Learn about special seasoning sauces for Chinese food - Chinese bean sauce, Oyster flavored sauce, tea sauce, fermented bean curd, yellow or brown bean sauce, msg or monosodium glutamate

Video Transcription

How about some of the special seasoning that gives Chinese food the unique taste and blend to a variety of dishes? Can you a list a few of these special seasoning along with a few Chinese dishes? Sure. I would be glad to do this. Chinese black vinegar, it has a mild and sour taste. It is used in marinating sparingly and it has changed the flavor of the dish as well as in soup with a mild pungent taste. Some of the dishes are chicken with walnut, shrimp with cashew and for hot and sour soup. Oyster flavored sauce, it is sometimes considered as ketchup in a Chinese serving table. It tastes salty and ketchup has a sour taste. The oyster flavored sauce is made with water, sugar, salt and oyster extracts, MSG, modified cornstarch and wheat flour, and it is used as a dipping sauce and marinades. Tea sauce, it is made with soybean, oil, fish, shrimp, garlic, spice, shallot, sesame seeds, peanut, coconut powder, salt and flavor enhancer called MSG. People have mistaken that the sauce has tea as part of the ingredient in spite of the translated name of the sauce. It has an unusual taste but it has no fishy smell or taste. This sauce is used much in gravy making and sometimes used in marinating. Examples of the dishes includes; beef with tea sauce, chicken with tea sauce and onion with tea sauce. Fermented bean curd, the product is sometimes known as Chinese cheese. It is made from many bean cakes, water and rice wine. Also, it comes in small squares. The squares are mashed before making the sauce. It’s limitedly used in marinating. Here are some of the most popular recipe; swamp cabbage with fermented bean curd sauce, a Chinese new year dish called vegetables with fermented bean curd sauce. Yellow or brown bean sauce. This product is made with soybeans, water and salt. It is sold in can and it’s quite salty. The sauce is usually mashed into a paste and added to cooking or used in making a gravy solution. Monosodium Glutamate, also known as MSG, which is a flavor enhancer. It does not add any flavor to the dish. If someone had eaten in an oriental restaurant and experience a dry mouth, they want to drink more water. And for other, they experience headache. And in more sever cases, a breakout occurs. This is called “Chinese Restaurant MSG Syndrome”, it has alerted many restaurant and they have dropped using this flavor enhancer, or at least used less in their dishes. It must be noted though that most of us with this flavor enhancer, it does have a positive influence to our taste. Thus, this is still used in many restaurants.