Asian Cooking
There are many regions in Asia, and all have their own cooking techniques and specialities. Asian food is a lot spicier compared to our everyday food. Some of the spices they use we find very difficult to get hold of, there are specialty food stores and now you can buy online. Traditional Asian cooking is one of the healthiest and probably tastiest cuisines around. Asian food is fresh and creative.
A lot of their kitchen utensils differ from ours, especially the wok, when it is hot it needs hardly any oil, and the cooking time is greatly reduced, the food loses none of its flavour or colour, it tends to be used more for stir fries. In China they use bamboo baskets for steaming.
People tend to go more for East (Chinese, Korean and Japanese) and South Asia (Indian and Bangladeshi) cuisine. Asian food is very popular all over the world, there are takeaways, balti houses, curry houses and restaurants. Indonesian cuisine is now rapidly becoming quite popular.
Chinese food is traditionally eaten with chopsticks, as knives and forks are regarded as weapons. Japanese people sit cross-legged on the floor, at a table just a few inches from the ground. The main food of both these provinces is rice, for its’ starch and carbohydrates.
Bengalis’ use their fingers to eat, and use banana leaves as plates, Indians also eat with their fingers and either sits on the floor or on cushions.
There are numerous books on Asian cooking, and a vast amount of Asian recipes online. Two of the well-known Asian chefs’ that stand out are, Ken Hom and Maddhur Jaffrey, obviously there are many more too numerous to mention.
One of the most popular herbs in Asian cooking has to be Lemongrass. We would probably think of it as a weed, it can grow up to 6 feet tall.
Asian cooking goes back many centuries, back to when the Nomads in China basically stopped roaming, and started to grow rice and other agricultural products.
It seems the Asians have recipes for every occasion, there are Zodiac recipes, for different signs of the zodiac, and there are yin and yang recipes, yin is the cold; yang is the hot, hence sweet and sour.
Japanese people tend to eat a lot of raw food, fish (sushi), and vegetables. Sushi is placed on a small bed of rice, then dipped in soy and horseradish sauce then eaten. India uses a lot of coconut they don’t use the milk, but make milk from the white flesh of the coconut. The main dish of India is balti it is a type of curry, with extra spices added, and cooked over a very high heat, the word balti means bucket, but it is actually a cooking pot.
Asians don’t just food as sustenance, some of their ingredients are actually used as cures for illnesses as well, as some are actually anti oxidants in their own right, for example cloves to help ease toothache.