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Old 09-05-2007, 04:43 AM
garcia1000 garcia1000 is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2004
Posts: 865
Default Re: Dim sum and other Cantonese food

Many people think that Cantonese food is boring. Quick background, there are four main categories of Chinese food.

Northern food, such as dumplings, noodles, and so on, is more similar to Western food. This is because the higher latitudes and colder climate means that food must be easy to make and able to be stored for a long time.

Sichuan food is appreciated by Caucasians a lot because it is very spicy due to use of their special kind of peppercorn. Sichuan is a mountainous region with a low variety of foodstuffs, and so the food needs to be flavoured with these things.

Shanghainese food, such as wonton chicken soup or Shanghai-style dumplings, are sort of midway between those above and Cantonese food. They have a variety of fresh ingredients (for example, hairy crabs are a particularly tasty delicacy) but also use cold cuts and noodles.

Cantonese food, especially places around the Pearl River Delta such as Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Shunde, etc, get a wide variety of fresh food including seafood. Because of this, the cooking de-emphasises heavy spices and sauces, and emphasises freshness of ingredients and bringing out the fresh taste.

As an analogy, say some guys were to prepare a tuna. Northern style would be to fry it with heavy sauce, Sichuan would be to dunk it in hot peppercorns, Shanghainese would be to steam it in some soup base, Cantonese would be to eat it sashimi-style.

In American restaurants, much Chinese food is Sichuan or sometimes Northern style. This is because it is the tastiest when working with cheap or non-fresh ingredients, and the use of thick sauces is more recognizable to the Western palate.

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