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Hot stuff from Hunan
Though descriptions of Chinese food often lump the two together to represent hot cuisine, some subtle differences exist. Hunan food takes curing, simmering, steaming and stewing as the main cooking methods. Dishes of this style are usually tinged with a sour and spicy flavour. Sometimes called Xiang Cuisine, Hunan's culinary specialties are similar to those of the chili-rich Sichuan dishes. Chili peppers (hua jiao), garlic (suan) and an unusual sauce, called "strange-flavour" sauce (guai wei jiang) on some menus, enliven many dishes, with a somewhat drier intensity than that of their Sichuan counterparts. Sweetness, too, is a Hunan culinary passion, and honey sauces are favoured in desserts such as water chestnut. Rice is Hunan's staple, but northern-style side dishes and fillers are also popular: bean curd "bread" rolls or dumplings and savory buns. They are further signs that Hunan is one of China's culinary heartlands, incorporating many flavours and regional influences. For one thing, Hunan cuisine is often even hotter than Sichuan cooking. Both make extensive use of red chili peppers, both to cleanse the palate and possibly to cope with the humid climate.
Having more to work with, Hunan cooks tend to do more with the raw ingredients prior to cooking. For example, a classic Hunan dish is orange beef, where the beef is marinated overnight, then washed and marinaded again with a mixture including egg white, wine, and white pepper. In braised soy sauce beef, the meat is simmered in an aromatic mixture including anise, sugar, ginger, soy sauce, and wine. Another popular dish is crispy duck, where the duck is seasoned with pepper corns, star anise, fennel, and other spices, then steamed and finally deep-fried. As these examples illustrate, simmering and steaming are popular cooking techniques in Hunan, along with stewing and frying. Hot and sour and sweet and sour are popular flavour combinations. Hunan cuisine consists of more than 4,000 dishes, among which more than 300 are very famous. Hunan food is characterized by its hot and sour flavour, fresh aroma, greasiness, deep colour, and the prominence of the main flavour in each dish. It consists of regional cuisines from the Xiangjiang River Valley, the Tongting Lake region, and the western mountainous area.
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Hunan cuisine is less well known than some of its famous
counterparts like Sichuan.
However, while Sichuan recipes often call for chili paste,
Hunan dishes frequently use fresh chili peppers, including the seeds and
membranes where most of the heat is contained.