/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>11672759
is that grass on top of fish

>>11672759
i enjoy the haka food my in-laws cook. there's some sort of pickled condiment they make which reminds me of chow chow and is probably my favorite chinese dish. not sure if that counts as a "dish" since i've never seen it served by itself but it's my favorite chinese food (in dumplings, bao, etc.).

>>11672759

One of the only regions of the world I’d rather starve to death. The further southeast from Europe you get the more disgusting the food gets.

>>11672759
Unfit to be served to dogs. China is one of the most backwards places in the world, and their "food" shows it. From the "authentic" to the more common fast food, it's consistently shit.

So you want some authentic Chinese food huh? I hope you like bone marrow and rice! Also, ORGAN meats! Are you salivating yet? How about a nice cup of Bird's Nest Soup?

On the slightly more edible side, we have what's known as "Chinese" all around America, which is basically just glorified fast food prepared by people you'd rather be 500 miles from your food rather than actually touching it. It's all super sugary sauces dumped onto of low quality meat thats been cooked to absolute death.

Theres one thing thats for sure - the chinese bring their low quality with them wherever they go. The Chinese have absolutely no concept of self or quality, why would you want put anything they make into your body, or encourage them with your money?

>>11672759
Sichuan cold noodles barely qualify as cooking, but are delicious

Sichuan/hunan and real cantonese are both excellent, but jiangsu is my favorite

>>11672903
what exactly is wrong with bone marrow, rice or organs??

>>11672880
so australia has nothing edible at all then

>>11672911
Sichuan is too spicy for my liking, but I've grown up eating Cantonese food, especially many variants of steamed fish.

And it's honestly quite nice, better than whatever fucking american kids eat for dinner.

>>11672841
Living in China ATM. Here's the skinny.
In urban areas the food is shit, in smaller rural areas it is very very good.
In all metropolitan areas dumbass Chinese have adopted horrible English tips and dumbed down the fuck out of their cuisine making it probably the most grey dull fuckup of a cuisine globally. Advanced gadgets and convenient take out has led to withering of culinary literacy in any area with data coverage. 90% of restaurants have adopted a "be plain, cause no offense" strategy that is good for money but shit for taste and health. Of course high end restaurants are still good but the average Chinese now gargles grey glop 350 days of the year and expects nothing better. Shanghai, HK and Beijing are particularly awfully bland-a-thons and you can weeks without rating anything but cartilage and weak chicken stock. Chinese are gradually accepting the western idea that "any meat except muscle is gross" and a lot of traditional cuisine has suffered as a result. Street food is still quite decent due to the very low cost of some spices and organ meat, not to mention the very low cost of running a little frying place where grandma beats the shit out of you if you hold back on spice. 1/?

>>11673238
i keep getting told our food isnt good enough for you

>>11673345
Out of the major metropolitan areas, food is varied and normally very high quality.
Chinese people in general are obsessed with "freshness" in cuisine and you get a vast array of seasonal dishes, replete with good fish, fruit, veg, especially where folk have no access to frozen warehouses and tinned food distribution.
They are also significantly less afraid of flavour compared to the homogenous half white Chinese of the cities, which means schezhuan and Cantonese traditional cuisine is a fucking delight. There are typically one or two small eateries in every medium sized town where the family are taught to coin properly from the age of 4. In the villages there are people more food literate than your most euro professional restaurateurs while not being, yknow, actually literate. Anywhere with a significant fishing culture will have amazing food, the respect people show to fish means they really fucking try hard with every dish. I've fish curries in southwest China that would make Ramsay shit himself.

>>11672903
Don't forget the gutter oil, desu.

>>11673358
The issue for Chinese cuisine isn't the introduction of new ideas, or retreat from tradition, mixing cuisines almost invariably improves both and modernity brings health, efficiency and new techniques. It's western capitalism. I have nothing against capitalism, it's fucking amazing at lifting people from poverty and increasing living standards, but it's also incredibly efficient at homogenising shit and China's cuisine is suffering as a result of being suddenly deep fried in the idea of the profit motive. Any chump son can double his father's profits but turning a dubbha into a KFC for cunt tourists and that is a loss to the county, tourist and history.
China needs to develop a love and support for its own traditional cooking a la Japan or britain or it will become Iowa.

>>11673373
Chinese food outside China is a funny proposition. It is good/variable but has a completely distinct history from all contemporary Chinese food within China.
It is the half remembered dishes of a couple of regions reinterpreted and remixed by people from other regions with different ingredients, and since maybe 1920 it bears no resemblance to the homeland. While some techniques are retained, local tastes and ingredients as well as savvy restaurant operators mean the "chinese" food almost instantly becomes "Chinese-london" or "chinese+New York", not that that is bad, but it ain't Chinese any more than a chicken tikka kebab pizza is italian.

>>11672759
tantanmen and mapo tofu

Sichuan food is the best. It's easy to tell it's the favourite too because in touristy areas of foriegn cities authentic Chinese restaurants have opened purely to cater to the huge numbers of Chinese tourists who can't into western food; and guess what -- they're mostly Sichuan style. That says a lot. Hunan food is also good, things like crayfish and xiao chao rou.

Favourite dishes: shui zhu niu rou, chongqing hot pot, suanmiao rou si, hong shao rou

Worst dishes: the carp that has a endless tiny hair-like bones (鲫鱼 I think)

>>11673247
there are lots of not spicy sichuan foods, like baicai or shaobai or zhacairou. there's also a lot of sweet and sour foods as well
>>11673345
my experience in shanghai is actually the opposite. the best places I ate at was a small shengjian seller I went to like five times a week and a small muslim shop's lamb soup, and when we visited family at big expensive restaurant banquets the food was mediocre. that being said a lot of the other small places I tried only once were the way you describe

>>11672903
>waaah waaah organs are scary and did you know that birds nest soup is made of bird spit that's so gross guys
Back to your boneless chicken breasts, you fucking baby.

>>11674067
I agree utterly, that guy is a fucking cowardly eater.

>>11673238
They eat marmite...the scum from beer making

>>11674334
>Australia
>marmite
Try again, cretin.

>>11674067
>boneless chicken breasts,
Retard.

>>11673366
Is that real or just some classic one incident represents everything situation?

>>11674369
Nah it's real. In China everyone knows which shitty slophouses are using bad oil and you only see people who are too poor to afford eating anywhere else going there.

>>11674369
it happens, not as much as everyone would like to make you think. It's mostly used by those filthy street food vendors and extremely poor people

>>11674067
>pretending to like a food borne of poverty just because someone pointed out organs
He's right though, anon. Authentic Chinese isn't good food, its survival shit tier food in an industrialized country. Even Chinese people hate it - I've been the general manager of two Chinese restaurants over the span of 10 years where they were loosely related. They swore off their own cuisine. I asked the owner who is kind of the head of the family about this and he said "Our food is like taking the worst meats, like roadkill with no regulation, and just making it edible. I'm not in China anymore so I dont have to eat that way". I've gotten a similar response from most of the family on that. Chinese people mostly never turn back unless there are a couple dishes that they just grew up liking. Some really poor families that somehow make it to the states still eat it out of pure 'tradition', but mostly they end up just making Americanized food with their own influences.

>>11672759
Dumb communist dog eaters and liquid poop drinkers. Panda Express is okay though.

>>11674597
>Authentic Chinese isn't good food, its survival shit tier food in an industrialized country
Why are you lumping all Chinese food together into one basket? Clearly what some peasant cooks up with the meager scraps they can find is totally different from luxurious banquet fare.

>>11674811
Not to mention it the quality of the cooking varies by region. Cantonese, Szechuan and Yunnan are pretty top tier cuisines. Fujian and Mongolian are definitely not.

Central Asian food is much better than Chinese.

>>11673345
>In urban areas the food is shit, in smaller rural areas it is very very good
it's actually the exact opposite you faggot english teacher

>>11672841
Its green onions you blind nigger

>>11673345
>>11673358
>>11673373
>rural china
>home of eggs boiled in little boy piss
You have no fucking idea what you're talking about. Also, just because high end restaurants have begun a trend of not poisoning their customers with gutter oil and rotten meat doesn't mean they've become more "westernized."

>>11676153
Umm, hate to tell you, but he's hella more believable than your silly /b/ tier viewpoint response to him. Have to say, you got btfo!

>>11676245
oh man this redditor just said i got btfo. i think im gonna pee my pants.

>>11673373
>China needs to develop a love and support for its own traditional cooking
They already have this though. Most Chinese people are absolutely convinced of the superiority of their food, even to the point of not considering foreign food 'real food'. The only exception would be westaboo youths in cities.

Oi someone post that piss tea they drink, not the wine the other shit. I forgot to save that infograph.

>>11676339
what you're doing is the equivalent of posting that maggot cheese and pretending that the entire west eats it

>>11676402
I never said anything about the whole of fuckign china doing it. im saying its something they do in china so you know what im talking about. no need to get all on the defense fuck sake. aint going to pretend i know what 1 billion fucking people get up too.

>>11676405
>chavs on /ck/

>>11676735
>fucking not posting the fucking thing

>>11672759
Wish I knew where I could get authentic food besides the chinese-american cuisine in the states, I love that desu. I generally love authentic Asian food except for some of their weirder fish dishes and shit

>>11672903
theres literally nothing wrong with organ meats, it is present in western cuisine as well (sausages, tripe ). Done well it is very delicious too.

you sound like a literal babby raised on factory made frozen dinners

>>11672880
You realize that Europe is home to stuff like putrid shark, maggot cheese, and rotten herring, right? And that's not counting British food.

>>11672880
ah yes, ethnic food is so "disgusting" the british now worships indian curry more than their own cuisine

>>11677277
To be fair, would you rather have a butter chicken or a chip butty?

is this the designated gag at tofu thread?

>>11674811
>>11674829
The cuisine you're talking about is largely for tourists and the wealthy. The Chinese also make most of the world's electronics but itd be unreasonable to say that the average citizen owns them. I'm assuming by the OP that the question was about what the average Chinese citizen eats. Even in their culinary hotspots the food they eat in their own homes isnt the same food they are preparing for the market or restaurants. The average Chinese citizen is as frugal as American Great Depression babies. Their banking system is a joke so they spend almost no money if possible. The wealth gaps between classes are also much more pronounced. All of this isnt to say that there aren't tasty things reasonably available to any person (dumplings, buns, fried rice, various fish), but just that culturally how the Chinese handle food is a bit different than in most other countries. This changed quite a lot thanks to Mao.

>>11676316
You've never been to China or met actual Chinese people then. Theres no such thing as a national pride in anything they do because China has traditionally been more like 5 nation states for most of its existence. They honestly dont give a fuck about how well the rest of their country is doing in terms of food (or anything else) no matter how much their communist government wants to convince you that the population is unified. Chinese pride surrounds family and friends only. The only people who actually have nationalist pride are working for the government.

>>11674334
Worse. They eat Vegemite, Marmite's shitty little brother.

>>11678528
>The cuisine you're talking about is largely for tourists and the wealthy.
High-end banquet food? Sure. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And as for the basic styles of Chinese food, that has nothing to do with wealth.

>> The average Chinese citizen is as frugal as American Great Depression babies.
So what? that doesn't mean you can't eat well. I am crazy frugal compared to my friends, yet I still eat like a proverbial king compared to them.

The great irony of a lot of lesser developed areas of the world is that while they lack a lot of money and infastructure they have fucking amazing food. This doesn't apply to a big city in China, but some peasant out in the countryside probably has better ingredients than a fancy hipster market in NYC, and the cook's skills are probably better too, since they have a lot more experience. I live in a big city in Europe with all sorts of fancy markets around me, high tech this and that....but when I see, say, Anthony Bourdain walk around some shithole wet market in central Asia the quality of the ingredients being sold there blows away what I have access to at home.

>>11676735
Did the piss tea offend you?

White people usually get Cantonese food with no sea food, half the time it's frozen and all the time it's full of soya, sugar and MSG.

Or try manage to use Google and find some bizzare village food and think Chinese eat dog all day.

>>11672911
There are many interesting versions of cold noodles I've come across.
The ugiurs and east kyrges have slabs of gluttonous rice cut from a solid block, the soup is usually heavy with sesame

The Tibetans have laphing, a kind of pancake served the same way
In Nepal you can even get raw instant noodles rolled in a rice pancake in soup.

>>11673345
This
Westernisation is killing Chinese cuisine in China, they have become elitist and unwilling to eat "village food"

>>11674841
You take that back
Central Asian food is awful, too much meat, not as much variety, no decent seafood, less access to spices.
Ukbeks know a thing or two though - but even then they have limited ingredients to work with unless you get south west and things start getting middle eastern

Some of my favourites:
The ubiquitous Dan Dan noodles, rice noodles with a pork mince topping.
The best is near chongching where they use pickles extensively.
So many pickles, literally hundreds.
Instead of soya sauce white purple need to learn about using fermented soya beans.

Steamed fish with djoubandjang (a fermented chilli/soya paste)

Chilli grill from dali, a potent mix of bitter mustard, chilli and some fermented paste that was a bit like Korean kimchi.
Usually green veg, tofu and sausage were grilled like that.

The dumplings, all of them.
Soup jelly dumplings from shanghai, prawn and glass rice from canton, pork cabbage and chives, egg and greens.

The Sichuan hot pot, two bowls of broth - one spicy and one not.
Lots of cardomon, fennel, chilli. Some broths were 10 years old, boiled daily.

Fried pancakes with green onion.
Sounds simple but a lot of work goes into them to layer the dough.

Oh and I make Peking duck by inflating the skin of the duck with a bicycle pump so the fat runs out, salting and airing the duck to take the fishy taste from the skin, then basting it in hard rice wine, then dextrose sugar.
Cook it with direct heat, an oven won't crisp the skin so well.
It takes two days to prepare.

If I'm showing off I'll remove the beasts first, confit the legs then use the skin /body meat in fried spring rolls with ginger, coriander, sasame oil and a heap of other shit.
You get the same duck served three ways, the breast and skin with picked daicon radish, the leg on a celeriac mash and the spring rolls with hoi sin /red vinegar
Garnish preserved lotus root, the whole plate comes in red and white