Chinese Cooking
Organizing the place where you are going to do the cooking work and preparing the ingredients to be used form and important part of Chinese cooking. This is because, most of the Chinese cooking is done by stir-frying, and stir-frying requires continuous stirring without break. Once the stove is on you cannot find time to do any other activity like chopping or preparing sauce etc.
Chinese food has become so popular globally that you cannot find any major city today that does not have a Chinese restaurant. This kind of popularity would make any one look for the reasons behind it.
Since the very old times of their Chinese history, Chinese people have considered cooking seriously as a subject of art rather than a simple craft. This level of sincerity is not found in many other cultures of cooking. The kind of dishes and the techniques of preparation involved in Chinese cooking expect the chef to be an expert with a lot of experience behind him. For example a simple activity like pulling noodles requires skill and a lot of practice.
Chinese cooking is influenced by two philosophies on the whole. The two philosophies are called Confucianism and Taoism. The big country like China and their huge population have depended on these philosophies for a lot many years for their cooking habits.
Confucius was a person who is know to have given lots of philosophies to the world that also include one of the Chinese cooking concept and the table etiquettes related to it. According to him, the appearance of the food on the table is as important as its taste. He gave so much importance to the looks that he believed in harmonizing even in the texture and color of the dish. He expected the good cooks to be good matchmakers as well.
For example the food before serving should be cut into bite size pieces. This approach does not believe in having a knife on the dinner table. To prepare a confucion dish, you definitely need to have a perfect combination of ingredients like the herbs, condiments and others. Thus the resultant flavor that is developed reflects the confucianist approach.
People following the customs of the other approach called Taoism gave more importance to the aspects related to the health when compared to its presentation. They have found many food habits that have medicinal powers and some of them are even life-savers. For example the medicinal power of ginger to be used as a remedy for problems related to stomach upsets, cold or sore throat was found by Taoist followers of Chinese cooking. Thus food and dishes prepared using authentic Chinese cooking techniques are healthy and in a way an ideal diet according to many. However, it is important to know that because of its wide spread popularity there are Chinese restaurants around the world serving non-authentic Chinese food with ingredients that has lot of saturated fat and unhealthy meat. On the contrary genuine Chinese cooking system uses poly-unsaturated oil instead of cream, butter or cheese. It uses only the required quantity of meat.