ChineseCookingDemystified
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[Book] Introduction: Thinking in Flavor Profiles
🕑 Added 2020-08-26 06:19:10 +0000 UTCFeedback welcome :)
Take a look at the menu of your local Chinese restaurant. Doesn’t matter if it’s a Cha Chaan Teng in Hong Kong, or a takeout joint in the United States: more likely than not, you’ll be greeted with a menu with dozens upon dozens of different dishes. For the purpose of illustration, let’s take a look at the menu of the following takeout joint in the United States:
Seems like a pretty classic spread of takeout fare. Now let’s compare that to the Supper menu of the restaurant Husk, one of the most well known and respected American restaurants in the United States:
This obviously doesn't include starters and desserts and such, but as a whole Husk’s menu reflects the broad consensus in the food and beverage industry in the West: have a tight menu. Do not try to be everything to everybody. With only six dishes to choose from, the restaurant can focus the entirety of their efforts executing those particular six dishes. The restaurant doesn’t have to order such a wide variety of ingredients, there’s less spoilage, the cooks get more intimately familiar with the dishes on the menu, and you end up with happy customers.
So then, what’s up with that takeout menu up there? Are they just… bad businessmen or something? Would Gordon Ramsey take them to task on Kitchen Nightmares?
Take a look at that takeout menu again. While at first glance there appears like there’s a bewildering number of options, you can start to see that there’s quite a few dishes that are the same fundamental flavor, only re-arranged with different ingredients. There’s Kung Pao chicken, and also Kung Pao shrimp; Beef with Garlic Sauce, and also Roast Pork with Garlic sauce. If you pared down the above menu to unique dishes only, you’d cut the size of the menu by roughly two thirds; if you took a more wide ranging view, you could whittle things down ever further (e.g. the American ‘General Tso’s’ flavor profile is practically the same as the American ‘Sesame’ flavor profile, only with a handful of small alternations). The restaurant is able to make a bewildering number of dishes and variants using a handful of fundamental techniques and flavors. That is the beauty of Chinese cooking - variety.
Of course, the American-style takeout menu is borderline infamous for that mix-and-match strategy, but you do see the same sort of dynamic at restaurants in China as well. And even if the menu doesn’t explicitly list out a variant based on a specific flavor profile, if the flavor’s on the menu, that’s often something that you can ask for. Westerners often seem perplexed when they see people around them ordering off-menu in a Chinese restaurant, leading to an enduring myth that there’s some sort of ‘secret menu’. There’s no secret menu, of course, just a shared simmering-below-the-surface cultural understanding of flavor profiles: “oh, I see you’ve got clams with garlic and black bean sauce, can you fry that up with squid, instead?” Because if the restaurant’s already got some squid prepped for stir-fry, why not?
Now famously, Sichuanese cuisine lists out fourteen different flavor profiles. In this book, we’ll cover most of those, but we also wanted to expand out of the Sichuan province and touch on foundational flavor profiles throughout the entire country. Unfortunately however, culinary institutes outside of Sichuan tend not to list out flavor profiles in the same systematic way, and even inside of Sichuan, the total number of flavors depends on who’s counting: while many sources list out fourteen, others list out twenty three, and we’ve seen one book that even listed out more than forty!
The subject of Chinese cuisine is as wide as the Pacific Ocean and as deep as the Mariana trench. So as a warning, this book will be far from exhaustive. We view this simply as a starting point for cataloging the flavors at various parts around the country, and we hope you can make some tasty food in the process.
Comments
Nightfall
This is very welcome news! I’m so glad you are taking the plunge and are compiling a cookbook. I think Americans have really embraced regional cuisines from around the globe lately and with the pandemic forcing folks to order ingredients online, so this is an excellent time to launch such an endeavor. Sign me up! I’ll be pre-ordering for sure. I am not familiar with any Chinese languages or dialects, but I do think pinyin could be helpful for people like me. I’ve been a translator for Arabic for decades, and I have seen that transliteration systems can be an asset if used correctly. But Arabic is definitely not Chinese, so I don’t know if the same rules apply. Trust your own judgment.
your_sweetpea
A quick pinyin pronunciation guide may be helpful too, if only to the poor Chinese people who are going to have to listen to us westerners butchering the names of the ingredients we're looking for
your_sweetpea
I had this in a thread but I'm moving it out to a top-level comment because I'm not sure how Patreon notifies creators on comments: I really recommend using actual Chinese characters when you're writing out Chinese names for things, but using ruby characters to include pinyin. See the Wikipedia page for Ruby characters for an example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character#Examples IMO it would help in a couple of different ways: 1. To give an "authentic feel", because your book is going to be authentic but the feeling of such things is important too :) 2. It'll make it easier to flip back through the book and skim through recipes for the names of certain Chinese ingredients and techniques, etc. you may be looking for the name of, since it'll break up the sameness of the page having Chinese characters there 3. Good density of information (you can both read the characters that will be on the label and know how to say it when you're asking about it at your local Chinese grocery store, without it taking up a lot of extra space or needing to flip to a "key")
James Atlas
Ooh this is sounding so good. My only issue is waiting! Yeah with naming recipes themselves, as already said, the Dunlop style of using English, pinyin and characters, seems good (eg: “Mustardy dressing (jiemo wei 芥末味)”). You could sort it the other way too of course: “Jiemo Wei 芥末味 (Mustardy dressing)” as long as the English was prominent enough to allow for quick recognition. Then your idea of including key characters to look for in the ‘master ingredient guide’ sounds really good. (Hahaha sorry, going right to the boring detail aren’t we! While you’re still designing at the top level...)
Matthew
Awesome!! Can’t wait for more, great start.
Grammar Antifa
This is exactly the kind of thing I've been wanting for a while, looking forward to it.
Zachary Boring
Great analytic lens. So happy to support you in documenting and carrying on these traditions.
Tyler Hall
This is such a great step for you folks! Thanks for everything you do!!
lulu & tazzy
i would guess by now you guys have perused Dunlop’s book she kinda nailed a great format. i did publish a a book on Samshwords and made a whopping 4.99 on it, just because my daughter felt sorry for me. and bought one. lol the book was a labor of love and i enjoyed every moment. you guys have the desire and energy to pull it off. perseverance furthers
Stephanie Li and Chris Thomas
Of course. Li and Thomas's seven part, 26 book magnum opus "Gastronomy and Civilization in China" ;)
Dana Coe
Once this book is done, you could then do an exhaustive treatise on each of the regions you included. That would keep you busy for... decades. Ha ha
Stephanie Li and Chris Thomas
Totally, we're 100% planning for that :) My metric of whether to include the Chinese on something is if a 12 year old American with no cooking experience would be able to pick it out without a label. So I generally don't translate 'salt', 'sugar', 'garlic' and 'water', but everything else gets the characters :) For a book... pinyin is negotiable haha. I'm thinking we can cover that in the 'master ingredient guide' section of the book... we can include the names of stuff in both Mandarin and Cantonese. But in the ingredient lists I feel like the characters might be good enough?
Stephanie Li and Chris Thomas
Hmm... I'd say here it really depends on the restaurant. But in general, I'd say the most common method for organization would be by cooking method. You've got the stir-fries next to the stir-fries, the braised dishes next to the braised dishes, the sizzling hotplates next to the sizzling hotplates etc. Although usually the starches (fried rices, fried noodles, etc) all tend to be next to eachother. Sometimes you will see a restaurant *specializing* in, say, their chicken dishes or lamb dishes (like, their sourcing is very good on that front) - in which case, those would often be in their own little section.
JF M
Very exciting! Can I preorder? :D Take the time you need to produce something you are proud of. Something I would be keen to see is if you can include characters / pinyin for ingredients and names for dishes? I have found that very helpful when shopping or going to places with poor quality english menus.
Olivier
One question that I had while reading was: Is it common in china to separate dishes on menus based on protein? It’s something I don’t particularly like in western chinese restaurants as I’m usually more interested in the flavor profile than what kind of protein is used.
Matthew and Fritz Faulhaber
I’m excited! Congratulations of a new adventure, I can’t wait.
