How to set up your kitchen to cook Chinese food! It's always a little bit of a process to set things up to cook a new cuisine (so that you're not spending a fortune buying a ton of random ingredients on Amazon or whatever), and in this video we wanted to cover the absolute basics of what you need to get started.

0:00 - The seven things you need to cook Chinese food
1:00 - 1, Fire
2:52 - 2, Rice
3:35 - 3, Salt
4:01 - 4, Oil
4:50 - 5, Fermented Sauce(s)
6:03 - 6, Vinegar/Wine
6:36 - 7, Tea/Dried Goods
7:31 - Is this a complete list?

A MORE COMPLETE LIST

We wanted to keep this video to basically the barest essentials. We also decided to cut out a few ingredients that we figured you might already have in your kitchen (e.g. cornstarch). To be ready to cook a wider range of Chinese food, it'd be helpful to at least have some of these as well:

BASICS: Salt, Granulated Sugar, MSG, Chicken Bouillon Powder, Cornstarch (or preferably a root vegetable starch like potato)

RICE/FLOUR/NOODLES: Jasmine rice, 00 Flour, Rice Noodles (dried Vietnamese rice noodles can work well), Noodles

OILS: Peanut oil, Caiziyou (virgin rapeseed oil) -or- Indian Mustard Seed Oil, Toasted Sesame Oil

SAUCES: Mianchi ("Bean Sauce") -or- Huangjiang -or- Red Miso, Pixian Doubanjiang ("Chili Bean Paste"), Oyster Sauce, Soy Sauce, Dark Soy Sauce, Lao Gan Ma, Tianmianjiang ("Sweet Bean Paste"), Hoisin sauce, Chu Hou Paste

OTHER FERMENTED INGREDIENTS: Fermented Bean Curd (white, red too if possible), Douchi (Chinese black beans), Yacai, Suancai

VINEGAR/WINE: Chencu ("Shanxi Mature Vinegar") -or- Xiangcu ("Chinkiang Vinegar"), Shaoxing wine (preferably unsalted)

SPICES: Cinnamon, clove, Sichuan peppercorn, fennel seed, star anise, white pepper, Tsaoko ("Chinese black Cardamom"), Chenpi (dried and aged tangerine peel), licorice root, sand ginger

DRIED INGREDIENTS: Dried shiitake mushrooms, dried shrimp, dried scallops, wood ear mushrooms, dried kelp

Eventually, we'll do the whole Youtuber thing, make an Amazon storefront & link it here for your reference (generally not recommended to buy Chinese ingredients on Amazon abroad, as the price is often 2-3 times what you'd pay at a Chinese supermarket). If you're USA based, you can also find a large number of these product on Weee:

https://www.sayweee.com/en

_______________________

And check out our Patreon if you'd like to support the project!
http://www.patreon.com/ChineseCookingDemystified

Outro Music: คิดถึงคุณจัง by ธานินทร์ อินทรเทพ
Found via My Analog Journal (great channel): https://youtu.be/GHaL5H-VYRg