So I know it's been a hot second since we've posted. We might've been a bit guilty of feature creep on this one - we wanted to make a nice guide, and it was a little difficult to know where to stop. We went into much, much more detail in the accompanying substack post too: chinesecookingdemystified.substack.com/p/63-chinese-cuisines-the-complete The video definitely glossed over some things. If you're interested in the topic, I'd definitely recommend checking it out. We tried our best to be comprehensive... but Chinese cuisine is basically infinite in its breadth and depth. It's always equal parts exciting and frustrating to know that you're only ever scratching the surface. Huge thank you, again, to Wu Zheng who helped us out a bit with Northern cuisines. We did some of his thoughts a bit more justice in the full written post :) Definitely check out his Instagram too - instagram.com/woksteampunk/
Have the two of you ever thought about sitting down and writing something along the lines of what Joseph Needham did with "Science and Civilization in China"? Perhaps organized along the lines of "A Mediterranean Feast: The Story of the Birth of the Celebrated Cuisines of the Mediterranean from the Merchants of Venice to the Barbary Corsairs, with More than 500 Recipes" by Clifford Wright. And include Southeast Asia and eventually Central Asia while you're at it. (I do realize I just described a project that would occupy both of you and a bunch of others for the rest of your lives, but it would create something pretty cool.)
One volume (at least) for each regional cuisine. I would be happy to buy that (and support the project when I have the money) and I'm sure I'm not the only one. And if it ends up with something like the Needham Institute (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needham_Research_Institute) it would be an ongoing resource for everyone.
I'm sorry, weren't you apologizing a few weeks ago for the fact that we'd have to go without recipe videos for a while? And then you drop _this?_ Why the hell would you apologize for content like this? This video was fantastic.
God.... as a chinese myself im really shocked by how well you researched and knew about chinese cuisine, and comparably how ignorant i am myself.... Super meaningful and exciting, Thank you!!!
It's honestly incredible how unique, well researched, and genuinely practical your videos are. For an English speaker trying to learn about China's food culture there is legitimately no one better. Getting english-speaking explanations of lesser-focused on regional cuisines like those in Fujian, Zhejiang, and Hubei is really hard, so I especially appreciate a video like this.
Ok I finished watching this. 3 things that really caught my attention: 1) Incredible amount of effort, research, and attention to detail on y'alls end. This is probably the most accessible English overview of the whole culinary map available. 2) I now appreciate, having watched most of your videos, how many dishes you have shown off from all over the country. It was awesome seeing dishes that I recognized specifically because y'all talked about them before and introduced me. 3) In regards to your ending plea for people to travel to China to eat the food, I would absolutely LOVE a video on that topic. Like, what apps/docs should foreigners set up in advance? How would you go about ordering food in a Chinese restaurant so you don't look like a jerk? Stuff like that. Just an intro video for how to do culinary tourism in China.
Low priority add on to the last part: how to manage food restrictions and diets, or if it's worth it to try. Can you be vegan and not a PITA? Can you be Indian vegetarian (avoid eggs but not milk) and not be utterly baffling? Can you be careful about gluten meaningfully? I don't travel myself, so there might be a whole general understanding of this I'm missing out on! But I am in the utterly baffling category above, and know folks of a lot of different dietary restrictions for medical reasons, and I wonder how to best serve those respectfully in other parts of the world, or if it's not wise to even try.
Ok, having now watched thia back to back: regardless of how well this video does, I think this is the channel's masterpiece. The raw amount of information, while never being overwhelming. The subtle and not so subtle jokes all throughout. And the conclusion: you guys have to keep doing this until you are like a hundred. There is SO MUCH MORE to cover. So many dishes just flashing by and leaving me wanting to know more!
I’m Toishanese so I can tell you that it’s like a rural home cooking version of Cantonese cooking. The home cooking has meat stuffed tofu and vegetables like the neighboring provinces but flavoring is very different. In Cantonese restaurants they won’t necessarily serve home cooked items as it’s assumed that these hunmble every day dishes are too cooked common to offer on a restaurant menu but focus on fancier restaurant specialties that people come to restaurants to specifically eat.
Finland really only has two cuisines which isn't that surprising given the size and small population. they split is between eastern and western influence as well as the fact that the west has coast meaning the available fish would be different. the biggest difference, in my opinion, is on the bread as in the east the house was heated with a large oven where as in the west it was common to have a heating fire and a cooking fire as separate. Hence, in the west "hole bread", that is a thin (rye) bread which were baked in large patches before storing and drying hanged from a pole, where as in the east bread was baked if not daily, way more often. that also leads to different kinds of oven stews being more popular in the east compared to stove top cooking being the way to go in west. there are then some local dishes due to either tradition or good marketing. Tampere and black sausage (blood and rye sausage) is a great example of the first where as "hydrogen", a meat pie (more of a savory donut filled with minced "trash meat" from bad cuts to lungs) with egg and ham of the later
You have no idea how appreciated your content is. I've been looking so long for something that would give a good overview of China's diverse food culture, and bam. There you come with the big nerdy guns. Love you guys.
Great video. Thanks for that! The question about the cuisines is also quite complicated for me to answer here in Germany. I would say... a dozen? At least. Bayrisch & Fränkisch, Pfälzer, Badisch & Schwäbisch, Westfälisch, Pommersche, Ostfriesische, Rheinisch & Bergisches Land, etc.pp. Even if that's difficult to say now. Many regions that are only less than 50-100km apart have completely different traditional dishes and food cultures. On the other hand, these have already merged a lot in modern times and some of what used to be regional cuisine has now become national cuisine.
Yeah, germany though tiny is pretty diverse when it comes to traditional dishes, probably has to do with it being young and a lot of terratory changes, but its hard to say cause of how prominent foreign cuisine are in every day cooking and how easely you can move from one end of the country to the other nowerdays. Aditionally to the usual regions there is also a difference in West vs east cause of the occupation not so long ago . . . .
That "old linguistics debate" that you quoted ("a language is a dialect...") comes from Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich, who was talking about the power relation between languages. The original saying was "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit un armey un a flot". Weinreich was talking about which languages get to be "real" languages and which are demoted to mere dialects - to this day, some people refer to Yiddish as a dialect of German and insist it can't be a language in its own right. (Interestingly, an argument many people make about Jewish cuisines, that we have no cuisines of our own and our foodways are mostly just subpar versions of other people's food - subpar because they "lack" certain elements that are not kosher. However, this idea is repudiated by pretty much every actual food historian. Gil Marks and Hasia Diner, among many others, have written on this idea, if you're interested!)
This is my biggest pet peeve when it comes to “Chinese” and the westerns world of understanding of Chinese. Even the fact that Cantonese is a “dialect” is a crazy statement. Every chance I get, I go on a rant about the language families of Chinese and the fact that only within these families are they mutually intelligible.
Without a doubt my nr. 1 favorite channel. This video is exactly what I had been hoping for since your last one, kudos for all your hard work all these years. This channel was a huge inspiration for me to travel to China and explore all the wonderful cuisines for myself. Keep up the good work, we love you guys! Lots of love from Holland
Thank you for the substack post so much. As someone who doesn't know chinese and is only a novice at writing characters in the correct stroke order, I often want to search for foods you mention on your channel but it's just so hard manually trying to type the characters in the food's name. Because it can be RIDICULOUSLY hard to find Chinese food not written in Chinese. Having something to copy/paste makes it infinitely easier. Speaking of, the fact that the English internet has so little on Chinese cuisine is why I am so grateful for your channel, it is one of the best sources for learning about Chinese cuisine in English. What you and Steph are doing is irreplaceable and legitimately makes the world a better place in a small way.
Well done. For foreign friends who want to learn about Chinese culture, this is a very good entry point. After all, food is something accessible to people all over the world. This map is a great guide to tourist destinations. If you are interested in Chinese food first, then go to the local area. You will not be disappointed during this journey. Food is produced by human gathering and migration, which can provide a good sense of the historical context. this map can be further subdivided and integrated. For example, the western part of Hunan and the eastern part of Guizhou (Zunyi, Tongren) are similar to Dishes of Salt gang in Sichuan. Also, due to the low salt content in the southeastern ethnic minority areas of Guizhou, they like to eat sour food. So I can infer whether Sichuan salt transportation is taking this route? Then each region, county, and town will have different specialty dishes. Finally, thank you for your content creation.
You are doing important work here. As someone who has lived in Canada for over 46 years of my 50, your videos make deep diving into the food culture of China so accessible ❤. Well researched and real. Kudos to you both and much gratitude 🙏
I really appreciate the respect you give Tibet in this video. I'm not ethnically Tibetan but I love the uniqueness of the culture, which is extremely complex and has deep historical roots. I even learnt how to read and speak the language as I was studying linguistics; did you know that it is one of the hardest languages to read? 😊
This is video is lighting up almost all of the pleasant parts of my brain. I would love to hear more about the cuisines of each region, even with rewatches you are skipping through information too quickly for me to make sense of it. Your presentation is excellent, my understanding is limited by my unfamiliarty. Anyhoo, thank you so much, this is just wonderful.
As a life-long lover of food, cook, chef, culinary educator, world traveler, and Chinese food fanatic, I believe this is the greatest video ever made. I bow to your greatness and envy your life experience.
The question on number of cuisines is difficult because, like you said, it depends on how granular you want to get; most of the country would categorize food from Louisiana as one distinct block, but people from Louisiana see Cajun and Creole as two clearly separate things. I personally think a good definition would be, "would a tourist traveling through your country recognize these as two separate cuisines?". By that definition, I think the United States would have 11 cuisines, with many of those having subsets (like Cajun and Creole within Louisiana cuisine): General American: hot dogs and hamburgers, meatloaf, taco tuesday, what most think of as the classic american home cooking. Pretty much all ingredients bought from national supermarket chains, practically zero locality beyond minor riffs on classics (like people from NM putting hatch chilies on a cheeseburger). Probably the vast majority of the country eats this. The default if you don't live in one of the other areas, and the default for a lot of people within those regions as well. I would put Midwestern as a subset of general american, as a heartier variation with casseroles and hotdishes galore and a higher reliance on canned products like cream of chicken/mushroom/whatever soup. There's further regional variations within midwestern but I don't think any of them distinguish themselves enough to be their own category. Southern: The first one that comes to mind for most people thinking of regional american cuisines. I'm going to lump soul food in here because there's significant overlap between the two, and there's not really another region outside of the south that soul food is particularly dominant in. TexMex: The mixing of cultures along the border created a thing all its own that's spread throughout the country, but it still is only predominant in that area. Appalachian: Similar to southern, but definitely its own unique thing. More of a focus on locality than many other regional cuisines. New England: Like you said on the map, it is kinda just american + lobster chowder and beans, but I think its distinct and developed enough to count as its own regional cuisine. New York: I struggle to put this one on here at all, because as far as home cooking it's not that distinct from general american beyond being the biggest immigrant melting pot, but none of those cultures dominate the home cooking landscape. Stepping beyond home cooking though, bagels, pizza, deli, and more all make NY (and the surrounding suburbs in NJ and CT) its own unique thing. Barbecue: Maybe my first controversial pick, especially because there are so many wildly different regional styles across the country, but there is such a consistent pervasive culture about it that I think it deserves its own category of cuisine. Are people eating bbq every day as a majority staple of their diet? no. but bbq culture is so ingrained in the regions that its popular and so *american* that I think it deserves this spot. Louisiana: As I said earlier, has its two subcategories within it, but most of the rest of the country wouldn't distinguish between cajun and creole. Both of them are so wildly different from everything else in the US that it clearly deserves its own category. Hawaii: So far from everywhere else and with such a different climate that it would be crazy if it didn't have its own cuisine/was its own category Alaska: see hawaii. Native American: I'm not the most familiar with native american foods, but what I do know is distinct from any other regional american food I've had.
Oh my god. You are crazy for doing this, but damn youre doing a good job at doing it and im here to watch the full video. By the way im currently studying in Guizhou, a large part of the reason why im here is actually because you introduced me to Guizhou food when i was still home... So thanks, i dont regret it for a second, the food here really probably is the best in China :D
I've always been fascinated by the apparent sparsity of recipes online from dongbei cuisine, so I would absolutely support a new more on the channel. And whatever that is at 35:53!
finally! someone recognizing steamed double stinky as a known dish! and yeah, our traditions in Jiangnan region is a huge mess of delineations, but most people classify it all as "Shanghainese" from outside of our area since Shanghai (which didn't have many dishes to begin with) absorbed all the immigrants when Shanghai became the 8 nation army port and for better or worse, prospered under foreign dictatorship until the Japanese invasion where Shanghai became the port to escape from mainland China, and all along bringing all the Jiangnan regional cuisine with all the migration. So Shanghainese/Hu cuisine, outside of western influences, is mainly a few local Shanghainese dishes(aka Benbangcai, the useless wiki lies again as Shanghai crab is not a shanghai dish but like "squirrel fish" both hail from Suzhou, beggar's chicken is from Hangzhou, lion's head is Huaiyang, ...), but mainly Huaiyang, Su-xi, Hangzhou, and Shaoxing dishes, with some Sichuan and Beijing imports that are highly unauthentic, and occasionally Cantonese dimsum, but mainly limited to various baozi. post-war modern Shanghainese cuisine and the addition of other cuisines into it comes from Jiangnanese immigrants in Hong Kong where the rich brought their house chefs, since back then no one went to restaurants. they all wined&dined guests at home, with barrels of steamed hairy crabs. it wasn't until the mid 50's or so when going to restaurants became more of a thing. and modern Shanghai's restaurant scene boomed in the late 70's when people started going back and bringing all the new traditions. some modern day Shanghainese may disagree but seriously, Shanghai food wasn't allowed to be anything prior to modern China opening up to capitalism. one thing about Toisan/Sze Yap, would Xinhui's mandarin peel production and regional specialty foods made with chenpi in mind (like chenpi duck that's local to Xinhui) be a distinction of it from Guangfu/Cantonese cuisine or would you consider it as "absorbed".
Love the pregnant pause before the England comparison, allowed me to jump in first with it 😅 Fascinating 40 minutes, need to watch your back catalogue now!
wow … just a simply great video. im a professor of linguistics and i can promise you - man your method is crazy and creative - but its systematic and replicable and just simply great. as i am sure you aware, this is ultimately a futile exercise because , well at some level granularity, there is always a continuum (gradient as you said) and modern linguistics actually talks about clusters of characteristics rather than discrete categories like dialect and language etc, but what a fun and informative exercise - fun interesting and informative - and one of the best you tube videos i’ve ever seen! keep it up!
Excellent work on categorizing Chinese cuisine! Food identity as ethnicity and history can get sticky real quick. This kind of video shows how deep this channel goes because even speaking as a chinese person, a lot of the foods you list I’ve never even heard of. Personally I am a mix of cantonese/hakka and hubei heritages, grew up in guangxi and have had food from both my parents’ families. Sometimes I wonder if certain foods are of one cuisine or were influenced by another as my ancestors moved around. As for what’s chinese, I think if something has taken hold somewhere inside of china then yes. Ethnic and foreign origins can also be a part of chinese food. A lot of the times they made food better, more interesting. In Guangxi we have ethnic dishes and they’re often the most interesting
for terminology alignment with Sinitic linguistics, it would be preferable to call the Fuzhou-centered northeastern part of Fujian as Mindong 閩東 / Eastern Fujianese, as Minbei is used in linguistics for the Jian'ou etc. area in northwest Fujian.
This is the best video, I swear! Been arguing with people about this very topic forever! Thank you so much!! And to answer the question from the beginning of the video, the Balkans. Most people, even the grand majority of people living here, would simply use the term "balkan food" when asked about the local cuisine, and by that they will inevitably mean Ottoman specialties. And if we bypass the whole debacle over why that's not actually "balkan food" and the politics of who owns the RIGHT recipe for sarma or burek, then we get to the great big block of denoting what exactly makes ottoman cuisine, as it consists of dishes from all regions the ottomans conquered. HOWEVER! Due to how isolated some villages were during the Ottoman ocupation, even recipes from the pre-christian times prevailed! This is why you will get, let's say, cevapi or filled peppers in every single city but as soon as you're off road, recipes wildly differ even within the same country - east side truffle and nettle stew, west side donkey cheese pie. While it's sad that not even people living here know about it, frankly, I think it's better for these villages to remain isolated. They would not withstand tourism. So... in terms of the number of cuisines - NO WAY OF KNOWING!! :)
❤❤❤ *LOVE THIS* ❤❤❤ The rest of the world is essentially clueless as to just how truly *VAST* and *DIVERSE* the breadth of the cuisine of China truly is and has been for centuries. Fortunately China is opening up to foreigners within the last year so access to a tiny glimpse is opening up. *Little Chinese Everywhere" and "Blondie in China" are great channels (in English) that highlight the diversity of China the country.
We love this video. So much things to see, learn & its a tour to places we have never been to or know it existed. Its not just N, S,E,W but province, town, village, dialect, family. So when they move they bring a little of the culture + what is available in the new place + if you move out of China into US, Europe, Middle East, Asia + chinese in Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei dress, language, culture, food are so different; we may not like or adapt; perhaps same ingredients but different spices & taste = different food altogether
As someone who could count the dishes I can identify by sight from my local Chinese buffet (U.S.) on one hand, this is both massively educational and just fascinating. Very approachable to even someone who knows basically nothing and now I'd love to try so many of the dishes mentioned here!
What a great rundown, my country is tiny so there's no real different cuisines, more like singular local specialty dishes. However going over everything so quickly makes things blend together and makes it feel a bit like I can start shoving any Chinese food into just a few categories without context. Let's get controversial: - Meat/fish with sauce - Meat/fish in stew/soup - Noodles with sauce - Noodles in soup - Tofu steamed/fried - Tofu in sauce/soup - Bao - Dumplings - Rice with additives - Sweets - Drinks That's still a lot of categories of food to be contained into a single country though, makes me wanna go out and explore my own backyard of Europe more and find some regional delicacies.
Yeah it's mostly a handful of Indian expat haunches, unfortunately. The good news is that China hasn't reciprocated the visa apocalypse happening in India currently - there something like four Chinese students left in the country, and it's practically impossible for Chinese people to get a visa to India (like, me and Steph would love to travel there, especially to Assam, but they literally just plain aren't giving out tourist visas). But India-China relations are not on a good track :/
@@ChineseCookingDemystified I thought China and India made peace wrt the border, and that China was going to start letting in Indians like we did in Canada.
Incredible incredible! I think the weight of the subject discourages even the attempt. This is the attempt and it is excellent, truly unique actually. Greek Cuisine probably can be grouped into 4 cuisines, according to the great rules: 1. 'The Northern Mountains' - Pindos mountains to the Rhodope mountains, heavily influenced on gradients from Albania, Northern Macedonia, Bulgaria 3 highlight dishes: Saffron Chicken Prune rice Kozani, Sweet Florina Peppers with Bukovo, Bougatsa (Custard Filo Dessert) 2. 'Fertile Islands' - Crete, Chios, Naxos, the Seven Islands, the Sporades, much of the Dodecanese, Lesbos and a few others fit in this geographic grouping. Islands that have a fertile hinterland with good fisheries. Anyone reading would probably have my head, but Chongqing has 3x the population of greece and didn't even get a region of its own, so chill everyone. 3 highlight dishes: a variety of cheeses (Naxos ash, Cretan Graviera (stronger manchego), Tinos kefalotyri), Cretan Dakos (carob rusk) salads, some of the best olive varieties and derived dishes 3. 'Coastal mainland greece and infertile islands' - A nebulous category as there is no point in Greece further than 35km from the sea, thus the whole place is 'coastal', but this is from Igoumenitsa all the way down to the Peloponnese up past Euboia to Thermaic gulf all the way to Alexandroupolis. Characteristics of this cuisine are also a gradient zone with group 2 - namely wheat bakes (pastitsio - a rather unappetising bechemel topped hollow noodle lasagna with ground meat and my favourite - a huge variety of kritharaki (orzo), and the dizzying varieties of filo-pies like in group 1). Other characteristics are proximity to the coast and manpower for fishing and a large enough fish market. 3 highlight dishes: Avgotaraho (bottarga, cured mullet roe in beaswax - I recently found out it is also made in Taiwan 乌鱼子!), Cured fish meat like skoubri (atlantic mackeral) and lakerda (bonito), stuffed vegetables - dolmades, gemista (stuffed peppers or zuchinnis). 4. 'Politiki Kouzina' - Cuisine from the 'City' AKA Istanbul. After the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey in the 20s, many ethnic Greeks who were living in the last vestiges of the Ottoman Empire moved to Greece. They brought with them a larder quite alien to their new compatriots. This included cinnamon, cloves and mace in savoury dishes, nuts and dried fruits in both savoury and sweet dishes, and curing meats - the list goes on and I could go on about this influence Greece's population increased by around 1/3 in a five year period. Though the initial wave was concentrated in cities, subsequent movement would find generations throughout Greece. 3 highlight dishes: Imam Baldi (means 'the imam has fainted' ) and Moussaka - eggplant, ground spiced meat, kataifi and baklava, many of the mezedakia dips (tzatziki, tyrokafteri - chilli pepper with whipped feta, melitzanosalata - eggplant)
Really appreciate this deep dive! Ive also been meaning to learn more about chinese geography so this really helps a lot of interesting context for me If i were to visit china for the food, what areas would you recommend i visit for the first trip?
Hmm… so any answer here’s inevitably going to be colored by what I personally enjoy and have the most experience with. The best universal advice I can give would be to go into smaller cities. If I was designing a trip for a friend of mine personally, I would start them off in Hong Kong (decent spot to chill and get over a bit of jet lag) and slowly progress to Chengdu by fast train. The specific route would depend on people’s preferences and how much time they had, but I’d probably heavily push at least a couple days in Guiyang.
i think you could lay a map of china over any part of the world except north america and find the same kind of diversity. anyways this is one of your best videos yet :)
I know close to nothing about Chinese food besides your typical Americanized dishes, but this video was so interesting I ended up watching it all the way through. Thank you.
5:30 you guessed wrong! Although I am one of those Hakka that are in the other corners of the world and grew up there, so I don't have too much knowledge of the cuisine outside of what my parents have made. From the examples you gave in the substack post, I recognised none of the Hakka dishes you mentioned and couldn't picture my parents ever making them, but recognised all of the Dong River Hakka foods, so I do see the differences personally. I did wonder why I had never heard of Hakka noodles before...
In Chongqing, I sometimes had xiao mian for breakfast, and that was pretty hardcore, but just a little west the have baijiu for breakfast? That's another level.
It seems like the difference between gradient zone and new cuisine is that either there is a new ingredient not seen in prior areas or if an ingredient used as an accent to a dish suddenly becomes central to the dish rather than as a condiment
🤯 That was fantastic. God, I wish I could speak at least Mandarin. I would love to just travel all of China for a decade or two. I think we should be immortal with an internal universal translator, lol. There are so many great things on this planet and so little time to enjoy them. Channels like this are a window into the world. Know the cuisine, know the people, is what I say. Thank you for your interpretation. Even if there is debate, it should be all good because we can learn so much. ☺❤
At what point does a "western dish" made with substitute Chinese ingredients become a "xpat" or "immigrant" dish. How many people have to try my kejia latke before it's a kejiatke?
That’s who I’d describe Hong Kong style cuisine - an amalgamation of Western and Chinese ingredients to make unique and tasty food, thanks to all the colonial transplants from Britain, India, Nepal and South East Asia, as well as migrants from the costal mainland provinces after WWII.
Great video! In Canada, we're pretty homogenous to be honest. Most people eat a pretty typical pan-American diet. Hamburger meat is a staple protein, flour and potato are the staple starches, we eat various brassicas and root vegetables, and we make a whole lot of that one type of industrial cheddar. Having said that, we do still have a few distinct cuisines: The ones I'm familiar enough with to claim as distinct are the maritime provinces, Quebec, Montreal, Vancouver, and the arctic. Hopefully a few other Canadians can help fill out the map a bit if there's more.
I've only ever eaten westernized Chinese food in the Americas and Europe and have no knowledge of the region beyond whatever I was taught in school, so every time you address the audience with possible concerns or objections that may arise I'm just 👁👄👁. But I am an amateur linguistics fan so using that approach is a very fascinating application to cuisines.
@onlywei no, i mean westernized. I'm trying to illustrate how i know zero, zilch, nada about the topic and any criticisms of their thesis is beyond me. To the extend that when he breaks the fourth wall, i feel like said emoji combination: 👁👄👁
Thinking about the US... I think there are probably 7 or 8 distinct ones. PNW (north of San Francisco up through Seattle) and New England/Northeast are actually largely similar, lots of seafood prepared in similar ways and tends to be milder flavor-wise. Mid-Atlantic states have a totally different take on it. Then you start getting to the Southeast, which is different from the Gulf Coast (I'm differentiating based on protein choice and spices, BBQ is very different from Gulf Coast seafood), which is heavily different from the Southwest (think west Texas through Arizona), which is different from Southern California despite both of them having quite a bit of influence from Mexico. The midwest and plains are also different with more Northern European influence.
The indigenous food influence shouldn't be overlooked. Just the emphasis on salmon in PNW cuisine, for example, is very much coming from the existing peoples of the region. In the upper Midwest (I'd say the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa) wild rice is a common staple, which is directly from Ojibwe influence. Obviously all of the Southwest has indigenous influence (since Mexican food is heavily indigenous-influenced) -- so Baja California, Arizona, New Mexican, and Tex-Mex food. And of course Cajun and Creole food have indigenous influence as well (file powder is an obvious example). Regarding the Mid-Atlantic, I'd honestly put us into Southern food, just a sub-variety - other than the regional classics like crab cakes, the food culture is heavily influenced by soul food, especially in significantly Black cultural regions like the Baltimore area.
@@marihagemeyer8166 Absolutely, I'm not discounting that at all. You are correct that there is a huge amount of influence in those cuisines from indigenous peoples.
You gotta read about taxonomy in biology. I think you'd enjoy the debate between lumpers and splitters, and the idea of sexual compatibility as a parallel to mutual intelligibility. Your instincts here seem pretty good in identifying populations that are distinct. This is a really good effort :)
Got to love the whole, if they cant interbreed, they are different specieses and then seeing tons of evidance of very clearly destinct ones still interbreeding fust to say f you sientists 😅😂
So I know it's been a hot second since we've posted. We might've been a bit guilty of feature creep on this one - we wanted to make a nice guide, and it was a little difficult to know where to stop. We went into much, much more detail in the accompanying substack post too:
chinesecookingdemystified.substack.com/p/63-chinese-cuisines-the-complete
The video definitely glossed over some things. If you're interested in the topic, I'd definitely recommend checking it out. We tried our best to be comprehensive... but Chinese cuisine is basically infinite in its breadth and depth. It's always equal parts exciting and frustrating to know that you're only ever scratching the surface.
Huge thank you, again, to Wu Zheng who helped us out a bit with Northern cuisines. We did some of his thoughts a bit more justice in the full written post :) Definitely check out his Instagram too - instagram.com/woksteampunk/
cantonese is also first chinese cuisine brought over to the west
Have the two of you ever thought about sitting down and writing something along the lines of what Joseph Needham did with "Science and Civilization in China"? Perhaps organized along the lines of "A Mediterranean Feast: The Story of the Birth of the Celebrated Cuisines of the Mediterranean from the Merchants of Venice to the Barbary Corsairs, with More than 500 Recipes" by Clifford Wright. And include Southeast Asia and eventually Central Asia while you're at it. (I do realize I just described a project that would occupy both of you and a bunch of others for the rest of your lives, but it would create something pretty cool.)
One volume (at least) for each regional cuisine. I would be happy to buy that (and support the project when I have the money) and I'm sure I'm not the only one. And if it ends up with something like the Needham Institute (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needham_Research_Institute) it would be an ongoing resource for everyone.
I'm sorry, weren't you apologizing a few weeks ago for the fact that we'd have to go without recipe videos for a while? And then you drop _this?_ Why the hell would you apologize for content like this? This video was fantastic.
God.... as a chinese myself im really shocked by how well you researched and knew about chinese cuisine, and comparably how ignorant i am myself.... Super meaningful and exciting, Thank you!!!
It's honestly incredible how unique, well researched, and genuinely practical your videos are. For an English speaker trying to learn about China's food culture there is legitimately no one better. Getting english-speaking explanations of lesser-focused on regional cuisines like those in Fujian, Zhejiang, and Hubei is really hard, so I especially appreciate a video like this.
Sir another 40 minute Chinese Cooking Demystified video has hit the algorithm
this is one of the absolute most comprehensive Chinese cuisine resources ever put into English. A true magnum opus.
Amazing work! thank you for this!
Ok I finished watching this. 3 things that really caught my attention:
1) Incredible amount of effort, research, and attention to detail on y'alls end. This is probably the most accessible English overview of the whole culinary map available.
2) I now appreciate, having watched most of your videos, how many dishes you have shown off from all over the country. It was awesome seeing dishes that I recognized specifically because y'all talked about them before and introduced me.
3) In regards to your ending plea for people to travel to China to eat the food, I would absolutely LOVE a video on that topic. Like, what apps/docs should foreigners set up in advance? How would you go about ordering food in a Chinese restaurant so you don't look like a jerk? Stuff like that. Just an intro video for how to do culinary tourism in China.
Low priority add on to the last part: how to manage food restrictions and diets, or if it's worth it to try.
Can you be vegan and not a PITA? Can you be Indian vegetarian (avoid eggs but not milk) and not be utterly baffling? Can you be careful about gluten meaningfully?
I don't travel myself, so there might be a whole general understanding of this I'm missing out on! But I am in the utterly baffling category above, and know folks of a lot of different dietary restrictions for medical reasons, and I wonder how to best serve those respectfully in other parts of the world, or if it's not wise to even try.
Ok, having now watched thia back to back: regardless of how well this video does, I think this is the channel's masterpiece.
The raw amount of information, while never being overwhelming.
The subtle and not so subtle jokes all throughout.
And the conclusion: you guys have to keep doing this until you are like a hundred. There is SO MUCH MORE to cover. So many dishes just flashing by and leaving me wanting to know more!
I’m Toishanese so I can tell you that it’s like a rural home cooking version of Cantonese cooking. The home cooking has meat stuffed tofu and vegetables like the neighboring provinces but flavoring is very different. In Cantonese restaurants they won’t necessarily serve home cooked items as it’s assumed that these hunmble every day dishes are too cooked common to offer on a restaurant menu but focus on fancier restaurant specialties that people come to restaurants to specifically eat.
Finland really only has two cuisines which isn't that surprising given the size and small population.
they split is between eastern and western influence as well as the fact that the west has coast meaning the available fish would be different.
the biggest difference, in my opinion, is on the bread as in the east the house was heated with a large oven where as in the west it was common to have a heating fire and a cooking fire as separate.
Hence, in the west "hole bread", that is a thin (rye) bread which were baked in large patches before storing and drying hanged from a pole, where as in the east bread was baked if not daily, way more often. that also leads to different kinds of oven stews being more popular in the east compared to stove top cooking being the way to go in west.
there are then some local dishes due to either tradition or good marketing. Tampere and black sausage (blood and rye sausage) is a great example of the first where as "hydrogen", a meat pie (more of a savory donut filled with minced "trash meat" from bad cuts to lungs) with egg and ham of the later
Oh my god, this is the motherlode. I had no idea it was coming, but this is something I have been trying to piece together for years! Thank you!!!
You have no idea how appreciated your content is. I've been looking so long for something that would give a good overview of China's diverse food culture, and bam. There you come with the big nerdy guns. Love you guys.
Louisiana by itself needs to be split into cajun and creole cuisine.
A surefire application of rule of thumb number two if I ever saw one :)
Tomatoes in my gumbo, proud to be creole! ⚜🍅
What a love letter to Chinese food. I’m blown away. You really should write a book.
Great video. Thanks for that!
The question about the cuisines is also quite complicated for me to answer here in Germany. I would say... a dozen? At least. Bayrisch & Fränkisch, Pfälzer, Badisch & Schwäbisch, Westfälisch, Pommersche, Ostfriesische, Rheinisch & Bergisches Land, etc.pp.
Even if that's difficult to say now. Many regions that are only less than 50-100km apart have completely different traditional dishes and food cultures. On the other hand, these have already merged a lot in modern times and some of what used to be regional cuisine has now become national cuisine.
Yeah, germany though tiny is pretty diverse when it comes to traditional dishes, probably has to do with it being young and a lot of terratory changes, but its hard to say cause of how prominent foreign cuisine are in every day cooking and how easely you can move from one end of the country to the other nowerdays. Aditionally to the usual regions there is also a difference in West vs east cause of the occupation not so long ago . . . .
This is one of my favorite episodes you've ever done. I'm STARVING now!
That "old linguistics debate" that you quoted ("a language is a dialect...") comes from Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich, who was talking about the power relation between languages. The original saying was "a shprakh iz a dialekt mit un armey un a flot". Weinreich was talking about which languages get to be "real" languages and which are demoted to mere dialects - to this day, some people refer to Yiddish as a dialect of German and insist it can't be a language in its own right. (Interestingly, an argument many people make about Jewish cuisines, that we have no cuisines of our own and our foodways are mostly just subpar versions of other people's food - subpar because they "lack" certain elements that are not kosher. However, this idea is repudiated by pretty much every actual food historian. Gil Marks and Hasia Diner, among many others, have written on this idea, if you're interested!)
This is my biggest pet peeve when it comes to “Chinese” and the westerns world of understanding of Chinese. Even the fact that Cantonese is a “dialect” is a crazy statement. Every chance I get, I go on a rant about the language families of Chinese and the fact that only within these families are they mutually intelligible.
Blown away by this. What a great overview you and Steph have produced here. So many details, I need to rewatch this. Thank you!
Without a doubt my nr. 1 favorite channel. This video is exactly what I had been hoping for since your last one, kudos for all your hard work all these years. This channel was a huge inspiration for me to travel to China and explore all the wonderful cuisines for myself.
Keep up the good work, we love you guys!
Lots of love from Holland
Hakka and Cantonese represent! Fantastic video, absolutely love that this guide exists now!
This video is absolutely incredible! Thank you so much for expanding our culinary and cultural horizons.
Another Chinese Cooking Demystified banger video. Y'all have my absolute respect and appreciation
Wow this is really finely researched. As a Chinese person this is seriously impressive.
Fantastic video! Yours and OTR are my favourite youtube channels
And both released new video today. I am eating good tonight.
Thank you for the substack post so much. As someone who doesn't know chinese and is only a novice at writing characters in the correct stroke order, I often want to search for foods you mention on your channel but it's just so hard manually trying to type the characters in the food's name. Because it can be RIDICULOUSLY hard to find Chinese food not written in Chinese. Having something to copy/paste makes it infinitely easier.
Speaking of, the fact that the English internet has so little on Chinese cuisine is why I am so grateful for your channel, it is one of the best sources for learning about Chinese cuisine in English. What you and Steph are doing is irreplaceable and legitimately makes the world a better place in a small way.
Well done. For foreign friends who want to learn about Chinese culture, this is a very good entry point. After all, food is something accessible to people all over the world. This map is a great guide to tourist destinations. If you are interested in Chinese food first, then go to the local area. You will not be disappointed during this journey. Food is produced by human gathering and migration, which can provide a good sense of the historical context.
this map can be further subdivided and integrated. For example, the western part of Hunan and the eastern part of Guizhou (Zunyi, Tongren) are similar to Dishes of Salt gang in Sichuan. Also, due to the low salt content in the southeastern ethnic minority areas of Guizhou, they like to eat sour food. So I can infer whether Sichuan salt transportation is taking this route?
Then each region, county, and town will have different specialty dishes.
Finally, thank you for your content creation.
amazing. i really love your recipe stuff, but this kind of content absolutely slaps. please, please, please, for the love of god, more of this!
Wow, what an incredible video. The generosity on display here is incredible
You are doing important work here. As someone who has lived in Canada for over 46 years of my 50, your videos make deep diving into the food culture of China so accessible ❤. Well researched and real. Kudos to you both and much gratitude 🙏
I really appreciate the respect you give Tibet in this video. I'm not ethnically Tibetan but I love the uniqueness of the culture, which is extremely complex and has deep historical roots. I even learnt how to read and speak the language as I was studying linguistics; did you know that it is one of the hardest languages to read? 😊
This is all I've ever wanted and i am going to watch this video until ive memorized it, thank you
This is video is lighting up almost all of the pleasant parts of my brain. I would love to hear more about the cuisines of each region, even with rewatches you are skipping through information too quickly for me to make sense of it. Your presentation is excellent, my understanding is limited by my unfamiliarty. Anyhoo, thank you so much, this is just wonderful.
Only someone who truly respects cuisine, of any type, would go through the effort of doing this, thank you.
This is what I needed in my life. Thank You!
As a life-long lover of food, cook, chef, culinary educator, world traveler, and Chinese food fanatic, I believe this is the greatest video ever made. I bow to your greatness and envy your life experience.
This video is incredible, thank you so much for all your research, nuance and insight. Best thing I've watched on TH-cam in a loooong time.
The question on number of cuisines is difficult because, like you said, it depends on how granular you want to get; most of the country would categorize food from Louisiana as one distinct block, but people from Louisiana see Cajun and Creole as two clearly separate things. I personally think a good definition would be, "would a tourist traveling through your country recognize these as two separate cuisines?". By that definition, I think the United States would have 11 cuisines, with many of those having subsets (like Cajun and Creole within Louisiana cuisine):
General American: hot dogs and hamburgers, meatloaf, taco tuesday, what most think of as the classic american home cooking. Pretty much all ingredients bought from national supermarket chains, practically zero locality beyond minor riffs on classics (like people from NM putting hatch chilies on a cheeseburger). Probably the vast majority of the country eats this. The default if you don't live in one of the other areas, and the default for a lot of people within those regions as well. I would put Midwestern as a subset of general american, as a heartier variation with casseroles and hotdishes galore and a higher reliance on canned products like cream of chicken/mushroom/whatever soup. There's further regional variations within midwestern but I don't think any of them distinguish themselves enough to be their own category.
Southern: The first one that comes to mind for most people thinking of regional american cuisines. I'm going to lump soul food in here because there's significant overlap between the two, and there's not really another region outside of the south that soul food is particularly dominant in.
TexMex: The mixing of cultures along the border created a thing all its own that's spread throughout the country, but it still is only predominant in that area.
Appalachian: Similar to southern, but definitely its own unique thing. More of a focus on locality than many other regional cuisines.
New England: Like you said on the map, it is kinda just american + lobster chowder and beans, but I think its distinct and developed enough to count as its own regional cuisine.
New York: I struggle to put this one on here at all, because as far as home cooking it's not that distinct from general american beyond being the biggest immigrant melting pot, but none of those cultures dominate the home cooking landscape. Stepping beyond home cooking though, bagels, pizza, deli, and more all make NY (and the surrounding suburbs in NJ and CT) its own unique thing.
Barbecue: Maybe my first controversial pick, especially because there are so many wildly different regional styles across the country, but there is such a consistent pervasive culture about it that I think it deserves its own category of cuisine. Are people eating bbq every day as a majority staple of their diet? no. but bbq culture is so ingrained in the regions that its popular and so *american* that I think it deserves this spot.
Louisiana: As I said earlier, has its two subcategories within it, but most of the rest of the country wouldn't distinguish between cajun and creole. Both of them are so wildly different from everything else in the US that it clearly deserves its own category.
Hawaii: So far from everywhere else and with such a different climate that it would be crazy if it didn't have its own cuisine/was its own category
Alaska: see hawaii.
Native American: I'm not the most familiar with native american foods, but what I do know is distinct from any other regional american food I've had.
Great Video! very informative!
Oh my god. You are crazy for doing this, but damn youre doing a good job at doing it and im here to watch the full video. By the way im currently studying in Guizhou, a large part of the reason why im here is actually because you introduced me to Guizhou food when i was still home... So thanks, i dont regret it for a second, the food here really probably is the best in China :D
You guys are he biggest ambassadors for Chinese cuisine not only to westeners but to other Chinese people alike. Thank you so much for this content
My favorite video yet! Much love from Sweden
I've always been fascinated by the apparent sparsity of recipes online from dongbei cuisine, so I would absolutely support a new more on the channel.
And whatever that is at 35:53!
my guess would be beef noodles
finally! someone recognizing steamed double stinky as a known dish! and yeah, our traditions in Jiangnan region is a huge mess of delineations, but most people classify it all as "Shanghainese" from outside of our area since Shanghai (which didn't have many dishes to begin with) absorbed all the immigrants when Shanghai became the 8 nation army port and for better or worse, prospered under foreign dictatorship until the Japanese invasion where Shanghai became the port to escape from mainland China, and all along bringing all the Jiangnan regional cuisine with all the migration. So Shanghainese/Hu cuisine, outside of western influences, is mainly a few local Shanghainese dishes(aka Benbangcai, the useless wiki lies again as Shanghai crab is not a shanghai dish but like "squirrel fish" both hail from Suzhou, beggar's chicken is from Hangzhou, lion's head is Huaiyang, ...), but mainly Huaiyang, Su-xi, Hangzhou, and Shaoxing dishes, with some Sichuan and Beijing imports that are highly unauthentic, and occasionally Cantonese dimsum, but mainly limited to various baozi.
post-war modern Shanghainese cuisine and the addition of other cuisines into it comes from Jiangnanese immigrants in Hong Kong where the rich brought their house chefs, since back then no one went to restaurants. they all wined&dined guests at home, with barrels of steamed hairy crabs. it wasn't until the mid 50's or so when going to restaurants became more of a thing. and modern Shanghai's restaurant scene boomed in the late 70's when people started going back and bringing all the new traditions. some modern day Shanghainese may disagree but seriously, Shanghai food wasn't allowed to be anything prior to modern China opening up to capitalism.
one thing about Toisan/Sze Yap, would Xinhui's mandarin peel production and regional specialty foods made with chenpi in mind (like chenpi duck that's local to Xinhui) be a distinction of it from Guangfu/Cantonese cuisine or would you consider it as "absorbed".
This video is incredibly well researched! I will definitely use this for future reference!
This presentation & accompanying Substack article are priceless!
Love the pregnant pause before the England comparison, allowed me to jump in first with it 😅 Fascinating 40 minutes, need to watch your back catalogue now!
amazing attempt and breakdown, awesome work!
Very interesting video and I certainly learned something from you!
Wow! What an interesting guide - thorough and well researched. I am truly impressed.
Once again Chris, an informative video. I really like this lecture style video you've been doing lately.
You are a slay for putting this out. This is an amazing resource. 谢谢你，谢谢你🙏
this is a staggering amount of information, awesome
wow … just a simply great video. im a professor of linguistics and i can promise you - man your method is crazy and creative - but its systematic and replicable and just simply great. as i am sure you aware, this is ultimately a futile exercise because , well at some level granularity, there is always a continuum (gradient as you said) and modern linguistics actually talks about clusters of characteristics rather than discrete categories like dialect and language etc, but what a fun and informative exercise - fun interesting and informative - and one of the best you tube videos i’ve ever seen! keep it up!
Great video! I have to pause every few seconds to stare at the delicious food.
This video was awesome! Really appreciated it!
Awesome video, Chris! Nice to know the history of one of the world's most go-to cuisines.
Cheers
loved the unexpected use of bollocks! sincerely a big big fan from the UK :)
Amazing video. So well researched, & information well presented. Learnt so much. Thank you.
Excellent work on categorizing Chinese cuisine! Food identity as ethnicity and history can get sticky real quick. This kind of video shows how deep this channel goes because even speaking as a chinese person, a lot of the foods you list I’ve never even heard of. Personally I am a mix of cantonese/hakka and hubei heritages, grew up in guangxi and have had food from both my parents’ families. Sometimes I wonder if certain foods are of one cuisine or were influenced by another as my ancestors moved around. As for what’s chinese, I think if something has taken hold somewhere inside of china then yes. Ethnic and foreign origins can also be a part of chinese food. A lot of the times they made food better, more interesting. In Guangxi we have ethnic dishes and they’re often the most interesting
Great stuff! Hunan also has a load of smoked tofu. And a tofu black pudding as well.
Fascinating!
for terminology alignment with Sinitic linguistics, it would be preferable to call the Fuzhou-centered northeastern part of Fujian as Mindong 閩東 / Eastern Fujianese, as Minbei is used in linguistics for the Jian'ou etc. area in northwest Fujian.
I think you didn't breathe when you did this video; so much food diversity to enjoy!
I was pleasantly surprised that in Harbin they still eat хлеб (bread) and колбасу (sausage). 🥰
This is the best video, I swear! Been arguing with people about this very topic forever!
Thank you so much!!
And to answer the question from the beginning of the video, the Balkans. Most people, even the grand majority of people living here, would simply use the term "balkan food" when asked about the local cuisine, and by that they will inevitably mean Ottoman specialties. And if we bypass the whole debacle over why that's not actually "balkan food" and the politics of who owns the RIGHT recipe for sarma or burek, then we get to the great big block of denoting what exactly makes ottoman cuisine, as it consists of dishes from all regions the ottomans conquered.
HOWEVER!
Due to how isolated some villages were during the Ottoman ocupation, even recipes from the pre-christian times prevailed! This is why you will get, let's say, cevapi or filled peppers in every single city but as soon as you're off road, recipes wildly differ even within the same country - east side truffle and nettle stew, west side donkey cheese pie.
While it's sad that not even people living here know about it, frankly, I think it's better for these villages to remain isolated. They would not withstand tourism.
So... in terms of the number of cuisines - NO WAY OF KNOWING!! :)
❤❤❤ *LOVE THIS* ❤❤❤ The rest of the world is essentially clueless as to just how truly *VAST* and *DIVERSE* the breadth of the cuisine of China truly is and has been for centuries. Fortunately China is opening up to foreigners within the last year so access to a tiny glimpse is opening up. *Little Chinese Everywhere" and "Blondie in China" are great channels (in English) that highlight the diversity of China the country.
We love this video. So much things to see, learn & its a tour to places we have never been to or know it existed.
Its not just N, S,E,W but province, town, village, dialect, family. So when they move they bring a little of the culture + what is available in the new place
+ if you move out of China into US, Europe, Middle East, Asia
+
chinese in Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei dress, language, culture, food are so different; we may not like or adapt; perhaps same ingredients but different spices & taste = different food altogether
I've had Xinjiang food in small town British Columbia of all places and it is indeed absolutely delicious
- Shadow
Fantastic video as always
This is the stuff I subscribed for!
As someone who could count the dishes I can identify by sight from my local Chinese buffet (U.S.) on one hand, this is both massively educational and just fascinating. Very approachable to even someone who knows basically nothing and now I'd love to try so many of the dishes mentioned here!
What a great rundown, my country is tiny so there's no real different cuisines, more like singular local specialty dishes.
However going over everything so quickly makes things blend together and makes it feel a bit like I can start shoving any Chinese food into just a few categories without context.
Let's get controversial:
- Meat/fish with sauce
- Meat/fish in stew/soup
- Noodles with sauce
- Noodles in soup
- Tofu steamed/fried
- Tofu in sauce/soup
- Bao
- Dumplings
- Rice with additives
- Sweets
- Drinks
That's still a lot of categories of food to be contained into a single country though, makes me wanna go out and explore my own backyard of Europe more and find some regional delicacies.
WOOOT so hyped. I love this channel so much. is anyone doing similar videos for Indian food?
What does Indian food look like in China?
Very few, mostly curry, and either Japanese or Hong Kong style
Yeah it's mostly a handful of Indian expat haunches, unfortunately. The good news is that China hasn't reciprocated the visa apocalypse happening in India currently - there something like four Chinese students left in the country, and it's practically impossible for Chinese people to get a visa to India (like, me and Steph would love to travel there, especially to Assam, but they literally just plain aren't giving out tourist visas). But India-China relations are not on a good track :/
@@ChineseCookingDemystified I thought China and India made peace wrt the border, and that China was going to start letting in Indians like we did in Canada.
Wow! Thank you for this!!!
Incredible incredible! I think the weight of the subject discourages even the attempt. This is the attempt and it is excellent, truly unique actually.
Greek Cuisine probably can be grouped into 4 cuisines, according to the great rules:
1. 'The Northern Mountains' - Pindos mountains to the Rhodope mountains, heavily influenced on gradients from Albania, Northern Macedonia, Bulgaria
3 highlight dishes: Saffron Chicken Prune rice Kozani, Sweet Florina Peppers with Bukovo, Bougatsa (Custard Filo Dessert)
2. 'Fertile Islands' - Crete, Chios, Naxos, the Seven Islands, the Sporades, much of the Dodecanese, Lesbos and a few others fit in this geographic grouping. Islands that have a fertile hinterland with good fisheries. Anyone reading would probably have my head, but Chongqing has 3x the population of greece and didn't even get a region of its own, so chill everyone.
3 highlight dishes: a variety of cheeses (Naxos ash, Cretan Graviera (stronger manchego), Tinos kefalotyri), Cretan Dakos (carob rusk) salads, some of the best olive varieties and derived dishes
3. 'Coastal mainland greece and infertile islands' - A nebulous category as there is no point in Greece further than 35km from the sea, thus the whole place is 'coastal', but this is from Igoumenitsa all the way down to the Peloponnese up past Euboia to Thermaic gulf all the way to Alexandroupolis. Characteristics of this cuisine are also a gradient zone with group 2 - namely wheat bakes (pastitsio - a rather unappetising bechemel topped hollow noodle lasagna with ground meat and my favourite - a huge variety of kritharaki (orzo), and the dizzying varieties of filo-pies like in group 1). Other characteristics are proximity to the coast and manpower for fishing and a large enough fish market.
3 highlight dishes: Avgotaraho (bottarga, cured mullet roe in beaswax - I recently found out it is also made in Taiwan 乌鱼子!), Cured fish meat like skoubri (atlantic mackeral) and lakerda (bonito), stuffed vegetables - dolmades, gemista (stuffed peppers or zuchinnis).
4. 'Politiki Kouzina' - Cuisine from the 'City' AKA Istanbul. After the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey in the 20s, many ethnic Greeks who were living in the last vestiges of the Ottoman Empire moved to Greece. They brought with them a larder quite alien to their new compatriots. This included cinnamon, cloves and mace in savoury dishes, nuts and dried fruits in both savoury and sweet dishes, and curing meats - the list goes on and I could go on about this influence Greece's population increased by around 1/3 in a five year period. Though the initial wave was concentrated in cities, subsequent movement would find generations throughout Greece.
3 highlight dishes: Imam Baldi (means 'the imam has fainted' ) and Moussaka - eggplant, ground spiced meat, kataifi and baklava, many of the mezedakia dips (tzatziki, tyrokafteri - chilli pepper with whipped feta, melitzanosalata - eggplant)
Really appreciate this deep dive! Ive also been meaning to learn more about chinese geography so this really helps a lot of interesting context for me
If i were to visit china for the food, what areas would you recommend i visit for the first trip?
Hmm… so any answer here’s inevitably going to be colored by what I personally enjoy and have the most experience with. The best universal advice I can give would be to go into smaller cities.
If I was designing a trip for a friend of mine personally, I would start them off in Hong Kong (decent spot to chill and get over a bit of jet lag) and slowly progress to Chengdu by fast train. The specific route would depend on people’s preferences and how much time they had, but I’d probably heavily push at least a couple days in Guiyang.
fantastic video.
i think you could lay a map of china over any part of the world except north america and find the same kind of diversity. anyways this is one of your best videos yet :)
It would be awesome for you to create playlist of your videos based on those different type of cuisine so we can explore them !
Great Video CHRIS - BRAVO 🤩🤩🤩
Holy shit, this is big. Can't wait to dive into it.
I know close to nothing about Chinese food besides your typical Americanized dishes, but this video was so interesting I ended up watching it all the way through. Thank you.
5:30 you guessed wrong!
Although I am one of those Hakka that are in the other corners of the world and grew up there, so I don't have too much knowledge of the cuisine outside of what my parents have made. From the examples you gave in the substack post, I recognised none of the Hakka dishes you mentioned and couldn't picture my parents ever making them, but recognised all of the Dong River Hakka foods, so I do see the differences personally.
I did wonder why I had never heard of Hakka noodles before...
In Chongqing, I sometimes had xiao mian for breakfast, and that was pretty hardcore, but just a little west the have baijiu for breakfast? That's another level.
Man, I am going to have to watch this ten more times at half speed to absorb even a fraction of the information!
What a great video.
fantastic video, bravo
It seems like the difference between gradient zone and new cuisine is that either there is a new ingredient not seen in prior areas or if an ingredient used as an accent to a dish suddenly becomes central to the dish rather than as a condiment
🤯 That was fantastic. God, I wish I could speak at least Mandarin. I would love to just travel all of China for a decade or two. I think we should be immortal with an internal universal translator, lol. There are so many great things on this planet and so little time to enjoy them. Channels like this are a window into the world. Know the cuisine, know the people, is what I say. Thank you for your interpretation. Even if there is debate, it should be all good because we can learn so much. ☺❤
this is quite in depth wow.
Bro, you outdid yourself with this video. How the hell do you know so much about Chinese cuisine as a foreigner???
This is extremely awesome.
At what point does a "western dish" made with substitute Chinese ingredients become a "xpat" or "immigrant" dish. How many people have to try my kejia latke before it's a kejiatke?
Fusion dishes
That’s who I’d describe Hong Kong style cuisine - an amalgamation of Western and Chinese ingredients to make unique and tasty food, thanks to all the colonial transplants from Britain, India, Nepal and South East Asia, as well as migrants from the costal mainland provinces after WWII.
I haven't watched the video yet, but Holy Moly the title suggests this is a titan!
Great video! In Canada, we're pretty homogenous to be honest. Most people eat a pretty typical pan-American diet. Hamburger meat is a staple protein, flour and potato are the staple starches, we eat various brassicas and root vegetables, and we make a whole lot of that one type of industrial cheddar. Having said that, we do still have a few distinct cuisines: The ones I'm familiar enough with to claim as distinct are the maritime provinces, Quebec, Montreal, Vancouver, and the arctic. Hopefully a few other Canadians can help fill out the map a bit if there's more.
I've only ever eaten westernized Chinese food in the Americas and Europe and have no knowledge of the region beyond whatever I was taught in school, so every time you address the audience with possible concerns or objections that may arise I'm just 👁👄👁. But I am an amateur linguistics fan so using that approach is a very fascinating application to cuisines.
Western Chinese food is mostly Cantonese or Taishanese, with modifications to suit Western tastes.
What’s western Chinese food? Is that from western china?
@onlywei no, i mean westernized. I'm trying to illustrate how i know zero, zilch, nada about the topic and any criticisms of their thesis is beyond me. To the extend that when he breaks the fourth wall, i feel like said emoji combination: 👁👄👁
Thinking about the US... I think there are probably 7 or 8 distinct ones. PNW (north of San Francisco up through Seattle) and New England/Northeast are actually largely similar, lots of seafood prepared in similar ways and tends to be milder flavor-wise. Mid-Atlantic states have a totally different take on it. Then you start getting to the Southeast, which is different from the Gulf Coast (I'm differentiating based on protein choice and spices, BBQ is very different from Gulf Coast seafood), which is heavily different from the Southwest (think west Texas through Arizona), which is different from Southern California despite both of them having quite a bit of influence from Mexico. The midwest and plains are also different with more Northern European influence.
The indigenous food influence shouldn't be overlooked. Just the emphasis on salmon in PNW cuisine, for example, is very much coming from the existing peoples of the region. In the upper Midwest (I'd say the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa) wild rice is a common staple, which is directly from Ojibwe influence. Obviously all of the Southwest has indigenous influence (since Mexican food is heavily indigenous-influenced) -- so Baja California, Arizona, New Mexican, and Tex-Mex food. And of course Cajun and Creole food have indigenous influence as well (file powder is an obvious example).
Regarding the Mid-Atlantic, I'd honestly put us into Southern food, just a sub-variety - other than the regional classics like crab cakes, the food culture is heavily influenced by soul food, especially in significantly Black cultural regions like the Baltimore area.
@@marihagemeyer8166 Absolutely, I'm not discounting that at all. You are correct that there is a huge amount of influence in those cuisines from indigenous peoples.
They just casually decided to drop perfection, that's quite something
You gotta read about taxonomy in biology. I think you'd enjoy the debate between lumpers and splitters, and the idea of sexual compatibility as a parallel to mutual intelligibility. Your instincts here seem pretty good in identifying populations that are distinct. This is a really good effort :)
Got to love the whole, if they cant interbreed, they are different specieses and then seeing tons of evidance of very clearly destinct ones still interbreeding fust to say f you sientists 😅😂
This is amazing!!