Much of the credit for the popularity of Chinese food belongs to its seasonings. What goes into the island's favorite dishes?
China's regional tastes are traditionally classified into four categories: salty in the north, sour in the east, sweet in the south, and hot in the west. Cynics might add a fifth: Taiwanese food is bland, bland, bland. Part of the trouble is that in Taiwan the lines between the four major cuisines have become blurred. Some of the island's more creative chefs now like to inject a little more spice into "Taiwanese" food, but conversely, and sadly, they may all too often choose to take some of the fire out of a Sichuan dish. Nevertheless, however much cooks may like to experiment, the condiments used to flavor Chinese food have remained roughly the same for centuries.
The three basic seasonings are soy sauce, vinegar, and sesame oil. Soy is the most commonly used condiment in Taiwanese kitchens, just as it is all over Asia. One of the world's most popular and versatile sauces, it is a vital constituent of many fried, steamed, and stewed dishes and is also used as a dip for meat buns and dumplings. Taiwanese chefs also keep it on hand as a secret weapon to brown foods and make them look more appetizing.
Vinegar is perhaps the second most popular seasoning in Taiwan, but shoppers will probably search in vain for the plain or fruit formulas that grace the shelves of delicatessens in the West. Instead, rice vinegars, in both light and slightly thicker dark varieties, are used to give local recipes an acidic twist, featuring in such well-known dishes as hot-and-sour soup and sweet-and-sour pork. Chefs the world over employ vinegar to mask the odor of foodstuffs that have passed their use-by dates, but Cheng Yen-chi, a chef at one of Taipei's five-star hotels, says that a good cook should not use condiments for this purpose. "If the fish is fresh enough, it shouldn't smell at all, and a cover-up shouldn't be necessary," he says.
Sesame oil completes the trilogy of classic Asian seasonings. Like soy sauce, this condiment, rich in vitamin E, has both light and dark varieties. The dark oil is used for making one of China's most famous dishes, "sesame oil chicken." This popular chicken stew, simmered in an earthenware pot, is reputed to be a particularly rich source of vitamins for mothers nursing their newly born babies. Light sesame oil is also tossed with cucumbers and other vegetables to make hors d'oeuvres, and can be mixed with vinegar and soy sauce to form a staple if simple dipping sauce.
Moving from the basic flavorings on to something a little more exotic, dried beans and berries merit a mention. While the concept of bean-as-seasoning may strike many Western chefs as strange, dried salted black beans are an integral part of Chinese cooking. One of the best-known mainland dishes, Peking duck, depends on soybeans for its succulence: The beans are mixed with flour to make a slightly sweet yet tart sauce to moisten and flavor slices of crispy roast duck rolled in Asian-style crepes.
Broad-bean sauce is used in fiery Sichuan cuisine, but the variety most commonly found in Taiwan is manufactured in Kangshan, Kaohsiung County, rather than southern China. Sichuan-style dishes are also jazzed up with dried fagara berries, sometimes called Sichuan peppers, which are plucked from the prickly ash tree, dried, and thrown into stews.
Cantonese cuisine has a strong following in Taiwan. The most famous condiment from that region is tsua tsan paste, made from fried ground brill, crushed peanuts, scallions, dried shrimp, and soy saucea necessary accompaniment to "hot pot," a dish of meats and vegetables boiled in broth. Then there is XO sauce, a newcomer to Cantonese cuisine and increasingly popular in Taiwan. This originated in Hong Kong, which has one of the highest per-capita rates of cognac consumption in the world, but the name is a nod to the region's jet-set lifestyle rather than an ingredient of the sauce. It consists of dried scallops, shrimp, and ham that is chopped before being left to soak in water and boiled to bring out the aroma.
Probably the most notorious of all Chinese seasonings is monosodium glutamate (MSG), or wei ching in Mandarin, which translates into "essence of taste." Cooks have been using this Japanese creation for around a hundred years, and no Taiwanese kitchen can be deemed well-equipped without a container of the white crystallized flavor enhancer. In the West, MSG has a reputation for causing a variety of ailments, including stiffness of the neck muscles, headaches, and rashes, although there appears to be no hard evidence implicating the condiment as opposed to the underlying foods. But "if you use too much MSG or add it incorrectly, it will cause uncomfortable side effects," Cheng Yen-chi maintains.
The key to cooking with MSG is knowing at precisely what point to add it. High temperatures, according to Cheng, can nullify the flavor-enhancing effects of MSG and turn it into a mild toxin. A cook should never add the flavoring to food that has been heated to more than 210 degrees Fahrenheit, or to dishes that are still on the burner.
Cheng is no big fan of MSG. "If your ingredients are fresh and you know how to bring out their flavors in the cooking process, then you don't really need it," he says. "It's just that MSG has become so ingrained in cooking here that people think of it as indispensable." There are only a few situations where the seasoning is essential, for example to spice up agar, a flavorless, plant -based gelatin often used as a meat substitute in vegetarian restaurants.
MSG is not the only substance with a question mark hanging over its health-affecting qualities. "Chinese sauces are mostly saltier than their Western counterparts," Cheng points out. "I think it's because maybe we don't pay as much attention to what's in our seasonings as they do in Western countries." But this may not be a long-term problem. If the "Taiwanization" of Chinese cuisine continues, encouraging chefs to leach traditional flavors out of classic dishes as they pander to popular taste, sauces and other condiments are likely to play a much lesser role in the future.