The most frequently used seasonings in Chinese kitchen

Beginning

Hello everyone, I am Doublefire coming from China. This is my first time showing up in front of a camera speaking to maybe hundreds or thousands of people if I am attractive. This is my first video on ChineseFoodLab, which contains three parts: self introduction, the most frequently used seasonings in Chinese Kitchen, and ChineseFoodLab app/website introduction. You can skip to the part you are interested.

Self Introduction

To be honest, I hardly ever cook when I was in China. I eat either in restaurants when in school or eat food made my mother at home, which is much better than former. Until I flew thousands of miles away from home to Sweden for my master’s degree one year ago, everything changed. I had to cook for myself cause there is no restaurant in my new school, eating out is too expensive, the most important reason is that I love Chinese Food most. So I started to learn how to cook Chinese food myself. Actually, I found cooking is much easier than I expected, maybe because I have a lot experience in lab work, which is much complicated than cooking. And I noticed that there is few videos made by Chinese people in English about how to cook Chinese food, maybe I can join this group to share the delicious Chinese food with you. Maybe some of you are wondering why this channel is called ChineseFoodLab. Let me explain. In my opinion, the most important thing about a tutorial is that it needs to be repeatable, which is the exact same spirit of experiment in the lab. So I think my lab experience must can help me doing this and I decided to cooking Chinese food in a lab way, so ChineseFoodLab is born. Our slogan is “Cooking academically to make every Chinese Food repeatable”.

The most frequent used seasonings in Chinese kitchen

As you can see, this is my Chinese kitchen. This is seasonings area. The most frequently used seasonings for Chinese food are salt, sugar, rapeseed oil, vinegar, dried chili, scallion, ginger, garlic, soy sauce, cooking wine, cinnamon, star anise, and bay leaf. Let me introduce them one by one. The introduction is based on my knowledge and understanding. My knowledge about Chinese food is still limited, so forgive me and welcome to correct me if I make any mistakes.

Acknowledgement

Before we start, I would like to claim that all the seasonings were bought by myself, not sponsored by any company. And I am not recommended any specific brand, I just show you what I have in my kitchen. You can choose whatever brand you like.

Salt

Everyone know salt is to make food salty, nothing special, so I won’t spend too much time on it.

Sugar

In Chinese food, there are two main functions of sugar. The first function is to make food sweet, very easy to understand. The second function is as a coloring agent. White or transparent sugar can become brown even black under high temperature, which can make food looks better. You will see this in my future videos.

Rapeseed oil

Rapeseed oil is the most frequently used cooking oil in China, easy to get and suitable for high temperature cooking.

Vinegar

Vinegar is used to make food sour. In my kitchen, I have two types of vinegar, one is Chinkiang Vinegar, which is not only sour but also has a special flavor. The other one is 9 degree rice vinegar, which is higher in acidity. They can replace each other if it is not available, but the dose should be adjusted according to the acidity.

Dried chili

Dried chili is more spicy than fresh chili. The most annoying thing is I cannot buy very spicy dried chili in Sweden, you know I am a spicy lover. In my kitchen I have different forms of dried chili. How to choose which one to use depends on if you want to eat the chili itself. I mean if you only need the spiciness, you can use large dried chili, which is easier to remove after cooking. If you want to eat the chili itself which makes food much more spicy, you can use dried chili as powder shape.

Scallion, Ginger, and Garlic

I decide to introduce them together casue they are often used together in Chinese food. They are smelly and spicy, which can hide the fishy smell of meat and make food more flavorful. Also, in some cases, we use them in different combinations. It depends on case and your personal preference. For example, I prefer use garlic alone when frying carrots, use ginger and garlic when cooking eggplants.

Soy sauce

Soy sauce is used to make food salty, flavorful, and add color. I have three types of soy sauce in my kitchen. The first one called light soy sauce, which used for frying often. The second one is dark soy sauce, which is darker and used in red braising to make the color of the dish more appealing. The third one is normal soy sauce, you can view it as between light and dark soy sauce. Normal soy sauce and light soy sauce can be used interchangeably, but dark soy sauce cannot be replaced by the other two. If you ask me which one to but between light and normal soy sauce, I would say choose light soy sauce, cause it has a better quality in most cases due to how it is made.

Cooking wine, Cinnamon, Star anise, and Bay Leaf

I decide to introduce them together because they are often used as a combination in red braising. Cooking wine is used to prevent the fishy smell of meat, and it can also make food more flavorful. Cinnamon, star anise and bay leaf have a strong aroma, so no matter what type of raw food you use, they can make a similar flavor.

Conclusion for the seasonings

It is hard to introduce all the seasonings in Chinese kitchen in one video, you know, there are hundreds of seasonings if I include all of them, so I just introduce the most frequently used ones.

ChineseFoodLab app/website introduction

In order to make it more convenient for my dear audience to learn how to cook Chinese food, I spend one and half month developing app and website for ChineseFoodLab. You can find the app in Google Play Store and Apple App Store, or visit the website at chinesefoodlab.com. I can provide apk file for Android users if needed. In ChineseFoodLab app, you can find materials, text tutorials, nutrition calculators. You can also register to add favorite materials and tutorials, and share the result of nutrition calculator with your friends.

Ending

Well, That’s all for my first video. I really appreciate it if you like my video and subscribe to my channel. Welcome to leave comments if you have any questions or suggestions. I will try my best to answer them. I hope you can enjoy cooking Chinese food with me in the future. See you next time! This is ChineseFoodLab, Cooking academically to make every Chinese food repeatable!