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  • Essay / Back to LA Essay - 813

    Today is a special day, I'm going to help prepare a New Year's Eve meal for the family I live with. This is going to take a long time because I will be cooking for twelve people. I'm going to cook a lot of things. First, I will prepare some starters which will be ribs, spring rolls and crab rangoons. I'm going to make twenty-four of each appetizer, which means I need a lot of ingredients. After planning the meal, the eldest daughter in the family, who is my age, went to the market to get the ingredients I needed for the meal. For the main course, I will cook Peking duck, lion's head soup, green onion cake, steamed buns and Chinese sweet and sour eggplant. For dessert, I prepare a chocolate fondue. For the dip, I use Asian fruits such as: star fruit, mangosteen and kumquats. The family loved my meal and asked me to prepare a few meals to take with them since they are nomadic and travel everywhere. I ended up cooking ten more meals for them, which took me about two days. As I prepared the meals, I wondered how many methods of Chinese cooking are there and how many different types are there. There are many cooking methods in Chinese culture. Many of them are water-based. “Water-based cooking methods include braising (炖/Dun), boiling (煮/Zhu), scalding (滚/Gun), simmering (炖/Dun), decoction (熬/ Ao) and steaming (蒸/Zheng)” (Chinese cooking – it’s all about the basics). Braising involves cooking meat over medium heat in a sauce or broth usually made from soy. Scalding is immersion in already boiling water. Scalding is usually used when cooking peppers or noodles. Decoction is used to extract flavor from an ingredient by boiling. The decoction is sometimes used for shrimp stock by boiling the...... middle of paper ... and their popularity. I found that in Los Angeles, the most popular cooking technique is baking, which is a dry cooking method. The most popular cooking technique in China is stir-frying, which is also a dry cooking method. China has many more cooking methods than Los Angeles. China alone has hundreds of wet cooking techniques, while dry techniques produce thousands. Some popular cooking techniques in Los Angeles and China are: barbecuing, boiling, frying, poaching, and stewing. Some more popular techniques in Los Angeles are grilling and stir-frying. Although it is obviously more popular in China, Chinese cuisine is also very popular in the United States, especially California, due to the amount of different cultures present there. People in Los Angeles and China use steam cooking, but in China they use special bamboo steamers that can steam multiple dishes at once..