Turkcerap

how are china foods? i dont know! :S

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dutchie

in here there is a chinese restaurant on every streetcorner! but friend of mine says chinese people in china don't eat 'our' chinese food. what do they eat?
oh turkcerap, chinese food in holland is Mie, Bami pangang, tjap tjoi, nasi, really tasty!

dutchie

by the way, i'm eating chinese right now :D

dutchie

chinese food

sajalarora

Noodles, chopsey etc are Chinese food. In India there are hell lot of restaurants, shops and stalls for Chinese food. Its very famous in India that people love to eat noodles using chopsticks.

D-man

Well, as far as I can tell you about the topic you were discussing, Chinese food is a complicated term, because it includes a lot of different examples. Sometimes one particular local cuisine differs from some other very much. Some experts have counted an approximate number of dishes in Chinese cuisine. So the number nearly comes to 5000.

Traditionally, eating is something bigger than simply food intake. It is rather a ceremony. You may often hear such a wish as "慢慢吃" that means literally "eat slowly". This confirms that food is not just a necessity, but a big pleasure. Eating truly is something very important for Chinese. There is also another linguistic example. Traditionally people used to say "你吃饭了吗？" as a phrase of salutation. It means "have you eaten?".

Strictly saying, there are two categories of the products used in Chinese cuisine: "primary" and "additional". The first category includes cereals (grain-crops), e.g. millet, oats, barley, and, of course, rice. Rice has even taken also the meaning of food in Chinese, not only just cereals. While such products as meat, fish, and vegetable dishes belong to the "additional" group.

It is important to mention that dairy produce has not become a part of the cuisine. There are some reasons that stipulate for this fact, but it would be too long to touch upon this subject here.

There are really a lot of condiments in Chinese cuisine. The most popular one must be soy sauce. Traditionally, Chinese distinguished five main condiments corresponded to "five gustatory senses": ginger (spicy), vinegar (sour), treacle (sweet), wine (bitter), and salt (salty).

The main floury food is the noodle you talked about. Traditionally, flour was primarily made of rice. Other examples are also different round cakes (common name - "bing" (饼)) and mantou (馒头) (steamed buns). If there is some filling (meat or vegetarian) inside the bun, it becomes a baozi (包子). There is also such a dish as jiaozi (饺子) that is also made of flour and vegetable or meat filling, but the dough differs from the previous one, it is rather a dumpling.

There are mainly four methods of cooking (making products prepared for eating) in Chinese cuisine:

1 Cooking at the open flame;
2 Cooking in the boiling water;
3 Cooking while food is processed using steam;
4 Frying with oil.

The last one includes frying on the oiled pan, frying with small and large quantity of oil, and boiling in the oil.

As for the geographical difference, traditionally, Northern regions were not familiar with sea food, while Southern regions - with mantou, and jiaozi, for example. It does not mean that nowadays it is still so, but historically it was. And this also left an imprint on the modern situation. Southern cuisine were rather disposed to spicy condiments and sweet food. Almost every historical province has got its own special dish. For instance, well-known Peking Duck (北京烤鸭). The most famous Northern local cuisines are Beijing and Shandong cuisines. As for the Southern regions, every province has got its own cookery traditions. Sichuan and Hunan cuisines are famous by wide adoption of spicy pepper. Guangdong and Fujian cuisines widely use sea food and different exotic dishes like famous "A Dragon struggles against a Tiger" (I am not sure whether it is the best translation for its name, so I prefer to give its original name - "longhudou" (龙虎斗)). This dish is cooked of three species of poisonous snakes, wild cat, and many spices. Chinese Muslim nations’ cuisine takes a special place. It includes different flour foods (mailnly of wheat flour), vegetable snacks, and soups. As for cooking meat, there are a lot of dishes made of mutton, while traditional Chinese cuisine more often uses pork.

As for drinks, it is also a long story. They include different sorts of tea, drinks made of rice, and different wine.

P.S. All transliterated names of dishes are given in Putonghua (Mandarin), the official language. So as for some local names, using different local dialects, there may be many variants, that totally differ from the names I mentioned above.

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Best wishes from Russia!

Turkcerap

hımm it is nice but , not as me...Because im a turk and our dishes are most delicious and diffirent from chiniese foods

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ßen yine sana mecburum...