Chapter 27 Section 27 Chinese Cuisine

Chinese cuisine should be divided into southern and northern cuisines with the Yangtze River as the central axis, especially along the Yangtze River. The Yangtze River joins the three rivers of Sichuan and enters the sea through Shanghai.People in Shanghai like sweetness, hot and sour are the best in Sichuan, while people in the middle of the Yangtze River, such as Hubei and Jiangxi, have a soft spot for bitter melon, lettuce, chrysanthemum chrysanthemum, wormwood, and ground vegetables. The cuisines along the Yangtze River are the most complicated. Even sweet, sour, bitter, hot can't explain it all.The situation is different from south to north. The south is represented by Guangdong. Those places with hot weather don’t judge the dishes by taste, but freshness is the most important. If you go back to the source, it’s probably good if it doesn’t deteriorate. Don’t elevate the old Cantonese taste to The incredible height is dictated by the characteristics of the regional climate.People in Hunan don’t talk about fresh food, but Hunan is a place where old food is eaten. They like to salt or smoke everything. Eating the cured meat and smoke tastes as if they want to chew for a period of time.There is a big unification in the north. Except for the jealous people represented by Shanxi people, there are two major categories that can be summarized. People in the Northeast love to stew, and people in the Northwest love to roast.People from the Northeast who eat rotten stew and people from Northwest who eat barbecue roughly dominate the northern cuisine. Beijingers also pay attention to shabu-shabu. Can shabu-shabu be considered a cuisine?

Cooking, frying, stewing, grilling, steaming, stewing and mixing——after mastering these skills, you can probably master the skills of cooking Chinese food. With these skills, you can go to Chinatown in the United States to open a restaurant, or go to France, and you can also travel in China. Traveling around, when I first arrived in Beijing, I thought that if I couldn’t support myself by selling articles, I would find a restaurant to work as a chef. I could eat and drink and still get some salary. No. article, a dish full of color, fragrance and taste, has the sensory stimulation of art works, and the lingering aftertaste of music works. Stir-fried is a plate of poetry, braised in brown sauce is a bowl of essays, shabu-shabu is just like writing essays, and of course a rotten stewed cauldron is a Long novels——I thought that an animal like a writer is a chef who cooks ordinary dishes with extraordinary tastes—there is absolutely a reason for using ordinary Chinese characters to arrange interesting words.

I think the degeneration of Chinese cuisine can be counted from the birth of monosodium glutamate. Since the introduction of monosodium glutamate, Chinese cuisine has begun to develop into a unified one. It has eroded dialects just like Mandarin.Especially the soup made with MSG, it is simply a lie, it makes our taste buds gradually lose the ability to judge sharply, and its function of turning rotten into fresh can only save poor cooks but cannot let us enjoy the richness of nature.I don't eat MSG. To judge whether a chef is superb or not, you can see whether he puts MSG or not. The chef who puts more MSG, the lower his grade, and he can't make good taste. He likes to use beautiful The word to praise beautiful writers is as useless as it is.

The key to Chinese cuisine is to master the heat. It runs through the Chinese philosophy of the mean. It is not good if the heat is under-heated, and it is not good if the heat is over-heated. It is just right. If you master this key, you can almost become a philosophy professor at Peking University.The heat is empirical and not easy to measure, because the dishes are different, and the same dish is closely related to its thickness, cutting method, and whether it is thickened or not. If you want to put soy sauce (soy sauce is the only non-oil crown It is called oil), then it has to be fried longer, and the taste of soy sauce will be separated from the vegetables after frying, which is contrary to Taoist thinking.There are two types of vegetables with vinegar. One is green vegetables, which need to be cooked immediately after vinegar is put in. The boiling point of vinegar is very low. Fresh water such as fish should be put in earlier to let the vinegar evaporate and take away the fresh water. The fishy smell does not cover the umami taste.Of course, we all have the habit of eating with vinegar, especially fresh water, which is another matter.Vinegar is a transition word in music or a transition word in Chinese characters. It is useless but indispensable.Acetic acid is a kind of thing that eats away calcium, too much content in the body may not be good.

With heat, soy sauce and vinegar, plus spiced garlic, chili and scallions, it is enough to make Chinese dishes, and of course there is no shortage of salt.In the days of lack of salt, our souls have nowhere to rest.It is said that during World War II, the Japanese invading army viciously blocked the salt road to prevent the Eighth Route Army from eating salt, which shows that the Japanese invading army is insidious and vicious.However, there are two types of salt, one is sea salt and the other is mineral salt. Between the two, sea salt is the top grade. For example, if you marinate bacon, you must use coarse-grained sea salt. The taste of bacon marinated with mineral salt is much inferior. , it seems that the sea is much richer, and it even has a faint fragrance of sunshine, the sea salt is sun-dried.

Chinese cuisine is extremely rich, but it may not be exactly as I said. The benevolent sees benevolence, and the wise sees wisdom. Fortunately, in an era where all kinds of dishes are competing for beauty, no one can be the only one. A man who likes to eat stinky fermented bean curd is also a gentleman.It is very important that we need to find a delicious way. At this point, the formalism must be greater than the connotation. Whether you slice or shred, steamed, grilled, fried, braised and stewed - it is still carbohydrates and protein.