Foundations & the Chinese Pantry

Chinese Cookery

Chapter 1 · Foundations & the Chinese Pantry

Chinese home cooking leans on a compact set of real, distinct sauces and a small handful of tools used with real precision — a wok, a cleaver, a steamer. This chapter is the no-cooking foundation: the pantry, and the equipment later chapters actually lean on.

Soy Sauce: Two Genuinely Different Bottles

Type	What it is	Best used for
Light soy sauce	Thinner, saltier, the everyday seasoning soy sauce	Seasoning during cooking, dipping sauces — the one to reach for most often
Dark soy sauce	Thicker, less salty, aged longer, with a mild sweetness and much deeper colour	Colour and depth in a braise, especially Chapter 7's own red braising — a small amount goes a long way

These aren't interchangeable Using dark soy where a recipe wants light will make a dish taste flat and oddly sweet without enough real salt; using light where a recipe wants dark leaves a braise pale and underwhelming, no matter how long it cooks. Keep both on hand rather than treating one as a substitute for the other.

Shaoxing Wine

A fermented rice wine, essential in marinades, stir-fries, and braises alike — it adds real depth and cuts through richness in a way water or stock alone can't. If you genuinely can't find it, a dry sherry is the closest reasonable substitute, though the flavour isn't identical.

Sesame Oil: A Finishing Oil, Not a Cooking Oil

Toasted sesame oil is deeply aromatic and nutty — and it burns and loses that aroma fast at real stir-fry heat. It's added at the very end of cooking, off the heat, as a finishing touch, not used as the oil a dish is actually cooked in.

The same finishing-oil logic as Italian Cookery's extra virgin olive oil Reserve your good sesame oil for the very end, exactly the way Italian Cookery's own Chapter 1 reserves a good extra virgin olive oil for drizzling rather than frying. A neutral oil (vegetable, peanut, or a similar high-smoke-point oil) does the actual cooking; sesame oil finishes it.

Rice Vinegar & Oyster Sauce

White rice vinegar — mild and clean, used in dipping sauces and lighter dishes.
Black (Chinkiang) vinegar — deeper, slightly smoky and malty, closer in character to a balsamic vinegar, used in richer dressings and dipping sauces, particularly for dumplings (Chapter 9).
Oyster sauce — a real, savoury depth-builder for stir-fries, despite the name it isn't fishy or sharp — genuinely umami-rich rather than seafood-flavoured on its own.

Cornstarch: A Different Thickener Again

Cornstarch does two real jobs in this course: it's the key ingredient in velveting meat (Chapter 4), and mixed with a little cold water into a slurry, it thickens a stir-fry's own sauce almost instantly at the very end of cooking.

A third way to thicken a sauce French Cookery thickens with a cooked roux; Italian Cookery thickens with starchy pasta water. A cornstarch slurry is a genuinely different, third approach — added raw, straight into a hot, already-cooking liquid, thickening within seconds rather than needing minutes of simmering.

Essential Equipment

Genuinely essential

A carbon steel wok (Chapter 5's own wok hei depends on it)
A Chinese cleaver (Chapter 2)
A steamer, bamboo or metal (Chapter 6)
A wooden spatula or ladle sized for the wok

Nice to have, not urgent

A spider strainer, for lifting food out of hot oil or water cleanly
A wok ring, if your stovetop doesn't hold a round-bottomed wok steady

Skip for now

A non-stick wok — a well-seasoned carbon steel one genuinely performs better for this course's own techniques
Specialty dumpling-pleating tools — your own fingers do this fine (Chapter 9)

Kitchen Practice

No cooking yet — this chapter's practice is about stocking and tasting, not a dish.

Kitchen Practice 1

Audit your own pantry against this chapter's own list. Check off what you already have, and note which missing items are needed soonest — light soy sauce and Shaoxing wine for the earliest chapters.

→ Solution

Kitchen Practice 2

Taste light and dark soy sauce side by side, plain, off a spoon. Note the real differences in saltiness, thickness, and sweetness between the two.

→ Solution

Kitchen Practice 3

Taste a small amount of toasted sesame oil plain, then heat a little of it in a pan until it just starts to smoke, and smell the difference. Note how much aroma is lost once it's been properly heated.

→ Solution

Quick Reference — The Chinese Pantry

Light soy for everyday seasoning; dark soy for colour and depth in a braise — not interchangeable
Shaoxing wine in marinades, stir-fries, and braises alike
Toasted sesame oil is a finishing oil, added off the heat at the very end
White rice vinegar for lighter dishes; black (Chinkiang) vinegar for richer dipping sauces
Cornstarch: velveting meat (Ch.4), and a raw slurry that thickens a sauce almost instantly
Equipment: a carbon steel wok, a cleaver, a steamer, and a wok-sized spatula

Next — Chapter 2: The Cleaver & Chinese Knife Skills
One all-purpose cleaver, rock-chop mincing, slicing on the bias, and smashing garlic with the flat of the blade.