Christine looks for the Chinese origins of foods like ketchup, pasta, baklava, pizza, and more.
Who said it first—Confucius or Hippocrates? Christine sets off to compare the thoughts of foodie philosophers.
Christine eats her way through the Lunar calendar with traditional customs, cuisine and culture.
Noodles symbolize longevity in Chinese culinary culture and this episode has more noodles than you can imagine!
Christine meets her Chinese chef mentors, discovering her assumptions about Chinese cuisine in North America might not be true.
Learning the history of Chinese immigration in America, challenges Christine’s idea of Cantonese cuisine.
Christine ventures into the world of Sichuan cuisine and discovers the surprise of flavor over heat.
Christine explores the flavor of sweet in Chinese immigrant communities across Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia.
Most salt in Asia is produced through the evaporation of seawater in coastal areas. This episode sees Christine learning firsthand the very challenging ‘how to’ of harvesting sea salt in Thailand’s dramatically beautiful salt fields. Cushing visits the area’s most unusual market that is regularly disrupted by the Maeklong Railway going right through its center! She cooks alongside chefs preserving traditional Chinese cuisine in Bangkok, and at Singapore’s oldest Chinese restaurant, Spring Court, Christine discovers Singapore Chinese cuisine and meets with culinary legend; Madam Soon.
The story of tea starts in China, where legend has it that tea was discovered through leaves accidentally falling into boiling water, and continues all the way to the traditional Chinese wedding tea ceremony and the political intrigues of the American Revolution. Christine brings along celebrity chef Anna Olson as they climb to the mountain tea farms of Taiwan and learn the ropes of tea wrangling. Then the chefs visit the home of the original bubble tea, where they get insider tricks and tips for creating the perfect concoction. In Hong Kong, with tea expert Vivian Mak, Christine is taken through every step of the brewing process as well as through the streets to visit some of the oldest tea merchants in the city. And with Sarah Rose, author of For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History, Christine learns of the early tea adventures of Robert Fortune and the part he played in the convoluted history of tea. Chef Christine and her guests and experts put together the story of tea; more than just a ceremony, it is an art and a science, a celebratory drink, and even a medicine!
Chef Cushing discovers that Huaiyang cuisine is historically connected to poets and scholars, and demands meticulous knife skills and elaborate presentations. The cuisine appears to be a personification of the teachings of Confucius. The creative presentation of skillfully combined ingredients expresses the four most important elements in the art of Chinese cooking: color, aroma, flavor and texture. All of this is incredibly enticing, so why, then, is Huaiyang cuisine so little enjoyed or understood in North America?
Is Chinese cuisine, with its Confucian structure, really the origin of the world’s great cuisines? Find out in this episode.
The bitter flavor is often found in Chinese cooking, but rarely used alone. It is said to clear "heat", strengthen the stomach, and promote salivation
The oldest of the Chinese cuisines and with roots in dishes served to royalty, Shandong is known as the cuisine of Confucius.