![]() ![]() Use number two: for use while stir-frying. So while any of these Huangjiu rice wines are often preferred, you can swap for a mijiu rice wine, a Japanese sake, a cheap bourbon, some dry white wine… just use your own judgment. It’s less for texture, and more for taste. ![]() So that’s why you’ll see Shaoxing wine so much in Chinese marinades. I dunno why, but it really really works together. ![]() Try chasing that stinky tofu with a good Shaoxing wine. So Chinese cooking’s often a game of counteracting and balancing those flavors, and for whatever reason, this kind of wine seems to do a really good job with funk in general.Įver wonder how some people can enjoy straight up unfried stinky tofu? Unlike in English though where ‘gamey’ is thought of as kind of a binary, ‘Shanwei’ can encompass things that’re very shan like mutton to things that’re a little shan like pork.ĭitto with the other flavors – fish that’ve been caught and killed via suffocation can be pretty fishy… but in China an egg is also sometimes conceptualized as a little fishy. See, there’s three categories of ‘unpleasant odors’ in Chinese cooking: shanwei, which’s sort of like gaminess xingwei, or fishiness and saowei, which’s the poultry equivalent. While that might sound damning, it honestly usually works just fine and, you know, you can’t argue with the price.īut no matter which wine you use, why do they seem to be used in almost every dish? ![]() Liaojiu, meanwhile, ferments huangjiu for only twenty days or so, then adds ethanol, and of course, a whole bunch of salt. Shaoxing wine, meanwhile, can really refer four different types of Huangjiu that all originated from that area.įirst sort is Yuanhongjiu, which’s dry, and generally the cheapest, most basic form of Shaoxing wine.Īmong cooking wines in China, it’s generally the nicer sort and what we’ve grown to usually use. Shaoxing wine is a sub-category of Huangjiu rice wine.Ĭompared to clear rice wines like Chinese Mijiu or Japanese sake, Huangjiu’s generally a bit sweeter and made using a mix of wheat and barley koji rather than purely rice koji. The city is the epicenter of the rice wine that bears its name, it’s a much-beloved drink there, and you can trace its popularity all the way back to the Song dynasty. The culture there runs deep – wandering around the city you’ll find that going out to eat’s often as conjoined with wine drinking as something like Spanish tapas might be. So in our recipe videos, I know that we should probably just call Liaojiu Shaoxing because that’s what everyone else does in English.but we stubbornly make the distinction because Shaoxing is a city that’s proud of its alcohol. While it is roughly based on actual Shaoxing wine… it’s salted, spiced, and while usually totally fine to cook with is… decidedly not for drinking. This, meanwhile, is Liaojiu…Chinese cooking wine.įor the most part, if you’ve been buying stuff labeled ‘Shaoxing wine’ in English in the West – this’s what you’re actually buying. It’s basically the Chinese equivalent of Burgundy – delicious to drink, delicious to cook with. This is a bottle of proper Shaoxing wine that we picked up in Shaoxing, which’s a small city in the Zhejiang province outside of Hangzhou. So let’s get something out of the way first. ![]()
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