What is the biggest feature of Cantonese cuisine? Anyone who knows a little about Cantonese cuisine will blurt out: "Guangzhou people dare to eat anything except four-legged tables on the ground, leeches swimming in the water and planes flying in the sky." It can be seen that the diet in Guangzhou is prosperous. Indeed, the biggest feature of Cantonese cuisine is its complex materials and rich dishes. It uses a wide range of materials, and the ingredients are many and skillful. Snakes, insects, rats, ants, birds and animals, delicacies, Chinese and foreign food, everything, is the highest in the country. These raw materials, once cooked by the chef's skillful hands, make every eater applaud and sigh as exotic treasures. For example, people from other provinces are afraid to eat snakes. Legend has it that Su Dongpo was banished to Huizhou in the Northern Song Dynasty. His beloved concubine Chaoyun was told that it was a snake only after eating snake soup, and she died of fright. But people in Guangzhou have been eating snakes for more than 2000 years. In today's Guangzhou, there are not only special snake restaurants and villages that eat snakes, but also restaurants and restaurants that operate snake meals, and there are dozens of ways to eat snakes, so you can make delicious snakes if you can think of them. Dare to eat anything, this is not ignorance and backwardness, but the embodiment of Guangzhou people's open mind and innovative consciousness in food culture. Although Guangzhou eats everything, it has stopped eating protected animals in recent years. First of all, provincial and municipal leaders advocate not eating game, and many restaurants, restaurants and the general public consciously abide by it. In order to enrich the food culture, many "game" are artificially raised.
The second feature of Cantonese cuisine is its light taste, which can be summarized by the word "fresh, tender, smooth and fragrant". This is the fundamental reason why Cantonese cuisine is so popular. There are many kinds of Cantonese condiments, including sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, salty and fresh. However, if a ship uses a small amount of ginger onion and garlic as "material" and uses less spicy seasoning such as pepper, it will not be salty and sweet. Cantonese cuisine emphasizes color and seeks magnesium gas (refers to heating magnesium with a torch, adding oil, and boiling the oil, so that the fried dishes have a fragrance), and the heat is just right. Cantonese cuisine pursues the original flavor and fresh flavor of raw materials, such as lively seafood and game, which should be slaughtered and cooked immediately to be original. Guangzhou people eat chicken, but the favorite is boiled chicken. The practice of white-cut chicken is to cease fire after boiling water, and soak the bare chicken in boiling water until it is cooked. Foreigners dare not eat it when they see the blood on the bones. In fact, the skin and meat are all cooked, keeping the original flavor of the chicken, and adding ingredients such as ginger and salt when eating. "Qingping Chicken" is a geisha in white-cut chicken and is called "the first chicken in Guangzhou". It is only soaked in white brine, without any ingredients, but the skin is smooth, the meat is white and fragrant, and the bones are full of flavor. This characteristic of pursuing tenderness, freshness and original flavor not only conforms to the climate characteristics of Guangzhou, but also meets the requirements of modern nutrition, and is a relatively scientific food culture.
The third feature of Cantonese cuisine is that it is good at variety, well-made and innovative. Cantonese cuisine has the advantage of hybridization. Because the history of the formation of Cantonese cuisine is the confluence of Chinese and foreign food cultures and the continuous innovation combined with regional climate characteristics. Northern immigrants moved to Lingnan several times in history, spreading the cooking methods of northern cuisines to Guangdong. Since the end of the Qing Dynasty, Guangdong's opening up has also infiltrated the ingredients of western food culture. There are more than 30 cooking methods of Cantonese cuisine, among which soaking, grilling and Sichuan are transplanted from the northern explosion, grilling and cooking, while frying and frying are borrowed from western food. Guangdong people are open-minded, not dogmatic and always good at imitating and innovating. Therefore, in the development of dishes and snacks, they are rich in changes, unconventional, well-made and rich in varieties. Cantonese cuisine also pays attention to variation with seasonal changes, with light in summer and autumn and heavy and rich in winter and spring. The dishes at the banquet are all crowned with good names. For example, the dish stewed by three snakes with old cats and hens is called "Dragon Tiger Phoenix", and the fried horseshoe with shrimp is called "Dragon Horse Spirit". So far, there are more than 5,400 kinds of Cantonese dishes, more than 1000 kinds of dim sum, and hundreds of kinds of flavor snacks. There are hundreds of kinds of chicken searches alone. Almost every famous restaurant and restaurant has its own "signature chicken" to attract customers. The famous ones are Qingping Chicken, Wenchang Chicken, Taiye Chicken, Dongjiang Salt Chicken, Dongfang Shijia Chicken, Tao Tao Ginger Chicken and so on.