Sichuan Cuisine

Chuan(Sichuan) cuisine’s signature is spicy and pungent flavor, known as Szechuan cuisine. It is one of the most famous spicy food in the world. Sichuan cuisine prolific of tastes, emphasizes on use of all different kinds of paper and chili to make the spicy circling in mouth and never fails. Besides spicy, garlic, ginger, green onion, basile are also used during in cooking process.

Blazing colors are usually a sign of Chuan cuisine, red, green are the most used color in Chuan cuisine. Chuan cuisine is never a boring cuisine, based on the excitement and burning of the mouth, it is too hot to stop, and if you had bland Chuan food before, I would strongly suggest that you should stop go to those Americanized Szechuan style resturant, unless they have a Chinese version menu hiding from you.

There is a special type of spicy in Chuan cuisine, we call it “Ma”, numbness sensation is the closest feeling that I can think of. Different that burning hot, Ma is more unique and less tearing part, it wont last long, and wont let you feel that you might need a firefighter to stop the fire in your mouth.

Speak of Chuan cuisine, most Chinese people would think of hot-pot, it is a soup based pot that can be spicy or not spicy, people put their food into the boiling hot-pot, and the flavor of the soup will melt into whatever you put in the pot, at the same time the pot will have the flavor of the food too. The signature of hot and non-hot hot-pot is called “Yuan Yang” hot-pot.

Double cooked pork is one of my favorite dish in Chuan cuisine, it uses same part of pork as bacon, but after cooked twice, the fat is less which means healthier, and enriches the flavor of spicy, numbness and Chinese onion’s unique taste.