Food writer Fuchsia Dunlop returns to the podcast to discuss her new book, Five Tastes: The Magic of Flavour in the Chinese Kitchen, and what Chinese cooking can teach us about flavour, texture, balance and learning to trust our senses.
Fuchsia explains the Chinese idea of wèi (味), taste or flavour, and why the classical five tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter and pungent) are better understood as a cultural framework than a literal limit. We explore běnwèi (本味), the essential flavour of an ingredient; xiānwèi (鲜味), the fresh savoury quality we now call umami; and xiāngwèi (香味), fragrance and aroma. We also discuss how Chinese cooks use ginger, spring onion, Shaoxing wine and other seasonings to correct unwanted flavours while allowing good ingredients to speak for themselves.
A central idea is that balance often happens across an entire meal, not within every dish. A fiercely málà (麻辣), numbing-and-hot dish might sit alongside plain rice, vegetables and a light qīngdàn (清淡) broth. These quieter foods are not failed attempts at excitement: their role is to soothe, cleanse the palate and make the meal work as a whole. Fuchsia also explains Sichuanese guàiwèi (怪味), “strange flavour”, where multiple strong seasonings are combined so harmoniously that none dominates.
We move from taste to texture: slippery, crisp, chewy, glutinous and gelatinous pleasures that are often more central to Chinese eating than Western diners realise. Fuchsia recommends wood ear mushrooms as an accessible introduction, and jellyfish for the more adventurous.
The conversation also becomes practical: how to build a Chinese meal from what looks good at the market, why not to overcrowd a wok, the usefulness of cold dishes and flexible sauces, and how Chinese flavours can travel into roast potatoes, roast chicken and even a French-style vinaigrette. Fuchsia talks about fermented tofu, three decades of food research and around 170–180 notebooks of observations, recipes and conversations gathered across China.
We discuss why becoming a better cook means moving beyond timers and measurements towards smell, sight, sound and taste — knowing when garlic has lost its raw edge, or when hot oil is ready because ginger and spring onion immediately hiss.
We finish with overrated or underrated: hot pot, steaming, microwaves, air fryers and tasting menus; and with Fuchsia’s argument that Chinese cooking can be immensely sophisticated without being intimidating.
Key takeaways
Balance belongs to the meal. Strong, spicy dishes make more sense alongside plain rice, vegetables, soups and other quieter foods.
Good cooking starts with the ingredient. Běnwèi is about understanding and respecting its natural flavour, then deciding whether to reveal, correct or transform it.
Chinese flavour goes far beyond “the five tastes”. Umami, fragrance, numbness, texture and compound flavours all form part of a much richer culinary vocabulary.
Texture deserves as much attention as taste. Crisp, slippery, chewy, soft and gelatinous foods create contrast and prevent the palate becoming bored.
Recipes are training wheels for judgement. Smell, listen, look and taste rather than relying only on exact timings.
Chinese cooking can be very simple. A few useful seasonings and techniques open up a large repertoire of fast, healthy everyday food.
Fuchsia Dunlop in her own words
“They’re not meant to be stimulating and exciting. They’re meant to soothe you.”
On the purpose of qīngdàn, light and understated dishes within a balanced Chinese meal.
“Chinese cuisine is hugely complex and sophisticated… but it has… simple dishes that you can knock up in five minutes after work.”
On why people should not be intimidated by cooking Chinese food at home.
Listen: Spotify ~ Apple ~ Listen notes
Watch: YouTube (audio only this one)
Contents
00:00 Welcome Fuchsia Dunlop
00:30 Five Tastes explained
03:53 Balance and layered flavour
06:44 Correcting off flavours
08:43 Fragrance and Maillard
11:34 Umami and xiānwèi
15:08 Harmony in sauces
18:05 Seasoning and salt
20:21 Showcase or transform
23:40 Qīngdàn and light broths
30:15 Texture as variety
34:31 Wood ear textures
35:29 Jellyfish crunch
36:29 Menu planning basics
38:33 Cold dishes and sauces
40:10 Roasts with Chinese flavours
41:37 Creating new recipes
43:16 Fermented tofu magic
45:14 Food, culture and field notes
49:55 Cooking by the senses
53:16 Overrated / underrated
59:37 Final advice and future projects
Transcript (AI-assited so mistakes possible)
Ben: Hey, everybody. I'm delighted to welcome Fuchsia Dunlop back to the podcast. Fuchsia is one of the finest food writers working today, and she's one of the most perceptive and engaging writers on Chinese food. Her new book is Five Tastes: The Magic of Flavour in the Chinese Kitchen, and I always come away from her work having learned something new about culture, history, and how to eat and cook better.
Fuchsia, welcome back.
Fuchsia: Thank you, Ben. It's lovely to be back.
Ben: When a Western cook says taste and a Chinese cook says wei, taste, are they actually talking about the same thing? Or within the Chinese idea, are we containing a whole philosophy of relationship, balance, and transformation that perhaps the English misses?
Fuchsia: I suppose it is slightly different because in one sense wei is talking about taste or flavour equivalent to the one that we talk about in English, except that the Chinese have five flavours or five tastes, whereas we have four. Chinese adding xin or la meaning pungent or spicy, to the, the Western sort of accepted four.
And beyond that, wei is a metaphor for all the flavours of the world and for the ple- like, if you say someone chases after the five flavours, the five tastes you mean that they're obsessed with good food. So flavour or taste becomes a metaphor for the pleasures of eating, of gastronomy, and also it ties in with the Chinese concepts of five, tying in across the cosmos.
So you have five directions, adding center to north, south, east, west. You have five colours, five phases or elements. So there's this whole system of fives. So I think there is a sort of metaphorical aspect which is perhaps deeper than it is in the Western four tastes.
Ben: So the five Chinese tastes are sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and pungent.
We can argue about that translation. And your book soon adds umami, numbness, fragrance, lightness, essential flavour, and we can go on. And then in Western cooking, as you hinted, in the sensory sciences we tend to talk about salt, sweet, bitter, sour, and we've added umami and sometimes mention of fat and acid.
And I think you alluded to this. So do you still think five tastes is the first right initial organizing idea because of the metaphorical way of thinking about this, that actually five is still quite a useful concept? Or is that perhaps a little bit misleading because it is a little bit more narrow and doesn't take into account some of the relational aspects of Chinese flavour?
Fuchsia: I don't think it's meant to be taken literally, really. So for example in the Western five tastes, now umami is largely considered to be an additional one because scientists have found that there are sensors in our brains and on our tongues that actually respond to umami in the same way that they respond to sweet and sour.
So it's always going to be a sort of classical, metaphorical, cultural concept of taste. But as you already mentioned there are various other flavour and taste terms in Chinese culinary arts and in Chinese gastronomy which are incredibly useful, both in the appreciation of food and to the home cook.
So I think it's not really a question about whether five tastes are limiting or not. It's an expression of the beauty of the Chinese arts of flavour for me, and that's why I chose it as the title of my book
Ben: Excellent. And if we go one more level deeper then on Chinese flavour, I had the impression from your writing within it that perhaps it's a little bit more relational than sort of English cooking concepts, in sense you have one taste correcting, one taste complementing.
When I read English or Western cookbooks, they tend to be a little bit more ingredient-centered. Do you think this is correct in terms of thinking about relational balance within flavour?
Fuchsia: I think that Chinese cooking is very technical and very thoughtful, and the Chinese have a very serious culinary culture in the way that the French do, with a whole vocabulary to express different processes and different concepts.
And I think that they are more abundant in these culinary concepts than we are perhaps in English because, the English, we borrow most of our culinary terms from French anyway. So in Chinese, yes, I would say that the idea of balance is at the heart of China- not just Chinese food, but also Chinese culture.
Yin and yang, and a good Chinese menu is always balanced, and there's an idea that if you have some dishes which are strongly flavoured, you should have some that are qingdan, which means very light and delicate. And then also as [Lin Yutang], that great interpreter of Chinese culture for the West in the early 20th century said, "Chinese cuisine is all about the art of mixture."
So typically you cut ingredients into small pieces and you combine them. So you don't have a steak. You cut up your piece of meat and you stir-fry it with a vegetable, perhaps with another ingredient. And so I suppose in flavour terms as well it's often about combinations of flavours. And I think particularly in Sichuan because Sichuan is the sort of home of flavour in China, you can argue, because the whole essence of Chinese cuisine is not just hot and spicy like the stereotype.
It's [fu kou wei], layered flavours. [Bai cai bai wei], 100 dishes, 100 different flavours. So in Sichuan, where I originally learned to cook in China you have all these combinations of flavours, not just sweet and sour, which of course is a sort of emblem of Chinese cuisine all over the world, but strange flavour, fish fragrant, all these different combinations which are meant to be balanced to create an exciting taste and, and in contrast and harmony with other dishes.
And as you said earlier, apart from the idea of actual- the flavours that you add to foods with seasonings. So sweet and sour, classic example of that. There are also all kinds of concepts for just the basics of handling ingredients and what ingredients have to offer. So the most fundamental perhaps is ben wei, the root taste or essential taste, and that's the sort of inherent natural taste of an ingredient.
And the job of the cook in Chinese conception is to honor the ben wei, the root taste of an ingredient, and to use the culinary arts to if there's anything slightly unpleasant about it, to correct that, and then to showcase this essential flavour. And so the idea of correcting flavours is a concept that you find not only in Chinese cuisine, but in many cuisines acro- across Asia and even the Arab world, that meaty and fishy ingredients sometimes have a sort of slightly unpleasant edge to their flavours.
And there are all these terms in China like [xing we]i, fishy taste [yi wei], off taste, some ... [shan wei], a muttony taste, which go back more than 2,000 years in the Chinese kitchen. So the first thing you do with your ingredient is you think, "Are there any of these slightly off tastes, and what do I do to subdue them?"
And so this is why when you're cooking meat in Chinese cooking, you often add salt and Shaoxing wine, which is to refine away those unpleasant meaty tastes. Similar with crushed ginger and spring onion or scallion. And then with quite heavy meats like- sheep meat, which has this shan wei, this muttony taste, which is traditionally not prized, for the Chinese.
You often find sort of things like garlic and coriander and spices like star anise and Chinese cardamom, and all these are also about correcting these off tastes. And then the other one, I think you mentioned [xiang wei], fragrance. This is a beautiful Chinese culinary term, and I think the character originated from the character for millet.
But it's also associated with incense, and it's associated with the scent of sacrifices and burning things to create wonderful scents to send up to the spirits. And the Chinese use the word fragrant very widely in cooking, and it's often used to describe what Western cooks might call Maillard reaction.
So when you're toasting and browning things and creating these wonderful smells, Chinese would describe that as xiang wei. And some ingredients are particularly xiang, like duck, roast duck, that wonderful aroma. And also toasty things like scorched spring onion whites, that's very xiang. A lot of these concepts, they're not, they're not the five essential tastes, but they're all about how you use flavour in cooking.
And I think that for a foreigner to understand them, it's a way to up your cooking game, and also more deeply appreciate not only Chinese food, but any kind of food
Ben: Yes, my mom tends to insist on slices of ginger with fish because she'll talk about fishiness in her dialect.
And then perhaps even more extreme, when I've cooked my mom's liver and do it in, say, a little bit more English or Western styles, which tend to be plainer and get to the essence of liver, she essentially complains. She says, "There's this liver pungent, off flavour," and says "Why haven't you done anything with that?"
And she would cook it in a very different way, much more layered and flavoured and say that's how you should cook liver and your offal, and you've got this completely wrong," which I think's really interesting.
Fuchsia: Yeah, 'cause with offal dishes in China, you find more Shaoxing wine and salt, and this idea of really cleaning up and refining the flavours.
So yeah. And I always say to people, if you want to, if you're not Chinese and you haven't come across these concepts and you want to understand what it's about, if you make a pork bone stock or broth, try making it with and without a bit of crushed ginger and spring onion.
And the one with the ginger and spring onion, the flavour is just brighter and cleaner and more beautiful. And also, if you blanch the bones first, which is the other thing that the Chinese cook would do to refine away these meaty tastes. It really is l- night and day.
Ben: My mom can always tell if I have or haven't used ginger in those types of broths.
It's ki- it's really, it's amazing 'cause one of my sons doesn't actually quite like ginger, so sometimes I do or don't. And my mom can always tell. She says "Oh, you've forgotten the ginger." So it's for those sorts of palates really obvious. I was wondering then, out of these Chinese flavour concepts, there's a couple of ideas I have.
What do you think is one of the hardest to translate into English or into the kind of Western style without losing something? And would you wanna highlight, perhaps the clusters of flavour concepts that someone is, coming into this should perhaps first understand? So we have the one with the pork broth, which I think's a really great idea.
But yeah, maybe the one which is hardest to translate and what are the ones we should think about first in terms of getting into this?
Fuchsia: Funnily enough, I think the hardest to translate is [xian wei], which is the Chinese for umami. And obviously now umami is becoming familiar, but we use the Japanese word because we don't have an equivalent.
And so I think that in the past, before umami gained currency as a word for these lovely savory tastes of nature, people just used savory, which was very inadequate because it's a beautiful, almost poetic term. In Chinese, the term xian wei originally meant fresh and then came to mean umami, but it still has a connotation of freshness and the beauty of natural ingredients.
And the Chinese character is made up of the sign for fish and the sign for sheep. Originally it was just three fish. But so it's full of cultural meaning. And I think, umami is now completely embedded in the language of people who care about food in the West, but it's a bit of a shame that we don't recognize that the Chinese also have their own term, which is [xian wei].
So I think to grasp this as a concept is very useful. So again, your second question, because Chinese cooks talk all the timit for some time, possibly adding a bit of ginger, spring onion.
You might add a bit of cured ham, Jinhua ham, which the function is to magnify the [ ], the umami flavours. You might add that it's very useful when you have pale-tasting ingredients like some kind...
…pak choi, Chinese cabbage, winter melon. Trying to think of Western equivalents. But just very lightly flavoured ingredients. If you cook them with something umami, you make them very delicious. So Chinese cooks will often cook vegetables in lard traditionally, particularly in the countryside, or use a little bit of stock to give them umami tastes.
And the same function is performed by little bits of cured pork, which is something that you also find in Italian pasta dishes and Spanish dishes, the use of a little bit of cured pork for umami flavours. Dried shrimps, dried seafood. And if you're vegetarian, you can bring out umami flavours with things like soy sauce, some kind of preserved and pickled vegetables.
Soybeans, if you sprout them and boil them, you get lovely umami tastes. So I think that this, this sort of [ ], umami, is both the most difficult to translate and also one of the most useful in practical terms.
Ben: And what then distinguishes, do you think, a harmonious combination of flavours in a sauce or a dish, rather than a dish or a sauce which just has lots of ingredients thrown together and it somehow doesn't balance?
Is there a kind of concept or way of thinking about that?
Fuchsia: It's difficult to be very precise about it because it's about instinct and the taste of the cook really. But the best example is the delicious Sichuanese guaiwei sauce, strange flavour sauce, which I've included in the book as a sauce for all kinds of things.
Green beans is the main recipe, but also roasted vegetables, cold meats, all kinds of things. And the guaiwei sauce, the whole, the reason it has the name strange flavour is because it uses most of the key seasonings in the Sichuanese pantry all together. But they're meant to be blended so harmoniously, so nothing stands out individually and it doesn't jar.
So you've got the nuttiness of sesame paste, the fragrance of sesame oil, sugar sweetness, vinegar sourness and soy sauce for umami, but the whole point is that it's balanced.
But the other thing is that the concept of harmony also can be present across the whole menu. So if you have something that's very fiercely spicy, like a dish that's [mala] , numbing and hot with chili and Sichuan pepper, that on its own, I don't think you'd really describe that as harmonious.
But if that's one dish in the menu and you also have some, something that's a bit sweet and sour maybe, or a fish fragrant dish with a little bit of spiciness and a very gentle soup, then across the meal you can have a kind of harmony. And it's back to the idea that Chinese food is all about balance, and good Chinese food should not only be really delicious, but it should make you feel very [shifu], very comfortable and well.
Ben: We might come back to this idea that the individual dish might not need to be so balanced, but actually across the meal or across the whole setting that we could have a, a balance wi- within that. But I was quite intrigued as to your makeup of some of these sauces. So we could do it through a dish with a fragrant or strange flavour or maybe even in making a kind of English meat gravy.
But when something tastes wrong or tastes off, and maybe we'll also come to this, this is the experience of the cook when it comes through. Do you think the answer is usually to add another seasoning or to take something away or to start again? Or how should the home cook start thinking about, "Oh, this doesn't taste quite right," how are we balancing it within what we're cooking?
Fuchsia: It depends what it is. I think the key thing is salt. And that's the most important seasoning in a way, and almost every savory dish has salt in it, apart from some very, very gentle soups which might not be salted. And salting is tricky in the sense that it's partly a matter of personal taste and what you're used to.
But it's very much just about the judgment of the cook, and there's no rule on that. But of course it's better to go, you can always add salt later, but you can't really take it away. So if you oversalt a dish, then you have to either add more ingredients to dilute it, it becomes very complicated.
So the thing is to always add ingredients very gingerly. With something like a strange flavour sauce, it's a bit different because you could just, if you made that too salty, you could just dilute it with more sesame paste and a little water. So that's not a problem. And I actually find it really fun making a strange flavour sauce because it's like playing an or- directing an orchestra, conducting an orchestra, and then you just say "shall I bring up a little of this and a little of that?"
And it's just, it can be quite fun and different every time. I think I always en- encourage people to use their palates and use their tongues and use their noses and just judge what tastes good. And I should say that, as a recipe writer, I test the recipes very rigorously.
If I give you a sauce, I will have measured every teaspoon of soy sauce and vinegar, and I hope that means that you'll come up with something that is balanced and tasty. But my hope, at home when I'm cooking, I don't, for most of them, I don't use measurements. And anyway, it's quite fun if you're a home cook to make it, once you've got a grasp of the principles, to make it a little different every time.
Yeah.
Ben: Yeah, for sure. My mom never uses measurements like that, and so she always said, she has a phrase for it "Sometimes you just have to fing-fing, fang-fang," is what she literally tells me. I said, "That's actually not that helpful at this stage in the dish." But that's what we have to do. What I thought of one of the most important judgments in the book, or one of the ideas which comes through, is when to reveal an ingredient's essential flavour, and we've talked about this, I think, the Ben way, or when you transform it through a blended flavour.
And how do you think you might decide which approach to take? 'Cause you can showcase the natural ingredients, you can remove or rebalance these unnatural notes. And I think we mentioned, we can even create new composed flavourings through seasonings and different blendings. And I was interested in your ideas as to when you nudge one to the other, and they come out very clearly in the recipes which one is that.
But I'd be interested in your thoughts on those different ways of judging how to do flavour.
Fuchsia: The traditional Chinese view would be that if you have a perfect ingredient that is just lovely, and in season, and very fresh, that you don't want to mess about with it too much, and the job of the cook is just to show it off.
So that is why Cantonese seafood dishes, for example, are often very understated. So you might have a beautiful fresh fish, and you just steam it with a bit of ginger and maybe spring onion to harmonize the flavour, and finish it with a sizzle of hot oil, little bit of soy sauce. But you really don't need a heavy flavour.
And so I think the snobbish Chinese view is that people who add lots of flavours are very lowbrow. And so Sichuanese cooking has traditionally since it's been spicy, known as a spicy cuisine has been seen as popular but not posh and elevated. So the hearty, spicy cuisines, the traditional Chinese view is that those are the cuisines of people who didn't have very fine ingredients, and they would be eating- wanting something tasty to go with their staple food, maybe rice in the south.
And so they would add all these chilies and spicy seasonings to xiafan to make the rice go down. Whereas rich people and privileged people would have very fine ingredients, and they wouldn't need all these seasonings. And it's quite interesting that not only does that concept carry across cuisines, like the most prestigious cuisines are Cantonese and the cuisine of the Jiangnan region around Shanghai, which are very understated.
But even within regions, so in Sichuan, the working class, docker's food of Chongqing is crazy hot and spicy, and the more elegant food of the old Mandarin officials, for example, understated. So you have things like ji douhua, chicken tofu, which is chicken breast that's whi- pulverized to a sort of puree and then made into set like a kind
So it resembles tofu in a clear broth. That's a classic Sichuan dish, and there's no chili at all. So I would s- I'm not ... I think that good and elegant Sichuanese cooking can combine good ingredients and spicy seasonings as well. But in general the finer the ingredient, the less you want to do with it.
Ben: And in the book, or in your writings in general, you defend this quiet food, this kind of Qingdan food that is clear, gentle, and understated. And do you think in the very best meals then you need dishes or it's great to have dishes which might seem unexciting if eaten on their own? And it's interesting that within English or European traditions you have less of that.
Although, I do remember going to an Italian restaurant and at the end being served a very plain, but really to my mind, delicious consomme, which is the closest I had to the kind of Chinese tradition of that. So what do you think about this sort of gentle and understated food and where is that placed within a meal or within cooking traditions?
Fuchsia: Yeah. I think it's not just, I think you mentioned just then, very elevated meals. But it's not, even just everyday meals in China will normally include say in Sichuan, you might have spicy dishes. Almost always you have a very plain, under-seasoned light broth to cleanse the palate and to balance the spicy dishes.
You almost always have plain white rice, not even salted. So I think that this is, it's a bit of a it's a way in which Westerners often misunderstand Chinese food that a typical bunch of Westerners go to a Chinese restaurant and they just order the exciting dishes, and they order egg fried rice or fried noodles to go with the food, and they order they are much less likely to order, a very plain stir-fried vegetable or a light broth.
And this is a sort of misunderstanding of the whole purpose and the whole principle of Chinese cooking, which again, is balance and health and making you feel good. And so in a good Chinese menu, you always have understated dishes. And yeah, you can say they're boring, but that's the whole point.
They're not meant to be stimulating and exciting. They're meant to soothe you. They're meant to calm you. They're meant to balance the other dishes. And that's one of the lessons that I think it took me quite, quite a long time to learn with Chinese food, 'cause in the beginning, I always gravitated to the more exciting dishes on their own.
But now I just love the way a well-balanced Chinese menu makes you feel. And part of that is soup. I found a much greater appreciation and appetite for soup, and I love soup, and I want to have soup all the time. And that's something which is, you don't really find you don't really find in Western cooking, but almost every Chinese meal has a soup.
Even if you go to a street stall and get a plate of fried noodles for your lunch, there'll probably be a bowl of broth to cleanse the palate. If you have some noodles in northern China, you may be offered some mientang, noodle water. The broth from cooking the noodles to smooth the throat and cleanse the palate, and that's taken unseasoned.
Yeah, so I do. I think the way we translate qingdan into English is usually bland or insipid, which are pejorative words in English. They just sound uninteresting. But actually qingdan is a beautiful term. It's lovely. It just makes me feel calm thinking about it.
Ben: Yeah, we should rethink that, and that's to our earlier point that you're, we can balance something across the whole meal and the whole menu, and if you have a whole meal or just dishes which are just explosive, then you've lost the balance.
You've lost some of the interesting things and the tension. And I was reading this anecdote you had within the book or your writing around the, I think maybe it's the only place that I know, but in China, even in something which is a fast food place like a KFC, you might go in there for your greasy, "Oh my God, this is the only thing I can have at 2:00 AM fried chicken."
But they might also offer you some basic broth, maybe made from a stock cube or something, but something to balance that even within something like a KFC meal. So do you have that across many fast food places in China, and is essentially that part of this concept within balance within that?
Fuchsia: Yeah. Yeah, so there's actually, in my book, there's a, a, a sort of a homemade version of this rather lovely vegetable soup they have in KFC, and its freeze-dried vegetables in a light broth with wisps of egg.
And it is very lovely, and it makes a KFC meal in China much more healthy and balanced than it is in the West. But I think in, in, in many fast food restaurants you have the option of getting a set menu. And fast food, by fast food I don't just mean American fast food, food options in airports and stations and things and school dinners, and you often get a tray with a few different dishes, but almost always part of that will be a light soup. And I think this is an aspect of Chinese cuisine which is not reflected in Chinese restaurants in the West, because the sort of old-school British and American Chinese food, all the soups were what the Chinese would call a geng, like a thick stew soup.
So things like sweet corn and chicken, sweet corn and crabs, sour and hot soup, which are much more substantial and much more like dishes than a light broth. And those beautiful light broths, every Cantonese meal practically has a light broth, but they very rarely feature on Cantonese restaurant menus in the West, I think because your average Westerner probably thinks it's a bit boring and a bit watery.
Why should I spend money on a clear liquid, instead of some exciting fried chicken?
Ben: Yes, we don't quite get it, and it's the same for those vegetable dishes. There's fewer. In fact, in some of the Cantonese restaurants I go to, you often have to ask what's fresh vegetable and things?"
It's not necessarily put on the menu high up, because it's perhaps a little bit expensive for the Western view of, "Oh, these just should be a side dish on the thing," without understanding actually it's a really important part of the menu or the balanced dish, and I would put soups in that category as well I was thinking also the book concentrates a lot on flavour, but it does mention something that we spoke about last time as well, which is the importance of flavour and texture.
So I was interested in that. Are there any particular flavours that you think also naturally belong and pair with texture? And o- obviously, in the West, we are, I would say, a little bit behind in thinking about texture compared to the mouth feel that we think about in Asia. So how should we think about composing flavour and texture and, maybe some of the recipes or things that we could try out in the book as a kind of easy way into texture or texture and flavour?
Fuchsia: Yeah. I think so. In Chinese terms, a good meal is all about variety. So you typically have several separate dishes at a Chinese meal, and the whole point is that they're varied. So if you have one dish where you have, say, meat that's stewed in dark soy sauce, a red braised dish, then you might have something else that's bright green or pale in color.
So colors, flavours you want to have bold flavours and light flavours. You also want to have food that looks visually varied. So if you have one ingredient that's cut into chunks, maybe another will be cut into slivers or shreds. So there are all these different dimensions of variety, and the more variety in your menu, the lovelier the meal, and your palate doesn't get bored as you roam from dish to dish, and you try this, a bit of that, and a b- bit of this.
And texture is another dimension of that. It's partly related to how things are cut. So the feeling of a strandy, shredded ingredient in your mouth is different from biting into a cube of meat, for example. But also, there are h- there's a whole world of textures. And texture is an essential part of the appreciation of food for most Chinese people.
And the range of textures people enjoy is much wider than it is for most Westerners. So there are all these sorts of glutinous, sticky, huggy textures, very much enjoyed. Slithery, crisp, slimy, gristly. So here we're going into words which don't sound very nice in English, but denote textures that Chinese people love eating.
But all these add to the variety. So if you have a meal, for example, in which everything is soft and mushy in texture, that's not as exciting as if you have something that's soft and mushy, something that's succulent and a bit juicy, and something that's crisp, and something that's slithery.
Wet and dry, different mouth feels. Yes, and I ... I always encourage people who would like to appreciate Chinese food more to just play with texture. Just try putting things in your mouth and just considering them. Put aside all your prejudices. Put a bit, start chewing a chicken's foot and using your teeth and tongue to take away the little bits of skin and cartilage, and crunch the cartilage, and just try not to make any judgment.
Just experience it in a sensory way, and I think that's the way in to realizing that texture's this whole other dimension to be explored. So yes, in terms of flavour and texture, I think slippery, crisp things like jellyfish, wood ear mushrooms, particularly lovely with sour tastes. There's a sort of briskness, refreshing briskness to them.
And then deep-fried things, particularly nice with sort of spicy tastes, numbing and hot, mala. Very good combination. And yeah, so I've given some suggestions for where texture and flavour might relate together. But I think if you want to have a go at experiencing the kind of textures that are very essential to Chinese cooking, but less for Westerners, then one ingredient I would really encourage people to try is the dried wood ear mushrooms. You can buy them in any Chinese supermarket.
You just soak them in water for a while, and then rinse and blanch them, and then you can put them into salads and stir-fries. And it's an ingredient that has virtually no flavour. It's all about the texture. But it has that quality that Chinese people love, which is that it's smooth and slippery, but a bit crisp at the same time.
I c- I think of these as edible oxymorons, contradictory textures. But it's just a mushroom. It's not some bit of offal. So I don't think most people have a problem with that. So that's a really good ingredient to try. And in the book I have a dish which I've called Italian wood ear mushroom salad because I made a version...
So n- the, there's also a version which is the typical Chinese one where you use rice vinegar, and garlic, and sesame oil, and chili. But I've done one with olive oil, and wine vinegar, and parsley which I made up for fun one day, and it was really delicious. So I put that in the book. But there again, you have the slippery texture, and the briskness of vinegar, and the sharpness of garlic, and it's quite an invigorating dish.
The other ingredient that's really fun to play around with is jellyfish. 'Cause if you haven't had jellyfish before, it sounds a bit scary and extreme. But actually jellyfish is just, it's just pure texture. It's the kind of jellyfish that you can buy in packets ready to eat in most Chinese supermarkets, it's just sheets of transparent slipperiness with a little crispness.
And there's one, one of my favorite recipes in the book is a white radish daikon salad. So delicious, so Chinese. But I often add some shredded jellyfish to that, and that just adds another lovely dimension of texture that goes very nicely with the crispness of the radish
Ben: That sounds all lovely.
So the dried mushrooms, jellyfish if you want to try textures, and pairing them with all of these flavours where something, the variety, is giving us the loveliness as well as the flavours. So putting this all together, perhaps inspired by your book or other recipe ideas that you have, say I am returning from an English farmer's market or a supermarket, say, we can decide what it is, but perhaps I have a fish or some chicken or whatever's on best special offer, and I have some classic things, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, aubergines, mushrooms, eggs, and the like, and I have the basic Chinese store cupboard, rice, tofu or however and perhaps we're gonna cook this tonight or on the weekend.
How would you think about maybe turning some of that into a dinner for four or six people? How should we go about deciding, and then what are the kinda couple of recipes or whatever that you might suggest for me?
Fuchsia: So the first thing is that traditionally with a Chinese menu, you'll have about the same number of dishes as people.
So if you're cooking for four or six people, four or six dishes. But if that's too much, I don't think you have to be conventional about it. You could just make four dishes for six people, but scale up quantities. The important thing to remember is that don't try and scale up quantities for stir-fry dishes, 'cause the whole point is you have a sort of limited amount of ingredients that you chase around a hot wok and they get hot very fast.
And particularly with a domestic cooker, if you double up or triple up, it's not going to work. It's going to lose that heat and speed that's essential to a stir-fry. So if you want to scale up dishes, then make stews or cold dishes, which you can make as much as you like. The other thing is that with Chinese ideas, you can often make several differences.
So whereas a Western cook might put everything together in a stew and then have a salad on the side, in China you're more likely to separate ingredients and group them and then have several different dishes. But I, this is what I do every weekend. I go to the farmer's market and come back with things and think what to do with them.
So I would say I always recommend including some cold dishes because they can be sensationally different, d- sensationally delicious, and you can make them in advance, so they really lessen the load of cooking for a bunch of people. And some of them are very nice for a day or two in the fridge as well.
So we've already mentioned the strange flavour sauce, and that's one of my standbys, 'cause it's so delicious. And so the main recipe is those sorts of fresh green beans which are, when they're in season, just top and tail them, boil them, refresh them in cold water, and then when you're ready, cover them in fish fragrant sauce and some toasted sesame seeds.
Delicious. You can use the same sauce with roasted cauliflower, really nice with cold chicken, with cold noodles, all kinds of things. There's another sauce that I invented in this book which is so delicious. So it's basically a French vinaigrette, but I added some Chinese fermented tofu, which gives it this wonderful creaminess and umami depth. The main recipe in the book is a version of the French leek vinaigrette, you know, leeks.
But I also serve it just as a salad dressing with lettuce. Crazy delicious. And it's also really nice just over sliced tomatoes, in half an avocado, on practically anything. So that's another sauce, and I would just see what vegetables I've got- come back with. And then you can also do Western cooking with Chinese flavours.
So for example one of the recipes in the book is for chicken joints, which are marinated in Sichuanese chili bean paste and other spicy seasonings, and then simply roasted in an oven, which is not really a Chinese home cooking method, but very delicious, very easy to make. M- marinated in advance and roasted it.
And also, as an English person, of course, I was brought up on potatoes, and I love potatoes, and roast potatoes especially. But I've got a really delicious recipe for roast potatoes tossed with all kinds of exciting spices, a bit mala, a bit of cumin, and herbs. It was really delicious. Yeah, but I think the main thing is just decide how many dishes you want to make realistically.
Minimize stir-frying if you're cooking for a group at home. And then just, yeah, think of different sauces and what they might go with. I've put... With all the recipes, some of them, there is a main recipe, but I've put suggestions for other ingredients, and the whole purpose with this book really was to encourage people to think in terms of flavours and then to be very playful and flexible about actually how to apply them.
Ben: Yeah, you have some really wonderful ideas in that. If, and if I recall correctly, there was a, a, a potato rice type of dish that I wanted to try out, or there was one where you're mixing two starches, which I hadn't come across. And I was thinking in terms of, I, I guess this is under personal creativity, but when you think about creating a new recipe or some new ideas, how does that come about?
There's gonna be a bit of everything, but is it, an ingredient, a remembered dish, this flavour template that we have, technique, a, a curiosity, and how does it come about? And maybe you could highlight a dish or two in the book through that. I s- I seem to recall this potato rice dish, but I mean that.
Now and how do we think about starting when you're creating new recipes?
Fuchsia: Oh. I'm just someone who thinks about food all the time. So sometimes I would literally, while writing this book, I would just wake up in the morning and think, "Let's try this. Wouldn't that be great?" Sometimes it's provoked by ingredients, so going to the market and thinking, "What can I do with kohlrabi, which would be really nice?"
And there's a recipe in the book where I've done a kohlrabi salad with spring onion oil, which is a Shanghainese thing that they normally or more commonly do with a daikon white radish, but I've done it with kohlrabi. So sometimes it was just seeing what's available. And also there's a carrot salad- And carrot is used in Chinese cooking, but usually as a supplementary ingredient for its nice color.
It's rarely the main ingredient. But I've got a carrot salad there which has a spicy Szechuanese sauce, and that was actually an idea that my sister-in-law gave me because I'd made a lovely... What did I make? I made one salad, maybe with the daikon radish, for a family party, and she said, "Wouldn't this be nice with carrots?"
And so I tried it with carrot, and it was great. So yes, and sometimes it's just one ingredient that I think is incredibly underappreciated in the West is fermented tofu, right? So this is tofu that has been allowed to grow a coat of mold, and then tossed with salt and alcohol and sometimes spices, and then cured.
And it's a bit like a blue cheese. It's rather like Roquefort in its salty intensity. But it has this amazing salty, rich umami flavour and a creamy texture. And at a time when people are wanting to make more plant-based foods that satisfy the sensory requirements of people who normally eat meat, dairy fermented tofu is just this magic ingredient.
It just adds a richness, a creaminess to vegetable dishes, stir-fries and, as I mentioned, vinaigrette dressing, which is a non-conventional application. So with that, I think I was thinking a lot about the fermented tofu and what can I do with it, and I started adding it to other dishes and ingredients that I had never seen in China, but I just thought, "Let's try it and see if it works."
And it's quite fun. So this book, because some of my books have been, like I did, a Szechuanese cookbook, and that was all about really trying to faithfully reflect the way people cook in Szechuan. And I wanted to take myself out of the equation and just report on food from Sichuan. This book is more personal.
This is just having fun and experimenting.
Ben: That really comes across. And now I've remembered it. It's smothered rice with pork and potatoes, so it's not quite rice potatoes. And I think you also mentioned within it, you could, you do it, you could try pancetta as some of that lard we mentioned, and you can add fried porcini, in mushroom season, which would not be a classical Chinese ingredient, obviously an Italian ingredient.
So that really comes through. And I think another thing I really love about your writing is that your recipes and food all tend to always recall, one of your travels or a particular person and a place, but then it travels with you and to us through that into some expression of whatever you're thinking.
And I'm interested in how much of a recipe is intertwined with particular people and places and how that travels. And maybe over the years of Chinese food or thinking about food, what has perhaps changed for you, maybe not maybe the most, but changed over that time in terms of what you pay attention to or your palate or some of the influences of people in place and how much does that influence when you're thinking about recipes or the recipes that you bring to people?
Fuchsia: The whole purpose of all my work is to try to encourage readers to appreciate not only the food, but the culture, and the place, and the people who make it. And I've been lucky to have met... I've had many adventures and met many fantastic people in China, some of them very good friends, some of them just chance acquaintances who've shared a recipe with me.
And so it's very much part of my research, and it's very much part of, yeah of the recipes. When I'm in China, I just meet people all the time. I talk to them about food. I write down everything, not just recipes, but also observations, what things that people tell me. Sometimes recipes, oral recipes, explained by a taxi driver during a short journey, and sometimes I've been in the kitchen with someone, watching them cook.
But all that is part of trying to, yeah, in- introduce people to the culture as I've met it as well. And yeah, and for me, there are some recipes when I make them. I think of particular people and places, and that's part of the pleasure of cooking. And so again, in this book, it's a sort of funny mixture because some of the recipes are, directly my attempts to recreate someone, something someone showed me or fed me in China and that, you'll hear about the place or the person.
And others, I just made up i- in London. So it's a mixture. But yeah, I think in terms of my method, for many years I've been writing everything down, and I think that I learnt quite early on that the more I recorded in the field, the more I would appreciate it later. So I write everything down, and when I'm writing an article or writing a book, I have 170 or 80 notebooks full of my notes and things from 30 years of work.
And so this is all very useful. And I suppose what's changed is just that now I'm a much more experienced cook. Sometimes I taste something delicious and I don't really need someone to explain the whole method. I just need to ask one or two key questions, and then I'll be able to have a go at recreating it myself.
So yeah, and sometimes I'll just grasp what the recipe is about w- without ev- just from eating something. So I think that the process of recreating recipes... 'Cause 'cause I don't really use written recipes for my books. It's not like someone in China gives me a piece of paper with a recipe.
As you mentioned with your own mother, so many people cook intuitively, and they don't measure things. So what I do is I taste something and write down my observations about the dish, or I watch someone in their kitchen and I write down my own approximations of how much of something. And then, the process of researching the book and writing the recipes is actually trying to re-engineer the recipe in my own kitchen.
But I... it's got easier with experience.
Ben: That really comes through in your writing as well, when you've observed people in their own kitchen. 'Cause there is this, Chinese cooks talk about this art of fire and timing, and my mom always goes on and on about how you hear or how you smell or how you see something.
And I'm often, "I have to come and watch you because I can't, I'm not quite even enough experienced to do that." And I know you've been around and looked at particular techniques, and in fact, there's Chinese characters, I'm sure, which are specific to these kinds of techniques or regions which don't necessarily even translate onto that.
So I was intrigued, what should a cook, maybe starting out, or even one fully formed in the home, be thinking about how to incorporate smelling, hearing, and seeing and all of that into your practice as to that's the kind of art? And I often liken this to a carpenter.
So you can- see a carpenter's spreadsheet, and maybe you can even watch them on YouTube. But there's nothing like being with a carpenter or trying to actually make something yourself. There's this whole other gap of knowledge which just seemed to be a kind of learnt or lived experience, and I was wondering about your thoughts on the importance of that.
Fuchsia: Yeah, very important, and I always do incorporate it in my recipes. So I don't believe that it's helpful to say heat some oil, add the garlic, and cook it for 20 seconds, and then add this. Because 20 seconds, what does that mean? It depends on how thick the wok is, how hot the flame is, how much garlic you...
There are all these different variables and if you just do it for exactly 20 seconds in different conditions, you'll get a different result. It's much better to, to tell people, cook it until you can smell the garlic losing its raw edge of flavour and becoming very mellow and aromatic but not changing color.
So if you give readers s- sort of observations about what they should be looking out for and smelling, and in some cases hearing then I think that's much more useful for actually learning to judge. And of course, you get better at it with experience. But that's part of the fun and the satisfaction of cooking.
With the ear thing, I would say a classic method is when you steam a fish. A very beautiful Cantonese technique is then you steam your fish and then you strew over some very finely shredded ginger and spring onions. And then you heat some oil, and you pour it over. And what you want to do is have the oil so hot that as soon as you put a drop on the ginger and spring onions, they s- they hiss and sizzle, and a jet of steam comes up, and a lovely smell.
And if you don't heat the oil hot enough, then it just ends up feeling greasy, and the ginger and spring onions will be raw. You won't have woken up to their flavours. And so you do need to get the oil hot enough, and the only way to know that it's hot enough is to get that sizzle. And so you can either have an old scrap of spring onion and just dip it in the oil, and w- as soon as it enters, if it goes shh, then you know the oil's hot enough, you pour it over your fish.
Or you can, use a ladle to drop a few drops onto your fish, and you want that immediate violent hiss. Yeah it is part of the fun of cooking, and I do try to guide people to how they should be observing what's going on in the pot.
Ben: That reminds me of hearing someone who does a lot of deep-frying and how they can tell by the sound of the batter and how low the batter drops u- up and down what the temperature and how they do, and then which ingredient they should do for which thing because different ingredients have different things with...
And that's all done by sight, sound, and however.
Great. I thought I'd do a little section of overrated, underrated, or correctly rated, and then we'll finish up with a couple of final questions. So I was wondering, overrated, underrated, or correctly rated nowadays hot pots
Fuchsia: Overrated.
I'm not a big fan of hot pot. Hot pot is a really fun way to eat, but I just, I just think that there's a tendency to have what I call the hot pot-ification of Chinese communities abroad, because hot pot is a much easier business to do than a restaurant with wok cooking, because you just need a master broth, and you need some workers to slice up ingredients.
You don't really need cooks. While I think hot pot is great fun once in a while, I think if all Chinese restaurants turn into hot pot restaurants, that would be a terrible tragedy.
Ben: Yes. I see another hot pot restaurant in London, I'm always a little bit sad. It's like, "Oh, it could have been something else, not that, that."
Great. Steaming as a technique. Overrated, underrated?
Fuchsia: Underrated in the West. In China, it's correctly rated, 'cause everyone- Yeah ... steams everything all the time. But I think that in the West, you may think of steaming dumplings or, at best, a fish. But you can steam all kinds of things, and you can even...
I don't have a microwave, so when I want to reheat leftovers, I put them in little dishes on a sort of metal grill in my wok and steam them with a lid. Yeah. Chinese microwave. Yeah.
Ben: Yes. So w- when I was at university, which is really my age, like a long time ago, over two decades my peers just thought I was crazy to steam a fish.
But I said "I steam a fish in this throwaway wok. You can, you only need a ring." We only had two electric rings, and it cooks so quickly that it's faster than all of these other dishes that you're trying to do. By the time you've cooked your pasta and even done your sauce, I'm equal, and that.
So steaming, definitely underrated. And you take away- And also- Go on ...
Fuchsia: One other thing about steaming is that it's very clean. If you're cooking with oil, there's a certain amount of mess. Steaming is just beautifully clean. You don't make any mess at all, and it's a really lovely way of cooking fresh ingredients.
Ben: Yes, and that's another thing, 'cause you didn't set off the possible alarm if you were doing- ... that. So it was- Yes ... they would say "This is crazy." I was like, "No, this is actually really simple," dorm cooking. So it did win me a lot of friends, but initially, they thought it was very crazy to steam, steam fish.
And in those days, fish was also quite cheap. So this is over two decades ago, at least where we got it from our own farmers market. In any case you stole my next underrated, overrated but I'll still ask it anyway, which was microwaves, underrated or overrated?
Fuchsia: I haven't much experience of them, so I'm not really sure.
But I would say my limited knowledge of them, a bit overrated as a cooking item. Okay for- Yeah ... heating things up, but I really like using traditional methods for flavour.
Ben: Sure. Air fryers, overrated, underrated? Do you have an air fryer? I guess you don't have a microwave, so you probably don't have an air fryer as microwaves.
Fuchsia: No, I'm the wrong person to ask because I'm not a gadget person.
Ben: Yeah. I simply
Fuchsia: like my Chinese knife, chopping board. That's it.
Ben: Yeah. And when, I, this got, I got this from your last book, but when in domestic Chinese households, when did ovens actually start appearing? Because if you go back in history, this, steaming because if you wanted roast meats, you'd probably go around to the roast meat place rather than do it in your own home.
So I don't know whether the air fryer is just one of our sort of expressions with that. But yeah, ro- roasting in ovens was actually relatively new in domestic Chinese households.
Fuchsia: Yeah, when I was a student in China in the '90s, nobody had ovens at home. They just weren't part of the thing. You just cooked, over, over gas really.
And yeah, so I think now that baking has become a sort of lifestyle hobby thing. Yeah. And so you do have fitted kitchens now, and you have ovens, and you have people baking for fun baking Western cakes and things. Yeah. Yeah, very recent to be part of domestic cooking.
Ben: Great. And then the last one on this tasting menu, overrated or underrated?
Fuchsia: I don't think they're either overrated or underrated. I think they're food as a form of art and performance and experience, which is absolutely fantastic once in a while with an accomplished chef showing you what they can do. But it's also a sort of intensive and quite exhausting way of eating.
So it's just not normal... it would certainly be overrated for an everyday way of eating. Yeah. But for a special treat, I think tasting menus can be fabulous.
Ben: Sure. Overrated every day, underrated if you've never never been to one and you're into food.
Fuchsia: Yeah. W- when I was younger, I remember when I was privileged to have my first experience of tasting menus with great chefs, it was an absolutely glorious experience, like going to some great opera.
And I think that I have had enough now that I wouldn't, I don't have a great compulsion to taste tasting menus, but for an experience they can be incredible
Ben: Yes, I think I was the same. Particularly I hadn't realized all of these extra pieces that you get with something like that, which is even the shape of your dish or how they've decided to present it and the order and all of these other things, which essentially is a, it's a cultural expression like you have in art or in theater and the like.
Which you, again, probably wouldn't do every day. But as this form of cultural expression in any food culture, actually, I think it's really fascinating to see, particularly with someone who has an expressional way that they're doing it in terms of their art.
Fuchsia: Yeah. And I think people sometimes, they're very, there's a tendency to pass judgment on things as if it's either/or, and it's not. The best thing to do is to eat more simply for most of your life and occasionally have a tasting menu. Yeah. And that's very, it's very simple to have both, really.
Ben: Yeah. And it goes both ways in terms of you shouldn't ignore street food either.
You probably shouldn't eat street food every day either. But to ignore snacking or snacks or street food again, I think would be y- yeah would make, lessen your food and life experience, for sure. Great. So the final last couple of questions would be any particular current projects or curiosities that you're working on?
Obviously, there'll be a lot of work around the launch of your new book, but anything else that you're working on that you'd like to share?
Fuchsia: Oh Chinese food has become a lifelong project, and so I've got various things that I'm working on at the moment, different regions, trying to deepen my knowledge and thinking about the next book.
Ben: Yeah. Great. And perhaps we can end on any open thoughts you have or advice, perhaps advice for an ordinary home cook. I say ordinary, but just someone cooking at home. Or perhaps you have some thoughts about what it is to be a food writer today. But any final thoughts that you'd like to share on your food writing?
Fuchsia: I think one thing is that people sometimes find Chinese cooking intimidating, and they think you need a lot of special equipment and special ingredients, and you really don't. Chinese cuisine is hugely complex and sophisticated, but it has everything from very complex and labor-intensive banquet cooking to simple dishes that you can knock up in five minutes after work.
And Chinese food, also contrary to the traditional Western stereotype, can be fantastically healthy and life-enhancing. So I think I would just encourage people to just give it a go. Buy a couple of seasonings, have a go and you'll find it I can almost guarantee life-enhancing and delicious and fun.
Ben: Excellent. So with that, I'll remind listeners that her new book is Five Tastes: The Magic of flavour in the Chinese Kitchen. And with that, Fuchsia, thank you very much.
Fuchsia: Thank you.