China EatingA guide to eating in China

Section · Recipes

Recipes and the kitchen habits behind them

Recipes covers more than a list of dishes. Each recipe sits inside a clear culinary lane — weeknight cooking, technique drills, and the pantry that runs a Chinese home kitchen — and every piece teaches the small move that makes the dish work.

Pick a lane, set up the pantry, and follow the recipe once. The pieces here are written to be cooked, not just read — they assume a home kitchen and a single wok.

  • Technique drills that travel across dishes
  • The 12-bottle pantry behind every recipe
  • Weeknight cooking under 30 minutes
  • What to cook next, by goal

About this section

How Recipes is organized

Recipes is split into three usable lanes. Technique teaches the small, repeatable move that makes a category of dishes work — how to velvet pork, how to bloom chili oil, how to steam a fish. Pantry covers the bottles, jars, and aromatics that show up in 80% of Chinese home cooking. Weeknight is what to cook on a Tuesday when you have 30 minutes and one pan.

Each lane is anchored by one longer piece and a handful of focused follow-ups. Cross-lane reading is encouraged — most recipes refer back to a technique or a pantry note, and the references are in the page, not in your memory.

If you are new to Chinese cooking, set up the pantry first. Then do the velvet pork and chili oil technique pieces — they unlock most of the rest of the lane. After that, pick weeknight dishes from the recipes you want to cook and let them pull you into the rest of the section.

About this section

Recipes

Kitchens, techniques, and step-by-step dishes you can cook in a home kitchen.

Photo by Vicky Ng on Unsplash

Three lanes through the section

Where to start, by what you want to cook

Three reading lanes, each anchored by a longer piece and a handful of follow-ups. Pick the lane that matches your kitchen and start there.

  • Technique

    Velveting pork, blooming chili oil, steaming fish, stir-frying greens. The small repeatable moves that make a category of dishes work — these pieces travel across recipes.

    Open the technique lane

  • Pantry

    The 12 bottles and jars behind a Chinese home kitchen. Soy, dark soy, Chinkiang vinegar, Shaoxing wine, doubanjiang, sesame paste, sichuan peppercorn, and the rest of the shelf.

    See the pantry

  • Weeknight

    Weeknight dishes under 30 minutes, on one pan, with no specialty equipment. Tomato and egg, scallion-oil noodles, dry-fried green beans — the dishes that feed you during the week.

    Pick a weeknight recipe

Start here

How to start cooking Chinese food at home

Three pieces that set up the rest of the lane. Read them in order, then branch out into technique, pantry, and weeknight cooking at your own pace.

Eating CultureWrapping the Lunar New Year TableFrom Han-dynasty frostbite medicine to gold-ingot dumplings at midnight — the recipe is the ritual.Wrap a batch →

Practical guide

What to cook, by goal

A short recipe roadmap by use case. Pick the goal and follow the list; cross references will keep you inside the section.

  1. Step 01 — Set up the pantry

    Buy the 12 bottles. Open them one at a time. Light soy, dark soy, Chinkiang vinegar, Shaoxing wine, doubanjiang, fermented black beans, douchi, sesame oil, sesame paste, chili oil, whole Sichuan peppercorns, and a bag of dried chilies. Smaller bottles more often.

  2. Step 02 — Learn three moves

    Velveting pork, blooming chili oil, steaming a fish. These three moves cover 80% of the recipes in the section. Each has a focused piece — read and then cook them once.

  3. Step 03 — Cook one weeknight recipe a week

    Pick a 30-minute recipe — tomato and egg, scallion-oil noodles, dry-fried green beans — and cook it on a weeknight. After eight weeks you will have cooked the whole lane.

  4. Step 04 — Branch by region

    Once the pantry and base techniques are settled, branch by region: Sichuan, Cantonese, Jiangnan, Beijing. The recipes will start to feel like variations on a small set of habits, which is the point.

Quick tips

Kitchen habits that will save the weeknight

Five small habits that turn a recipe into a regular dish. Cook these into muscle memory and the rest of the section reads like a list of small variations.

  • Get the wok hot before the aromatics

    Heat the wok dry until it smokes, add oil, then add ginger and garlic. A screaming-hot wok is the difference between stir-fry and stew.

  • Cut everything before you turn on the heat

    Chinese cooking moves in fast stages. The recipe will not wait for you to dice a carrot. Have every ingredient prepped before the first oil goes into the pan.

  • Read the recipe twice, then read it again

    Once for the method, once for the timing, once for the salt. Most home-cooking failures are sequencing failures, not ingredient failures.

  • Season with the rice in mind

    Chinese recipes assume a bowl of plain rice on the table. If you are skipping the starch, dial back the salt, the soy, and the chili by 20% — the dish is balanced with rice as a counterweight.

  • Buy smaller bottles more often

    Opened Chinese condiments lose their aroma faster than European ones. A small bottle of doubanjiang that is two months old is better than a large bottle that is two years old.

Articles

Recipes — the full archive

Wider reading from across the archive that gives you a working map of the topic and useful routes into related sections.

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The pieces that anchor recipes no matter how the archive grows. They are listed on every channel page so the recommendation set is never empty.

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Other sections worth reading alongside recipes.

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