Chinese Fukien Cooking

The cooks of Fukien specialized in clear and tasty soups. Fukien is famous for the quality of its soy sauce and for red-cooked dishes.

Fukien is very much a specialist school. It has none of the variety of Canton or Szechwan, but it is noted for the quality and lightness of its cooking, specializing in clear and tasty soups. Indeed, there are those who would fault it on this basis, saying that most Fukien dishes are perhaps too soupy.

Fukien is famous for the quality of its soy sauce and for red-cooked dishes---meat or vegetables cooked or braised in soy sauce-base liquid. The province has a long sea coast and seafood is therefore very popular, and what cannot be used in any one season is salted and sun dried for the next. Dried scallops form the basis of some of the best soups of the region, and have a unique and unforgettably delicate flavor.

Chinese Hunan Cooking

The cooks of Hunan who first produced one of China's best-known flavors: the sweet-sour sauce.

Like Shantung, Hunan was once the capital, the seat of a great court. Like Szechuan it grows the most wondrous fungi.

It was the cooks of Hunan who first produced one of China's best-known flavors: the sweet-sour sauce. And it is they who devised a dip-fry method using boiling oil to cook ingredients like kidneys which shrink greatly on cooking through loss of moisture.

The Homan method of dip-frying consists of intermittently dipping then removing the food from boiling oil, and results in a delicate balance between a crisp sealed outside and a tender textured inside all at once.