Chinese Recipe Tips

Chinese recipes usually call for very specific ingredients and ways to cook everything. There are many tips you can use to save time and money and still have a top notch meal or add ingredients to make a good meal great.

You can cut corners on rice, kinds of oil, even the kind of meats you use. Many people take the meat out of a recipe and call it vegetarian.

A delicious alternative to regular cooking oil is sesame oil. Just a few drops mixed with your normal oil or used by itself, sesame oil makes any dish have a very unique flavor.

Shrimp cooked in vegetable oil tastes like greasy shrimp but shrimp cooked in sesame oil taste like a Chinese treat. Sesame oil has a strong and unique flavor that many people automatically associate with Chinese food.

It is higher in fat so if you are on a diet, it might not be a good choice.

Rice is common in all kinds of Chinese recipes. If you make a lot of Chinese food, you can cook a lot more rice than you know you will use.

You can freeze this excess rice and use it later on for fried rice. This will save you the trouble of cooking a whole new batch and it tastes just as good.

Dont be afraid to change recipes. If you have a great recipe for chicken, try using crab or shrimp next time or changing some vegetables around.

You might have just created your own unique recipe! This can be a lot of fun and the more familiar with Chinese recipes you get, the better your creations will be.

Outdoor Grilling Methods

More To The Grill

Before anything else, you should be aware that your outdoor grill is not limited only to direct grilling. Your outdoor grill can do so much more than just that, it could even be more versatile than your kitchen. While the classic method of direct grilling can already please most of us, just think about the other things that it could do. Other outdoor grilling techniques include searing, indirect grilling and smoking which turns ordinary meat into a tasting pleasure with a distinct flavor.

Different outdoor grilling techniques are to be used depending on what types of items you are to grill, for example; direct grilling is best for large cuts of beef and sausages, smoking on the other hand is best for whole fish and meats too. With experience, you will later develop a taste of what goes where in the grill enabling you to be an expert on it.

Have A Clean Grill

Even before starting out, you have to be sure that your grill is clean. The worst thing that could happen in a grill is to have a beautiful slice of prime rib and to later have it taste like grilled salmon. In cleaning the grill, make sure that you do it right after cooking and while the grill is still hot. In doing this, use a wire brush and scrub off all remaining residue that is left on the grill, these residue are what causes unpleasant flavoring if you dont clean your grill well.

More to that, these residues can also fall into the grill and can later cause a flare-up, this of which we would like to avoid. While your grill is clean, you would also want to prevent residue from sticking to it as much as possible. To do this, spray the surface of your grill with vegetable oil every time before you grill. This is even more important if you are using sugar based sauces like the common ones people use to coat ribs and barbecue.

Get Your Grill Hot

When grilling, it is also very important that your grill is hot before you place the items on top of it. For most of us especially for those who own gas-powered grills, we put the items in right after we start the fire. This is wrong as we have to wait around 15-30 minutes of having the fire turned on before putting the items to be grilled in while having all the items and cooking tools you will be needing standing by.

Also be aware that the surface of your grill is not equally hot on all sides. There are some sides that are hotter than others and some that are a bit cooler than others. Being good on the grill, you should know where these sides are and use them to your advantage. The most common grilling technique used here is indirect grilling of which you would need to know where the cooler side is.

Having Ingredients Ready

Even before you start grilling; it is very important that your ingredients are already prepared and ready to be tossed on top of the grill. For steaks, you might want to cut of excess fat and have it seasoned with some salt and pepper. As for chicken, since it is quite difficult to have it grilled, you can pre-cook it in the microwave oven. This will lessen cooking time and as well as make it easier for you to have your chicken brown.

Vegetables on the other hand should already be cleaned and cut for the grill. After all these, you are ready to get grilling.