Cooking tips from a Chinese chef

Ching-He Huang is a chef and entrepreneur. She was born in Taiwan, where she saw her grandmother prepare meals for their extended family every day. After finishing her studies, she ventured into the food production business. She hasn't looked back since.

Ching presented the TV show Ching's Kitchen and has published many cookbooks, such as China Modern. In this article, she shares with gbtimes her tips for cooking healthy, fresh and delicious Chinese food.

Use fresh ingredients

A meal is only as good as the ingredients you use. Using fresh, quality ingredients makes a huge difference. In cooking, skill counts for only 35 percent while the quality of the ingredients you use makes up 65 percent of the success of the dish.

Avoid MSG

Stay away from monosodium glutamate (MSG), which is a common flavour enhancer in Asian cooking. Clean and fresh is the best way to go.

MSG can also be found in oyster sauce, hoisin sauce or even soy sauce but you can do without these sauces and create some fantastic dishes with just a handful of spices, some stock, fresh vegetables and fresh meat.

Cut down long ingredient lists

Sometimes people look at a Chinese recipe and think, "Oh, no, look at all those ingredients!" You can cut down on the number of the ingredients you need. For example, a recipe like mu shu pork, which is an imperial style recipe, calls for ingredients fit for an emperor.

You don't need ten different kinds of vegetables to create that flavour. You just need simple seasoning and that comes from soy, sesame, Shaoxing rice wine, maybe two or three vegetables, meat or fish or prawns, and some spices like ginger, garlic, five-spice powder and chili.

These are all simple ingredients that you can easily find to create fabulous tasting food.

Additionally, don't worry about chopping all those ingredients by hand, it's very therapeutic. I've looked at old recipes and I've thought of how to make those dishes sexy, full of flavour but take less work.

Substitute hard-to-find ingredients

I try to keep my recipes as authentic as possible, but sometimes the ingredients needed to make are just not available in Europe.

Just to give you an idea, when making dan dan noodles, which is a favourite snack food found all over the streets of Sichuan, I often substitute pickled gherkins for the pickled mustard leaves called for in the recipe. If you can't find an ingredient, substitute something that will impart the same flavour to the finished dish.

In a sense, the cooking method might have remained the same but the ingredients have changed. You have to try and substitute. Life's too short these days. We're all a bit too busy and while it's good to stick to tradition, you also have to change with the times.

This is the whole point of being a cook, you can tweak recipes here and there, make them a little bit fun, a little bit more interesting.

Have a good store cupboard

Making Chinese food is easy if you have the right ingredients in your cupboard. Once you have your store cupboard ingredients, you're away. Here's a list of the basic ingredients you will need in Chinese cooking:

• Shaoxing rice wine (substitute dry sherry if rice wine is not available)

• Light soy sauce

• Sesame oil

• Corn flour

• Stock (even if you only have stock cubes and not fresh stock, that's enough)

• Five spice powder

If you want to expand that, also buy:

• Sichuan peppercorns

• Dried chilies or dried chili specks

• Chili bean sauce

• Fermented black beans

• Make your own black bean sauce

Making your own black bean sauce is easy. Don't get it out of a jar. Just heat up some oil in a wok, add garlic, ginger, chilies and the fermented black beans.

Make sure that you rinse the beans in cold, running water to wash away some of the salt they're covered in. You can then just add chicken.

If you don't have time to cook the chicken beforehand, don't worry, you can just add them in.

After that's been cooking for a while and starts to turn a bit opaque, just add a bit of stock and let it bubble away in the wok. The chicken will stay moist because of the stock.

Then add some bell peppers and then bring it up to the boil. Add some seasonings, maybe some light soy sauce and some toasted sesame oil.

At the very end, thicken it with some cornflour dissolved in cold water. You can add some sliced chilies if you want that kick and garnish with some spring onions. That's it. A dish in five minutes. You can do it!

Remember that food affects your health

To the Chinese, food is medicine. You're eating for your health. When I was growing up, my mother would feed me chicken soup cooked with wolfberries and burdock and ginseng which were thought to be help women balance their qi.

When I'm tired, I make myself some green mung bean soup and that's supposed to be very cooling for the body. In winter, I have azuki red bean soup. These soups are made by boiling the beans for a very long time. I'll put them in a chilled bowl maybe with some taro or sweet potato that I have cooked before. Then, I'll add a bit of honey on top.

I have to admit that my Western friends find it strange, but I really feel the benefits. You have to try it.

(GBTIMES)