China cooking has always been famous for its color, fragrance, taste, shape, utensils, quality, nutrition and hygiene. As one of the attributes of dishes, aroma is often regarded as one of the criteria to measure the quality of a dish. A high-quality dish has its own unique flavor. In a sense, its charm may be better than color and shape. We can't see its shape and color, but we know its delicacy by smelling its fragrance first and not tasting its taste. This shows the importance of aroma to a dish.

Flavor in dishes is an important attribute of high-quality dishes. Good aroma can arouse people's appetite and make them drool. The poem praising the famous Fujian dish "Buddha jumps over the wall", "The altar is full of meat and fragrant, and the Buddha hears it and abandons Zen and jumps over the wall", which can be described subtly the appetizing aroma of this dish. Aroma is formed in the process of reasonable cooking, and its methods mainly include three aspects.

(1) Cooking and heating make the aroma overflow. Generally, food raw materials themselves have no fragrance, and their fragrance is mainly produced by heating and cooking. Aromatic substances contained in plant spices are not easy to release at low temperature, and the flavor of dishes is mainly obtained through the clever collocation and reasonable cooking of chefs. For example, if food tissues are destroyed by cooking and frying, a large number of aromatic substances will be released, which can increase the flavor of dishes. Stir-fried dishes are more fragrant than cold dishes because more substances evaporate. In addition, if we can avoid the loss of substances that are fragrant and easy to evaporate during cooking, we can also increase the aroma of dishes. (2) Add spices to enrich the fragrance. Most ingredients in cooking materials contain volatile aromatic substances, such as alcohol, alcohol and vinegar. For example, the fragrance of Daphne comes from the fragrance of Daphne; Cinnamon comes from cinnamon wick; Onion and garlic come from dipropylene and dithiodipropylene; Qu liquor comes from fusel alcohol and vinegar; Bananas and oranges come from vinegar and nerol. In addition, there are soy sauce, vinegar, ginger, pepper, rose, milk vinegar, mint and so on. It also has a certain fragrance. When cooking dishes, adding these flavor ingredients properly will increase the flavor of food. (3) Aroma blending is used to induce new aroma. In the cooking process, the aroma of many different raw materials can be transformed into new unique aroma. For example, Sichuan cuisine "Fish-flavored shredded pork" is cooked with pickled pepper, garlic, ginger, onion, cooking wine, soy sauce, vinegar and spicy oil. Many organic substances in the seasoning combine with each other to produce a taste similar to fish flavor, and even shredded pork has a delicious fish flavor. The above three situations are the principles of food flavor formation. Although the raw materials of dishes are rich in nutrition, they rarely contain aroma. From the principle of fragrance formation, it can be seen that most raw materials can only be exposed after heating and seasoning. Moreover, in many edible animal and plant raw materials, some raw materials often contain bad smells such as fishy smell and must be removed after cooking.