13 recipes
One of the world's oldest and most varied cuisines, with thousands of years of history, eight great regional traditions and the art of the wok.
Read its storyA classic Chinese fried rice made by tossing day-old rice with egg, spring onion and soy sauce over high heat, ready in about ten minutes.
Sichuan's most famous chicken dish: diced chicken stir-fried over high heat with dried chillies, peanuts and a glossy sweet-sour sauce.
Soft, fluffy egg in a juicy sweet-sour tomato sauce: a quick, humble home dish cooked in almost every household in China.
Silky tofu simmered with ground beef in a fiery red sauce of chili bean paste, one of the most famous dishes of Sichuan cooking.
Crispy coated chicken tossed with peppers, onion and pineapple in a glossy red sweet-and-sour sauce, a Chinese takeaway favorite.
Thin-skinned half-moon dumplings filled with juicy meat and cabbage and boiled, the centerpiece of Chinese New Year tables, especially in the north.
Egg noodles stir-fried over high heat with chicken and vegetables in a savory soy and oyster sauce, crisp in places and deeply satisfying.
A warming Chinese soup that gets its heat from white pepper and its tang from vinegar, lightly thickened and filled with mushrooms, tofu, chicken and silky egg ribbons.
Sichuan's famous street noodles: wheat noodles tossed in a sesame, chilli-oil and numbing Sichuan-pepper sauce, topped with crisp-fried beef mince.
Crisp, golden Chinese spring rolls filled with stir-fried vegetables and optional chicken, a favourite snack of the Lunar New Year.
An elegant Cantonese classic: a whole fish gently steamed, then finished with ginger, spring onion, sizzling hot oil and a lightly sweet soy dressing.
A Sichuan vegetable dish of meltingly soft eggplant in a glossy garlic, ginger and chilli sauce that balances sweet, sour and spicy.
A Chinese-American restaurant classic of thinly sliced, velvety beef and crisp broccoli stir-fried in a glossy oyster sauce.
Chinese cuisine is one of the oldest and most continuous in the world. Millet and wheat in the north and rice in the south have been staples for millennia. Confucian thought linked food to social order and family, while traditional Chinese medicine emphasised balancing foods with "warming" and "cooling" qualities. That search for balance still shows in pairings of contrasts such as sweet and sour, or soft and crisp.
The Silk Road brought grapes, sesame and new spices to China. From the late Ming dynasty onward, chillies, corn, sweet potatoes and peanuts arrived from the Americas. The chilli, now the emblem of Sichuan and Hunan cooking, is in fact a relatively recent arrival. Meanwhile, Chinese creations such as noodles, soy sauce, tofu and tea spread across East Asia.
China is commonly said to have eight great regional cuisines: Shandong, Sichuan, Cantonese (Guangdong), Jiangsu, Fujian, Zhejiang, Hunan and Anhui. Sichuan cooking is famous for the tingling Sichuan peppercorn and its heat. Cantonese cooking relies on fresh ingredients, light sauces and the dim sum tradition. Shandong is known for seafood and soups, Jiangsu for refined, slightly sweet flavours, and the north for dumplings (jiaozi) and hand-pulled noodles.
Soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, ginger, garlic, spring onions and starch are the essentials. The best-known technique is stir-frying in a wok over very high heat, but steaming, poaching, red-braising (slow-cooking with soy sauce and sugar) and deep-frying are just as important. Having every ingredient chopped and ready before you start cooking is the first rule of success in Chinese cooking.
Egg fried rice and tomato and egg stir-fry are among the best-loved and easiest dishes of Chinese home cooking. Then build your stir-frying skills with