It is the hardest to categorize, emphasizes light cooking with seemingly limitless range of ingredients. Cantonese cuisine took shape in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. In the process of its development, it has borrowed the culinary essence of northern China and of the Western-style food, while maintaining its traditional local flavor.
The cooking methods of Canton cuisine are complicated and Canton cuisine is elaborate and refined. Chefs have to spend much time to prepare the materials and cook, that’s why the Canton cuisine restaurants are less than Sichuan cuisine restaurants.
The most characteristic cooking methods are cooking in salt or wine, baking in a pan, and soft frying. Guangdong cuisine emphasizes unique mixed flavorings. For example, one flavoring liquid is a mixture prepared from onion, garlic, sugar, salt, and spices. The gravy is prepared from a mixture of peanut oil, ginger, onion, Shaoxing rice wine, crystallized sugar, anise, cassia bark, licorice root, clove, ginger powder, and dried tangerine peel. Spiced salt is prepared from refined salt, sugar, powdered spices, and anise. These flavorings, along with other favorite condiments such as oyster sauce, fish sauce, clam oil, and curry, give Canton cuisine a unique taste.
For many people of Canton, everything that walks, crawls, flies, or swims is edible, such as cat, snake, honeybee pupae and so on. In order to esteem the eating habits of other areas, some of materials are eliminated. Therefore, a lot of strange food no longer appears to today’s Canton cuisines.
Hot Canton Dishes
•Eight treasures Stuffed Duck
The fillings are sticky rice, mushroom, lotus seed, dried shrimp, squid, meat and preserved egg. Stuff them inside the duck, and then boil and steam. Take it with the original soup. This dish is very delicious with oily but not greasy taste and the fragrance of the fillings mixing together with the duck.
Eighte Treasure Suffed Duck
•Dim Sum
Dim sum is a collective name. It includes variety of desserts, snacks and wheaten food. Based on the local food, Canton dim sum gathers advantages of both Chinese flour dim sums and Western style of cakes and deserts. It is characterized by its ingredients, variety, styles, tastes and diversity. The most popular and common dim sum includes shrimp dumplings, char siu bao, spring rolls and sea-food gruel and so on.
Dim Sum
•Double Layer Milk Cream
Double layer milk cream is regarded as the most popular and classic dessert in Canton province. It is sweet, fragrant and slippery. The cooking method is like: boil the milk and pour it into a small bowl. Cool it until the milk becomes hard on surface. Pour out the milk carefully but remain the cream at the bottom of the bowl. Add some sugar into fresh milk and stir evenly. Filtrate the fresh milk and put it into the cream milk, cover it and steam for about 15 minutes.
Double Layer Milk Cream