[Book] Introduction: Thinking in Flavor Profiles

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Take a look at the menu of your local Chinese restaurant. Doesn’t matter if it’s a Cha Chaan Teng in Hong Kong, or a takeout joint in the United States: more likely than not, you’ll be greeted with a menu with dozens upon dozens of different dishes. For the purpose of illustration, let’s take a look at the menu of the following takeout joint in the United States:

Seems like a pretty classic spread of takeout fare.  Now let’s compare that to the Supper menu of the restaurant Husk, one of the most well known and respected American restaurants in the United States: 

This obviously doesn't include starters and desserts and such, but as a whole Husk’s menu reflects the broad consensus in the food and beverage industry in the West: have a tight menu. Do not try to be everything to everybody. With only six dishes to choose from, the restaurant can focus the entirety of their efforts executing those particular six dishes. The restaurant doesn’t have to order such a wide variety of ingredients, there’s less spoilage, the cooks get more intimately familiar with the dishes on the menu, and you end up with happy customers.

So then, what’s up with that takeout menu up there? Are they just… bad businessmen or something? Would Gordon Ramsey take them to task on Kitchen Nightmares? 

Take a look at that takeout menu again. While at first glance there appears like there’s a bewildering number of options, you can start to see that there’s quite a few dishes that are the same fundamental flavor, only re-arranged with different ingredients. There’s Kung Pao chicken, and also Kung Pao shrimp; Beef with Garlic Sauce, and also Roast Pork with Garlic sauce. If you pared down the above menu to unique dishes only, you’d cut the size of the menu by roughly two thirds; if you took a more wide ranging view, you could whittle things down ever further (e.g. the American ‘General Tso’s’ flavor profile is practically the same as the American ‘Sesame’ flavor profile, only with a handful of small alternations).  The restaurant is able to make a bewildering number of dishes and variants using a handful of fundamental techniques and flavors. That is the beauty of Chinese cooking - variety. 

Of course, the American-style takeout menu is borderline infamous for that mix-and-match strategy, but you do see the same sort of dynamic at restaurants in China as well. And even if the menu doesn’t explicitly list out a variant based on a specific flavor profile, if the flavor’s on the menu, that’s often something that you can ask for. Westerners often seem perplexed when they see people around them ordering off-menu in a Chinese restaurant, leading to an enduring myth that there’s some sort of ‘secret menu’. There’s no secret menu, of course, just a shared simmering-below-the-surface cultural understanding of flavor profiles: “oh, I see you’ve got clams with garlic and black bean sauce, can you fry that up with squid, instead?” Because if the restaurant’s already got some squid prepped for stir-fry, why not?

Now famously, Sichuanese cuisine lists out fourteen different flavor profiles. In this book, we’ll cover most of those, but we also wanted to expand out of the Sichuan province and touch on foundational flavor profiles throughout the entire country. Unfortunately however, culinary institutes outside of Sichuan tend not to list out flavor profiles in the same systematic way, and even inside of Sichuan, the total number of flavors depends on who’s counting: while many sources list out fourteen, others list out twenty three, and we’ve seen one book that even listed out more than forty! 

The subject of Chinese cuisine is as wide as the Pacific Ocean and as deep as the Mariana trench. So as a warning, this book will be far from exhaustive. We view this simply as a starting point for cataloging the flavors at various parts around the country, and we hope you can make some tasty food in the process.