Icy Flame

Chinese cuisine can be broadly divided into four major regional categories which follow a north, south, east, west orientation: Beijing and Shandong, Cantonese and Chaozhou, Eastern, and Sichuan.

Cantonese&Chaozhou and Beijing&Shandong

Cantonese & Chaozhou

This is southern Chinese cooking. They have lots of streaming, boiling and stir-frying. They don't use so many oils compared with the other Chinese cuisine.

Dim sum is a snack-like variation, served for breakfast and lunch and consisting of all sorts of little delicacies served from pushcarts wheeled around the restaurant floor. The Cantonese are famous for making just about anything palatable: specialties are abalone, fried squid, 1000 year old eggs, shark's fin soup, snake soup, and dog stews.

Guangzhou is popular for its rich and exotic dishes both at home and abroad.cantonese cuisines is one of the famous four in china, which is characterized with various unusual gradients and materials. Apart from seafood and animals, insects and worms, flowers and weeds are all made into dishes. There is a variety of Cantonese dim sum, sweet or salty. It is estimated that there are over 1000 ways of making deserts. Scattered all over the city there are over 5000 restaurants, teahouses and snack eateries, offering service around the clock. Guangzhou is a paradise for gourmets.

Beijing & Shandong

Beijing and Shandong cuisine comes from one of the coldest pats of China. Since this is China's wheat belt, steamed bread and noodles are the staple rather than rice. Basically, northern cuisine combines very simple cooking techniques (stir-frying and steaming) with the sophistication of imperial dishes.

China's most famous northern specialty is Beijing duck, served with pancakes and plum in sauce. Another specialty is beggar's chicken, supposedly created by a beggar who stole a chicken earmarked for the emperor and secretly cooked it underground (the chicken that is, not the beggar)-the dish is wrapped in lotus leaves and baked all day in hot ashes.

Eastern


The cuisine of eastern China is probably the least understood of China's regional cuisine's-by foreigners at least. It encompasses Shanghai, Zhejiang, Fujian and the so-called lower-Yangzi region of Jiangsu.

It is undoubtedly the most diverse of China's regional cuisine's and has produced many famous dishes. Wuxi spare ribs is one to look out for; it features the common eastern technique of "red cooking" in a stock of soy sauce and rice wine to produce a tasty stew. Soups are a celebrated aspect of eastern cuisine, and there are hundreds of varieties.

In the coastal regions, seafood is an important ingredient and is generally cooked simply to enhance the natural taste. It is true that stir-fried dishes in this part of China tend to overdo the oil or lard, but in mainly restaurants nowadays this is becoming less the case. Cooking standards 10 years or so, and anyone with some money to throw around can enjoy some of best cooking in China.

Sichuan
Sichuan cuisine is world-famous and in a class of its own. The Chinese claim that it comprises more than 4,000 dishes, of which over 300 are said to be famous.

It's easily China's hottest and spiciest cuisine, often using huajiao, literally "flower pepper", a crunchy little item that leaves a numbing and strangely unfamiliar aftertaste-some compare it to spicy detergent.

Sichuan chefs have a catch-cry that draws attention to the diversity of Sihuanese cooking styles: "baicai baiwei", literally "a hundred dishes, a hundred flavors". Whether "a hundred flavors" is a characteristic Chinese exaggeration or not is difficult to say. There is, nevertheless, a bewildering cornucopia of Sihuanese sauces and culinary-preparation techniques. Some of the more famous varieties are yuxiang Wei, a really tasty fish-flavored sauce that draws heavily on vinegar, soy sauce and mashed garlic. Mala Wei, a numbingly spicy sauce that is often prepared with the most justifiable famousness is that used with smoked duck; and, perhaps most famous of all, the hot and sour sauce (suanla wei).

The hottest and sour soup, suanla tang, is eaten throughout China and is great on a cold day. A famous dish is spicy chicken fried with peanuts (gongbaojiding). Equally well known is mapo douhu, which is bean surd, pork and chopped spring onions in a chili sauce.

A favorite with travelers and worth trying simply for the novelty value is guoba roupian. Guoba refers to the crispy bits of rice, uncannily similar to Rice Krispies, which stick to the bottom of the rice pot -they are put on a plate, and pork and gravy added in front of the dinner.