Chinese Cooking Techniques
Superior Materials
Material selection is the first and foremost technique for Chinese chefs and the basis for making top grade Chiense cuisine. It requires rich knowledge and skilled techiniques of application. The raw materials of each cuisine include main ingredients, side ingredients, supplementary ingredients and seasonings, which all need careful study and have fixed patterns. They can be generalized as the two words of "exquisiteness" and "fineness". This is what Confucius says high quality materials and finely cut meat. “Exquisiteness” means when selecting materials, people should consider the characteristics of their varities, places of origin, seasons and growth period, etc. Superior materials should be fresh, rich, tender, and excellent in quality. Take Beijing roasted duck as example. It selects the "stuffed duck" produced in Beijing. An exellent quality duck has a weight around two and a half kilograms. If it is too large, the flesh will be old while if it is too small, the flesh will not be fat and delicious enough. Sometimes materials need special treatment according to the flavor of dishes. Take the famous dish of Hangzhou "West Lake fish in vinegar" as example. It selects live grass carp produced by the West Lake. Though it tasets fresh, it has loose flesh and the smell of earth. Therefore, it should be placed in a specially made bamboo cage and starved for two days in clear water until its flesh become solid and the odor of earth is got rid of. In this way, the fish will taste more tender and delicious with the flavor of crab flesh after being cooked. "Fineness" means selecting raw materials from the best part. For example, the famous cuisine "chicken cubes with peanuts" selects the tender flesh at the breast of a spring chicken of the same year so as to guarantee the tenderness of flesh.
Fine Slicing Techniques
Slicing technique is namely the cutting treatment of a chef on raw materials of food so that the materials might have an orderly and identical shape required by cooking, adapt to duration and be heated evenly. In this way, the materials become tasty while retaining certain morphological beauty. Therefore, it is one of the keys of cooking techniques. Our country has attached great importance to the application of slicing techniques since ancient times. Through repeated practice, chefs of past dynasties have created abundant ways of cutting, such as straight cutting, slice cutting, oblique cutting, score cutting (score the material without cutting off) and engraving cutting, process raw materials into all shapes such as slice, strip, shred, pieces, diamond, grain, paste, into a variety of designs and colors such as pellet, ball, ear of wheat, Lizi, coir raincoat, orchid and chrysanthemum. Cutting techniques are combined with dish decoration. Ripe materials and edible raw materials can be pieced together into highly artistic and lifelike hors d'oeuvres of birds, beasts, insects, fish, flower, grass, such as "dragon and phoenix bringing auspices and prosperity (made of snakes, hens, hams and medlars)", "peacock showing its tail (steamed bream with scallions and black beans)", "a pied magpie ascending the plumb tree (made of sautéed goose breast, stewed winter mushroom with gravy, white cake, yellow cake, ripe chicken breast, carrot and ham, etc)", "lotus and crane (made of lotus, egg, shark fin and crab roe)" and "two phoenixes above flower basket". For example, "peacock showing its tail" uses fifteen ingredients such as duck meat, ham, pig tongue, partridge egg, crab claw meat and cucumber and is completed through twenty two exquisite cutting techniques and decorating procedures.
Original Duration
Duration is one of the keys to the formation of the flavor characteristics of delicious dishes. However, duration is fast changing, it is difficult to control the duration to perfection without several years of practical operational experience. Hence, a mastery of appropriate duration is a stunt of the chefs in our country. The chefs in our country can accurately distinguish between different firepower such as vigorous fire, medium fire and slow fire, are familiar with the heat-resistant degree of all kinds of ingredients, are skillful in controlling the time of using fire, excel in mastering the performance of heat transfer objects (oil, water and gas), fix on the sequence of placing ingredients into the boiler according to the ingredients’ degree of tenderness, amount of water, shapes, sizes, wholeness and thickness and apply cooking techniques flexibly. Hence, the cooked dishes can either be tender, soft or boiled to a mush.
Duration is the most important thing in cooking and also the most difficult to be mastered and explained. However, whether a cook can become a famous chef, the key lies in duration. Therefore, when cooks in the cuisine field of our country operate duration, they bring into full play the abilities of subtle observation and experience and rich imagination with a lifetime's experience and intelligence of enlightening themselves and do the creation of diet culture. Ingenuity in varying tactics depends on mother wit. It’s really the case that "the gain and loss can be known to the cook's heart".
Five Flavors Being in Harmonious Proportion
Flavoring is an important cooking technique. "If five flavors are in harmonious proportion, there will be a hundred sweet-smelling flavors". The flavors of fish and meat dishes are divided into the basic type and the compoud type. The basic type is probably divided into nine categories, namely, saltiness, sweetness, sourness, spiciness, bitterness, freshness, fragrance, numbness and lightness. The compound type is difficult to be counted. It can generally be reduced to around fifty types. The flavor types of dishes in our country approximately include: salty and flesh flavor, salty and sweet flavor, sour and sweet flavor, spicy and salty flavor, fragrant and spicy flavor, spicy flavor, fragrant rice wine flavor, fish flavor and special spicy flavor, etc.
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