Return to LA Essay

Today is a special day, I am going to help cook a new years eve meal for the family I am staying with. It will take a long time because I will be cooking for twelve people. I will be cooking many things. First, I will make some appetizers which will be spare ribs, egg rolls, and crab rangoons. I will be making twenty four of each appetizer which means I need lots of ingredients. After I planned the meal, the eldest daughter of the family, who is my age, went to the market to get the ingredients I needed for the meal. For the main course, I will be cooking Peking duck, Lion’s head soup, green onion cake, steamed buns, and hot and sour chinese eggplant. For dessert, I am making chocolate fondue. For dipping, I am using aisian fruits such as: starfruit, mangosteen, and kumquats. The family loved my meal and they asked me to make a few meals for them to take with them since they are nomads and they travel all around. I ended up making ten extra meals for them which took me about two days to make. As I was making the meals, I wondered to myself, how many Chinese cooking methods are there, and how many different types are there.

There are many methods of cooking in the Chinese culture. Many of them are water-based. “Water-based cooking methods include braising (炖/Dun), boiling (煮/Zhu), scalding (滚/Gun), simmering (炖/Dun), decoction (熬/Ao), and steaming (蒸/Zheng)” (Chinese cooking- it’s all about the basics). Braising is when you cook meat over medium heat in a usually soy-based sauce or broth. Scalding is the immersing of already boiling water scalding is usually used when cooking peppers or noodles. Decoction is used to extract the flavor of an ingredient by boiling. Decoction is sometimes used for shrimp broth by boiling the...

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...s and their popularity. I found that in Los Angeles, the most popular cooking technique is baking which is a dry-cooking method. The most popular cooking technique in China is stir-frying which is also a dry-cooking method. China has much more cooking methods than Los Angeles does. China has hundreds of wet-cooking techniques alone so with dry techniques that makes thousands. Some cooking techniques popular in both Los Angeles and China are : barbecuing, boiling, deep-frying, poaching, and stewing. Some techniques more popular in Los Angeles are grilling and sautéing. Though obviously more popular in China, chinese food is also very popular in the United States, especially California because of the amount of different cultures here. People in both Los Angeles and China use steaming, but in China, they use special bamboo steamers which can steam many dishes at once.