I don't know if you have noticed the common steamed dishes in Chinese cooking, such as steamed bread and steamed stuffed bun for breakfast, steamed ribs with soy sauce and steamed pork with flour for lunch and dinner; However, steamed food is rarely seen on Western tables.
Of course, we are not the only ones who have questions. Many foreigners also posted on the Q & a forum: I heard that steaming (such as steaming fish) is very popular in China. After all, steaming fish is fast, and the meat is sweet and juicy. Why don't Western chefs like this kind of cooking?
First of all, let's look at the historical reasons. As early as the stone age, China's pottery making technology was very mature.
Data show that China's pottery production has a history of about 20000 years. Pottery is the main daily production and living utensils of the primitive ancestors. Entering the Neolithic age, pottery making has made great progress in China.
At the beginning, our ancestors only used pottery to hold water and burn it on the fire. Later, they developed the cooking appliance steamer based on the stove. So our diet is mainly steamed and boiled, so we don't have the habit of using an oven.
The reason why there is no steamed food in the west is that the ancient Westerners did not invent pottery for cooking, so they invented dry baked things to replace it; This can also explain why the world's first household electric oven appeared in the United States.
Secondly, steaming is more fuel-efficient than roasting or baking. In the past, when we were short of resources and cooking fuel for a long time, natural steaming became more and more common. In the west, this is not the case, so there is no cooking culture like ours.
In addition, it has to be mentioned that Western chefs attach great importance to the color change of food after cooking. There is no browning or caramelization in steamed dishes, just like the "Maillard reaction" followed by foreigners, they will think that this cooking method has obvious shortcomings.
However, we can also understand that Western chefs do not like cooking, perhaps because they can't make food beautiful by steaming, and their value can't be reflected.
