Tag: High Heat

Good Chinese Recipes for Beginners

Choosing a good Chinese recipe can be hard if you have never prepared much Chinese food in the past. With ingredients you may not be used to and cooking styles you are unfamiliar with, it might seem a little scary when looking through recipes.

Its best to start with something easy and fun unless you are an experienced cook or you know exactly what you want. If you absolutely love pot stickers, you might try making those.

For most people, the best Chinese recipes to start with are single course dishes. The easiest are usually rice, a few vegetables and one kind of meat.

If you get more complex than that, you might have too much going on at once and it can feel overwhelming. Its very easy to start some rice and cook your meal while the rice is cooking.

Rice usually takes about 20 minutes and it should take about that long to cut some meat and vegetables and get them cooking. Stir fry is the easiest thing to cook. Its basically meat and vegetables seared over high heat while stirring constantly.

When choosing a Chinese recipe, you should keep in mind how many people you are going to feed. If its just a meal for one or two, you can get a little fancier and try a couple different types of sauce.

If you are feeding kids, you cant go wrong with something familiar like sweet and sour chicken. If you try to serve up a bunch of Chinese bean pancakes, the kids might protest.

Its always best to start small and try something familiar.

Chinese Vegetable Recipes

Chinese vegetable recipes are very popular these days because everyone is always on a diet. With the right recipes on hand, you could easily drop a few pounds a month by eating delicious Chinese food a couple times a week.

Many people immediately think of things like bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, and bok choy. While these are common Chinese vegetables, not that many recipes use them.

They are just usually prepackaged in the frozen food section with anything that says Chinese on it. There are many more vegetables you can use to give your recipes a distinctly Chinese flavor.

Chinese cabbage is one of the best tasting and useful vegetables you can buy. Its not as tangy or large as normal cabbage and has a great flavor.

You can use this in salads, soups and stir fry to add a more authentic Chinese taste and look to your food or improve any standard Chinese recipe. It doesnt hold up well under high heat so it should always be added last.

A great way to make your Chinese recipe really special is to add a handful of fresh snow pea pods. These are very sweet and are commonly found in soups like won ton. They can really add something special to any stir fry and go great with seafood.

Every grocery store has a section that will have some Chinese vegetables. If you like the taste of ginger, it can be used to spice up almost any recipe you have.

It can be overpowering though. You will also see many things that look like leeks and green onions. If you dont know what they are, it doesnt hurt to buy some, take it home and find a recipe for it. You might find a new favorite vegetable!

Chinese Recipe Cookware Substitutions

So, you have got a great Chinese recipe you want to try out but you realize you are not prepared at all for the demands of Chinese cooking.

Well, there are many ways you can recreate what you should have with what you might have on hand. This goes for cookware as well as actual food ingredients.

An important part of cooking any Chinese recipe to perfection is to use the right cookware. Many people dont own a wok or rice cooker however and will have to use what they have in the kitchen.

A normal frying pan can work as a wok but its best to use a very deep frying pan that is at least 1 and a half inches deep.

Woks rely on oil and high heat to cook meat and vegetables and if you use a shallow pan, grease will get all over and might even spill out and start on fire. Thats no good at all.

For rice, a normal saucepan will work but you need to make sure you have a tight fitting lid. Tin foil over the top will work in an emergency but can burn you and is not recommended.

Many Chinese recipes call for a meat or seafood to be breaded and deep fried. Without a deep fryer, you are going to have a mess no matter what.

The deepest cooking pot or saucepan you have will work but will probably splash all over no matter how you try to contain it.

These are basic solutions but having the proper equipment can really make a difference. An electric wok is very easy to clean and can also be used to deep fry.

A rice cooker really isnt necessary unless you truly cant cook rice. Buy what you need and have fun with your new recipes.