Chinese Cooking ABC

If you just become interested in Chinese cooking, there are several things you may want to know first. Hope they are helpful in your future practice. And anytime, if you have questions, you can always come back here. If we don't have the answer, put down a comment, we will post it in no time.

1. Green onion, ginger, garlic, and 炝锅 qiàng guō.

They are extensively used in almost all the Chinese dishes unless specified. So whenever you are preparing to cook Chinese dishes, remember to add these three guys into your grocery shopping list.

A common way of using them is called "炝锅 qiàng guō", which basically means the following procedure:

Heat up the frying pan, add oil, when the oil is hot, put in three of them and fry them first, before you throw other materials in. This process will produce a big noise as well as smoke, so be prepared and stay calm.
The reason to do this is to extract the scent of the three ingredients into the oil, which will later neutralize the smell of the meat, or add more flavor to your dishes.

Normally, I like to put wild pepper powder (or referred as Szechuan pepper in wiki) into hot oil first, then put three of them in. That's what I learned from my parents. Your choice.

2. Wild Pepper, Aniseed, Dried orange peel and Spice ball.

Wild pepper (or Szechuan pepper in wiki), Aniseed (or Star anise in wiki), and Dried orange peel are commonly used when you braise meat. Usually a small handful of wild pepper, 3 aniseed, and 2 peels of dried orange peels are enough. Put them into the spice ball, and soak it into the water when you braise meat. The first two are quite easily find in Asian markets, good luck with the third one. However, you are totally fine if you only use the former two.