What is Cantonese Home Cooking?

What normal people in Guangdong would actually eat at home.

Nov 28, 2023

The above video also exists in Cantonese (no English subtitles, sorry).

Click here to jump to the Stir Fried Baby Bok Choy recipe
Click here to jump to the Steamed Fish Slices recipe
Click here to jump to the Milky Fish Head soup with Luffa recipe
Click here to jump to the Century Egg and Napa Cabbage soup recipe.

Note: Cantonese pronunciations are written using Jyutpin. For English speakers, Jyutpin mostly sounds the way it looks, except “Jy” is pronounced as “Y”. Characters are written in simplified because… that’s the input system that I have on my computer. Plus, it’s what I learned. Apologies in advance to the 繁体字 die-hards.

There’s a certain genre of Chinese food video on YouTube that centers around “What’s a Chinese Breakfast like?” A fun topic for sure - to save you a Google usually the answers within’ll usually be stuff like:

Youtiao
Soy Milk
Rice Noodle Rolls
Congee
Dim Sums
Baozi

… which is, of course, a perfectly accurate representation of what a Chinese breakfast can be. It’s what a traveler would be exposed to – walk the streets of Shenzhen at 7am, and that fare is basically what you’re going to find.

So as someone that likes cooking, maybe you decide that you’re going to embark on recreating an ever-so-classic Chinese breakfast – youtiao and soymilk. After familiarizing yourself with the process… you dutifully soak your soybeans overnight, blend those into milk, boil the milk while ladling constantly, strain it through a cheesecloth to get your final milk, make and rest your youtiao dough, shape the dough into logs, rest them again, and finally deep fry in a generous wok-ful of oil. (Or, to save some work, you can also order and ship a homestyle soy milk machine from China.)

And while your end result may indeed be delicious, somewhere in between incessantly ladling down the soymilk foam and storing up the liters of deep frying oil… perhaps you can’t help but wonder “wait, do people in China actually do all this first thing in the morning?”

The answer is – obviously – “of course not”. Youtiao and Soymilk are generally not something that are made at home, they’re something that’re eaten in cities and towns outside the home. Of course, an enormous benefit of living in a walkable city with lenient street hawking laws is that you can have access to a whole diversity of breakfast stalls that’re cheap, delicious, and ubiquitous – so in a lot of ways this *is* how urban China eats breakfast.

But then… what about rural China? What’s a normal breakfast like for those that pretty much always have to cook it for themselves?

And unfortunately, the answer there probably isn’t the best one to get people on the hype train for Chinese breakfast. A common sight would be that people taking rice leftover from the previous dinner, boiling it into a quick congee, and eating it with some simple, flavorful pickles, like so:

Of course, before jumping to judgement, in my opinion this fare still compares reasonably favorably to that workaday American breakfast of “plain milk soup and highly processed anti-masturbation* flakes – with or without the extra sugar”.

Anyway, the point is this – because for the most part we experience foreign cuisines through the lens of professional restaurants… it sometimes can lead to an unrepresentative and perhaps slightly twisted view of how people actually practice their cuisine. And, I think, perhaps few cuisines have this issue more than…

Cantonese Cuisine

A few years back during lockdown, we sat down with the renowned Kenji over Zoom and chit chatted a bit. Something that he said that stuck with me a bit was his musings on Cantonese food - that is, how his (and most westerners!) view of Cantonese food was colored by eating it out at restaurants - that most Americans just plain hadn’t really experienced what Cantonese home cooking is.

But I don’t think this phenomenon is even unique to the United States! Even in China, most people experience Cantonese food in restaurants – a bit like French cuisine in the west, it’s sort of become the country’s default ‘fancy’ food. It’s settled to become the haute cuisine of China – a popular choice for wedding banquets, business dinners, and Michelin stars. Media surrounding it will often emphasize the sophistication of the technique and the skill of the chef – whether it be the subtle wok hei of a Fried Rice (Western media), or the thirteenth pleat of the Har Gow (Chinese media).

But just like how French food is more than Escoffier and his brigade system, Cantonese food is more than a labor-intensive mise culminating in the spectacle of a high powdered wok station.

So today, we wanted to try our hand at answering an enormously difficult question to answer – i.e. what is Cantonese home cooking actually like?

But… is Homecooking Actually a Different ‘Thing’ than Restaurant Cooking?

Forgive a random philosophical aside at first, because trying to draw the lines here started to prove surprisingly difficult for us.

Think about certain foods in your culture that would squarely be ‘restaurant cooking’. Like, in my home country of the US, I think most of the time people will be getting pizza from a restaurant. But… homemade pizza nights featuring pre-bought dough is a thing, right? Also, from-scratch pan-pizza is a thing, frozen pizza is a thing, and obsessive cooking dweebs like us are also certainly a thing.

Staying in the US, an oven-baked casserole is pretty synonymous with home cooking… but there’s plenty of restaurants that serve sides of Mac n Cheese, I can see Tater Tot hotdish-inspired stuff gracing an increasing number of menus, and hell, the Chicken Divan of my childhood was originally borne out of restaurant cooking.

The more you zoom in, the harder it is to categorize stuff as solely “restaurant-only” or “homecooking-only”. The line’s fuzzy and there’s tons of stuff that crosses between both. So while you’d probably never see a Cantonese home cook obsessing over the 13th pleat of their Har Gow… Macaroni Soup is one of the most iconic Chachaanteng dishes out there and you can absolutely find it in home kitchens too.

That said, I do think there’s three primary differences between Cantonese home cooking and restaurant cooking:

First, often – but not always – the techniques used at home can be a little simpler, a little more streamlined. Like, for example, probably one of the most obvious characteristics of a Cantonese restaurant stir fry is that the meat is usually passed through oil first – i.e. given a brief shallow fry. While it wouldn’t be unheard of, that move would be much, much rarer to see in someone’s home. Ditto with stuff like extensive alkaline treatments, using stock in stir fries, etc.

Second - and I know this one might be a little controversial - but Cantonese home cooking does not have wok hei. Normal people in Guangdong do not own crazy high powered restaurant burners, nor do they go through years of culinary school training to learn how to use them properly. Wok Hei is a restaurant thing, you enjoy it at restaurants. Home cooking has other advantages.

Primary among them is probably the same as in any country – restaurant cooking is always and everywhere limited by economics. What will the market buy, for what price? How can you execute that efficiently, using supplies sourced economically? At home, you’re not constrained in quite the same way. If the situation demands it you can go incredibly cheap, cutting costs in ways that’d simply not be possible in a competitive marketplace. And on the other end of things you can also afford to, say, add a little extra dried scallop to a braise without worrying about if it’ll price out customers.

Similar deal with technique. Restaurant cooking can at times be phenomenally complex, but no matter what successful restaurant cooking must always adhere to two core pillars: (1) batch production and (2) the interchangeability of parts. It’s ok for a restaurant to spend 20 minutes on a technique that will make a dish 5% more delicious, if it means that it can be applied to 200 servings (or ideally, across their entire menu). But 20 minutes for a single serving for a single table? That obviously… can’t happen.

Because of that, while something like great Siu Ngo is incredibly complex, it works for a restaurant. But Chai Yu Geng, with its hand tearing of pan-fried fish? Endangered in restaurants – but lives on in Shunde home kitchens. So while the venn diagram definitely overlaps, there certainly are specific dishes that you see more at home than in a restaurant.

That out of the way, let’s get down to brass tacks.

The elements of a Cantonese homecooked meal

If you’re familiar with ordering at a Cantonese restaurant, this will likely cover a lot of the same ground. Still, for those new to the sport:

1. Starch: rice, usually

Generally speaking, when you’re out at a Cantonese restaurant you’re going to order some sort of starch in your meal. This could be fried rice noodles, fried rice, congee, fried noodles, deep fried noodles smothered in gravy, or even just some white rice.

At home, this potpourri is usually simplified to just plain white rice, almost always cooked in a rice cooker. The others could still been seen of course (e.g. oyster sauce Lo Mein is a very common quick lunch), but white rice is generally the mainstay.

2. Soup, or other soupy stuff

If you asked ten Cantonese people what the essence of Cantonese homecooking is, probably nine or ten of them would quickly reply “soup”. And by ‘soup’, usually what’s implied is lengtong (靓汤): a sort of long-brewing, delicate soup that’s slow-simmered for hours on end. It’s often a mainstay within weekend meals (Steph would have one every Sunday when she’d go to her grandmother’s house), and is this… whole culture in and of itself. In Cantonese kitchens, Lengtong are one of those things that sort of blur the line between ‘food’ and ‘medicine’ –purported to have numerous health benefits, but quite delicious even if you’re not the biggest believer in TCM.

It’s so deep and vast, that by necessity pretty much has to be outside of the scope of this post. We’ll try to figure out a way to circle back one day.

Instead, what we want to focus on is the type of soup that you’d usually see on an average weekday in Cantonese kitchens – an easier sort called gwantong (滚汤), which can come together in anywhere between 10-20 minutes.

If you come from a background of western cooking with its day-long chicken stocks, I know you might be saying to yourself “WTF, 10-20 minutes for a soup? How is it even possible to get something rich and flavorful in that time?” The first thing to understand about a gwantong is that the liquid of the soup is often a supporting character to the ‘stuff’ that you’re cooking inside the soup. You’ll absolutely enjoy and drink the soup too of course… but if you’re making a gwantong with Napa cabbage, perhaps you could conceptualize it as a ‘Napa cabbage’ dish first and foremost.

There are a bunch of tricks to get a flavorful base in a short period of time though. A very non-comprehensive list:

Make a milky fish soup. Take some fish head and bones, pan fry over high heat. Add hot, boiled water and bring it up to a rapid boil. Boil for 15 minutes until milky, then season.
Make a fried egg soup. Panfry some eggs, then add hot, boiled water and bring to a rolling boil for 15 minutes until milky, then season.
Make a seaweed soup. Add dried seaweed (i.e. zicai, gim, ‘raw nori’) to boiling water and boil for ~30 seconds, then season.
Make a century egg soup. Cut a century egg into chunks, fry over a medium flame until blistered. Add hot, boiled water and cook for 2 minutes.
Boil dried seafood. Boil dried shrimp or dried scallops in water for 10-15 minutes.
Boil pork slices. Fry pork slices in oil over a high flame until done, then swirl in Shaoxing wine or maizau (米酒) - sort of like de-glazing. Add water, bring to a boil, then season.
Boil sweet vegetables. Adding sweet vegetables to your soup like Luffa Gourd, Napa Cabbage, or Daikon can give additional depth. Often used in conjunction with the other methods.
Crack in a (raw) salted egg. Crack a whole (uncooked) salted egg into simmering water. Cook until done, then season.
Make an egg drop soup. Self explanatory, for details you can check out our Egg Drop Anything video.

From here, you can really add anything you like to the soup. Vegetables are an excellent choice, especially some of the sweet vegetables we listed above. You could also add in some meat slices, whether as a fried base like in approach #6 above, or simply blanching in the bubbling soup. Some other additions could be fish or meatballs, Tofu or various Tofu products (e.g. tofu skin), or glass noodles.

A bit later in the post, we’ll show you two different ‘levels’ of gwuntong – a classic milky fish soup with luffa, plus a quick & lazy century egg soup with napa cabbage.

3. Vegetables

So… day-to-day Cantonese cuisine is incredibly heavy on vegetables. Even in China, Cantonese people can be sort of renowned for their love of veg.

To paint you a picture, for caterers in the west the rule of thumb for a side salad is about about 85g, or one cup – and that’s everything in the salad, croutons and all. In Guangdong, a good rule of thumb for a meal would be about 250g worth of vegetable. Whenever Steph’s in the United States (or to a lesser degree Thailand), one of the biggest adjustments for her is the small portions of vegetables.

And by ‘vegetable’, this usually implies ‘greens’ – stuff like Gailan, Choy Sum, Bok Choy, Lettuce, etc etc. Root vegetables like carrot or daikon would not be considered ‘vegetable’, per se (Steph sometimes jokes that stuff like Napa Cabbage/Cabbage/Bitter Melon are ‘borderline vegetables’ to her). Like, this vegetable… specificity… is even sort of a meme in China at this point.

These vegetables are then generally either:

Blanched. Simple enough. Take the vegetable, boil it in water seasoned with salt and oil until done, and eat directly. To make it a bit more palatable, you can also drizzle over a bit of soy sauce, oyster sauce, oil, etc.
Cooked in a gwuntong. As discussed above.
Stir-fried. Recipe for a simple stir fried vegetable is below. For many heartier vegetables (e.g. Choy Sum), these will be blanched first and then stir fried… but this also depends on the family. Steph’s Dad is very much a believer in pre-blanching, but another common move in Guangdong would be to start stir-frying, add a little water to cook the vegetable through.

4. A Meat-y ‘Main’

Of all of these components, this is likely one that has the most crossover with restaurant cooking. Basically, what you’d be looking at is completing the meal with some sort of (1) stir fry (2) braise or (3) steamed dish.

If I’m sounding overly general, it’s because it’s obviously difficult to give any sort of comprehensive guide here. So while we’ll get to a specific sort of example main a bit later on in the post, here’s a selection of dishes that you might see in this role:

Whole Steamed Fish
White cut chicken
Pork Belly Steamed with Minsi Paste
Steamed chicken with Mushrooms
Beef with Gailan
Beef with Broccoli
Black Bean Garlic Beef
Horse Stop Pot
Fry Roast Chicken
Stuffed Chili Peppers
Fish Omelette (via Made with Lau)
Chicken with Bak Choy (Via Wantanmein)
Pork cake with salted fish (via Wantanmien)
Braised Tofu with Pork (Via LetsCookHongKongFood)
Steamed Pork with Salted Fish (Via LetsCookHongKongFood)
Braised Lotus Root with Spareribs (Via LetsCookHongKongFood)
Braised Chicken with Potato & Tomato (Via LetsCookHongKongFood)
Braised Mushrooms with Siu Yuk (Via LetsCookHongKongFood)
Braised Mutton with Red Fermented Tofu (Via LetsCookHongKongFood)
Braised Tofu with Minced Pork (Via LetsCookHongKongFood)

Grace Young’s cookbooks also feature some homestyle Cantonese dishes and could be a good resource for idea generation. And if you happen to know some Cantonese (or don’t mind lack of English subtitles), an absolutely fabulous channel for inspiration for homecooked Cantonese dishes would be “Shunde Old Baby”.

5. Optional: Rice Killers

When it comes to the world of over-rice-ability, Guangdong is less… passionate… than some of its southern neighbors. While you could practically think of the entire cuisine of Hunan as a grand system of consuming “stuff-with-rice”, a good chunk of parents in Guangdong will explicitly teach their children to not mix their dishes in with their rice.

There might be a bit of a class element at play here, because in Guangdong often rice killers – sungfaan (送饭) – were items leaned on when food was less abundant. The two most classic being: (1) Fujyu, fermented tofu (腐乳) and (2) Haamjyu (咸鱼), fermented fish.

If you’re the type of person that enjoys flavorful stuff, both are… pretty awesome. The latter is maybe the closest thing that you could get to fish sauce in solid form. It’s usually steamed on a little plate over the rice (i.e. added to the rice cooker once you see it rapidly steaming) together with ginger and sometimes a touch of pork belly. You then either take a bit of that and smear it on your rice, or take a nibble of it interspersed between large bites of white rice. It’s an ingredient with such a deep cultural relevance that you can even find it embedded within the Cantonese language itself:

食得咸鱼抵得渴 “If you ate Haamjyu, you’ll need to endure the thirst.” If you decide to do something, you’ll need to accept the risk.
咸鱼翻身(翻生) “A Haamjyu flips and comes back to life.” Someone in a seemingly hopeless situation (often financially) manages to steer the situation from the worst, and makes the situation better.
我系一条咸鱼 “I’m a Haamjyu”. Someone that doesn’t have dreams, aspirations, or ambitions. Similar meaning as the currently-popular Chinese meme of “lying flat”.
人无梦想，同一条咸鱼有咩区别 “If a person doesn’t have dreams, then there’s no difference between that person and Haamjyu” …you get the gist.

Fujyu, meanwhile, might be the ultimate working class rice killer. It’s cheap, rich, salty, and has flavor in absolute spades. For Steph, when she was a kid, her and her cousins would love to eat Fujyu straight on their rice, and the adults would never let them eat as much as they wanted. For their generation (i.e. the cultural revolution generation), eating Fujyu straight with rice is always something associated with difficult times, when they had no other options.

How a Cantonese Home Kitchen is Set Up

As we brought up in our stocking a Chinese kitchen video, there’s an old saying that you need seven things to properly stock up a kitchen:

柴、米、油、盐、酱、醋、茶

Firewood, Rice, Oil, Salt, Fermented Sauce, Vinegar, Tea

So when it comes to the difference in how restaurant kitchens vs home kitchens are set up, it seems like as reasonable of a place to start as any.

Heat Source (i.e. ‘Firewood’)

In the old days of course, woks were large and powered by firewood – you can still see some ‘village cooking’ YouTube channels following this approach (though no Cantonese ones, as far as I know). For the vast majority of home kitchens in 2023 however, the heat source will be gas.

The gas stoves commonly used in Guangdong are much the same as the rest of the country – generally clocking in at around 15000 BTUs. Which, while still stronger than that standard ~8000 BTU western range, behave nothing like those iconic jet engine restaurant wok burners. So it is worth noting that if the only people you’ve ever seen stir-frying Cantonese food are professional chefs, there are certain stir-frying motions that they need that the average Cantonese home cook does not, as we covered in this bit in our Beef and Broccoli video.

And while most people would own a gas range, induction isn’t unheard of – especially in those sorts of studio apartments designed for young, working single people that don’t do much cooking. In this case, a wide non-stick wok like this would be the cooking vessel of choice.

Rice

The go-to rice in Guangdong is Champa rice, or Tsimmai (粘米). I cannot seem to find whether this rice is categorized as a medium grain or a long grain rice in English (I personally feel that grain size is a borderline useless way of categorizing rice, but that’s another rant for another day). It behaves very similarly to Jasmine rice, which is also common to see in Cantonese kitchens nowadays (imported from Cambodia and Thailand generally).

Oil

Just like in Cantonese restaurants, the two most common cooking oils in Guangdong are (1) ‘Unrefined’ Peanut Oil and (2) Lard.

I put ‘Unrefined’ in quotes for the peanut because the oft-cited smoke point for unrefined peanut oil – 160C – doesn’t seem to match our experience with the ingredient. In Guangdong, the general process for making peanut oil is this – roasting, tossing through an expeller press, then filtering. The end result is something with a relatively high smoke point (I’d gather around 200-210C?), but’s got this awesome peanutty aroma to it.

Lard, meanwhile, might actually be slightly more common to see in home kitchens than at restaurants. You can render some lard yourself, of course (what we do), or you can do what Steph’s parent’s do – whenever there’s a bit of pork belly that’s extra fatty, Steph’s Dad’ll render out the excess lard and use it to fry vegetables for the upcoming meals. As he likes to say, “use peanut oil to fry meat, use lard to fry vegetables”.

As for finishing oil, a Cantonese home cook is much more likely to reach for toasted sesame oil than a restaurant, which will tend to simply use more peanut oil.

Salt (and Sugar, and MSG)

No real difference in salt between Cantonese restaurant and home cooking: just use some bog-standard table salt.

That said, when is comes to the Cantonese-restaurant ‘Holy Trinity of Seasoning’ of Salt, Sugar, and MSG… the last element is often conspicuously absent in Cantonese home cooking. While it’s reasonably common for, say, a Sichuanese homecook to stock MSG in their cupboard, I’ve yet to meet a Cantonese homecook that does the same.

The reason is… complex. These days, I feel like often the food space tends to frame the MSG myth as a simple racist phenomenon that white America has placed onto the world. And while the moral panic surrounding MSG undeniably had - and still has - racist elements, ask a random Cantonese grandmother about the ingredient and she’d likely be quick to tell you about its supposed health detriments as well (and that you shouldn’t eat out at restaurants too often… and that you’re either too fat or not fat enough;).

Of course, these attitudes were likely forged a good bit via backpropagation – after all, America has this cultural megaphone. Plus, a good chunk urban Cantonese have at least some extended family living abroad (especially America). So… ideas spread.

But from what we can tell, food writers in Hong Kong were writing negative things about MSG before it became a phenomenon in America. And it’s worth noting that the original letter to the New England Journal of Medicine that kicked off the MSG scare was written by Dr. Ho Man Kwok, a Cantonese man who had recently immigrated from Hong Kong – who blamed his symptoms on eating Northern Chinese food, opining that the ‘syndrome’ could have come from either MSG or chili peppers, or both.

No matter the history, it is true that the ingredient has definitely become a line in the sand of sorts between Cantonese home-cooking and restaurant-cooking:

Restaurants use MSG.

Home cooks don’t.

Or… they use chicken bouillon powder. Which’s of course a handy way to add monosodium glutamate without having to… Add Monosodium Glutamate.

Fermented Sauces

Whether it’s home cooking or restaurant looking, like pretty much all of China (and I guess East Asia by extension), fermented sauces make up the backbone of Cantonese cuisine. I can’t really think of any differences between home cooking and restaurant cooking here, but usually the cupboard will contain much of the following:

Soy sauce (生抽)
Dark soy sauce (老抽). For coloring dishes.
Minsi Paste (面豉). Similar in flavor to Japanese akamiso. Also referred to as “ground bean sauce”.
Chuhou Paste (柱侯酱). A flavored Minsi paste.
Hoisin Sauce (海鲜酱). A flavored Minsi paste.
Shrimp Paste (虾酱). Fermented krill.

Besides these, there’s also the aforementioned Fujyu, which can also be used as a base for dishes. If you’re eating the stuff straight with rice you’d want the white Fujyu, but for braises (especially gamier stuff like goat or goose) you’d opt for the red Naamjyu (南乳).

And of course, there’s also Oyster Sauce (蚝油), which of course isn’t fermented but rather made by either reducing oyster brine (traditionally) or mixing oyster extract with soy sauce, caramel, and syrup (modern production methods).

Vinegar/Cooking Wine

So as a general statement, Cantonese cuisine doesn’t go quite as heavy on the vinegar as many other Chinese cuisines do. You’ll usually only see it in the context of a sweet and sour, which tend to be a bit more common in restaurants than they are in homes. So while a Cantonese kitchen’ll likely stock some, you’ll never see a Cantonese homecook finish a stir fry by swirling in a bit of aged vinegar like you’d see elsewhere like in the north or Sichuan.

(Of course, there is sweet vinegar, which’s fundamental in the ever-so-classic post-natal Trotter and Ginger Stew, but… let’s call that the exception that proves the rule).

When it comes to wine however, there can be a slight difference between what’s generally used in restaurants and what you see most often in Cantonese home kitchens. While restaurants usually reach for Shaoxing wine, home kitchens are often stocked with Maizau (米酒) – this stuff:

Traditionally, this was the economical choice in Guangdong, as Maizau was produced locally in the Pearl River Delta – most famously in the town of Gaugong (九江) in the county of Naamhoi (南海). The taste is similar to sake, albeit stronger – Maizau usually clocks in at around 30% ABV.

Of course, these days the most economical choice would be that ever-so-common Liaojiu (Liuzau) cooking wine – a seasoned, salted Shaoxing wine that can be found throughout China.

Any of the three – Shaoxing wine, Maizau, and Liaojiu – could be found in a Cantonese home kitchen.

Tea

In a Cantonese meal, tea isn’t for drinking, but rather for washing dishes before the meal:

I’m mostly just kidding here - I mean, you wouldn’t see the above move at someone’s house (it’s because the dish-cleaning services that restaurants outsource to sometimes don’t do the most phenomenal of jobs). But still, compared to some other Chinese cuisines it’s definitely less common to tea next to a Cantonese home cooked meal.

I mean, you can drink tea if you want of course, but often it’s the soup that’s the drink (some people even think that drinking tea with a meal is bad for the stomach).

You’ll usually see tea drank next to snacks instead - i.e. Dim Sums and the like.

Making a Cantonese Home Cooked Meal

Like all of China, Cantonese meals are served family style, with roughly an equal number of people and discrete ‘dishes’. So if you’re serving 4-5 people, that’s 4-5 dishes that you need to get to the table – hopefully all at roughly the same time, hopefully all hot from the wok.

In practice, this can sometimes prove… a little tricky. Being able to juggle all these different dishes at once is one of the primary skills that a Chinese homecook needs to get good at. It’s the type of thing that gets easier with experience – over time, you’ll be able to build a mental model in your head of the meal in its entirety, and figure out which steps you can do simultaneously.

It's one of the reasons why I’m not the biggest fan of the whole “recipes as a technical document” philosophy that’s dominant among cooking writing in the west. Because for any single recipe you’re making from our channel, unless you’re cooking for one person you should be breaking up the steps in your head based off of what else you’re cooking. For a deeper look on how to potentially improve this skill, definitely check out our Chinese Mise En Place video.

Besides that though, perhaps we can also share a couple tips, based off of what Steph’s Mom and Dad tend to do when they’re cooking a full meal:

Leftovers are your friend. I’ve heard that in Europe (correct me if I’m wrong!) it’s really rare to see people bringing home uneaten food from restaurants. In America, it’s obviously quite common… but across China, it’s almost a culture. Repurposing a leftover is a fantastic way to help fill your dish quota on the quick - definitely check out our How to Repurpose Chinese Leftovers video if you’re new to the sport.

Chef Mike (i.e. the microwave) is your friend. Sometimes certain dishes end up coming out at different times – it is what it is. You don’t want that vegetable you stir fried up to end up getting cold, so what do you do?

Toss it in the microwave for 30 seconds.

There might be some ever so minor textural changes, but in the end the dish will be tastier hot than cold. Steph’s parents’ microwave is actually right next to their dining room table, so sometimes they’ll even nuke a dish as we’re eating if it’s getting cold.

Claypots are your friend. Claypots are perhaps the very best vessel there is when it comes to heat retention. On a standard porcelain serving plate, the shot clock starts ticking as soon as it comes out of your wok. If you cook a dish in clay, it can stay pleasingly hot for upwards of fifteen minutes - or even longer.

Even if you’re not planning on cooking something explicitly in your claypot, one nice trick is to finish in the claypot. Stir fry or braise like you always would, then transfer to a hot claypot. Then, the dish can chill on the side until you’re ready to heat (in an ideal world, you can finish the dish with aromatics and finishing oil right when you bring it to the table).

‘Wok soups’ are your friend. If you’re on the fuck-it level of making a gwuntong, one trick is make what I lovingly refer to as a ‘wok soup’ (not a real name or anything).

Basically… once you’re done stir-frying, the wok’ll often have a little residual sauce and such in it. You could wash it and then start your fuck-it gwuntong… or instead you can just toss in water and bring it all up to a boil. The residual sauce and such can add a subtle layer of complexity to the soup… but most importantly, it’s one less time you have to give the wok a scrub.

Further, because of the boiling water, the post-wok-soup wok is usually much easier to clean.

Staggered eating is your friend. A common move that Steph’s parents pull is to assemble their ‘steamed dish’ at the very end as they’re setting the table. Then at the very last second as the meal begins, pop your ‘steamed dish’ in the wok and steam it as you begin the meal. Once you’re about finished your first bowl of soup, the steamed dish should be done - you can quickly pop back into the kitchen to grab the thing and bring it hot to the table.

Similar deal if you happen to have a smaller braise within the aforementioned claypot. You can keep the dish bubbling in the kitchen (with some aromatics already cut/prepped), and part way through the meal pop back and move it in while everything’s still bubbling.

Four Homestyle Cantonese Recipes

These were the dishes that we cooked within the linked video.

Stir Fried Baby Bok Choy with Ginger and Garlic (清炒小棠菜)

Baby bok choy (上海青/小棠菜), 500g. Cut in half.
Aromatics:
Garlic, 3-4 cloves. Smashed
Ginger (姜), ~1 inch. Smashed
Oil, lard preferably, 2 tbsp.
Maizau (米酒) -or- Shaoxing wine (绍酒/料酒), 1 tbsp
Soy sauce (生抽), 1 tbsp
Seasoning, all mixed in a small bowl:
Salt, 1/4 tsp
Sugar, 1/4 tsp
Chicken bouillon powder (鸡粉), 1/8 tsp
White pepper powder (白胡椒粉), 1/8 tsp
Cornstarch (生粉), 1/4 tsp
Water, 1 tbsp
Toasted sesame oil (麻油), 1 tsp

Cut the baby bok choy in half, or quarters if they’re larger. Smash the garlic and the ginger. Mix together the seasoning in a small bowl.

Bring a pot of water up to a boil. Blanch the baby bok choy until they’ve deepened into a more vibrant green, 1-2 minutes. Remove, and rinse under running water to stop the cooking process. Let drain.

To a wok, first longyau: get it piping hot, then shut off the heat and add in the oil. Give it a swirl and swap the flame to medium-low. Fry the aromatics until fragrant, ~30 seconds, then up the flame to high. Swirl in the wine. Quick mix, then add in the blanched vegetable. Mix, then swirl in the soy sauce. Fry for about thirty seconds, then swap the flame to low.

Slowly add in the seasoning while mixing constantly. Once incorporated, shut off the heat and drizzle in the toasted sesame oil.

Steamed Fish Slices (清蒸鱼片)

Fish fillet, ~300g
Marinade for the fish:
Salt, 1/4 tsp
Sugar, 1/4 tsp
White pepper powder (白胡椒粉), 1/4 tsp
Maizau rice wine (米酒) -or- Shaoxing wine (绍酒/料酒), 1 tsp
Cornstarch (生粉), 1/2 tbsp
Oil, preferably unrefined peanut oil, ~1.5 tbsp
Scallions, ~4-5 sprigs. White and green parts separated. Greens made into curls.
Ginger, ~1/2 inch. Julienned.
Soy sauce (生抽), 1/2 tbsp
Oil, preferably unrefined peanut oil, 2 tbsp. For sizzling at the end.

Slice the fillet into about 1/2 cm sheets. Mix with all the ingredients for the marinade except the oil. Add enough oil until the pieces can slip in your fingers, ~1.5 tbsp.

Separate the scallion in the whites and greens. Add the whites to the fish and mix well. For the greens, get them into curls by slicing them lengthwise, then keeping in a cup of cool water. Julienne the ginger and lay it over the fish.

Steam the plate for four minutes.

Drizzle over the soy sauce, and place the scallion curls over the fish. Heat up the oil until smoking (~200C) and sizzle it over the greens.

Fish Head Soup with Luffa and Carrot (丝瓜鱼头汤)

Bones and Head from one fish
Luffa gourd (丝瓜), ~250g
Carrot, ~40g
Aromatics:
Garlic, ~4 cloves. Smashed
Ginger, ~1 inch. Smashed.
Oil, lard preferably, 1 tbsp
Maizau (米酒) -or- Shaoxing wine (绍酒/料酒), 1 tbsp
Hot, boiled water from the kettle, 5 cups
Seasoning:
Salt, 1/2 tsp
Sugar, 1/2 tsp
Chicken Bouillon Powder (鸡粉), 1/2 tsp
White pepper Powder (白胡椒粉), 1/8 tsp

Cut the carrot into ~1/2 cm sheets, and the luffa gourd into ~1 inch chunks using the Chinese rolling cut. Smash the garlic and the ginger.

To a large (preferably stick) wok or pot, fry the fish head and bones over a high flame, flipping periodically. Once the fish is good and browned, swirl in the wine. Quick mix, and add in the aromatics. Once fragrant, about ~15 seconds, add in the hot, boiled water. Bring up to a rapid boil.

Lower the flame to medium/medium high - keep the soup at a rolling boil. Cover, and boil until milky - at least 10 minutes, or up to 40.

Add in the carrot. Boil for one minute.

Add in the luffa. Boil for two minutes.

Add in the seasoning and mix.

Century Egg Soup with Napa Cabbage (香荽皮蛋滚黄芽白)

Garlic, 3 cloves. Crushed.
Century Egg (皮蛋), 1. Cut into chunks.
Napa Cabbage (娃娃菜/黄芽白), 100g.
Cilantro, 1 sprig, cut into half inch sections
Oil, 1 tbsp.
Maizau (米酒) -or- Shaoxing wine (绍酒/料酒), 1/2 tbsp
Hot, boiled water from the kettle, 3 cups
Seasoning:
Salt, 1/4 tsp
Sugar, 1/4 tsp
Chicken Bouillon Powder (鸡粉), 1/8 tsp
White pepper Powder (白胡椒粉), 1/8 tsp

Cut the century egg into chunks and the napa cabbage into ~2.5 inch sections. Crush the garlic.

In a hot wok or pot, swirl in the oil and fry the garlic over a medium-low flame. Once fragrant, about 30 seconds, add in the century egg. Fry the century egg until slightly blistered, ~2 minutes, then up the flame to high and add in the Napa Cabbage. Quick mix, then swirl in the wine. After another quick mix, add in the hot water. Bring to a boil.

Cover, boil for two minutes. Add in the seasoning and cilantro. Optionally finish with a drizzle of toasted sesame oil.

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