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've found myself greatly interested in the peanut soup featured in the Honghe section of the video, but found nigh zero information about it while looking on RUclips or Google, it's basically all just Tong Sui. I'd greatly appreciate further information on how to approach this dish.
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!!!
That's how experts are compared to people of any country. It's sometimes funny to me how people expect a lay person to know more than an expert just because the lay person is ethnically of the country you are asking the question about, while the expert is of some other ethnicity.
@ hahah you’re right! It’s kinda cringey what I said, but still watching their videos for sometime I was always taking them as very invested and interesting Chinese cuisine enthusiasts, rather than experts, but now realizing they’re actually really really good!
Maybe for foreigners, his videos have a lot of fresh new angles and information. But for Chinese people, especially chinese foodies,this is all stuff we already know and familiar,theres nothing new. All I'm trying to say is,here are already plenty of the academic and theoretical book, but he still got a shot on foreign market,i dont know.
@@minghliao9993 Unfortunately, until the Chinese information gets translated into English, many of the international audience simply will not know/be aware of all this info. Hell, my parents from HK, I grew up having homecooked Canto food everyday, and I still learned a lot in this video.
Not even 10 mins to the video, me, as a Chinese, already felt ashamed that I don't even know that much of the cuisine in my own province than a foreigner that is making a video on RUclips. Mad respect to you with the amount of research and preparation.
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.
@@ssatva The unfortunate answer regarding dietary restrictions - from friends that have done this personally - is that to eat well you generally need to lower your standards. People keeping Halal could likely eat very well in the Northwest of the country, sticking to Halal eateries. There *are* Buddhist vegetarian restaurants, but it would be difficult to organize all of your meals around these. Restaurants certainly aren't going to lengths preventing cross-contamination. I have a friend that keeps vegetarian, and when they go out to eat they'll simply order vegetable and tofu dishes. Sometimes these will contain some oyster sauce, stock, or bouillon powder. The way they square that knot is that they don't order things with meat intentionally, and if there's some little meat bits in the dish they'll simply eat around it. I had a friend that keeps kosher that had a similar don't ask, don't tell policy. The restriction itself matters much less than the strictness of its application: a strict pescatarian might not have the best time, but a vegan that blindly orders tofu and vegetable dishes will eat fantastically. I definitely do know that that sort of... flexibility... might feel a bit alien to a lot of Americans. People tend to be quite strict about their personal dietary restrictions, and that's certainly okay too! In that case, the reality is that China might not be the best fit as a food travel destination. And of course, if you have any anaphylactic allergies, I would *heavily* suggest doing a bevy of research before travelling, and perhaps skipping for a different location. I've met expats in China that live with peanut allergies, but knowing Chinese is an enormous help and they would never go anywhere without an epipen (they also cook at home quite a bit).
@@ssatva I spent 10 years living in China, 8 of them in Beijing, and had a few expat friends/associates that were vegan. It is manageable, but it also depends on where you are. To this end, they had the Happy Cow App - can't say whether it still works, but it did back in 2016 before I left for Hong Kong, and it did include Chinese locales, so that might make it easier to navigate places in China and let you know if there are options for you in smaller towns.
3) first get a vpn, (not express or Nord, better Astrill or Shadowrocket), then for food you need Meituan (food delivery), Dazhong Dianping (like a mix of tripadvisor and yelp), Xiao Hong Shu (Little Red Book) and a good translation app like Baidu Translate.
@@ChineseCookingDemystified i'm not gonna lie this video is making me reconsider veganism when I travel to China, even though it's been 9 years... there is just so much creativity in all these dishes
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.
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.
One of my grandmothers is Toishanese and the other is from Shenzhen and while there's a good overlap of dishes they cook they have extremely different vibes and flavors. I think a lot of the overlap also becomes muddled by the fact that a lot of the Toisanese chefs in the US cook Cantonese food and don't really do Toishan specialties unless someone specifically asks for them, like a secret menu or something, because Cantonese food is the food that sells / people in the US want. Most prominent example: Made With Lau. Daddy Lau is 100% Toishanese but the channel has, to my memory, very few Toishan-specific dishes and lean much more Cantonese.
That’s what I love about Cantonese cuisine (aside from the fact that I am from Hong Kong) Restaurant Cantonese food and home Cantonese food are so different but they are both still amazing and a huge part of Cantonese cooking and culture
I'm from Sanming, Fujian, a small city between mountains. I was very happy to hear about my hometown in a video from a foreigner. In fact very few even Chinese food bloggers can articulate the differences between so many local cuisines. You have done a wonderful job.
As a Vietnamese, hearing "best or second-best rice noodles in the world, depending on how you rate Vietnam" brought a smile to my face. Would love to try Guangxi noodles one day.
Well, considering northern Vietnam was under direct control by the Chinese Empire (as Giao Châu) for over 1000 years, there are probably a lot of shared influences and simialrities between Vietnamese rice noodles and Guangxi rice noodles to begin wtih.
I'm a Chinese, also a lover for food. But somehow you made me think about my career as a scientific researcher. Great work is driven by real passion, what an inspiration!
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!
Here in Mexico, people usually guide themselves culinary by the classic 7 culinary zones which are: north, pacific center, pacific south, bajío, centro, gulf and southeast. And while there may be a lot of similitudes between the states in these areas, there are also a lot of differences. I have lived in the north all my life, more specifically in the northwest and just here there are many "subcuisines", the Baja peninsula could be its own cuisine, while it may be similar to Sonora and Chihuahua in Mexicali, once you go beyond the Rumorosa mountain the climate changes to a Mediterranean weather, changing the cuisine completely, also there is the whole pacific ocean for fresh seafood, Nuevo Leon's cuisine also it's specific details, being a little more complex than the food you find in Sonora or Chihuahua, but one thing you'd find true, is all the north is united in it's love for beef and flour tortillas, flour in general really. Then there's the pacific south zone, where Oaxaca alone could be considered its own cuisine (and it sometimes is), same with Chiapas. Or the gulf, where both Veracruz and Tabasco are unique on their own. And so on and on, while those 7 zones might be helpful, they don't tell the whole story.
Agree having been born in Guanajuato which would be considered bajio I found it to be lacking a strong identity but I also have Oaxaca family members who have amazing food with strong identity
I live in Texas and I can definitely say the beef and flour culture has migrated north (even though I prefer corn). I have a question though, so I make a pretty good deal of mexican food, and I notice that mostly me and my neighbors prefer to wrap our steamed dishes (mixiotes de pollo, tamales, etc) in corn husks, but sometimes for christmas or something one of my neighbors will give me some tamales wrapped in banana leaves and I always think, that is so odd. Is this wrapping controversy just a texas thing, or is it a greater divide in mexican cuisine at large?
@@caelumleamhain4058 it's just a texas thing. In most tropical zones, which include the gulf, pacific center, pacific south and southeast (yucatan) zones banana leaves are used as much, if not more, than corn husks, some states like in Michoacan even use maize leaves for corundas, which are really similar to tamales or there's even the use of hoja santa, which has this wonderful anisy, minty taste to it. There's also the use of banana leaves for barbacoa, cochinita pibil and other dishes where they are not used exclusively to wrap masa, but to wrap meats or fish or just to infuse its flavor. Overall it's not right or wrong to use either, it's more of a matter of availability and personal taste, you can find banana leaves anywhere in Mexico now, you just will see less banana leave tamales in the north. But even if you can use whatever leaf you want, there are some tamales that just don't taste right without banana leaves, like mole or chipilin ones.
@@caelumleamhain4058banana leaf-wrapped tamales are a southern thing, the most famous of which are Oaxacan but also Chiapas (southern most state) and Yucatán (the eastern peninsula) also use banana leaves.
I'm a 5th generation hakka immigrant, and you just described a lot of my childhood cuisine. Those fluffy rice cupcake are often used in offerings for relatives that's already passed away. We still eat a lot of stuffed tofu with pork too. Of course a lot of family's cuisine has been intermixed, fused, or forgotten but it is interesting you still see the shared DNA within those in mainland china.
As a foodie who lived in and travelled numerous cities in China, I'm shocked about the level of details of this video. The video is extremely informative and you presented it in a super objective and humble way. Probably the best intro video for Chinese food that I can find on RUclips.
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.
I'd encourage you to keep continuing to improve your ability to recognise and write characters then! Learn by rote for a bit then you can pick up the patterns, is a good mental exercise as well! :)
this is THE video that will serve as the gold standard reference for explaining Chinese food. like it won't be just a "hot video", this video will endure on the internet for long time to come thank you for compiling and making it. I cannot fanthom how long it took for you to put it together but it is well done!
An incredible video - a magnum opus. The amount of work this would have taken combined with easy and clearly the informative is conveyed is mind blowing.
Hey man, long time fan for half a decade and a Henan native here: A key aspect of Henan's food that deserve some love is the local's love for nuts- the locals have a lot of love for peanut sauce as well as sesame oil and places them on everything. Honestly the sesame oil quality is world class in itself. One of my reliable favorites- and a noted global brand is Kadoya from japan, happy to say almost all local Henan sesame oils even from local small shops are that quality. So we are really spoiled in that respect. They also have some good fried savory desserts as well also involving either peanut or sesame, like sesame twists and sesame string bundles. If you are a Westerner reading this a close reference would be those golden fried crispy wonton strips they serve with hot and sour soup (very similar to hot pepper soup from Henan) so imagine those crispy golden strips of goodness but much larger/ alternatively thinner and coiled up.
As a Chinese myself, I even couldn't tell this well about cuisine of all different areas in China. Very well-researched and the accuracy is pretty high! Job well done.
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.
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)
As you asked for the cuisine division as an Indian, we are similar to China but most recognize the broad cuisine divisions of North and South which is kinda basic version Indian cuisine can be broadly divided into 1) Northern - Awadhi,Purvanchal,Maithili,Bihari,Braj,Luckhnavi,Haryanvi,Punjabi etc (includes provinces of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Punjab,Haryana) 2)North Eastern - Bodo, Kokborok, Gorkha, Assamese, Meitei, Mizo, Khasi, Garo, Lepcha, Nepali, Naga, Kuki, Arunachali etc (includes Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram, Tripura, Manipur, Sikkim and parts of North Bengal 3) Himalayan - Kashmiri, Ladakhi, Dogri, Kashmiri Pandit, Kumauni, Pahadi, Gharwali, Nepali (includes Ladakh, Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand) 4) Eastern - South Bengali, North Bengali, Odia, Sambhalpuri, many other tribal cuisines, Gorkha (includes West Bengal, Orissa, Chattisgarh) 5) Southern- Uttar Karnataka, Malenadu, Karavali, Kerala, Chettinad, Tanjavur Marathi, Hyderabadi, Telangana, Rayalseema, Coastal Andhra, Kodagu,South Karnataka, French influenced Puducherry cuisine, Coastal Tamil and Tamil uplands (includes Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry,Karnataka,Kerala,Telangana, Andhra Pradesh) 6)Western - Marathvada,Wardha, Konkan, Konkani Goan, Goan Portuguese influenced, Khandeshi, Bundeli, Malvani, Marwari, Mewari, Dungari, Braj, Gujrathi, Kathiawadi, Kutchi, Sindhi, Gondi etc (includes Maharashtra, Goa,Gujrath,Rajasthan,Madhya Pradesh) 7) Apart from these we have many others like Mughal,Modern Indian, caste specific cuisines like Havyaka Gowda Iyyengari Jain etc note that these are broad divisions there can be many other divisions and many may contest this division too
As a Chinese-Canadian that loves food, especially Chinese food, your seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of Chinese cuisines across the map is absolutely mindblowing... I need to do a food tour of China so bad...
On the subject of Tibetan yak milk tea- it is salty, it is gamey, and it is incredibly warming to the body. I won't say it's especially tasty, but I think I would lunge for a cup on the coldest winter days, because I know it would be exactly what I need to keep me going. It's salt, fat, warmth, and energy. It's a survival drink.
Many years ago your channel rekindled my desire to understand China through its food culture. You have gotten better and better sharing the profound depth Chinese cuisine for English speakers. It's so hard to find this kind of content for us. Thank you for putting in the work and your love of Chinese culture is shines in every video.
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
I spent a summer near Savonlinna teaching English. My best food memory was the rye bread stuffed with whole little lake fish. The slow cooking dissolved all the bones. So it fits with your classification.
As a Finn I disageree. For bread there's soured rye bread which is trad. Finnish. But there are lots of other cuisines traditionally Finnish. Karelia stew, raindeer dishes, fish baked into rye bread (kalakukko), Karelian pies. Then Finnish split pea soup traditinally is very diffrent from Swedish version, so I call that one. There are lot's of salmon dishes. For example a Finnish-Swedish fishmonger had never heard of whole baked salmon which is traditional way to bake it in Finland. So there are much more in Finland than just traditional rye bread. Talking about this with my sister I got few more: liver caserole with raisins, broiled or smoked lampreys and anything with Baltic herring.
This video? This is one of the best videos I have ever, Ever, EVER watched on RUclips. I kept switching between learning I was completely ignorant of things and then being captivated by learning enough to peel back the ignorance, just a little. I felt both bewildered and honored. Thank you SO much 🙏 💘
This is like by far the best compilation of Chinese cuisines I’ve seen. It’s like crazy amount of info in such a “short” compressed video. Really nice insight to the diversity of Chinese cuisines.
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.
> 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? This is a really intriguing thought, and could maybe form a nice model of Southwest at large. I'll have to take some time to mull it over :) As to the map itself, we have a decent bit of confidence in Guangdong (though an argument could be made for Dong Hakka --> Hakka and Lianzhou --> Guibei) and to a lesser extent Guangxi. I definitely do think people with different areas of expertise would likely be able to do a cleaner job with their respective corner of the country. Subdivisions could definitely be found in Hubei and Henan. Our treatment of Dongbei was a bit of a clusterfuck
@@ChineseCookingDemystifiedI’m from Guizhou, the southern part (qian nan) to be exact. I think the hypothesis is true (or at least that’s what we think among ourselves). Due to the lack of salt, people of the southern and southeastern mountainous part of Guizhou (main consists of ethnic minorities) consume a lot of sour food. There is a saying in these parts of Guizhou: if you don’t eat something sour for 3 days your legs get weak😂 There are two types of sour soup (suan tang). The white suan tang of the southeastern Guizhou that’s made of fermented rice and the red suan tang of the southern Guizhou that’s made of a local variety of tomatoes. Another interesting fact is that Guizhou is the first province in China to adopt chilli pepper in cuisine. After chilli pepper was introduced to China, they were mainly for horticultural purposes. People of Guizhou, perhaps also out of the need to season their food other than salt(?), decided to use chilli pepper as an ingredient for cooking. If there is a simplified way to describe southern-southeastern Guizhou cuisine, it should be sour-spicy (suan la).
@@ChineseCookingDemystified Northeast China is a bit complicated. Northeast China is home to Shandong people who ventured through Shanhaiguan, as well as Korean and Manchu ethnic groups and Russian and Japanese colonizers. The history of large-scale settlementof Han people in Northeast China is not long. But you should believe that the Northeast people are the first Chinese to start industrialization, and their historical status is beyond doubt.More like the feeling of the Great Lakes and Chicago in the United States.
Once again, outstanding work. This deep overview of Chinese culinary diversity is truly invaluable. Regarding Spain, I would distinguish the following cuisines, in a very simplified manner. Note that there are lots of gradient zones. For example, the region of El Bierzo is in Castille but they are very Galician in character. There are also things that are eaten all over Spain but with regional styles, like morcilla (blood sausage). For example, morcilla from Burgos is made with rice, while Galician morcilla is sweet and has raisins: 1) Galician: heavy on the seafood, potatoes and pork, particularly salted pork. They tend to keep seasonings at a minimum and rely on garlic, on the salted pork, on unto (pork fat from the intestines) and on pimentón (paprika) for flavor. Boiled octopus with potatoes is the most famous dish, but they have their own cocido type (caldo gallego, made by boiling salted pork ribs, tongue, chorizo, rapini, white beans and other stuff. You eat a soup with the beans and then the other stuff on the side. All cocidos work like this). Their cheeses are soft and not very aged. 2) Asturian: gigantic portion sizes. Their most famous stuff is fabada (a fava bean stew), cachopos (two thin but very wide veal cutlets that are breaded and fried with ham and cheese inside) and chorizo a la sidra (chorizo cooked in cider) 3) Basque-Navarrese: they spawned dishes dishes "a la vizcaína" (a stew cooked in a thick pepper sauce) and "a la riojana" (thin stews of paprika and chorizo as flavor base). Their fish dishes are awesome, and they have a distinct tapa tradition with the "pintxos". Beef steaks are also beloved here, but it is the case in all the Atlantic coast. 4) Aragonese-Mountain Catalan: this is a tradition heavily influenced by sheperd food, but also by the fertile Ebro. Lots of hearty stews of mutton and chicken, potatoes and porridges, but also lots of vegetables like cardoon, artichokes, green beans... There are also lots of mushrooms in season. 5) Catalan: very Mediterranean vibe. They have lots of preserved meat preparations just like Italian salumi. They also have cannelloni and their own type of cocido, the escudella, which features macaroni for the soup and a complex meat stock. They also add alioli to their patatas bravas, making them bravioli, although they call it just bravas. 6) Mediterranean: this covers Valencia and the Balearic islands. This is were paella belongs, and a myriad of other delicious rice and noodle (fideuás) dishes. In the city of Valencia they also eat horse meat (in sandwiches), which is uncommon in the rest of Spain these days. 7) Northern Castillian: hearty stews of meat and legumes, roasted meats like suckling pigs and mutton and lamb. They also have one of the best soups anywhere in my opinion (sopas de ajo), which is classic peasant food. They also make excellent preserved meats like chorizo, cecina, lomo, etc, and an empanada made out of them called hornazo. Excellent cheeses, especially in Zamora. In addition, lots of classic desserts like mazapán, various cookies, etc. 8) Southern Castillian: somewhat oversimplified, but this includes Castilla La Mancha and Extremadura. It is very rustic food, and it boldly displays its humble origins. Vegetable dishes like pisto (the Spanish version of the nowadays popular shakshuka/menemen), migas (hearty meals based on broken old bread), porridges, meat based dishes including the really interesting morteruelo (a pounded mixture of liver and meat bits) and salted cod dishes like atascaburras (this one is also pounded in a mortar) or bacalao al ajoarriero. In Extremadura is where the best jamón ibérico is made, though there is also excellent production into the bordering region of Andalucía (this is a gradient zone). They make the famous manchego cheese, and cheeses from Cuenca are my personal favourite. 9) Andalusian: very big region, with differences between the coast and interior. They have fried small fish, seafood, hunted meats, cold soups and salads, and a varied repertoire of pastries. Gazpacho, salmorejo and ajoblanco are typically andalusian dishes, but the former two are popular in all of Spain. 10) Madrid: the capital has a very Castillian gastronomy, but it is also a melting pot with influences from all over Spain and particularities from being the biggest city by far in the Central Mesa. Offal is very typical, with callos a la madrileña (a tripe stew) and grilled pork ear. They feature more seafood than the rest of interior Spain with calamari, prawns and fish, although in the old times it was mainly salted cod. They have a version of cocido, cocido madrileño. Technically very similar versions are cooked in Castille and Andalucía. It features beef shank meat, chicken and/or hen, chorizo, panceta (salted pork belly), pork ear, pork snout, cabbage, chickpeas, potatoes... 11) Canary Islands: they are there own thing in various ways. They have a particular type of flour called gofio, awesome pepper sauces called mojo and hearty stews. Excellent and very underrated cheeses, which they use to make the extremely delicious almogrote, which is a dip of finely ground goat cheese mixed with olive oil and paprika.
Ok I kind of can't believe that I can access this level of incredible, in-depth research on culinary history ... for free on RUclips. A place that suffers from clickbait-y content that stands on the weakest of information. I've been supporting you all for a while on Patreon, just because I'm genuinely so happy to be able to make sure more of this kind of stuff is made. Thanks so much to you both!
This is one of the most important videos on RUclips. I laughed, I cried, and sometimes I had these moments of illumination in which I recognised a favourite dish within its proper context, and was delighted. Thank you for making this. You have my subscription!
Canadian cuisine actually has some pretty firmly established regions that are overall relatively well-agreed upon as they're mostly divided up by the ingredients that are produced and grown in each region and the unique blends of immigrants which defined the region. Of course, you could also up-divide by province or even city in some cases, but, overall, the regions are as follows: The Maritimes, composed of New Brunswich, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, & Newfoundland & Labrador - known for simple foods, the cuisine is primarily defined by the heavy use of seafood and especially white, Atlantic fish as well as foods that derive from Scottish and Irish cuisine such as a Jiggs Dinner which is a spin on corned beef and cabbage, ham boiled with cabbage, potatoes, and root vegetables, though newer immigrants to the region created dishes like donair, a spin on the German doner which is a spin on Turkish doner Quebecois, found in Quebec - HEAVILY French influenced, specifically very old-fashioned and even long forgotten peasant French cuisine, it's known for being very heavy, rich, and savory with a large focus on protein and liberal use of things like gravy. This is of course the region that gave us poutine, french fries and cheese curd smothered in beef gravy, and tourtiere, a spiced meat pie often eaten with ketchup Ontario - could probably be subdivided further as its the most populous province BY FAR, but largely defined by its focus on fruits and vegetables grown in the farms in the St Laurence Lowlands and for its love of diary, though this is one of the two regions which are most heavily influenced by immigration. Peameal bacon, the true Canadian bacon, comes from here as well as the famous buttertarts The Prairies, composed of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, & Alberta - known as Canada's breadbasket because it produces most of Canada's grain, beef is also produced there, particularly in Alberta, and there's a distinct influence of Polish & Ukrainian cuisine such as perogies, though they're pretty much readily found across Canada. It's from the Prairies and particularly Saskatchewan that the world has been introduced to Saskatoon berries, so beloved they literally named the town after them. British Columbia - the other region most heavily influenced by immigration, it's known for sea food as well, but a distinctly different spread than the Maritimes and especially on things like Pacific salmon, it's also been influenced by Japanese and Chinese cuisines since pretty much it's founding due to the work on the railways with both the BC and California rolls being invented in BC as well as famous dished like the Japadog, a hot dog with mayonnaise and seaweed on top, though this is probably most well-known for Nanaimo bars
I would probably break out Northern Prairies / Northern Ontario / Northwest Territories + Yukon into a shared culinary tradition with a lot of influence from First Nations cuisine and a separate category for Inuit Nunangat (Nunavut, Nunatsiavut, Nunavik, and the Inuvialuit Region). Otherwise I agree with your comment!
A lot of people think that Quebecois food is mainly influenced by France, but overlook the British and Native influences (not to mention immigrant groups like the Jewish in Montreal). Quebecois food is very different from classic French cuisine.
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? 😊
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.
@@_oaktree_ The idea Jewish foods are just kosher versions of other people's cuisines, yet "American food" is a subpar version of everyone's cuisines yet it gets it's own label. (I'm not including cuisines like creole and cajun in that label when they're treated as other/special within the US itself.)
@@garbagewitch666 Mazel tov on learning Yiddish. My father z'l taught Yiddish at Vassar, I was always surprised at how many students he had. May I ask what your inspiration for learning Yiddish is? I learned Hebrew from my dad, but wasn't very interested in learning Yiddish, which I now regret.
@@letXeqX Well I'm Jewish, for one, so it's a way to feel connected to my culture. I'm also a musician, and also very interested in history and culture, and there's so much Yiddish music and literature that never got translated into English, so it's a way to learn more. If my grandparents were alive I would have loved to talk to them in Yiddish but sadly all 4 of them have passed.
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
Whew, this could be a 3-credit semester course, and I about wore out the Pause on my keyboard. Thanks! I've sworn off buying any more cookbooks, but one delineating each of the 63 regions, with recipes for just the three/four dishes mentioned, I'd have to pick up (don't have enough years left to get thru them all, but…).
The closest book I can think of for one that delineates a lot of Chinese cuisines is Carolyn Philips ‘All Under Heaven’. It doesn’t get quite as granular but for a useable, English language, single volume book it’s good and has a somewhat similar approach.
This is an forking awesome video!!! Well done, Chris (and Steph). Love how much care and respect you place on the diversity of foods in China. As an ethnic Hakka, the diversity is evident as Meizhou Hakka food is quite different from Huizhou Hakka food (and just being honest, my experience is based on Hakka food from the overseas diaspora). What's really interesting is that globalisation and the diaspora has created so much additional diversity to Chinese food. So there's really no way we can even say what is truly authentic. I broadly agree with your closing comments - let's be lovers of food whereever we are globally ... the competitiveness of the food industry always means that there will be folks who (1) try to achieve as much "authenticity" based on their upbringing and heritage; and (2) there will also be those who push the boundaries to explore how to adapt their food to their environment. At the end of the day ... good food is good food!
Amazing work! The diversity of cuisines is huge, but you managed to name and explain the entire country. I cannot belive I just watched a 40 minutes video, it is like a documentary that I did not know I needed . Again, amazing work!
As a Chinese descent and honestly the level of knowledge, research and detail that went into this video puts a lot of us to shame. I've been following your channel since early COVID, and this might be one of your best videos yet. Respect!
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.
Right, we thought about this categorization as well but since we're not 100% sure where Mindong, Minzhong, and Minbei split (didn't know much about the liguistic diferences as it's very complicated in Fujian), so we decided to go with our personal experience, i.e. the food is very different in these regions, obviously. Thanks for pointing this out.
Awesome video! As an Italian I'll try to answer your question with a very coarse breakdown of our cuisine, which will also double as an exercise on how many Italians I can piss off in a single comment. Do keep in mind I'm being VERY vague here. The very roughest breakdown would be north (french influence, butter based), center (heavy on meat, mushrooms), south (olive oil based, plenty of fish and produce) and the two main islands, Sicily and Sardinia (both complex melting pots which I won't try to subdivide further), should be counted separately. Now going a tad deeper I think one can distinguish a north-eastern, a north-western and a mountain cuisine in the north, west coast, east coast and appennini (the central mountain range, whose cuisine closely resembles what is generally thought of as "central italian" cuisine) cuisine in the center, and the southern cuisine could be split into the "rich" cuisine of more affluent areas like Naples and Bari and the "poor" cuisine (not worse guys, don't flame me) of more agricultural areas, which also split along the east/west axis. So at this very very coarse level I'm counting eleven different cuisines, though one could easily argue for, I guess, upwards of twenty.
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 . . . .
I don't know, man. Southern German cuisine is really similar across the board. The names may differ but at most there are side dishes that are distinct with maybe one or two unique main dishes.
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.
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
It happened! I remember being one of the people requesting this video many moons ago, and I'm very happy to say that it exceeded my already high expectations.
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!
@@宋教仁-b4i Use the search function, type OTR and food. The channel will come up and you will be mesmerized, plus it's fun to play "where's Steph and Chris" in OTR videos as they are all very good friends.
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!
Oh, that! That's awesome! A Xinjiang dish that I have no idea how to categorize. It's called 馕包肉. Braised lamb smothered over Uighur Naan Bread - super delicious. Can't seem to find a recipe from my favorite Xinjiang creators, but this recipe jives with my general understanding: ruclips.net/video/x1ca81qSQxY/видео.html
Bravo. Everyone should watch this. This is more than a culinary adventure. This is so well done. The bits of history are great and every single image of the locations showed how beatify and diverse China, and the rest of the world is. Lovely.
Thank you so much for this! I have always been frustrated (in a friendly way) talking with locals about the 8 main cooking styles. The exclusion of such rich cuisines like Xibei, yet the inclusion of styles like Lu (Shandong) which no one to this date has been able to define to me in words. (Your video was illuminating on this subject). Also, so interesting to learn that the 8 styles are where they are in the cultural zeitgeist mainly because they had established dining presentations. LOVE this video. 10 out of 10. I will likely reference this video for years to come.
My family's from Zhejiang and Jiangsu and only through watching this video did I realize just how specific our home cooking is to these places!! I had no clue before, its super fun to think about how other Chinese families would probably cook so differently depending on where they're from.
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".
Im autistic and I love Chinese cooking; this channel is such a blessing with all the systematizing and all the deep dives into the food. Thanks so much you guys are amazing
I wish someone did a similar video on Indian food! In the west, Punjabi cuisine (with its chicken butter masalas and naans) is taken to represent all of India, which is more than weird! In effect, by that logic, most of India in India don't eat Indian food.!! If I apply your methodology, these are the ones I can Identify as distinct cuisines of India (and I am more than certain I have missed out on many): 1) North East Tribal (Naga, Mizo, Manipuri, Khasi etc) 2) Assamese 3) Nepali (yes, there are more Nepali in India than in Nepal - so essentially Gorkha, Newari, and Indo-Tibetan) 4) Bengali 5) Bihari/Bhojpuri 6) Awadhi 7) Mughlai 8) Haryanvi 9) Pahadi (Kumaoni and Dogri) 10) Punjabi 11) Kashmiri 12) Rajasthani 13) Guarati 14) Bundelkhandi 15) Marathi 16) Konkani 17) Udupi 18) Mangaloren 19) Malabari 20) Chettinad 21) Andhra 22) Hyderabadi 23) Kalinga/Odia 24) Central Indian Tribal (Bhil, Santhal, Munda)
This is exactly the kind of content I want. Currently working on a year-long project of analyzing the cooking of the Middle East through the lens of history and the points you make and the explaination of your process is inspiring.
🤯 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. ☺❤
That was fantastic, seriously. The first part when you guys explain your choices is really interesting, thanks for taking the time to zoom in on this, it shows it's not an easy, rapid exercise. I'm amazed, learning about how to delimit cultures in a context where they mingle and overlap. China is so complex, I'm amazed you did this!
A native Chinese here who spent a lot time in Guangxi province, particularly Beihai. How you single out from Guangxi province and group it with Guangdong cuisine is surprisingly accurate. I also want to add that Beihai has/had a Danjia (the boat people) community and a strong influence of Vietnam influence. Beihai holds a big re-settlement of Chinese Vietnam refugees who fled Vietnam. I won’t go into the reason why they fled Vietnam but leave it here for who are interested to research further.
Many years ago I had a freshman advisor whose family name was Nguyen. I assumed he was Vietnamese, but he said that actually he was Chinese and his family had to flee to France where he got his physics degree. Probably part of the same story?
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.
@@totot99 Creole is heavy on tomato, seafood and spices, while cajun has a more earthy flavour profile. Creole jambalaya f.e. is brick red (from the tomatoes) and spicy, studded with seafood, while the cajun one is oily and brownish (because it uses a roux like dark sauce) with a mild flavour and only sausage and chicken (sometimes ground beef).
First, y'all did a ton of work on this. My hat's off to you and Steph. Second, I'm glad I'm eating lunch watching this, because there's some amazing looking food scattered throughout to show the regional differences.
I’m actually sitting with a cookbook with recipes from each and every of the 25 traditional provinces of Sweden. which all used to have their own regional style. This is NOT a big country, with only ten million people (which used to be much lower). Nowadays Swedish cuisine has been modernized and centralized. Many of the traditional foods have been replaced with foreign or national Swedish food. Daily most people will eat such things such as pasta with ketchup and salty licorice. However there are still some general regional differences. And some of these are is stell - even the fast food can vary alot throughout Sweden. There's northern Swedish cuisine which is rustic and filling: huge dumplings, porridges, barley flour, different kinds of flat breads, the traditional foods of the Sami people with alot of reindeer meat which is fried, smoked or in boiled. Fermented herring (surströmming) is only eaten here as a late summer festivity. Melted butter can sometimes be the only sauce. Alot of Northern delicious things exists such as cloudberries, västerbotten cheese, arctic char fish, vendace caviar and much more. My favourite is the very rare berries "Arctic bramble" which are amazing. Because of migration you can find quite good Thai food in some middle of nowhere places in the north and the whole Swedish countryside. The huge forested region of Central Sweden has a lot of delicacies - crisp bread, game meat such as moose, an overabundance of mushrooms, blueberries and lingonberries in the forests, also alot of traditional dairy and pork products. Traditional cafés with many pastries also abound in smaller cities and villages. As well as lakes abound with alot of fish and crayfish. Stockholm was traditionally the genesis for many of the classic bourgeoise foods of Sweden such as the national dish Meatballs with lingonberry jam, potatoes, cream sauce and quick-pickled cucumber. As well as being the epi-centre for beloved fast food dishes such as Swedish style pizza (including kebab and banana-curry pizza), Swedish hot dog (including the one with flat bread and shrimp mayo) etc. Today Stockholm's food is often very international, hipster and touristy. But many of the classics remain. The Swedish West coast basically have one thing: an overabundance of sea food: lobster, shrimp, crab, langoustines, oysters or the humble mackerell. Gothenburg food has historically had many British influences such as the dark Carnegie porter beer. Different ways of pickling, smoking and frying herring is found all along the whole coast of Sweden. If you like herring, Sweden is like paradise. Southern Sweden beyond the forests has a huge agricultural area and alot more culinary influences from Denmark and Germany and beyond. Traditionally this was an area with a much better growing season and because of this a more abundance of food than the rest of Sweden. Skåneland used to be Danish so many of the traditions are Danish in origin. Malmö is also just about 30 minutes away from Copenhagen so the Danish influx is constant. Rye bread, pork, goose, eel, beans, pumpkins, salmon, schnapps, apples, pears, different pancakes and egg dishes,, several types of cabbage and other vegetables, the use of more spices such as caraway, saffron and mustard. Migrants from Arabic, Balkan and Eastern european countries have left their mark. Middle eastern Falafel is a Malmö iconic cheap staple.
Your explanation of the gradation of change in cuisines was good. For the purposes of this video you do have to draw a line somewhere. It reminded me of the language group map for Aboriginal Australians, where they also had to draw lines somewhere. Most groups could communicate with their neighbours, but could they talk to groups 2 or 3 neighbours away, probably not. Another great video. Thanks
i should probably look more into how they drew those maps. i lived on kamilaroi land, which is one of the largest recognised regions, but from what i can tell, there are at least three distinct dialects of kamilaroi spoken within the region, which suggests that the lines might be more political than linguistic and like the same thing happens in places we consider more “rigid” like the basque and catalan regions between france and spain speaking latin dialects distinct from french and spanish: the standardisation of their languages is more to do with where they drew country boarders than any meaningful distinction. the same is very true of the scandinavian peninsular… and tbh most of planet earth. i think the part that’s interesting about aboriginal languages is that like china, they’re distinct, but gradient groups now clustered into one massive country, but unlike china, they’re not endemic languages - rather than evolving due to social trade, and thus modernising, they kind of fossilised during colonisation; like a dead language that nonetheless has tens of thousands of speakers
Me, as a Chinese, are learning Chinese Cuisines from a English RUclips video.... Great job! I'm going to use this video to select my next domestic vacation destination.
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
Very interesting video! The Netherlands is a very small country so the food differences aren’t as big as in china obviously. But if I would have to divide the country culinarily I would say there are traditionally 3 main cuisines allthough some small areas within those can be a bit distinct on their own. Cuisine 1: western cuisine. Cuisine of North Holland, South Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht. Western cuisine is the cuisine of the culturally dominant Holland region, this is why when you look of “Dutch food” online you’ll mainly see western food. Western food uses a lot of dairy, most famous Dutch cheeses are from here, they use a lot more butter in cooking and baking compared to other regions. The western provinces are next to the sea so here you find most seafood dishes. They traditionally make a lot of ‘Jenever’ which is the pre curser of gin. Cuisine 2: northeastern cuisine Cuisine of Friesland, Groningen, Drenthe, Overijssel, Gelderland. Characterized by smoked or dried meats and sausages. Along the coast and the IJselmeer they eat a lot of seafood as well. The provinces are also home to more heavy and solid varieties of Dutch pastries, cookies and (rye) breads. Northern rye bread is very dark and baked a long time which makes it sweet. This area is famous for it’s bitters. Friesland has overlap with western cuisine in the use of dairy and cheese production. Cuisine 3: southern cuisine. Cuisine of Brabant, Limburg. The Catholic provinces are stereotyped for their enjoyment of good food. The south is known for their beer, which they also use a lot in cooking, mainly in stews. Brabant has wordtenbroodjes (small long bread with meat filling) and the Bossche bologna (large cream puff with chocolate). I myself am from the Southern part of Limburg, which is often considered the most “non Dutch” including cuisine. If you look on a map it is kind of an enclave, it borders Germany, Flanders and also Wallonia and you see a lot of Belgian, German and French influences. Sweet and savoury dishes are very popular here.
Absolutely loved this. I had no idea how little I knew about the cuisine and now I feel like I have a high level overview of its diversity. Thank you so much.
This is a very great video. As a Cantonese, I think what we usual called Cantonese Cuisine has 2 meanings. 1) Foods that origin from Guangzhou area, including regions nearby. Since Guangzhou was the economic and culture centre of Guangdong in ancient time, so people there led the fashion. Shunde, Taishan, Zhongshan etc. have influenced the style because many chef working in Guangzhou are from these area. 2) Geographically, Hakka and TeoChew are located in Canto (Guangdong). So, for people outside Guangdong, it is easier for them to identify these kind of cooking as Canton Cuisine. But the taste/ philosophy of cooking for Guangzhou, Hakka and TeoChew are so different. So, for me, Cantonese Cuisine should be Guangzhou, Hakka and TeoChew. For language-wise, if a person's family speak in Canton/Hakka/TeoChew dialog, they usually cook in the corresponding style at home. While TeoChew food are more closed to South Fujian and South Taiwan style, as well as the language. Hakka is another style. One fun fact, Canton person enjoy Japanese food very much and Japanese food's cooking philosophy has some similarity to Canton. Also, the Japanese language has certain similarity to Canton as well.
This video is the reason I am a patreon subscriber! So interesting and so much knowledge in one video. I've been planning to make a map of all the restaurants in London serving different Chinese cuisines and I couldn't find a proper breakdown of all the cuisines as described on this channel. Everyone keeps talking about 8 cuisines on the internet, even though that's obviously not true. So happy that you made this one!
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!
This was so impressive. I really appreciate the detail and diversity alongside the geographic tour. Thanks for helping the rest of the world understand so much more about Chinese cuisine!
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 :/
You think we need a proper recipe video after this? No way. I will chew on the information presented here for weeks. Thank you so much. It's perfect timing too. I have been wanting an overview of China's regional cuisines for some time, and this video went above and beyond. Great job!
Месяц назад+3
Bro, you outdid yourself with this video. How the hell do you know so much about Chinese cuisine as a foreigner???
Marry Steph, mostly (the real brains of this channel) I think of us as... kind of a translation team haha. Chinese language content --> Steph's brain --> My brain --> English language content :) A little bit of a simplification (I also do some research, she also has a big hand in the videos/posts), but yeah that's basically why
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've found myself greatly interested in the peanut soup featured in the Honghe section of the video, but found nigh zero information about it while looking on RUclips or Google, it's basically all just Tong Sui.
I'd greatly appreciate further information on how to approach this dish.
@@DoesItMatterAtAll Good idea! We'll try to touch on it soon. It's an interesting dish and not too difficult :)
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.
Absolutely 100% this.
I was drooling through this whole video, and has NOTHING to do with the pot of chili im making.
Right! I loves these deep dive videos! They bring so much content and history to the dishes they cook and show us!
Yes, it was an excellent video. However, I now absolutely need the top 3 recipes from every culinary region. :D
Agreed. Incredible research and brilliantly presented.
Don’t we all change our minds after thinking about stuff?
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!!!
+ 1
@alx1719 Honestly, that's what I love about this channel. They bring so much to the table (no pun intended) in terms of quality research.
That's how experts are compared to people of any country. It's sometimes funny to me how people expect a lay person to know more than an expert just because the lay person is ethnically of the country you are asking the question about, while the expert is of some other ethnicity.
Don't be that impressed, if they fetishize your race, it's not that hard to do
@ hahah you’re right! It’s kinda cringey what I said, but still watching their videos for sometime I was always taking them as very invested and interesting Chinese cuisine enthusiasts, rather than experts, but now realizing they’re actually really really good!
"I'm not Hakka, and I'm sure neither are you"
Me, a Hakka: 👁️👄👁️
Mauritius Hakka , fun fact I feel more Hakka than chinese
Another one here
Literally the Chinese population of Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia :
Where there are Chinese there are Hakka
@@johnyap4154 “The Jews of Asia”
Sir another 40 minute Chinese Cooking Demystified video has hit the algorithm
goddammit 🤣
HAHAHAH REAL
What a love letter to Chinese food. I’m blown away. You really should write a book.
omg yes I'd buy that book, especially if it includes a highlight recipe from each place aaaaaaa I would love it 😍
Just a highlight recipe? Gotta add 3-4 eavh. It could be an encyclopedia. Thats a VR series id love to watch.
Totally agree. I didn’t realize but this is so amazing to get to understand. I love a book.
Maybe for foreigners, his videos have a lot of fresh new angles and information.
But for Chinese people, especially chinese foodies,this is all stuff we already know and familiar,theres nothing new.
All I'm trying to say is,here are already plenty of the academic and theoretical book, but he still got a shot on foreign market,i dont know.
@@minghliao9993 Unfortunately, until the Chinese information gets translated into English, many of the international audience simply will not know/be aware of all this info. Hell, my parents from HK, I grew up having homecooked Canto food everyday, and I still learned a lot in this video.
Not even 10 mins to the video, me, as a Chinese, already felt ashamed that I don't even know that much of the cuisine in my own province than a foreigner that is making a video on RUclips. Mad respect to you with the amount of research and preparation.
Same here 🥺 learnt so much from this video!
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.
@@ssatva The unfortunate answer regarding dietary restrictions - from friends that have done this personally - is that to eat well you generally need to lower your standards. People keeping Halal could likely eat very well in the Northwest of the country, sticking to Halal eateries. There *are* Buddhist vegetarian restaurants, but it would be difficult to organize all of your meals around these. Restaurants certainly aren't going to lengths preventing cross-contamination.
I have a friend that keeps vegetarian, and when they go out to eat they'll simply order vegetable and tofu dishes. Sometimes these will contain some oyster sauce, stock, or bouillon powder. The way they square that knot is that they don't order things with meat intentionally, and if there's some little meat bits in the dish they'll simply eat around it. I had a friend that keeps kosher that had a similar don't ask, don't tell policy. The restriction itself matters much less than the strictness of its application: a strict pescatarian might not have the best time, but a vegan that blindly orders tofu and vegetable dishes will eat fantastically.
I definitely do know that that sort of... flexibility... might feel a bit alien to a lot of Americans. People tend to be quite strict about their personal dietary restrictions, and that's certainly okay too! In that case, the reality is that China might not be the best fit as a food travel destination.
And of course, if you have any anaphylactic allergies, I would *heavily* suggest doing a bevy of research before travelling, and perhaps skipping for a different location. I've met expats in China that live with peanut allergies, but knowing Chinese is an enormous help and they would never go anywhere without an epipen (they also cook at home quite a bit).
@@ssatva I spent 10 years living in China, 8 of them in Beijing, and had a few expat friends/associates that were vegan. It is manageable, but it also depends on where you are. To this end, they had the Happy Cow App - can't say whether it still works, but it did back in 2016 before I left for Hong Kong, and it did include Chinese locales, so that might make it easier to navigate places in China and let you know if there are options for you in smaller towns.
3) first get a vpn, (not express or Nord, better Astrill or Shadowrocket), then for food you need Meituan (food delivery), Dazhong Dianping (like a mix of tripadvisor and yelp), Xiao Hong Shu (Little Red Book) and a good translation app like Baidu Translate.
@@ChineseCookingDemystified i'm not gonna lie this video is making me reconsider veganism when I travel to China, even though it's been 9 years... there is just so much creativity in all these dishes
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.
One of the best RUclipsrs I’ve come across. Orders of magnitude above the average
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
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.
One of my grandmothers is Toishanese and the other is from Shenzhen and while there's a good overlap of dishes they cook they have extremely different vibes and flavors. I think a lot of the overlap also becomes muddled by the fact that a lot of the Toisanese chefs in the US cook Cantonese food and don't really do Toishan specialties unless someone specifically asks for them, like a secret menu or something, because Cantonese food is the food that sells / people in the US want. Most prominent example: Made With Lau. Daddy Lau is 100% Toishanese but the channel has, to my memory, very few Toishan-specific dishes and lean much more Cantonese.
That’s what I love about Cantonese cuisine (aside from the fact that I am from Hong Kong)
Restaurant Cantonese food and home Cantonese food are so different but they are both still amazing and a huge part of Cantonese cooking and culture
台山是不是有一种糕，像大的饺子，糯米皮，里面有各种馅
I'm from Sanming, Fujian, a small city between mountains. I was very happy to hear about my hometown in a video from a foreigner. In fact very few even Chinese food bloggers can articulate the differences between so many local cuisines. You have done a wonderful job.
Shaxian County street food is awesome, spreading across the whole country and even abroad!
As a Vietnamese, hearing "best or second-best rice noodles in the world, depending on how you rate Vietnam" brought a smile to my face. Would love to try Guangxi noodles one day.
Well, considering northern Vietnam was under direct control by the Chinese Empire (as Giao Châu) for over 1000 years, there are probably a lot of shared influences and simialrities between Vietnamese rice noodles and Guangxi rice noodles to begin wtih.
I'm a Chinese, also a lover for food. But somehow you made me think about my career as a scientific researcher. Great work is driven by real passion, what an inspiration!
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!
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!
Here in Mexico, people usually guide themselves culinary by the classic 7 culinary zones which are: north, pacific center, pacific south, bajío, centro, gulf and southeast. And while there may be a lot of similitudes between the states in these areas, there are also a lot of differences. I have lived in the north all my life, more specifically in the northwest and just here there are many "subcuisines", the Baja peninsula could be its own cuisine, while it may be similar to Sonora and Chihuahua in Mexicali, once you go beyond the Rumorosa mountain the climate changes to a Mediterranean weather, changing the cuisine completely, also there is the whole pacific ocean for fresh seafood, Nuevo Leon's cuisine also it's specific details, being a little more complex than the food you find in Sonora or Chihuahua, but one thing you'd find true, is all the north is united in it's love for beef and flour tortillas, flour in general really. Then there's the pacific south zone, where Oaxaca alone could be considered its own cuisine (and it sometimes is), same with Chiapas. Or the gulf, where both Veracruz and Tabasco are unique on their own. And so on and on, while those 7 zones might be helpful, they don't tell the whole story.
Agree having been born in Guanajuato which would be considered bajio I found it to be lacking a strong identity but I also have Oaxaca family members who have amazing food with strong identity
I live in Texas and I can definitely say the beef and flour culture has migrated north (even though I prefer corn). I have a question though, so I make a pretty good deal of mexican food, and I notice that mostly me and my neighbors prefer to wrap our steamed dishes (mixiotes de pollo, tamales, etc) in corn husks, but sometimes for christmas or something one of my neighbors will give me some tamales wrapped in banana leaves and I always think, that is so odd. Is this wrapping controversy just a texas thing, or is it a greater divide in mexican cuisine at large?
@@caelumleamhain4058 it's just a texas thing. In most tropical zones, which include the gulf, pacific center, pacific south and southeast (yucatan) zones banana leaves are used as much, if not more, than corn husks, some states like in Michoacan even use maize leaves for corundas, which are really similar to tamales or there's even the use of hoja santa, which has this wonderful anisy, minty taste to it. There's also the use of banana leaves for barbacoa, cochinita pibil and other dishes where they are not used exclusively to wrap masa, but to wrap meats or fish or just to infuse its flavor.
Overall it's not right or wrong to use either, it's more of a matter of availability and personal taste, you can find banana leaves anywhere in Mexico now, you just will see less banana leave tamales in the north. But even if you can use whatever leaf you want, there are some tamales that just don't taste right without banana leaves, like mole or chipilin ones.
What zone does Guadalajara fall under?
@@caelumleamhain4058banana leaf-wrapped tamales are a southern thing, the most famous of which are Oaxacan but also Chiapas (southern most state) and Yucatán (the eastern peninsula) also use banana leaves.
I'm a 5th generation hakka immigrant, and you just described a lot of my childhood cuisine. Those fluffy rice cupcake are often used in offerings for relatives that's already passed away. We still eat a lot of stuffed tofu with pork too. Of course a lot of family's cuisine has been intermixed, fused, or forgotten but it is interesting you still see the shared DNA within those in mainland china.
As a foodie who lived in and travelled numerous cities in China, I'm shocked about the level of details of this video. The video is extremely informative and you presented it in a super objective and humble way. Probably the best intro video for Chinese food that I can find on RUclips.
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.
I'd encourage you to keep continuing to improve your ability to recognise and write characters then! Learn by rote for a bit then you can pick up the patterns, is a good mental exercise as well! :)
this is THE video that will serve as the gold standard reference for explaining Chinese food.
like it won't be just a "hot video", this video will endure on the internet for long time to come
thank you for compiling and making it. I cannot fanthom how long it took for you to put it together but it is well done!
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!!!
An incredible video - a magnum opus. The amount of work this would have taken combined with easy and clearly the informative is conveyed is mind blowing.
Hey man, long time fan for half a decade and a Henan native here:
A key aspect of Henan's food that deserve some love is the local's love for nuts- the locals have a lot of love for peanut sauce as well as sesame oil and places them on everything. Honestly the sesame oil quality is world class in itself. One of my reliable favorites- and a noted global brand is Kadoya from japan, happy to say almost all local Henan sesame oils even from local small shops are that quality. So we are really spoiled in that respect.
They also have some good fried savory desserts as well also involving either peanut or sesame, like sesame twists and sesame string bundles. If you are a Westerner reading this a close reference would be those golden fried crispy wonton strips they serve with hot and sour soup (very similar to hot pepper soup from Henan) so imagine those crispy golden strips of goodness but much larger/ alternatively thinner and coiled up.
As a Chinese myself, I even couldn't tell this well about cuisine of all different areas in China. Very well-researched and the accuracy is pretty high! Job well done.
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.
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)
This was a beautiful breakdown of Greek food too. Thanks so much for the effort!
As you asked for the cuisine division as an Indian, we are similar to China but most recognize the broad cuisine divisions of North and South which is kinda basic version Indian cuisine can be broadly divided into
1) Northern - Awadhi,Purvanchal,Maithili,Bihari,Braj,Luckhnavi,Haryanvi,Punjabi etc (includes provinces of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Punjab,Haryana)
2)North Eastern - Bodo, Kokborok, Gorkha, Assamese, Meitei, Mizo, Khasi, Garo, Lepcha, Nepali, Naga, Kuki, Arunachali etc (includes Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram, Tripura, Manipur, Sikkim and parts of North Bengal
3) Himalayan - Kashmiri, Ladakhi, Dogri, Kashmiri Pandit, Kumauni, Pahadi, Gharwali, Nepali (includes Ladakh, Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand)
4) Eastern - South Bengali, North Bengali, Odia, Sambhalpuri, many other tribal cuisines, Gorkha (includes West Bengal, Orissa, Chattisgarh)
5) Southern- Uttar Karnataka, Malenadu, Karavali, Kerala, Chettinad, Tanjavur Marathi, Hyderabadi, Telangana, Rayalseema, Coastal Andhra, Kodagu,South Karnataka, French influenced Puducherry cuisine, Coastal Tamil and Tamil uplands (includes Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry,Karnataka,Kerala,Telangana, Andhra Pradesh)
6)Western - Marathvada,Wardha, Konkan, Konkani Goan, Goan Portuguese influenced, Khandeshi, Bundeli, Malvani, Marwari, Mewari, Dungari, Braj, Gujrathi, Kathiawadi, Kutchi, Sindhi, Gondi etc (includes Maharashtra, Goa,Gujrath,Rajasthan,Madhya Pradesh)
7) Apart from these we have many others like Mughal,Modern Indian, caste specific cuisines like Havyaka Gowda Iyyengari Jain etc
note that these are broad divisions there can be many other divisions and many may contest this division too
As a Chinese-Canadian that loves food, especially Chinese food, your seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of Chinese cuisines across the map is absolutely mindblowing... I need to do a food tour of China so bad...
On the subject of Tibetan yak milk tea- it is salty, it is gamey, and it is incredibly warming to the body. I won't say it's especially tasty, but I think I would lunge for a cup on the coldest winter days, because I know it would be exactly what I need to keep me going. It's salt, fat, warmth, and energy. It's a survival drink.
Many years ago your channel rekindled my desire to understand China through its food culture. You have gotten better and better sharing the profound depth Chinese cuisine for English speakers. It's so hard to find this kind of content for us. Thank you for putting in the work and your love of Chinese culture is shines in every video.
Wow this is really finely researched. As a Chinese person this is seriously impressive.
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
I spent a summer near Savonlinna teaching English. My best food memory was the rye bread stuffed with whole little lake fish. The slow cooking dissolved all the bones. So it fits with your classification.
As a Finn I disageree. For bread there's soured rye bread which is trad. Finnish. But there are lots of other cuisines traditionally Finnish. Karelia stew, raindeer dishes, fish baked into rye bread (kalakukko), Karelian pies. Then Finnish split pea soup traditinally is very diffrent from Swedish version, so I call that one. There are lot's of salmon dishes. For example a Finnish-Swedish fishmonger had never heard of whole baked salmon which is traditional way to bake it in Finland. So there are much more in Finland than just traditional rye bread.
Talking about this with my sister I got few more: liver caserole with raisins, broiled or smoked lampreys and anything with Baltic herring.
This video?
This is one of the best videos I have ever, Ever, EVER watched on RUclips.
I kept switching between learning I was completely ignorant of things and then being captivated by learning enough to peel back the ignorance, just a little.
I felt both bewildered and honored.
Thank you SO much
🙏
💘
Another Chinese Cooking Demystified banger video. Y'all have my absolute respect and appreciation
This is like by far the best compilation of Chinese cuisines I’ve seen. It’s like crazy amount of info in such a “short” compressed video. Really nice insight to the diversity of Chinese cuisines.
Hakka and Cantonese represent! Fantastic video, absolutely love that this guide exists now!
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.
> 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?
This is a really intriguing thought, and could maybe form a nice model of Southwest at large. I'll have to take some time to mull it over :)
As to the map itself, we have a decent bit of confidence in Guangdong (though an argument could be made for Dong Hakka --> Hakka and Lianzhou --> Guibei) and to a lesser extent Guangxi. I definitely do think people with different areas of expertise would likely be able to do a cleaner job with their respective corner of the country. Subdivisions could definitely be found in Hubei and Henan. Our treatment of Dongbei was a bit of a clusterfuck
@@ChineseCookingDemystifiedI’m from Guizhou, the southern part (qian nan) to be exact. I think the hypothesis is true (or at least that’s what we think among ourselves). Due to the lack of salt, people of the southern and southeastern mountainous part of Guizhou (main consists of ethnic minorities) consume a lot of sour food. There is a saying in these parts of Guizhou: if you don’t eat something sour for 3 days your legs get weak😂 There are two types of sour soup (suan tang). The white suan tang of the southeastern Guizhou that’s made of fermented rice and the red suan tang of the southern Guizhou that’s made of a local variety of tomatoes. Another interesting fact is that Guizhou is the first province in China to adopt chilli pepper in cuisine. After chilli pepper was introduced to China, they were mainly for horticultural purposes. People of Guizhou, perhaps also out of the need to season their food other than salt(?), decided to use chilli pepper as an ingredient for cooking. If there is a simplified way to describe southern-southeastern Guizhou cuisine, it should be sour-spicy (suan la).
@@ChineseCookingDemystified Northeast China is a bit complicated. Northeast China is home to Shandong people who ventured through Shanhaiguan, as well as Korean and Manchu ethnic groups and Russian and Japanese colonizers. The history of large-scale settlementof Han people in Northeast China is not long.
But you should believe that the Northeast people are the first Chinese to start industrialization, and their historical status is beyond doubt.More like the feeling of the Great Lakes and Chicago in the United States.
@@youness9302没事儿，哈尔滨的冰雪节快开始了，到时候去玩一圈也能了解个大概😂
Once again, outstanding work. This deep overview of Chinese culinary diversity is truly invaluable.
Regarding Spain, I would distinguish the following cuisines, in a very simplified manner. Note that there are lots of gradient zones. For example, the region of El Bierzo is in Castille but they are very Galician in character. There are also things that are eaten all over Spain but with regional styles, like morcilla (blood sausage). For example, morcilla from Burgos is made with rice, while Galician morcilla is sweet and has raisins:
1) Galician: heavy on the seafood, potatoes and pork, particularly salted pork. They tend to keep seasonings at a minimum and rely on garlic, on the salted pork, on unto (pork fat from the intestines) and on pimentón (paprika) for flavor. Boiled octopus with potatoes is the most famous dish, but they have their own cocido type (caldo gallego, made by boiling salted pork ribs, tongue, chorizo, rapini, white beans and other stuff. You eat a soup with the beans and then the other stuff on the side. All cocidos work like this). Their cheeses are soft and not very aged.
2) Asturian: gigantic portion sizes. Their most famous stuff is fabada (a fava bean stew), cachopos (two thin but very wide veal cutlets that are breaded and fried with ham and cheese inside) and chorizo a la sidra (chorizo cooked in cider)
3) Basque-Navarrese: they spawned dishes dishes "a la vizcaína" (a stew cooked in a thick pepper sauce) and "a la riojana" (thin stews of paprika and chorizo as flavor base). Their fish dishes are awesome, and they have a distinct tapa tradition with the "pintxos". Beef steaks are also beloved here, but it is the case in all the Atlantic coast.
4) Aragonese-Mountain Catalan: this is a tradition heavily influenced by sheperd food, but also by the fertile Ebro. Lots of hearty stews of mutton and chicken, potatoes and porridges, but also lots of vegetables like cardoon, artichokes, green beans... There are also lots of mushrooms in season.
5) Catalan: very Mediterranean vibe. They have lots of preserved meat preparations just like Italian salumi. They also have cannelloni and their own type of cocido, the escudella, which features macaroni for the soup and a complex meat stock. They also add alioli to their patatas bravas, making them bravioli, although they call it just bravas.
6) Mediterranean: this covers Valencia and the Balearic islands. This is were paella belongs, and a myriad of other delicious rice and noodle (fideuás) dishes. In the city of Valencia they also eat horse meat (in sandwiches), which is uncommon in the rest of Spain these days.
7) Northern Castillian: hearty stews of meat and legumes, roasted meats like suckling pigs and mutton and lamb. They also have one of the best soups anywhere in my opinion (sopas de ajo), which is classic peasant food. They also make excellent preserved meats like chorizo, cecina, lomo, etc, and an empanada made out of them called hornazo. Excellent cheeses, especially in Zamora. In addition, lots of classic desserts like mazapán, various cookies, etc.
8) Southern Castillian: somewhat oversimplified, but this includes Castilla La Mancha and Extremadura. It is very rustic food, and it boldly displays its humble origins. Vegetable dishes like pisto (the Spanish version of the nowadays popular shakshuka/menemen), migas (hearty meals based on broken old bread), porridges, meat based dishes including the really interesting morteruelo (a pounded mixture of liver and meat bits) and salted cod dishes like atascaburras (this one is also pounded in a mortar) or bacalao al ajoarriero. In Extremadura is where the best jamón ibérico is made, though there is also excellent production into the bordering region of Andalucía (this is a gradient zone). They make the famous manchego cheese, and cheeses from Cuenca are my personal favourite.
9) Andalusian: very big region, with differences between the coast and interior. They have fried small fish, seafood, hunted meats, cold soups and salads, and a varied repertoire of pastries. Gazpacho, salmorejo and ajoblanco are typically andalusian dishes, but the former two are popular in all of Spain.
10) Madrid: the capital has a very Castillian gastronomy, but it is also a melting pot with influences from all over Spain and particularities from being the biggest city by far in the Central Mesa. Offal is very typical, with callos a la madrileña (a tripe stew) and grilled pork ear. They feature more seafood than the rest of interior Spain with calamari, prawns and fish, although in the old times it was mainly salted cod. They have a version of cocido, cocido madrileño. Technically very similar versions are cooked in Castille and Andalucía. It features beef shank meat, chicken and/or hen, chorizo, panceta (salted pork belly), pork ear, pork snout, cabbage, chickpeas, potatoes...
11) Canary Islands: they are there own thing in various ways. They have a particular type of flour called gofio, awesome pepper sauces called mojo and hearty stews. Excellent and very underrated cheeses, which they use to make the extremely delicious almogrote, which is a dip of finely ground goat cheese mixed with olive oil and paprika.
As a Spaniard, this was such a pleasure to read. Bravo!
Ok I kind of can't believe that I can access this level of incredible, in-depth research on culinary history ... for free on RUclips. A place that suffers from clickbait-y content that stands on the weakest of information. I've been supporting you all for a while on Patreon, just because I'm genuinely so happy to be able to make sure more of this kind of stuff is made. Thanks so much to you both!
100%
This is one of the most important videos on RUclips. I laughed, I cried, and sometimes I had these moments of illumination in which I recognised a favourite dish within its proper context, and was delighted. Thank you for making this. You have my subscription!
Canadian cuisine actually has some pretty firmly established regions that are overall relatively well-agreed upon as they're mostly divided up by the ingredients that are produced and grown in each region and the unique blends of immigrants which defined the region. Of course, you could also up-divide by province or even city in some cases, but, overall, the regions are as follows:
The Maritimes, composed of New Brunswich, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, & Newfoundland & Labrador - known for simple foods, the cuisine is primarily defined by the heavy use of seafood and especially white, Atlantic fish as well as foods that derive from Scottish and Irish cuisine such as a Jiggs Dinner which is a spin on corned beef and cabbage, ham boiled with cabbage, potatoes, and root vegetables, though newer immigrants to the region created dishes like donair, a spin on the German doner which is a spin on Turkish doner
Quebecois, found in Quebec - HEAVILY French influenced, specifically very old-fashioned and even long forgotten peasant French cuisine, it's known for being very heavy, rich, and savory with a large focus on protein and liberal use of things like gravy. This is of course the region that gave us poutine, french fries and cheese curd smothered in beef gravy, and tourtiere, a spiced meat pie often eaten with ketchup
Ontario - could probably be subdivided further as its the most populous province BY FAR, but largely defined by its focus on fruits and vegetables grown in the farms in the St Laurence Lowlands and for its love of diary, though this is one of the two regions which are most heavily influenced by immigration. Peameal bacon, the true Canadian bacon, comes from here as well as the famous buttertarts
The Prairies, composed of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, & Alberta - known as Canada's breadbasket because it produces most of Canada's grain, beef is also produced there, particularly in Alberta, and there's a distinct influence of Polish & Ukrainian cuisine such as perogies, though they're pretty much readily found across Canada. It's from the Prairies and particularly Saskatchewan that the world has been introduced to Saskatoon berries, so beloved they literally named the town after them.
British Columbia - the other region most heavily influenced by immigration, it's known for sea food as well, but a distinctly different spread than the Maritimes and especially on things like Pacific salmon, it's also been influenced by Japanese and Chinese cuisines since pretty much it's founding due to the work on the railways with both the BC and California rolls being invented in BC as well as famous dished like the Japadog, a hot dog with mayonnaise and seaweed on top, though this is probably most well-known for Nanaimo bars
I would probably break out Northern Prairies / Northern Ontario / Northwest Territories + Yukon into a shared culinary tradition with a lot of influence from First Nations cuisine and a separate category for Inuit Nunangat (Nunavut, Nunatsiavut, Nunavik, and the Inuvialuit Region). Otherwise I agree with your comment!
A lot of people think that Quebecois food is mainly influenced by France, but overlook the British and Native influences (not to mention immigrant groups like the Jewish in Montreal). Quebecois food is very different from classic French cuisine.
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? 😊
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.
@@_oaktree_ The idea Jewish foods are just kosher versions of other people's cuisines, yet "American food" is a subpar version of everyone's cuisines yet it gets it's own label. (I'm not including cuisines like creole and cajun in that label when they're treated as other/special within the US itself.)
Big fan of both Weinreich and his son, Uriel, who wrote the textbook I'm learning Yiddish from.
@@garbagewitch666 Mazel tov on learning Yiddish. My father z'l taught Yiddish at Vassar, I was always surprised at how many students he had. May I ask what your inspiration for learning Yiddish is? I learned Hebrew from my dad, but wasn't very interested in learning Yiddish, which I now regret.
@@letXeqX Well I'm Jewish, for one, so it's a way to feel connected to my culture. I'm also a musician, and also very interested in history and culture, and there's so much Yiddish music and literature that never got translated into English, so it's a way to learn more. If my grandparents were alive I would have loved to talk to them in Yiddish but sadly all 4 of them have passed.
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
Whew, this could be a 3-credit semester course, and I about wore out the Pause on my keyboard. Thanks!
I've sworn off buying any more cookbooks, but one delineating each of the 63 regions, with recipes for just the three/four dishes mentioned, I'd have to pick up (don't have enough years left to get thru them all, but…).
The closest book I can think of for one that delineates a lot of Chinese cuisines is Carolyn Philips ‘All Under Heaven’. It doesn’t get quite as granular but for a useable, English language, single volume book it’s good and has a somewhat similar approach.
This is an forking awesome video!!! Well done, Chris (and Steph). Love how much care and respect you place on the diversity of foods in China.
As an ethnic Hakka, the diversity is evident as Meizhou Hakka food is quite different from Huizhou Hakka food (and just being honest, my experience is based on Hakka food from the overseas diaspora). What's really interesting is that globalisation and the diaspora has created so much additional diversity to Chinese food. So there's really no way we can even say what is truly authentic.
I broadly agree with your closing comments - let's be lovers of food whereever we are globally ... the competitiveness of the food industry always means that there will be folks who (1) try to achieve as much "authenticity" based on their upbringing and heritage; and (2) there will also be those who push the boundaries to explore how to adapt their food to their environment. At the end of the day ... good food is good food!
Amazing work! The diversity of cuisines is huge, but you managed to name and explain the entire country. I cannot belive I just watched a 40 minutes video, it is like a documentary that I did not know I needed . Again, amazing work!
As a Chinese descent and honestly the level of knowledge, research and detail that went into this video puts a lot of us to shame.
I've been following your channel since early COVID, and this might be one of your best videos yet. Respect!
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.
Right, we thought about this categorization as well but since we're not 100% sure where Mindong, Minzhong, and Minbei split (didn't know much about the liguistic diferences as it's very complicated in Fujian), so we decided to go with our personal experience, i.e. the food is very different in these regions, obviously. Thanks for pointing this out.
Awesome video! As an Italian I'll try to answer your question with a very coarse breakdown of our cuisine, which will also double as an exercise on how many Italians I can piss off in a single comment. Do keep in mind I'm being VERY vague here. The very roughest breakdown would be north (french influence, butter based), center (heavy on meat, mushrooms), south (olive oil based, plenty of fish and produce) and the two main islands, Sicily and Sardinia (both complex melting pots which I won't try to subdivide further), should be counted separately.
Now going a tad deeper I think one can distinguish a north-eastern, a north-western and a mountain cuisine in the north, west coast, east coast and appennini (the central mountain range, whose cuisine closely resembles what is generally thought of as "central italian" cuisine) cuisine in the center, and the southern cuisine could be split into the "rich" cuisine of more affluent areas like Naples and Bari and the "poor" cuisine (not worse guys, don't flame me) of more agricultural areas, which also split along the east/west axis. So at this very very coarse level I'm counting eleven different cuisines, though one could easily argue for, I guess, upwards of twenty.
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 . . . .
Fascinating. Do these distinctions follow the old borders of the various German principalities and nations, or are they aligned some other way?
I don't know, man. Southern German cuisine is really similar across the board. The names may differ but at most there are side dishes that are distinct with maybe one or two unique main dishes.
@@abydosianchulac2either that, plain geographical borders or especially in berlin, a devide between the former occupation zones is quite noticable
@@ExitusGSZyou dont see a difference between elsas and bayrisch?!
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.
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
It happened! I remember being one of the people requesting this video many moons ago, and I'm very happy to say that it exceeded my already high expectations.
This channel deserves way more subscribers than it has. Incredible work.
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!
Fantastic video! Yours and OTR are my favourite youtube channels
And both released new video today. I am eating good tonight.
What's OTR if I may ask?
@@宋教仁-b4i Use the search function, type OTR and food. The channel will come up and you will be mesmerized, plus it's fun to play "where's Steph and Chris" in OTR videos as they are all very good friends.
@@宋教仁-b4iOur buddy Adam’s channel. Does food travel/history videos with an emphasis on Thailand
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
Oh, that! That's awesome! A Xinjiang dish that I have no idea how to categorize.
It's called 馕包肉. Braised lamb smothered over Uighur Naan Bread - super delicious. Can't seem to find a recipe from my favorite Xinjiang creators, but this recipe jives with my general understanding: ruclips.net/video/x1ca81qSQxY/видео.html
@@ChineseCookingDemystified amazing, thank you. I love making central Asian bread, so this dish sounds perfect.
My God, I can't imagine the amount of work you put in this. very well done.
Bravo. Everyone should watch this. This is more than a culinary adventure. This is so well done. The bits of history are great and every single image of the locations showed how beatify and diverse China, and the rest of the world is. Lovely.
Blown away by this. What a great overview you and Steph have produced here. So many details, I need to rewatch this. Thank you!
Thank you so much for this! I have always been frustrated (in a friendly way) talking with locals about the 8 main cooking styles. The exclusion of such rich cuisines like Xibei, yet the inclusion of styles like Lu (Shandong) which no one to this date has been able to define to me in words. (Your video was illuminating on this subject). Also, so interesting to learn that the 8 styles are where they are in the cultural zeitgeist mainly because they had established dining presentations. LOVE this video. 10 out of 10. I will likely reference this video for years to come.
My family's from Zhejiang and Jiangsu and only through watching this video did I realize just how specific our home cooking is to these places!! I had no clue before, its super fun to think about how other Chinese families would probably cook so differently depending on where they're from.
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".
Guangfu cuisine is indeed different from the rest of Guangdong, even from Shunde & Panyu, & especially compared to Toisan/ Sze Yap's rustic fare.
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!
Im autistic and I love Chinese cooking; this channel is such a blessing with all the systematizing and all the deep dives into the food. Thanks so much you guys are amazing
Thanks for breaking this down, I love the diversity of Chinese food and do miss authentic Hunan, Sichuan and Guizhou food big time 😢😢
I wish someone did a similar video on Indian food! In the west, Punjabi cuisine (with its chicken butter masalas and naans) is taken to represent all of India, which is more than weird! In effect, by that logic, most of India in India don't eat Indian food.!! If I apply your methodology, these are the ones I can Identify as distinct cuisines of India (and I am more than certain I have missed out on many):
1) North East Tribal (Naga, Mizo, Manipuri, Khasi etc)
2) Assamese
3) Nepali (yes, there are more Nepali in India than in Nepal - so essentially Gorkha, Newari, and Indo-Tibetan)
4) Bengali
5) Bihari/Bhojpuri
6) Awadhi
7) Mughlai
8) Haryanvi
9) Pahadi (Kumaoni and Dogri)
10) Punjabi
11) Kashmiri
12) Rajasthani
13) Guarati
14) Bundelkhandi
15) Marathi
16) Konkani
17) Udupi
18) Mangaloren
19) Malabari
20) Chettinad
21) Andhra
22) Hyderabadi
23) Kalinga/Odia
24) Central Indian Tribal (Bhil, Santhal, Munda)
This is exactly the kind of content I want. Currently working on a year-long project of analyzing the cooking of the Middle East through the lens of history and the points you make and the explaination of your process is inspiring.
太厉害了！作为一个中国人我了解的远不如你的详细...当我看到你把川菜分为上河帮、下河帮和盐帮菜，我就知道你是绝对的行家🎉
Can I say how much of a blessing this video is? I'm so impressed, grateful, excited... Thank you, thank you, thank you!
🤯 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. ☺❤
That was fantastic, seriously. The first part when you guys explain your choices is really interesting, thanks for taking the time to zoom in on this, it shows it's not an easy, rapid exercise. I'm amazed, learning about how to delimit cultures in a context where they mingle and overlap. China is so complex, I'm amazed you did this!
A native Chinese here who spent a lot time in Guangxi province, particularly Beihai. How you single out from Guangxi province and group it with Guangdong cuisine is surprisingly accurate. I also want to add that Beihai has/had a Danjia (the boat people) community and a strong influence of Vietnam influence. Beihai holds a big re-settlement of Chinese Vietnam refugees who fled Vietnam. I won’t go into the reason why they fled Vietnam but leave it here for who are interested to research further.
Many years ago I had a freshman advisor whose family name was Nguyen. I assumed he was Vietnamese, but he said that actually he was Chinese and his family had to flee to France where he got his physics degree. Probably part of the same story?
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.
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! ⚜🍅
How different are they?
@@totot99 Creole is heavy on tomato, seafood and spices, while cajun has a more earthy flavour profile. Creole jambalaya f.e. is brick red (from the tomatoes) and spicy, studded with seafood, while the cajun one is oily and brownish (because it uses a roux like dark sauce) with a mild flavour and only sausage and chicken (sometimes ground beef).
And again for everything north of I-10
First, y'all did a ton of work on this. My hat's off to you and Steph. Second, I'm glad I'm eating lunch watching this, because there's some amazing looking food scattered throughout to show the regional differences.
I’m actually sitting with a cookbook with recipes from each and every of the 25 traditional provinces of Sweden. which all used to have their own regional style. This is NOT a big country, with only ten million people (which used to be much lower). Nowadays Swedish cuisine has been modernized and centralized. Many of the traditional foods have been replaced with foreign or national Swedish food. Daily most people will eat such things such as pasta with ketchup and salty licorice. However there are still some general regional differences. And some of these are is stell - even the fast food can vary alot throughout Sweden.
There's northern Swedish cuisine which is rustic and filling: huge dumplings, porridges, barley flour, different kinds of flat breads, the traditional foods of the Sami people with alot of reindeer meat which is fried, smoked or in boiled. Fermented herring (surströmming) is only eaten here as a late summer festivity. Melted butter can sometimes be the only sauce.
Alot of Northern delicious things exists such as cloudberries, västerbotten cheese, arctic char fish, vendace caviar and much more. My favourite is the very rare berries "Arctic bramble" which are amazing. Because of migration you can find quite good Thai food in some middle of nowhere places in the north and the whole Swedish countryside.
The huge forested region of Central Sweden has a lot of delicacies - crisp bread, game meat such as moose, an overabundance of mushrooms, blueberries and lingonberries in the forests, also alot of traditional dairy and pork products. Traditional cafés with many pastries also abound in smaller cities and villages. As well as lakes abound with alot of fish and crayfish.
Stockholm was traditionally the genesis for many of the classic bourgeoise foods of Sweden such as the national dish Meatballs with lingonberry jam, potatoes, cream sauce and quick-pickled cucumber. As well as being the epi-centre for beloved fast food dishes such as Swedish style pizza (including kebab and banana-curry pizza), Swedish hot dog (including the one with flat bread and shrimp mayo) etc. Today Stockholm's food is often very international, hipster and touristy. But many of the classics remain.
The Swedish West coast basically have one thing: an overabundance of sea food: lobster, shrimp, crab, langoustines, oysters or the humble mackerell. Gothenburg food has historically had many British influences such as the dark Carnegie porter beer. Different ways of pickling, smoking and frying herring is found all along the whole coast of Sweden. If you like herring, Sweden is like paradise.
Southern Sweden beyond the forests has a huge agricultural area and alot more culinary influences from Denmark and Germany and beyond. Traditionally this was an area with a much better growing season and because of this a more abundance of food than the rest of Sweden. Skåneland used to be Danish so many of the traditions are Danish in origin. Malmö is also just about 30 minutes away from Copenhagen so the Danish influx is constant. Rye bread, pork, goose, eel, beans, pumpkins, salmon, schnapps, apples, pears, different pancakes and egg dishes,, several types of cabbage and other vegetables, the use of more spices such as caraway, saffron and mustard.
Migrants from Arabic, Balkan and Eastern european countries have left their mark. Middle eastern Falafel is a Malmö iconic cheap staple.
Your explanation of the gradation of change in cuisines was good. For the purposes of this video you do have to draw a line somewhere. It reminded me of the language group map for Aboriginal Australians, where they also had to draw lines somewhere. Most groups could communicate with their neighbours, but could they talk to groups 2 or 3 neighbours away, probably not. Another great video. Thanks
i should probably look more into how they drew those maps. i lived on kamilaroi land, which is one of the largest recognised regions, but from what i can tell, there are at least three distinct dialects of kamilaroi spoken within the region, which suggests that the lines might be more political than linguistic
and like the same thing happens in places we consider more “rigid” like the basque and catalan regions between france and spain speaking latin dialects distinct from french and spanish: the standardisation of their languages is more to do with where they drew country boarders than any meaningful distinction. the same is very true of the scandinavian peninsular… and tbh most of planet earth.
i think the part that’s interesting about aboriginal languages is that like china, they’re distinct, but gradient groups now clustered into one massive country, but unlike china, they’re not endemic languages - rather than evolving due to social trade, and thus modernising, they kind of fossilised during colonisation; like a dead language that nonetheless has tens of thousands of speakers
This is one of my favorite episodes you've ever done. I'm STARVING now!
Me, as a Chinese, are learning Chinese Cuisines from a English RUclips video.... Great job! I'm going to use this video to select my next domestic vacation destination.
My favorite video yet! Much love from Sweden
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
Very interesting video!
The Netherlands is a very small country so the food differences aren’t as big as in china obviously. But if I would have to divide the country culinarily I would say there are traditionally 3 main cuisines allthough some small areas within those can be a bit distinct on their own.
Cuisine 1: western cuisine.
Cuisine of North Holland, South Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht.
Western cuisine is the cuisine of the culturally dominant Holland region, this is why when you look of “Dutch food” online you’ll mainly see western food. Western food uses a lot of dairy, most famous Dutch cheeses are from here, they use a lot more butter in cooking and baking compared to other regions.
The western provinces are next to the sea so here you find most seafood dishes.
They traditionally make a lot of ‘Jenever’ which is the pre curser of gin.
Cuisine 2: northeastern cuisine
Cuisine of Friesland, Groningen, Drenthe, Overijssel, Gelderland.
Characterized by smoked or dried meats and sausages. Along the coast and the IJselmeer they eat a lot of seafood as well. The provinces are also home to more heavy and solid varieties of Dutch pastries, cookies and (rye) breads. Northern rye bread is very dark and baked a long time which makes it sweet. This area is famous for it’s bitters. Friesland has overlap with western cuisine in the use of dairy and cheese production.
Cuisine 3: southern cuisine.
Cuisine of Brabant, Limburg.
The Catholic provinces are stereotyped for their enjoyment of good food.
The south is known for their beer, which they also use a lot in cooking, mainly in stews.
Brabant has wordtenbroodjes (small long bread with meat filling) and the Bossche bologna (large cream puff with chocolate).
I myself am from the Southern part of Limburg, which is often considered the most “non Dutch” including cuisine. If you look on a map it is kind of an enclave, it borders Germany, Flanders and also Wallonia and you see a lot of Belgian, German and French influences. Sweet and savoury dishes are very popular here.
Absolutely loved this. I had no idea how little I knew about the cuisine and now I feel like I have a high level overview of its diversity. Thank you so much.
This is what I needed in my life. Thank You!
Loved this! Thank you so much for all the work and thoughtful assessment that went into this. I thoroughly enjoyed it! Much appreciated!!!
Once again Chris, an informative video. I really like this lecture style video you've been doing lately.
This is a very great video. As a Cantonese, I think what we usual called Cantonese Cuisine has 2 meanings. 1) Foods that origin from Guangzhou area, including regions nearby. Since Guangzhou was the economic and culture centre of Guangdong in ancient time, so people there led the fashion. Shunde, Taishan, Zhongshan etc. have influenced the style because many chef working in Guangzhou are from these area. 2) Geographically, Hakka and TeoChew are located in Canto (Guangdong). So, for people outside Guangdong, it is easier for them to identify these kind of cooking as Canton Cuisine.
But the taste/ philosophy of cooking for Guangzhou, Hakka and TeoChew are so different. So, for me, Cantonese Cuisine should be Guangzhou, Hakka and TeoChew. For language-wise, if a person's family speak in Canton/Hakka/TeoChew dialog, they usually cook in the corresponding style at home. While TeoChew food are more closed to South Fujian and South Taiwan style, as well as the language. Hakka is another style.
One fun fact, Canton person enjoy Japanese food very much and Japanese food's cooking philosophy has some similarity to Canton. Also, the Japanese language has certain similarity to Canton as well.
Only someone who truly respects cuisine, of any type, would go through the effort of doing this, thank you.
This video is the reason I am a patreon subscriber! So interesting and so much knowledge in one video. I've been planning to make a map of all the restaurants in London serving different Chinese cuisines and I couldn't find a proper breakdown of all the cuisines as described on this channel. Everyone keeps talking about 8 cuisines on the internet, even though that's obviously not true. So happy that you made this one!
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!
This was so impressive. I really appreciate the detail and diversity alongside the geographic tour. Thanks for helping the rest of the world understand so much more about Chinese cuisine!
This is all I've ever wanted and i am going to watch this video until ive memorized it, thank you
Wow, what an incredible video. The generosity on display here is incredible
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 :/
@@ChineseCookingDemystifiedthere’s a fantastic Indian restaurant at Shenzhen called Little Papa Indian Restaurant next to Coco Park :))
You think we need a proper recipe video after this? No way. I will chew on the information presented here for weeks. Thank you so much. It's perfect timing too. I have been wanting an overview of China's regional cuisines for some time, and this video went above and beyond. Great job!
Bro, you outdid yourself with this video. How the hell do you know so much about Chinese cuisine as a foreigner???
Marry Steph, mostly (the real brains of this channel)
I think of us as... kind of a translation team haha. Chinese language content --> Steph's brain --> My brain --> English language content :)
A little bit of a simplification (I also do some research, she also has a big hand in the videos/posts), but yeah that's basically why
So well researched and such a crisp delivery. I'm impressed! Great vid!