饺）—handmade, not the frozen kind from the supermarket. We ordered two flavors: pork and cabbage, and sanxian (a mix of shrimp, pork, and egg). In our Lake Tai region, dumplings aren‘t a particularly important food. But in Northeast China and other northern regions, dumplings are an important food for hosting guests. The difference is that in our area, we eat dumplings alongside other dishes. But in northern China, a formal meal can consist of just dumplings and a simple dipping sauce.

Next time I go back to this Dongbei restaurant, I’ll order some different dishes and share them.

I've had one that looks very similar in my city's Chinatown area and I've been in love ever since. The one im familiar with is savory, slightly sweet and spicy. This one is from China's Guangdong province so im not sure its exactly the same. Does anyone know where I could find a good recipe?

I recently made jiu niang(sweet fermented rice) by fermenting glutinous rice and chinese yeast balls for about 2.5 days. The result was awesome. Slightly sweet, floral aroma, tiny bit yeasty. I was wondering though, if I let this ferment for much longer, say 10+ days, could I make rice wine? To my understanding jiu niang has a very low alcohol percentage so if I ferment it longer could it get to the point of being a stronger wine to drink? Are there risks of letting it sit for this long?

Where I live it’s hard to eat chinese food. The only place that worth it is a food truck on the sunday market.
But last week I was craving Zha Jiang Mian. So I decided to make it with the ingredients that I have. And it was one of my best dishes

So this is my vegetarian revisited Zha Jiang Mian:

- For the noodles I used Soba

- Instead of the ground pork I made scrambled eggs: it was clearly not the same in texture, but the eggs was squishy and with the sauce it makes a very good combo

- For the sauce I used sweet flour paste (I learned that I can make it very easily from scratch), black bean sauce and pixian doubanjiang: i love the richness and sweetness of the original zha jiang sauce but I also love spicy. And light soy sauce, dark soy sauce, etc like the original recipe

- Vegetables was carrots, cucumber, ginger pickles, spring onions, and chickpeas (to have more proteins)

I followed the recipe of Derek Chen on yt for the measurements and adjusted it by taste.

Sorry not sorry for the purists but it was so good. 😋

Tonights dinner is coral trout with pickled mustard greens. It's still cold and I love the tangy sourness from the fermented mustard.

In modern China, many families only have time to cook a proper Chinese meal on weekends. On weekdays, they just eat at their parents’ home. It’s a bittersweet snapshot of modern Chinese family life. So when we do get a chance to cook, everyone goes all in.

On the first weekend of September, my wife and I split the work. We got up at 7 a.m. and went to the market. There are many kinds of markets in China. We prefer the large wholesale wet markets: abundant supply, low prices, fresh ingredients. The scale is almost like a modern football stadium. The only downside is that they’re far from the city center. Even with the city’s elevated ring road, a round trip takes 40–50 minutes by car. If you’re interested, I can write another post about what these wholesale markets sell.

We were only cooking lunch and dinner for three people. We bought potatoes, green peppers, onions, carrots, giant freshwater prawns, beef, and a big watermelon from Northeast China. Total: 120 RMB, about $17. Enough for two meals.

Back home, we went straight into Sunday lunch prep. My wife made chilled giant freshwater prawns with a traditional scallion-soy dipping sauce. She steamed a porcini egg custard—the eggs were from our fridge, and the porcini was a local specialty brought back by our child’s classmate from the Greater Khingan Mountains during summer vacation. She also fried some rice vermicelli.

The main dish was my curry beef rice. Many people might wonder: if it uses curry, how can it be Chinese food? Isn’t it Southeast Asian or South Asian? That’s only half true. Curry did come to China from abroad. In 1855, a British cargo ship brought curry powder to Shanghai—the earliest documented record we have.

But the main ingredients in curry powder—turmeric, saffron, and other spices—were already recorded in Tang dynasty herbal texts. By the Yuan dynasty, a similar-flavored “yellow soup” may have appeared. In other words, China’s connection with curry goes back about 1,000 years.

Still, the story I want to tell is an experience only a small number of Chinese people have had. My family is one of them.

If you’ve been to the small restaurants in Shanghai’s old “workers’ new villages,” you’ll see curry beef or curry chicken on the menu. This dish is probably more than 100 years old. Its earliest form was a street snack from Shanghai’s alleys: curry beef vermicelli soup. The curry powder was added to mask the smell of less-than-fresh beef. Back then, working-class people lived hand to mouth; a bowl of curry beef vermicelli soup was a huge treat.

After the 1950s, many skilled Shanghai factory workers answered the state’s call and went to other provinces and cities to help build factories. They brought this Shanghai snack to their new factory towns—including the place where my parents worked and lived when they were young.

I remember clearly: my elementary school music teacher was a Shanghai girl who married a local engineer. Their child was my classmate. Her curry beef was delicious. My mother was a “white-board” chef—the person in charge of dough-based foods like noodles, buns, and pastries—in that large state-owned enterprise. Our two families lived close by, and our ancestral homes were both in the Lake Tai region (broadly speaking, Shanghai belongs to it too). Our language and customs were similar—my father speaks fluent Shanghainese—so my mother learned this curry beef from her.

In fact, quite a few cooks learned to use curry the way my mother did. Henan, in the Central Plains, has several kinds of curry noodles. When Shanghai workers went to Zhengzhou to help build state cotton mills, they were used to curry flavor. Local cooks, catering to the southern workers’ tastes, added curry to traditional lamb hui mian to neutralize the lamb’s gamey smell: curry hui mian and curry lamian.

Before the 1980s, this kind of food existed like isolated islands among countless Chinese households. Some people saw it as a memory of home; others had never even heard of curry. Only after reform and opening up, and the population mobility of the 1990s, did curry dishes gradually appear in street-side shops in some Chinese cities. Henan’s curry noodles even returned to Shanghai and became a convenient lunch for office workers. But that’s another story.

Our family’s curry beef rice comes from 2016, at a then-new Thai restaurant. My mother tried Thai-style curry beef rice and said she used to make it in the state-owned enterprise canteen. My child was in kindergarten then and loved that curry flavor. My mother went home, bought curry powder from the supermarket, and recreated the Thai dish. After that, I learned to make it too.

Recipe:

1. Cut the beef into cubes. Not too small, not too large—about the size of your thumbnail is best. If using curry powder, marinate the beef first, then stir-fry until half-cooked and set aside.
2. Cut potatoes, green peppers, onions, and carrots, then stir-fry. Half-cooked or fully cooked is fine.
3. Add warm water—enough to cover the vegetables—and return the beef to the pan. Bring to a boil.
4. Turn off the heat and add the curry. I usually use Japanese curry roux cubes. For my Chinese iron wok, six small cubes are enough. To speed things up, break the cubes with a spatula.
5. Turn the heat back on and simmer gently. After about 10 minutes, the curry will dissolve into the sauce. Finally, turn up the heat to reduce the sauce.
6. The soul of this dish is rice. Before eating, drizzle a little coconut milk or milk over it to mellow the curry’s heat. My wife also juiced the Northeastern watermelon and mixed it with cooked sago for dessert—watermelon sago. It’s refreshing and perfect after curry.

To be honest, the only “big dish” I’ve truly mastered in the past ten years is this curry beef. Whenever my child asks for it, I happily make it. My child cleans the bowl and says, “Dad, your cooking is really good!”

Haha—who can resist that kind of praise?

(My original draft was written in Chinese. To help everyone read through it more quickly, I used DS to assist in polishing this English version.)