Recipes • Quick and Easy Orange Chicken • Basic Stir-fry Recipe

Related Resources • Chinese Food 101 • Beginning Cooks

From Other Guides • How to Read a Cooking Recipe

At first glance, the typical Chinese recipe can seem a little overwhelming. Chinese recipes are not known for having a short ingredient list. The typical dish may require anywhere from ten to fifteen ingredients - more for festive specialties such as Buddha Jumps Over the Wall. Beginning Chinese cooks can be forgiven for concluding that a long ingredient list equals a recipe that a) takes too much time to make, and b) is beyond their skill level. 

That's unfortunate, because the average stir-fry can be whipped up quite quickly. The following tips will help you quickly read through a recipe to determine how much work is actually involved and whether you can adapt it to meet your needs: 

Make sure you understand the ingredient list 
Most Chinese cookbook recipes tend to follow a few general conventions:

• "soy sauce" refers to light soy sauce. A recipe will state if dark soy sauce is required. 

• Rice vinegar refers to white rice vinegar. The recipe will specify if black or red rice vinegar are to be used instead. Occasionally, a recipe may use the term "brown" in place of "black" rice vinegar. 

• Since pale dry sherry is the common substitute for Chinese rice wine, recipes will sometimes list only sherry without mentioning rice wine as a possibility. If a recipe calls for pale, dry sherry and you have a good Chinese rice wine on hand, feel free to substitute. 

• If cooking oil is on the ingredient list, it's probably for stir-frying or deep-frying. Use either peanut oil or vegetable oils such as canola. 

• British cookbooks sometimes use British terms for ingredients: for example, groundnut oil instead of peanut oil, and cornflour in place of cornstarch. Make sure you know which ingredient is being called for before starting to cook. 

Figure out which ingredients are used in a marinade and/or sauce. 
The Chinese almost never fry meat without marinating it first.  At the other end, it's common to add a sauce to fried food in the final stages of cooking, often thickened with a cornstarch and water mixture. 

Separating out the marinade, sauce, secondary ingredients, and thickener will make it easier to organize the recipe.