Fujian Cuisine has long been well known for its four distinctive styles: Fuzhou, Western, Southern and Quanzhou. In particular Fujian Cuisine is famed for its use of seafoods, its soups and stews, and for the stunning visual presentation of its dishes.
Fuzhou cuisine is light compared to the other styles, often with a mixed sweet and sour taste. Emphasis is on utilizing soup in a variety of styles
Western Fujian cuisine often has a spicy taste and the cooking methods used are often steaming and the well known stir-fry method.
In the Southern style of Fujian cuisine frequently there is a mix of tastes in spicy and sweet flavours with an elaborate selection of sauces to provide the diner with a seemingly unending number of choice options
Quanzhou cuisine is the least oily among all the Fujian styles of cuisine but with the strongest taste/flavour. It also puts a great deal of emphasis on the shape of the material for each dish.
To list all of the ingredients would require many pages, but a few of the major seasonings used include shrimp sauce and shrimp oil and soy sauce for the salty dishes and white vinegar and Qiaotou (a vegetable similar to green onions and garlic)are often used in the sour dishes.
The sweet ones include brown and crystal sugar while the spicy ones include pepper and mustard. Sweet-smelling ingredients include brown sugar, spice powder, aniseed and cassia bark. Fujian cuisine is especially particular about the flavoring of its clear soups and goes to great lengths to prepare and make the base stock for all of the soups. This can take many hours with the final product filtered to give a very clear broth but nevertheless rich in colour, fragrance and flavour.
As well as the accepted range of basic cooking methods used in Fujian cuisine, others include red rice wine in grilling, sautéing, smoking and stewing. Red rice wine provides unique flavouring in this cuisine. It is actually made from glutinous rice fermented with red yeast and takes on the name "red distiller's grain". Taking over a year to prepare in a specially made and sealed vessel, the final product is sharp and sweet/sour in flavour and is a valued ingredient in Fujian cuisine. It goes extremely well with light meats, seafood and quick-fried vegetables. As the name suggests, this intriguing sauce has a vibrant, deep rose-red colour, and an enticingly edged bouquet.
Representative dishes have some very attractive and unusual names such as:Braised Weeverfish with chrysanthemum; Sautéed Phoenix-tailed shrimp; Simmered top grade Pomfret fish; Buddha's Delight (made of selected seafood); Stir-fried azure jade pea; Finding Pleasure Amid Suffering (made of tomato, balsam pear, prune, crumb, red seaweed, lobster sauce, fresh caraway and lettuce), Stewed Frog with garlic or, as the French chefs would say, 'Ragout de grenouille'; Stir-fried meat with celery and bamboo shoots and Chinese cabbage soup with dried shrimps to name just a few of the very popular dishes you will enjoy from this great cuisine style.