Sichuan Cuisine Cooking Technique

Sichuan cuisine arose in ancient Ba and Shu, maturing over a long history especially in the late Qing, and spread from Chengdu and Chongqing across China and abroad as one of the country's four great culinary schools; the cooking craft of Sichuan cuisine is the overall summation of this school's sourcing, knife work, seasoning, and cooking traditions.

The craft calls for wide-ranging ingredients, fine knife work, and careful heat, and excels above all at seasoning, with dozens of compound flavor profiles and original styles such as mala, fish-fragrant, strange-flavor, and red-oil, drawing on stir-frying, explode-frying, sliding, dry-frying, and braising, and known for the ideal that every dish carries its own taste.

The craft concentrates the culinary wisdom and palate of the Ba-Shu people, giving rise to famous dishes such as mapo tofu, husband-and-wife offal slices, and twice-cooked pork; it entered the fifth national intangible-heritage list in 2021 and is an important part of Chinese food culture.

The cooking craft of Sichuan cuisine can be tasted firsthand in Chengdu's time-honored restaurants, the Sichuan cuisine museum, and its street snacks, where a plate of mapo tofu or a bowl of dandan noodles is a living expression of the tradition.