Cuisine guide
Chinese
recipes.
Chinese cuisine isn't one cuisine — it's at least eight major regional traditions (Cantonese, Sichuan, Hunan, Shandong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Fujian) plus countless local variations, each shaped by climate, geography, and centuries of distinct culinary lineage. What unifies them is technique: the wok and the cleaver, the patient cultivation of umami through soy sauces and fermented bean pastes, the principle that texture matters as much as flavour, the parallel discipline of cooking-as-medicine. The dishes most non-Chinese readers know — kung pao, sweet-and-sour, fried rice — are a tiny edge of a much larger and more sophisticated culinary universe.
Recipes from Chinese
27 dishes to cook from
The shape of the cuisine
Three pillars to anchor what you cook.
Cantonese (Guangdong)
The cuisine non-Chinese diners most often meet, thanks to Hong Kong and the Cantonese diaspora. Light hands with seasoning, an obsession with ingredient freshness, the steaming of whole fish, and roast meats (siu mei) hung in shop windows. Dim sum is its tea-house tradition.
Sichuan and Hunan
The province of mala — má (numbing, from Sichuan peppercorn) and là (hot, from chillies). Mapo tofu, dan dan noodles, dry-fried green beans, twice-cooked pork. Hunan is similarly chilli-driven but more sour and smoky than numbing.
Northern (Shandong, Beijing)
Wheat country: hand-pulled noodles, dumplings, scallion pancakes, the breads of the Hui Muslim minority. Heavier seasoning, stronger vinegar. Peking duck is the most famous dish; it's also one of the technically hardest things in any cuisine.
Staple ingredients
The pantry you'll want.
Light and dark soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, black vinegar (Chinkiang), white rice vinegar, sesame oil, doubanjiang (fermented broad-bean paste), oyster sauce, fermented black beans (douchi), Sichuan peppercorns, white pepper, ginger, scallions, garlic, dried shiitake, cornstarch, jasmine rice, long-grain rice, wheat noodles, rice noodles.
You don't need everything at once. Build the pantry over a few months as recipes call for it; most of these are shelf-stable and useful across cuisines.
Core techniques
A few moves to learn well.
- Velveting — coating sliced meat in cornstarch and egg white before stir-frying for tenderness
- Wok hei — getting a wok screamingly hot before adding oil and ingredients
- Building a stir-fry by aromatics first (ginger, garlic, scallion), then protein, then vegetables, then sauce
- Steaming fish whole at very high heat for the briefest time possible