Cuisine

The diversity of Chinese cuisine reflects China’s long history. With each dynasty, new recipes and cooking styles emerged. The food on tour will introduce you to many of the country’s “Eight Cuisines”—Shangdong, Sichuan, Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hunan and Anhui.

Sichuan cooking features three peppers (Chinese prickly ash, pepper and hot pepper), three aromas (shallot, ginger, and garlic), seven tastes (sweet, sour, tingling, spicy, bitter, piquant and salty) and eight flavors (fish-flavored, sour with spice, pepper-tingling, odd flavor, tingling with spice, red spicy oily, ginger sauce and home cooking).

Hunan cuisine stresses the use of oil, dense color and techniques that produce crispness, softness and tenderness as well as savory flavors and spices. Popular dishes include stewed fins, fried fresh cabbage with   chestnuts and Dong Anzi chicken.

Along the Yangtze River, you may sample Ahhui cuisine. You will find fewer fried or quick-fried dishes than those that are braised. People here are inclined to add ham as seasoning and sugar candy to enrich the freshness and are quite accomplished in the art of cooking. Some traditional Ahhui dishes include braised turtle with ham and Fuliji grilled chicken.