There are many differences between Chinese and American food culture, while it is hard to list all the differences. Let's start from the first meal of the day - Breakfast! Chinese start their busy day early in the morning around 6am for job or school. Thus it is a big problem for them to have time to cook breakfast at home. The way Chinese eat breakfast is distinctive than American. It is easy because Chinese can buy various types of breakfast at street shops, while it is not easy because most of the breakfast dishes are not easy to make. Rice congee is the mainstay diet of Chinese breakfast. It is common and simple to make at home. With enough water that more than you use for cook rice, cook the rice for a long time until the rice get soft and thicker. It is great having warm and mild meal to start a nice day! Of course, you can add other ingredients to make various flavors. It can be sweet or salty with what ever you want, meat, vegetables, or seafoods. In addition to the variety of congee, we also have Tofu Pudding as one of the important diets for Chinese breakfast that you may never heard before. It is a kind tofu that is very soft and tastes like pudding that made from raw beans. While, depend on deferent regions in China, people like different flavor of tofu pudding. Generally, people from the North prefer salty tofu pudding, while people from South prefer sweet tofu pudding, besides, the tofu pudding also can be spicy, especially people from Sichuan love Spicy. Usually, we don't eat congee or tofu pudding alone, we have various side dishes to eat with. One of the traditional and typical snack is deep-fired dough slice. Just like its name, it is deep-fired sticks of dough. And it is great to eat with some soupy dishes, such as congee, tofu pudding, and soymilk. Another type of side dish that I love is steamed buns. It also has different flavors for you to change your choice everyday. Steamed buns are made from wheat flour. After fermentation, the buns have a spongy feel. The basic steamed bun (without any fillings) is called Mantou. It can be white made from wheat flour, brown made with wholemeal flour, or yellow made from corn flour. In addition to steamed buns, another famous Chinese cooking way is pan-frying. For example, the pan-fried buns called "Shengjian" and pan-fried dumplings called "Guotie" have crisp browned bottom, also have more juicy fillings. Shaomai is one of my favorite buns. It has thinner wrapper and different fillings than the buns that I have mentioned above. The most common fillings of shaomai are sticky rice, shiitake mushroom, and minced pork. Sticky rice as the basic ingredient of shaomai, you can replace the pork with other meat or seafoods, or you can make vegetarian shaomai. These are not all the dishes we eat for breakfast, there are many other delicious dishes such as various flavors of noodles, wonton (another type of dumpling), spring roll, egg pancake, and so on. Now, you know how different the Chinese breakfast and American Breakfast. Would you try Chinese breakfast? These video will teach you how to make these at home. Go to my Youtube page find the Chinese Breakfast playlist! Or you can just find a Chinese Restaurant to order these delicious dishes!
Thank you for your reading. See you next week!
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April 2017
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