Chinese Sauces

Are there 7 million different kinds of bottled Chinese condiments and sauces because there are 1.3 billion people there, or is there some other reason?  Or maybe I'm just a racist jerk or something.  I'm sure someone will enlighten me.  

Comments

[minxi]

Well, I am not sure what you mean by bottled Chinese condiments (I assume you mean fish sauce, bean paste, different types of soy sauces, vinegar, etc). But part of the reason for such a wide variety is because of really big differences in regional cuisine. For example, cuisine in northern China (such as Shandong province) relies heavily on vinegar-based sauce, and they 'fine-tune' the flavoring with different types of vinegars. In certain eastern parts, the typical dishes tends to be sweeter, so you get different bean pastes. Same goes for the salty - which results in different soy sauces. There is also a big distinction between the typical starch - northerners eat a lot of wheat-based foods, such as bao (pork buns), noodles, dumplings, while southerners generally eat rice and maybe rice noodles. So these different starch preferences also call for different ways to season.

So actually, a Chinese person from a specific region will generally not know how to use all the different types of sauces. I am from the central south part of China, and I only really use a few types in my cooking (pickled chili peppers, soy sauce, bean paste).

Hope this sheds a bit of light on your ponderings... :)

[Terry]

I said the same thing tonight as I stood in Harris Teeter looking for the Hoisin sauce...

[Matt]

I think Chinese cooking relies on sauces more than it does on (say) spices, so the sauces section of a well-stocked Oriental grocer will have a richness of variety rivaling that of a typical-American grocer's spice and condiments sections combined.

And yes, there's lots of regional variety; also, most Oriental grocers stock foods from several wildly divergent Asian cultures (Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, Filipino).

[Traveling Jones]

For those of you who don't know, I've been living in China for five months now, so I have a basic knowledge.

Yes, there are many different regional cuisines, but more importantly, whereas Western cuisine tries to bring out the flavor of the underlying food, Chinese cuisine tries to change the flavor of the food. A master chef in China is able to make something taste NOT like what it is -- and that is done with sauces.

To illustrate, a couple of the Chinese staff ate Christmas breakfast with us. One of the Brits had prepared a proper British breakfast: steak and eggs. There was sauteed potato cake, grilled tomato, grilled mushrooms, a proper hunk of steak, and sunny-side eggs on toast. There was salt and pepper for seasoning. The Westerners were in heaven. The Chinese staff, on the other hand, were confused. This food has no flavor, they cried. It's bland. It's boring. Where's the sauce?!?!? They dumped on ketchup and sweet chili sauce in an attempt to "flavor" the food.

But yes, the Chinese love their sauces.

[Joe Eater]

See? You folks really do rock! :)

[John Zhu]

What part of China are you in? I ask because what you described -- that Chinese cuisine tries to change the flavor of the food rather than bring out the flavor of the underlying food -- is the antithesis of the Cantonese cooking I grew up eating in Guangzhou. The essence of Cantonese cooking is to accentuate the flavor of the ingredients. No dish exemplifies this better than the Cantonese staple of white-cut chicken, where a chicken is marinated in salt and cooked whole in hot water and then served as is, with a dip of minced ginger, green onions, salt, and oil that's designed to bring out the flavor of the meat rather than overwhelm it. The same is true in the way the Cantonese prepare fish -- steamed whole with some ginger, green onions, dried mushrooms, and Chinese smoked sausage. So keep in mind that there's a huge difference between the cuisines from different regions of China.

[Divad]

Reminds me of the old line, "England has fifty religions and one sauce, France has one religion and hundreds of sauces."

[Sucar]

I'm late to this party I recently saw this post:http://www.seriouseats.com/2011/06/whats-in-my-fridge-cold-pantry-sauces-condiments.html?ref=carousel which got me thinking about the subject above. Fascinating.

[Joe Eater]

Shugah! Glad to hear from you! :)