Asian Cuisine

With today’s world obesity problems, heart disease and diabetes problems, it makes sense to use more stir fry Asian style cooking in your diet.

Asian style stir fry cooking is very economical and extremely nutritious. It is high in fibre and low in fats. Because it uses seasonal vegetables, your ingredients tend to be fresher, cheaper and higher in nutritional value – not stored in a refrigerated warehouse for a month before delivery to a supermarket.

Today China also has an obesity problem but this is largely due to the Westernisation of their diet – the addition of high fat, high starch snack foods and soft drinks (soda).

One of the more appealing aspects of Asian Cuisine today, is the reduced cooking time; an added bonus in today's hectic lifestyle. The reduced cooking time also means the nutritional value for the meal is often higher than if the same ingredients were prepared Western style.

Asian Cuisine
Who said that diet meals are tasteless?

We tend to lump all cooking that involves stir fry, as Asian but there are many different types of Asian cooking. Chinese food tends to be oily, Yum cha is gelatinous, Indonesian tends to be rich in flavours, Thai is renowned for its flavour layering (the flavour changes as you eat it) and Korean food uses a lot of pickles and is often salty or vinegary.

There are many different styles of Asian cuisine

Within China itself, there are provinces (like we call states) that in terms of culture, are more like the small countries in Europe and each has its own characteristic style. However, there is one unifying characteristic – their use of a salad style presentation of a range of vegetables with less meat than Western cuisine.

Asian stir fry pork

Meat is usually the most expensive component in any meal. If you take the amount of meat normally used in most Western style servings and use it for Asian meals, you will get at least three Asian servings to two of your Western servings. That’s less fat and cholesterol. There’s no difference between the actual meal sizes because the Asian style meal will make up the difference with vegetable content. In terms of flavour, the Asian style meal is streets ahead of Western cuisine – ask anyone who has come back from a holiday in Indonesia or Thailand about the food!

Thai cuisine relies on flavour layering.

This is done two ways using a little psychology. First there is a wider range of vegetables used in the meal but each vegetable is served in a smaller quantity that it would be on a Western plate of meat and three vegetables. Secondly most of the vegetables in an Asian dish are cut in two separate ways to add to the illusion there is twice the selection of vegetables. In Asian cuisine, the desired visual effect is one of variety and this enhances the overall effect while not breaking the bank. Buying groceries for Asian cooking is usually much cheaper too; you buy smaller quantities of each vegetable and you concentrate on what’s in season, so you are buying at the best price as well as the peak freshness (which is also the peak nutrition). Because their cuisine evolved without refrigeration, they use dried ingredients for out of season produce. Dried goods are generally much cheaper than frozen, especially if you buy them from an Asian grocery rather than your supermarket.

Asian cuisine relies on whatever vegetables are in season cut in several different ways.

In both cases when you leave the table, you feel equally satiated but the Asian meal will often contain less calories but at least as much nutrients. One reason is that in most Asian dishes the sauces are a byproduct of the cooking process, not a later addition thickened with flour (extra ultra high calorie starch). Although many Asian dishes contain a thickened sauce too, it is lower in starch than most Western gravies and sauces, and tends to be used as a glaze rather than a puddle of gravy.

Asian sauces are used as a glaze rather than an acompaniment like our gravies.

I can’t use Sodium Monoglutimate (MSG) in high quantities, like some Asian dishes require because I get a reaction to it – a raging thirst for an hour after the meal. In Asian cooking MSG is used rather as we would use salt but it also has a colour preserving quality that salt doesn’t have. This means that when I’m cooking, the magnificent looking array of food in my wok will quickly become a khaki swamp of compost if I cook it too long. The solution is to avoid over cooking and serve immediately, straight from the wok.

Asian Curries and Indian Curries
To most Westerners a curry is from India. In fact Thai curries are nothing like Indian foods. Indian food used a lot of fenugreek and cumin. Both of these add a strong taste and the aromatic oils can find their way into your sweat glands.

Indian curries rely on cumin and fenugreek amongst other spices

I taught in an International school in Australia for a while and the Chinese students were often complaining about the Indian student’s body odor in the elevator, often preferring to use the stairs. The Indian students were clean but in the warm climate here their body odor was the result of curry spices – mainly cumin. Asian curries are very different.

Thai green curry

They come in different colours. The most common is Thai red and Thai green curries. Both have different flavours, a creamy texture from a coconut cream base that smooths out the heat.

Thai red curry

As a very broad generalization (from an ignorant Westerner’s observation) Chinese cuisine tends to use fennel seed, cinnamon and coriander rather than Indian’s cuisine’s cumin and fenugreek. Thai favours lime, cinnamon and ginger and while Indonesian favours ginger, cinnamon, mace and cloves – in summary, all regions have their own curries or hot spicy dishes but each region is distinctly different from the other.

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